1006
by the brothers. Isidore subsequently reaped the benefi t
of the partnership with Daguerre in the form of a share
of the pension awarded by the French government. As
for the reputation of Niépce, the efforts of Victor Fouque
in the 1860s, Helmut Gernsheim in the 1950s, and Jean-
Louis Marignier in the 1990s, have sought to account for
Niépce’s role in the history of photography and credit
him for his innovations. Apart from debates concerning
chronology, priority, and infl uence, the larger continu-
ity of Niépce’s heliographic work with cultural issues
surrounding the early history of photography began to
be explored by scholars in the 1990s.
Stephen Petersen
Biography
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce was born 7 March 1765, in
Chalon-sur-Saône, in Burgundy, to a landowning family
with ties to the Royal Court. The third of four children,
he was educated for religious service but, at the time of
the Revolution, conceived a career as a scientifi c inven-
tor. He served in the National Guard from 1788–1792,
and as a second lieutenant in the Revolutionary Army
from 1792 to 1794. Recovering from health problems
in Nice, he met and married Agnès Roméro in 1794. A
son, Isidore, was born in 1795. The family returned to
Chalon in 1801, where Nicéphore and his older brother
Claude shared management of the family estate and
worked together on a series of mechanical inventions,
until Claude left in 1816. In relation to his work with
lithography after 1813, Niépce began to investigate
the use of light-sensitive materials for the production
of images, including images formed in the camera ob-
scura. Over the next decade he developed his process,
called Heliography, but was unable to achieve public
recognition. He joined in a business partnership with
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre in 1829. Niépce died
on 3 July 1833 in Saint-Loup de Varennes. In addition
to the holdings at the University of Texas at Austin,
important collections of heliographic studies are at the
National Media Museum, Bath, and, with Niépce’s
pioneering camera equipment, at the Musée Nicéphore
Niépce, Chalon-sur-Saône.
See also: Daguerre, Louis-Jacques-Mandé;
Daguerreotype; Heliogravure; History: 2. 1826–1839;
and Lithography.
Further Reading
Batchen, Geoffrey, “The Naming of Photography: ‘A Mass of
Metaphor’.” History of Photography, vol. 17, no. 1 (Spring
1993): 22–32.
Fouque, Victor, The Truth Concerning the Invention of Photog-
raphy: Nicéphore Niépce, His Life, Letters and Works, reprint
edition of 1935 original, translated by Edward Epstean, New
York: Arno Press, 1973.
Gernsheim, Helmut, The Origins of Photography, New York:
Thames and Hudson, 1982.
Hardenberg, Horst O., The Niépce Brothers’ Boat Engines,
Warrendale, PA: Society of Automotive Engineers, 1993.
Jay, Paul. Niépce: Genèse d’un Invention, Chalon-sur-Saône:
Musée Nicéphore Niépce, 1988.
Marignier, Jean-Louis. “Heliography: The Photographic Process
Invented By Nicéphore Niépce Before His Association with
Daguerre, New Light on the invention of Photography.” The
Daguerreian Annual (1996): 53–63.
Marignier, Jean-Louis, Niépce: L’Invention de la Photographie,
Paris, Belin, 1999.
Marignier, Jean-Louis,. “The Physautotype: The World’s Second
Photographic Process, Invented by Niépce and Daguerre in
1832.” The Daguerreian Annual (2002–2003): 350–362.
Nicéphore Niépce: Une Nouvelle Image / Nicéphore Niépce: A
New Image, Chalon-sur-Saône: Société des Amis du Musée
Nicéphore Niépce, 1998 (conference proceedings).
Smith, R.C. “Nicéphore Niépce in England.” History of Photog-
raphy, vol. 7, no. 1 (January 1983): 43–50.NIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY
The night, according to the French Academy’s diction-
ary of 1858, is ‘the length of time during which the
sun is below our horizon.’ Night is perceived as the
opposite to day and daylight. It occupies a mythical
space in many cultures and has been imaged through
the centuries both negatively and positively. It can be
unfathomable, threatening, sorrowful, sexual, modern,
dreamlike or poetic. Rembrandt van Rijn’s night prints
and Francisco de Goya’s twilight scene ‘Los Caprichos’
were precursors to the increasing interest in this subject
to a nineteenth-century audience. Night scenes became
very fashionable from the 1850s, documenting the social
impact of the fi rst gas and electric lights and immortal-
ising the developing modernity of the city. Night and
night-life captured the public imagination, spurred on by
contemporary painters such as Edgar Degas, Toulouse
Lautrec, Claude Monet and James McNeill Whistler.
Technically, photographing night was extremely dif-
fi cult. It required a very long exposure time and therefore
stillness, as well as light from the moon or an artifi cial
source. An added complication was the urgency associ-
ated with making daguerreotypes (used from the 1840s
to mid-1950s) and wet collodion negatives (used from
the 1850s until the 1880s). These need to be developed
straight after the image is made, and the complications
for the nineteenth-century photographer being in the
dark or depending on dangerous and volatile artifi cial
light sources hindered the process.
As photography evolved, so did strategies and tech-
niques for photographing at night. Wet collodion plate
negatives must be kept moist from the time they were
coated with collodion until they are developed. Expo-
sure time was typically twenty seconds to fi ve minutes
and the plate usually dried out in ten minutes. To keep
the collodion wet for longer and thus permit a longer