Daguerreotype
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Daguerreotype was the first publicly available photographic process, widely used from the 1830s to 1850s. "Daguerreotype" also refers to an image created through this process.
Daguerreotype portrait of a daguerreotypist displaying daguerreotypes and cases pictured in an airtight frame, 1845
Daguerreotype of Louis Daguerre in 1844 by Jean-Baptiste Sabatier-Blot
The first authenticated image of Abraham Lincoln, taken soon after his election to Congress in 1846, attributed to Nicholas H. Shepard
Nicéphore Niépce
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Joseph Nicéphore Niépce was a French inventor and one of the pioneers of photography. Niépce developed heliography, a technique he used to create the world's oldest surviving products of a photographi
Posthumous portrait by Léonard François Berger, 1854
Niépce's birthplace at Chalon-sur-Saône, with a plaque in his memory
One of the three earliest known photographic artifacts, created by Nicéphore Niépce in 1825. It is an ink-on-paper print, but the printing plate used to make it was photographically created by Niépce's heliography process. It reproduces a 17th-century Flemish engraving.
Still life of a set table, by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, 1824–1833, the second earliest known camera photograph of which any visual record has survived. It is seen here in a late 19th century printed reproduction. The original, which was on glass, disappeared very early in the 20th century and is presumed to have been accidentally destroyed