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Two hundred years ago, someone stopped time for the first time.
It’s around 1826 — give or take a year. Historians still debate the exact date. A French inventor named Joseph Nicéphore Niépce leans out of the window of his studio in Burgundy, places a pewter plate coated with bitumen inside a camera obscura, and waits. He waits a long time: the exposure lasts about eight hours. In the end, he obtains something faint, almost illegible — a courtyard with buildings and trees seen from above — but it’s real, it’s permanent, it’s there.
It is the first photograph in history.
Two hundred years later, I’m writing this article with a camera that can shoot three thousand images before the battery dies. Shutter speed? A lot faster. And yet there’s something about that pewter plate smeared with bitumen that still fascinates me every time I think about it.
Niépce wasn’t trying to make art. He was trying to solve a technical problem: how to permanently fix an image projected by light. His research belongs to a broader scientific continuum that connects chemists, opticians, and European inventors, but he was the first to achieve something that truly lasted. He called his process “heliography” — literally, writing with the sun.
A few years later, the term “photography” would replace it, shifting from writing with the sun to something broader: writing with light. Not just sunlight, but light in all its forms.
I like to think that, in the end, that’s still what we do every time we press the shutter, after two centuries.
The curious part is that for almost a century and a half, no one knew where that photograph had gone. Niépce left it to the English botanist Francis Bauer before returning to France. After Bauer’s death in 1840, the image changed hands several times before slipping into oblivion. It was rediscovered only in 1952, almost by accident, and today it is preserved at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
Think about it: the oldest photograph in the world spent decades sitting on a shelf, forgotten, without anyone truly knowing what it was. A bit like certain rolls of film lying at the bottom of a drawer — or like those gigabytes of images I was talking about in my previous article.
2026 is officially the bicentennial year. Two hundred years of photography is a long time — long enough to move from a pewter plate to the smartphone, from heliography to artificial intelligence generating images out of nothing. And yet the gesture remains the same: deciding what deserves to be remembered, and freezing it.
Niépce did it with eight hours of patience and a bit of bitumen. We do it in a thousandth of a second. But the question remains: what is worth shooting?
Take care and talk soon!