Others' Photography

Photography began in the 1790s when Thomas Wedgwood silhouetted profiles by using the light sensitivity of silver nitrate. By 1816, the French chemist Joseph Nicéphore Niepce had produced a negative photograph, and before 1827 a direct positive was produced. From 1829 until he died in 1833, Niepce collaborated with painter Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre to develop daguerreotype, a process announced by Daguerre to the French Academy of Sciences in 1839. Almost simultaneously, English archaeologist William Fox Talbot was experimenting with calotype. Photography evolved from these two important inventions. From the day in 1837 when Daguerre took the earliest known photograph to today, people of every walk of life have had an ongoing love affair with photography.