Photography was born in the 19th century: in 1827 Nicéphore Niépce fixed the oldest surviving photograph, View from the Window at Le Gras, then Louis Daguerre made the daguerreotype public in 1839, while William Henry Fox Talbot developed a process based on a paper negative.
For centuries, the camera obscura could project a living image onto a wall, faithful and in colour, but it vanished as soon as the light faded, because no one yet knew how to hold on to it.
Everything changed at the start of the 19th century, when the challenge was no longer to look at this image but to fix it, and it is this precise moment, the shift from projection to recording, that this article traces. At the starting point of it all lies the principle of the pinhole camera, a black box pierced with a simple hole that is enough to form an image.
Looking at an image is no longer enough
The camera obscura, or dark chamber, was known and used long before photography, mainly as the tool that made it possible to draw a scene projected onto a sheet of paper.
Its history stretches from the observations of Antiquity to the portable devices of the Renaissance. Here, just one thing needs remembering: the image already existed, bright and precise at the back of a box, but it depended on the presence of light. The missing step was therefore not optical but chemical.
Niépce and the oldest surviving photograph
It was a French inventor, Nicéphore Niépce, who first succeeded in permanently fixing an image produced by light, after long research into sensitive surfaces.
The oldest surviving photograph attributed to him is dated 1827. Known as View from the Window at Le Gras, it is a view taken from a window of his estate.
Nicéphore Niépce first coated a metal plate with bitumen of Judea, a substance that hardens when exposed to light. Placed in a camera obscura and exposed for several hours, or even several days depending on the source, this plate enabled him to fix an image of the observed scene.
Despite its lack of sharpness, it is this image that marks the first decisive step in the history of photography. The image projected in the camera obscura could now be preserved, even when the light was gone.
View from the Window at Le Gras, heliograph by Nicéphore Niépce, 1827. Source: Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
A camera obscura with a lens, not a pinhole camera
One point here calls for real rigour, because it is tempting but wrong to believe that this first photograph was born from a pinhole camera.
Niépce worked with a camera obscura fitted with a lens, which concentrated the light, and not with a simple hole pierced in a wall.
The pinhole camera is indeed the ancestor and the principle from which everything descends, since it establishes that a device can form an image with nothing more than light passing through, but it would be inaccurate to say that photography was born from a bare hole.
Pinhole photography in the strict sense, meaning photography without any lens, developed later, towards the end of the 19th century, when practitioners deliberately explored this stripped-back approach. The optical principle of the hole is detailed in the article on how a pinhole camera works. The Sténoflex pinhole mini-lab lets you check all this for yourself, with the box, the paper and the baths provided.
From Niépce to Daguerre and Talbot
Nicéphore Niépce opened the way without seeing it through. His process remained too slow and too uncertain to spread. It was his partner Louis Daguerre who developed a much sharper and faster process, made public in 1839 under the name daguerreotype.
In England, at almost the same time, William Henry Fox Talbot was working separately on a process based on a paper negative, whose advantage is that it allows several prints to be made from the same shot, whereas the daguerreotype gave only a reversed image that could not be reproduced.
These two paths, the very fine one-off image and the reproducible negative, opened up photography as it would later be known, but they share the same origin: a camera obscura that forms the image, and a chemistry that holds on to it.
What this turning point teaches us
The pinhole camera keeps a special place in this story, that of the bare, original principle, older than any lens, which reminds us that an image can be formed with almost nothing.
Éric Marais — Photographer, author of two books on pinhole photography (published by Pearson) and creator of the Sténoflex. Since the very beginning, he has run introductory workshops in pinhole photography and analogue developing.
