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<\/a>If you\u2019ve seen the famous image, the crisp and grainy one with the white background and the clear rooftops, you haven\u2019t seen the plate. You\u2019ve seen an enhanced and heavily reworked copy. More on that later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The French Ministry of Culture announced this week (at time of writing) that the plate is coming home. Its owner, the Harry Ransom Center<\/a> has agreed to lend the \u201cPoint de vue du Gras\u201d to the mus\u00e9e Nic\u00e9phore Ni\u00e9pce in Chalon-sur-Sa\u00f4ne, the town where Ni\u00e9pce was born in 1765. It will be shown in France for the first time in its existence, inside the exhibition \u201cL\u2019empreinte d\u2019H\u00e9lios. 1826-1827, Ni\u00e9pce invente la photographie !\u201d, which runs from 20 March to 20 June 2027. The plate itself goes on display from 26 April<\/a>. I\u2019d go, but with such a short two months window, it\u2019s going to be heaving.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s part of the official Bicentenaire de la Photographie<\/a>, a state-sponsored birthday party running from September 2026 to September 2027, with 182 projects in France and about thirty other countries. The Grand\/Petit Palais and various other venues in Paris have already run a number of photography exhibition this year ahead of schedule.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The plate\u2019s trip took two years of negotiation<\/a>. The display case is oxygen-free (filled with argon, people who worked in datacentres will know what that does) and monitored around the clock. The plate is so delicate that the case travels with it. Dominique de Font-R\u00e9aulx, who chairs the bicentenary\u2019s scientific committee and negotiated the loan, told Lib\u00e9ration that the plate is less a eureka than a process, and that treating it as the beginning of photography runs against some known facts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ni\u00e9pce wasn\u2019t a scientist. He was a landowner with a military past and an obsessive streak, a gentleman scientist, as PetaPixel puts it<\/a>, like we no longer have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He\u2019d been discharged from the revolutionary army, of all things, for poor eyesight. Ironic for the man who made the first photograph.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With his older brother Claude he spent years and most of the family fortune trying to commercialise the Pyr\u00e9olophore<\/a>, one of the first internal combustion engines, patented in 1807 and meant to propel boats up the Sa\u00f4ne river. The brothers also worked on oil pastel, sugar beet, and an early bicycle. Their engine never paid off. But the research left behind a bag of bitumen of Judea, a natural asphalt, and Ni\u00e9pce noticed it had a strange property: it hardened with light.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He started trying to fix camera images in 1816, just before his fifty-first birthday. His first results were pictures on paper coated with silver salts. He called them points de vue<\/em>. The Harry Ransom Center describes them<\/a> as legible but fleeting. He wanted positives and couldn\u2019t get them to stay. The trail of what he did next only exists in letters because Ni\u00e9pce kept no lab notebook and published nothing. His main documentary legacy is his correspondence, now edited in full<\/a>: around 700 documents collected from more than fifty archives, half of them never published before, including letters mostly to family. According to their editor, they contain his failures, his mistakes, his doubts, as well as his hopes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By 1822 the bitumen was working as a copying process. He was reproducing engravings by contact, on plates, with light doing the drawing. Then on 16 September 1824 he wrote to Claude and described something new: a view from life, taken with the camera obscura, not copied from an existing image. The exposure, he told his brother, had been four to five days, and the image was barely visible: those details come down to us through photography historian Michael Pritchard, reprinted in Amateur Photographer<\/a>. He called the result a heliograph, sun writing<\/em>. Emmanuel Hermange, who has read the 1816 letters closely for the journal Romantisme<\/a>, makes the point that the oldest surviving print became, ipso facto, \u201cthe first obtained\u201d. The letters tell the reality: years of images that didn\u2019t survive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Lib\u00e9ration, Besson describes how the correspondence follows him around the house: he starts at one window, then moves to his brother\u2019s bedroom because it has the better light, sheltered from the weather. \u201cIl fait beaucoup de points de vue<\/em>. Un seul est parvenu jusqu\u2019\u00e0 nous.\u201d He made many such views; only one reached us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s the rate of success behind the first photograph. One survivor. Every other view he took from a window is gone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In May 1827, writing to his cousin Alexandre du Bard de Curley (yep, that posh), Ni\u00e9pce compared himself to Columbus on the edge of the discovery: \u201cJe suis comme Colomb lorsqu\u2019il pressentait la d\u00e9couverte tardive, mais certaine d\u2019un nouveau monde\u2026 nous avan\u00e7ons la sonde \u00e0 la main, sur notre nacelle aventureuse, et bient\u00f4t l\u2019\u00e9quipage s\u2019\u00e9criera avec transport\u2026 Terre ! Terre !\u201d. He is like Columbus, he says, certain of a new world he can\u2019t reach yet, sounding ahead in his adventurous little craft, waiting for the crew\u2019s cry of land! land!<\/p>\n\n\n\n The birthday party has a problem, though: if the photograph was taken in 1826, the bicentenary falls in 2026. Many scholars lean 1827. Helmut Gernsheim, the historian who found the plate, first dated it 1826, then switched to 1827, which is what\u2019s inscribed on the back. Wikipedia<\/a> gives a creation window between 4 June and 18 July 1827. The French write-ups<\/a> are honest about it: institutions and the bicentenary say 1826, a number of historians since Gernsheim and Jean-Louis Marignier say 1827, and the polite formula is \u201cvers 1826-1827\u201d. So the French government decided to go halfsies: the birthday party will run 2026-2027.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In fact, not only the plate that\u2019s being moved to France was most probably taken in 1827, but it was also probably taken at a window in a house six kilometres from the museum where it will be next spring.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The plate\u2019s biography is pretty strange and it took a long list of lucky events to get to us. Ni\u00e9pce took it to London in September 1827. He had two reasons: firstly, a botanist named Francis Bauer saw the heliographs and urged him to present the process to the Royal Society. Ni\u00e9pce wrote the paper but refused to disclose how it worked, and the Royal Society rejected it under its rule against undisclosed processes. Secondly, his brother Claude, who had spent two decades chasing engine money in London, had come apart. Lib\u00e9ration says he was \u201cdevenu fou \u00e0 force d\u2019\u00e9checs\u201d, driven mad by failure, and had just died. Ni\u00e9pce abandoned the plate there, in the middle of arranging to ship his brother\u2019s body home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The memoir and the specimens stayed with Bauer, and Ni\u00e9pce went back to France. He never came back for them, and he died in 1833, of a stroke, at 68, while still experimenting. Daguerre, the Parisian optical-painter he\u2019d gone into partnership with in 1829, kept going, and in 1839 the daguerr\u00e9otype took the spotlight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After Bauer died in 1840 the plate moved through a series of owners, and it was exhibited now and then as a curiosity. The trail goes cold at the turn of the century: the standard history has it last shown in public in 1905, one account puts the loss of the trace back in 1898, and either way the plate then vanished into private storage. Nothing, for roughly half a century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1952 Helmut Gernsheim, a German-born photo historian who had spent years hunting for it, was contacted by the widow of a man named Gibbon Pritchard. She\u2019d found a plate in her late husband\u2019s things. Gernsheim verified it was the Point de vue<\/em>, acquired it, and in doing so put Ni\u00e9pce\u2019s name back at the top of photography\u2019s history. The Harry Ransom Center\u2019s own account credits his detective work with returning Ni\u00e9pce \u201cto his rightful place as the inventor of photography\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When you think about it, it\u2019s a crazy part of the story: a widow going through her late husband\u2019s things found a plate, contacted the right person who was looking for it (how did she know?), then he acquired it from her. There are so many points in that story where the plate could have been thrown away and gone forever, sold to the wrong person, or lost\/stolen once identified as valuable. But it made it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And then Gernsheim had a copy made at the Kodak Research Laboratory, and it was so hard to photograph the plate faithfully that he took a brush and retouched one of the copy prints, cleaning it up, making it clearer. For decades he allowed only that enhanced version to be published.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The image of the first photograph as you know it, the one in every textbook, is Gernsheim\u2019s partly hand painted interpretation of a plate most people can\u2019t read. Well, that\u2019s a disappointment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1963 Harry Ransom bought the Gernsheim collection for the University of Texas at Austin. Over 35,000 images, then the largest photography collection in the world. Gernsheim donated the plate itself. The Getty Conservation Institute studied it in 2002 and 2003, confirmed the bitumen on pewter, and built the argon case it still lives in. In 2012 it left Texas once, for a Gernsheim exhibition in Mannheim, Germany, its first time back in Europe in fifty years. It has been on display in the Ransom Center lobby since 2003, next to the Gutenberg Bible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Since the plate is nearly invisible, a large part of the experience is its interpretation. The standard elements, identified in Gernsheim\u2019s own drawing: a pigeon house on the upper left, a pear tree, a slant-roofed barn, a bakehouse with a chimney, another wing of the house on the right. Most of those buildings are gone now from the ancestral home as you can see in the photo above. Lib\u00e9ration\u2019s describes it as: a building on the left, one on the right, a mysterious triangle of light in the centre, and beside it a dark shape that the eye wants to see as a human figure in a black cape, \u201ctel Nosferatu\u201d, leaning over the void.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s a quote in French newspapers this week that puts the myth around that photo in its place. Cl\u00e9ment Ch\u00e9roux told Lib\u00e9ration in January: \u201cC\u2019est une image extraordinaire parce que c\u2019est la premi\u00e8re photo. On se dit alors que c\u2019est une photo magique. Mais en fait, pas vraiment. La premi\u00e8re photo est une photo rat\u00e9e.\u201d Extraordinary because it\u2019s the first photograph (that we still have), but not because it\u2019s any good. The first photo is a failed photo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And he\u2019s right. The plate is underexposed despite the several days exposure, barely visible to the naked eye, unreadable head-on. A technical failure. Its exposure time made it useless for anything but immovable subjects, and its maker couldn\u2019t repeat it reliably. He called it himself, in December 1827, whilst writing about his process, \u201cthe first uncertain step in a completely new direction\u201d. Uncertain<\/em> is the inventor\u2019s own word for this landmark.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I like to picture April 2027: in a museum six kilometres from that window, people leaning and crouching and tilting their heads, exactly as Ch\u00e9roux describes, trying to catch the light off a piece of pewter. Most will see almost nothing. The ones who persist will see rooftops, a tree, a courtyard, and the accumulated sunlight of days. A failed two hundred years old photo that outlasted everything else its maker made. That\u2019s a fine afterlife for a photo that failed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sources<\/strong>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Images<\/strong>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n #Photography #LensOfTime #Niepce #History<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The image the world calls the first photograph is nearly invisible, undecipherable. Looking at it, most people can\u2019t see anything clearly identifiable. And it hasn\u2019t been in France for over a century. The photo is a pewter plate, about sixteen by twenty centimetres, coated with bitumen of Judea. Joseph Nic\u00e9phore Ni\u00e9pce (which can only be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,21,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-lensoftime","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8172"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8172\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8176,"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8172\/revisions\/8176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>
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