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BOULEVARD DU TEMPLE by Louis Daguerre
The shoe shiner working on Paris’ Boulevard du Temple
one spring day in 1839 had no idea he would make his tory.
But Louis Daguerre’s groundbreaking image of the man
and a customer is the first known instance of human be-
ings captured in a photograph. Before Daguerre, people
had only been represented in artworks. That changed when
Daguerre fixed his lens on a Paris street and then exposed a
silver-plated sheet of copper for several minutes (though oth-
ers came into the frame, they did not stay long enough to be
captured), developed and fixed the image using chemicals.
The result was the first mirror-image photograph.
Unlike earlier efforts, daguerreotypes were sharp and
permanent. And though they were eventually outpaced by
newer innovations—daguerreotypes were not reproducible,
nor could they be printed on paper—Daguerre did more
than perhaps anyone else to show the vast potential of the
new medium of photography.