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
Heliography
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Heliography is an early photographic process, based on the hardening of bitumen in sunlight. It was invented by Nicéphore Niépce around 1822. Niépce used the process to make the earliest known survivi
View from the Window at Le Gras
…France, and shows parts of the buildings and surrounding countryside of his estate, Le Gras, as seen from a high window. The image was created by heliography, a process which Niépce had invented around 1822, and which uses the hardening of bitumen in light to record an image after washing off the remaining…
This earliest known surviving heliographic engraving, printed from a metal plate made in 1825 by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce using his "heliographic process". The plate was exposed under an ordinary engraving. Heliography was also used to capture a scene directly from nature with a camera.
Comparison between the original engraving and the heliography of Joseph Nicephore Niépce. Left: Engraving of Portrait of Georges d'Amboise, 1650 right: Heliography (Heliogravure) of the engraving, 1826