The First Ever Photograph of a Person

How a momentary encounter became the first photographic portrait

Our normal expectations of photography tend to focus on the instancy of the process. A photo is a snapshot, a frozen slice of time measured in fractions of a second.

This particular photograph is different. It was made over a much longer duration. Look to the bottom-left of the frame. There is a man having his shoes shined. That man — this picture — is the earliest known photograph of a recognisable human being. It was taken in Paris, France, in 1838 by Louis Daguerre.

It wasn’t that the man in question was the only person on the street. More than likely, the street was full of horses and carts and pedestrians going about their business. It was rather that the exposure time for the image was around ten minutes, which meant that everything else in the scene was moving too fast to be captured in any clarity.

Only the man with his leg raised, who stood still long enough to register in the photograph, is at all visible. The shoe-shiner working on his shoes is also present, although his form is not as distinct.

I can’t help but wonder what it was the man was thinking at the time. It is perhaps an insight that only imagination can supply: a man from two centuries ago stands in the middle of a busy Parisian street having his shoes cleaned for the duration of ten minutes. What was he thinking about as he stood there? I’d love to try to answer that question some time.

The invention of photography required certain technologies to come together to complete the jigsaw. One component had been around for many centuries: known as a camera obscurer, this was a piece of apparatus that projected an image of a scene onto an interior screen of a darkened room or box. It had been used by artists like Johannes Vermeer, so the images could be accurately traced and used as a basis for painting. The resulting projection was in fact reality seen in reverse, as one sees oneself in the mirror.

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