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
View from the Window at Le Gras is the oldest surviving photograph. It was created by French inventor Nicéphore Niépce between June 4 and July 18, 1827, in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France, and shows pa
Nicéphore Niépce
…technique he used to create the world's oldest surviving products of a photographic process. In the mid-1820s, he used a primitive camera to produce the oldest surviving photograph of a real-world scene. Among Niépce's other inventions was the Pyréolophore, one of the world's first internal combustion engines, which he conceived, created, and developed…
The original plate, showing rooftops visible from a second-story bedroom window
Demonstration of camera obscura. The original image gets rotated and reversed through a small hole onto an opposite surface.
Gernsheim's enhanced version
The original plate on display at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, in 2004