First Camera photography

Invented in the first decades of the 19th century, photography (by way of the camera) seemed able to capture more detail and information than traditional mediums, such as painting and sculpting. Photography as a usable process goes back to the 1820s with the development of chemical photography. The first permanent Photoetching was an image produced in 1822 by the French inventor Nicephore Niepce, but it was destroyed by a later attempt to duplicate it. Niépce was successful again in 1825. He made the first permanent photograph from nature with a camera obscura in 1826.

Because his photographs took so long to expose (eight hours), he sought to find a new process. Working in conjunction with Louis Daguerre, they experimented with silver compounds based on a Johann henrich Schultz discovery in 1816 that a silver and chalk mixture darkens when exposed to light. Niépce died in 1833, but Daguerre continued the work, eventually culminating with the development in 1837. Daguerre took the first ever photo of a person in 1838 when, while taking a daguerreotype of a Paris street, a pedestrian stopped for a shoe shine, long enough to be captured by the long exposure (several minutes). Eventually, France agreed to pay Daguerre a pension for his formula, in exchange for his promise to announce his discovery to the world as the gift of France, which he did in 1839.