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
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
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
View from the Window at Le Gras
…View from the Window at Le Gras (French: Point de vue du 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 parts of the buildings and surrounding countryside of his estate, Le…
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