“But what about Niépce?”
I asked this in a post two years back while pondering who really invited photography and why there seems to be so much confusion about the issue. (Even the typically-stated date of invention — 1839 — seems to blatantly contradict the facts.) In a recent British Journal of Photography article, “New early photographic process to force history re-write,” Olivier Laurent reports that “Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s contribution to the history of photography has been elevated after the National Media Museum and the Getty Conservation Institute revealed new findings stemming from three of Niépce’s photographic plates.”
Un Claire de Lune, c. 1827 © The Royal Photographic Society Collection at National Media Museum/SSPL.
Created by Niépce circa 1827, Un Claire de Lune is the name of the work that’s really got photographic history re-writers excited. Laurent explains that the image — truly beautiful and evocative, hardly a mere photographic experiment — was long thought to be “enhanced with etching” but that “it is actually a photograph without any hand tooling at all.”
To better understand the confusion regarding the early years of photographic history, check out my earlier post and see how Louis Daguerre usually gets pitted against William Henry Fox Talbot, while Niépce seems to get such short thrift because:
1. Apparently he was not able to demonstrate his work to the Royal Society in London. (Something about the organization being in turmoil, says that National Media Museum.)
2. He died in 1833. (Never good for standing up for one’s place in history.)
According to the National Media Museum, these facts left Niépce’s “sometimes collaborator Louis Daguerre to publicly reveal photography to the world in 1839.”
Beauty Beyond Theft
This might make it sounds like Daguerre was an opportunist and a thief, and maybe he was. But as I Continue reading “Niépce Gains Greater, Much Deserved Respect”
