The Untold Story of the World’s First Photograph
And the man who took it.
Words by John Jeremiah Sullivan
Photographs by Joakim Eskildsen
Illustrations by Leanne Shapton
There is a beautiful anecdote concerning the invention and early history of photography that is inexplicably preserved only in an old article from the New York Evening World. In the story, a little boy lies sick-abed at his family’s house in France, at a place called Chalon-sur-Saône, about 200 miles southeast of Paris. The year is 1775. He’s on his back in a fever, staring up at the whitewashed ceiling. The room is dark — his family has shuttered him up — but a few spokes of light are coming through cracks and gaps in the blinds, one of them shining directly onto the ceiling. The boy’s eyes widen in his pale, narrow face: He sees living things above his head.
A man driving a horse and cart, a drover moving cattle down the street, and then a more familiar form, his own father. And then his dog. When he tells his family, they assume he is raving and call for a doctor.
A coincidence of angles and shadows and sunlight had turned the boy’s room into a camera obscura — a precursor to the modern film camera. The incident passed, as did his sickness, but the boy was left with a gnawing desire to understand what he had seen. How had the process worked? What were the physics of it? Why had it been so fleeting? Was there no way to make it stay somehow? In the seconds when the pictures had danced above his head, it had seemed that, had he been able to reach, he could hold them in his hand, like a print.
The boy’s name was Joseph, and he comes down to us in history — or more often doesn’t — as the person most scholars consider to have taken the first true photograph. I have been half-consciously fascinated with him since I myself was a boy, and with the question of how and why history, by and large, erased him.
With so many of life’s fixations, there is work required to figure out why they took hold of you, but this one arrived in the open and literally through the air. We were crossing the Sherman Minton Bridge between Kentucky and Indiana, heading in the Louisville direction. My mother was driving. I was in the back seat. There used to be a radio show, or not a show so much as a kind of segment (I don’t know that the programming category exists anymore), called The Rest of the Story, narrated by an announcer named Paul Harvey. The show began during the Second World War. Harvey was from Oklahoma and had a wonderful American accent that I don’t think exists anymore, either, clipped and broad. Most of the spots were too adult-level for my interest — I was maybe 7 — but this one held an appeal that I can describe only as a kind of glamour. It had to do with the first human being ever photographed.
The photographer in question was the famous Louis Daguerre, who in 1839 gave his name, rather ostentatiously, to the daguerreotype, the early photographic process by which he made the first pictures that look to us like “modern” photographs. The daguerreotype inaugurates the tradition of hyper — intense photographic naturalism that has done more than any artistic innovation since the advent of painting itself to shape our sense of visual reality. Every time we snap a phone pic, we join a spectrum, a continuum, that started with Daguerre, even if the chemistry has been replaced by pixels and the chemicals by electricity. We are calling into being an image that meets the demands of a certain just-this-side-of-godlike fidelity to what one would have seen had one been there, or did see because one was.
In the beginning, the problem with -photographing human beings involved the exceedingly long exposure time — hours and hours. It was impossible for anyone to sit still enough for long enough. And if they moved, they would efface and erase themselves in the image, so that in the end you might be left with at best a blur, indistinguishable from the background.
It’s partly this phenomenon of self — erasure that gives the earliest daguerreotypes of Paris, the ones made by Daguerre himself — those elegant “surveys,” taken from high up, of streets and public squares — an eerie emptiness. Seeing them, one wonders how anybody could have arranged for those bustling sections of Paris to be vacated in the middle of the day. But, as Harvey explained on the radio, the streets in those pictures were not really vacant. All throughout the time the aperture stayed open, they were full of people and horses and carriages and moving life. Only objects that stood or lay still, dead still, can be seen.
But experiments and accidents were constantly improving the process, and for the photograph Harvey described, Daguerre was evidently using a process that shortened the time required. Not enough that he’d solved the self-erasure problem entirely: Most everyone who passed through the scene is absent, as in the other shots. Except for one person — a man who, in precisely those minutes, happened to be standing stock still for an unusually long time. The reason was simple: He was getting his shoes shined. You can see him there, a little black figure on the lower left of the daguerreotype, shaped like a lowercase h, with the vertical line of his body on the left and his bent leg forming the rest of the letter. The shoeshine boy is there, too, but just as a smudge by the man’s feet.
We don’t know who he was. It was the late 1830s. He could be a she. She could be George Sand. More likely it’s a clerk. I remember nothing Paul Harvey said about him. Just a perception of some disorienting combination of terror and beauty that only the word sublimity serves to name. Something about the arbitrariness of this man’s having been singled out for ghoulish immortality, him and no one else, brought with it, darkly implicit, the totality of death’s domain. Later, in school, when they taught us about the sublime, Paul Harvey was the reason I knew vaguely what it meant.
That particular daguerreotype is special, but for me it’s the case that the great majority of those early photographs — the images created in the half-century between 1790 and 1840 by a small band of inventors and chemists and artists, mainly in France and England, who were groping their way scientifically toward the kind of picture we now call a photograph — possess a similar troubling attraction. Like the earliest sound recordings, they have necromancy in them. You can almost sense time rushing outside the frame.
The first time I saw that Daguerre was in a book my parents kept on the shelf in our single long hallway, the kind of book Time-Life would send you when you got a subscription. I was maybe 11, walking around many days with a color Polaroid around my neck on a thin strap. Though always a crap photographer, I was a prodigy when it came to paging through photography books. I found the Daguerre, which looked more or less like Paul Harvey had said it would. But another picture, reproduced on the facing page, caught my eye. It was deeply strange. It showed shapes — a slanting rooftop, the side of a building, a tree in the distance — and looked not so much black-and-white as shadows-and-shade. A caption said it had been made many years before Daguerre’s first successful pictures. It was titled View from the Window at Le Gras, Le Gras being the name of an estate outside of Chalon-sur-Saône, and had been created by a man whose name appeared so alien it seemed to refuse to produce a sound in my head: Nicéphore Niépce, né Joseph. (After years of buttonholing French people on exactly how to say it, I believe it is meant to sound something like knee-EPS. Remember the “Knights Who Say ‘Ni!’,” from Monty Python? I always hear it in that short sharp high-pitched tone: Niépce!).
One note: Any early — photography buff can tell you that Daguerre, although he gets most of the credit and glory, certainly did not “invent” photography. Nearly half a century before the daguerreotype, there had been an Englishman named Thomas Wedgwood, scion of the Wedgwood pottery dynasty, who in the early 1790s tried to fix or freeze the images produced inside a camera obscura. A camera obscura: You build a chamber, a camera in Latin, without windows, a dark box, and you prick a tiny hole in one of the walls. The light coming through the hole re-expands inside the box, it fans back out into a picture, reverse and upside down. The human eye is a natural camera obscura. We take in light through the pupil. But then we trap it. We remember. Wedgwood asked, what if he could make a chemical that could remember?
He never succeeded in making the pictures stay. He managed only silhouettes. But he was a path-breaker. Still, of all the figures who followed him into the scientific labyrinth of 19th-century “sun pictures,” including Daguerre, none is more compelling than Nicéphore Niépce.
The word photograph did not exist when Niépce was alive. In fact, it was coined in 1839 in response to Daguerre’s creation. By the time Niépce made View from the Window at Le Gras, he had started using the word heliograph, or sun-writing. Many names, often overlapping, were used at different stages in the long evolution of the medium — from Wedgwood’s “silver pictures” through to the data streams collected by the Hubble telescope. But when we refer today to the larger tradition of photography, of pictures that bring with them a kind of accuracy and authority, pictures in which we see, as an early ad for daguerreotypes put it, “nature delineated by herself” — that tradition begins at Le Gras.
On its face, the View shows only the frame of a window and, beyond it, a simple rural scene. Its eeriness lies not in its content, but rather in the sense one gets that it represents a true birth. Something came into the world with the View that was destined to exert an -immeasurable effect on human consciousness, and the portal through which this change had been fated to enter hung there, at Le Gras.
That said, visually speaking, the image is like nothing that had come before — or after, for that matter: part painting, part lithograph, part X-ray, part litmus paper, a mirror and a black hole. It contains multiple time signatures. The light moving over the rooftops seems to emanate from different parts of the day simultaneously, even from the evening, and this is because it did: The exposure lasted all day long — or even, by some estimates, several days. Hours of earth history committed themselves to Niépce’s chemical coating as they passed above the interior of France in the summer of 1827. The effect is dream-like, in the sense that if one were to project a human dream onto a screen — which surely we will eventually learn to do, a further extension of the form — it might resemble this. That’s what I remember best about seeing it as a child. You felt you could fall into it. You felt that although it was the first true picture of this world, it had been brought back from another.
When you think about the ubiquity of photography today, its penetration into every chamber of our lives — our memories, our metaphors, our courtrooms and laboratories, our bedrooms and bodies, our knowledge of the cosmos — it’s only then that the real momentousness of Niépce’s invention can be understood. We live in an age when every kid has an iPhone in a pocket and satellites take pictures of infant galaxies, but try to re-enter for a moment the mental world of someone who has never seen a fixed image, but is then confronted with one. Think, for starters, how it would change your idea of time. Something that had remained fluid for hundreds of thousands of years of human history could now be frozen and framed. The effect of this on our imagination is comparable only with the beginnings of cave art, maybe, when it first became possible to select an object from the physical world and store it outside of memory.
About a year ago, in starting to work on a book about the predawn of photography with the Canadian artist-writer Leanne Shapton, I undertook to learn as much as could be found about Niépce, as person and inventor. Bizarrely, there has never been a true, dedicated biography, in French or English, of a figure who, even if we were to credit him for only his most obvious invention, ranks among the great technical — scientific pioneers of the modern period. Yet it was hard to find a single intimate detail from the man’s life, some description of a moment that would bring his personality into relief against the generic language in which one repeatedly saw him described: as a figure of universal regard, modest and diligent, unimpeachable, and the like.
For this reason the little chink in the wall afforded by a newspaper piece I found — the childhood sickbed anecdote — thrilled me. It was written by Albert Payson Terhune, who’d go on to pen beloved novels about collies. When I learned that I would soon have the opportunity to visit Le Gras with Shapton and present this lost factoid personally to the photographer Pierre-Yves Mahé, who has spearheaded a minor Niépce renaissance in the past few decades, I knew my chance to make a contribution had come.
“That is completely false,” Mahé said, when we’d reached Le Gras after a plane, train, and automobile ride. “I have never heard of that.”
It was a rainy day, the countryside more gray than green. I found myself noticing walls — the 17th-century walls of Le Gras rose in their drab colors on either side as we walked. Closed. Private. No public face. If you had passed it on the road, you would have done just that, passed by, having no idea that an earth-changing invention had come into being here.
Mahé, while affable, did not suffer with patience misinformation along the lines of my sickbed story. Of modest height with a healthy head of trimmed salt-and — pepper hair, he had a protectiveness around his subject unavoidable by those who labor for years resurrecting forgotten geniuses. The casual ignorance of the layman begins to madden. And Niépce was not only obscure, Mahé gave us to understand — no, making matters worse was that whatever biographical information did exist was shot through with conjecture and error. There were many stories like my newspaper clipping. Meanwhile, the truth had been neglected, he said, and gestured toward the house.
Mahé more or less rediscovered Le Gras more than 20 years ago. Not that its location was ever unknown in the academic sense, or that the place had fallen into ruin, but it had been a long time since anyone had taken an active interest. For all any interested parties knew, the house no longer existed or had long ago been turned into a museum. But it turned out a family owned it and was living there. Another family still does today, which means the property had been enjoying basic maintenance through the 20th century. As Mahé explained, flipping back and forth between English and French, “There are so many old important houses in the interior of France!” More than the government could ever take care of.
It was different from our situation in the States. We had our treasures, and we protected them. In the town where I grew up, everybody knew where the Scribner brothers’ house was, and we went on field trips there. (The Scribner brothers founded the town of New Albany, Indiana — did you seriously not know that?) But here in France, Mahé explained, every random country house was a candidate for enshrinement. Some discovery had been made there, or Voltaire had spent a night. Over the years, Le Gras stood there, aging but intact. Benign neglect is often the best thing that can happen to a property — folks aren’t tempted to make all sorts of unfortunate improvements. When Mahé went inside for the first time, in 1999, despite the fact that various people had lived there on and off for years, the essence of the place had remained unchanged since Niépce’s time.
Joseph Niépce was born in 1765, and, in his college years, changed his name to Nicéphore, taking the name of a saint he admired, or maybe just one whose name he liked. Nicephorus I, a ninth-century Orthodox patriarch, was known best — by a prescient or, if you’re not mystical, at least curious coincidence — for having supported the cause of the so-called iconodules, the “servants of images,” worshipers who believed in the power and sanctity of paintings and other icons.
For his first 30 or so years, Niépce led a fairly unremarkable life. He taught in the same school he’d studied in, the academy of the Oratorians. By one account, he was fired when the administrators learned he had been entertaining the pupils with magic-lantern shows. After that, he joined the army. His commanding officer described him as “the most brilliant lustre of my staff.” But then Niépce got sick, eventually moving back to the region around Chalon-sur-Saône, and, with his brother Claude, took over stewardship of the family estate. He’d married a woman named Marie-Agnès, who bore him a son, Isidore. Niépce’s mother was still alive and lived with them, and so did a younger brother. He seemed well on his way to enjoying the luckiest of fates: a Frenchman tending his gardens, able to bequeath his ancestral property to his son, and destined to leave no obvious sign on the world but a modest churchyard grave.
What made the difference with Niépce was his cast of mind. He had the dual instincts — for dogged tinkering and play — that mark the great inventors. And he was that, a truly great inventor. I hadn’t realized quite how great until I started reading about him. On the train down from Paris, I had finished a beautiful -little book from 1935, wrapped in a paper printed with silvered green leaves, a translation of a French text from the 1860s, The Truth Concerning the Invention of Photography by Victor Fouque. (It had been fun to hunt the book down back in the States. It is extremely rare and has only a wisp of digital existence that I could determine. One had to find it and touch it.) It is primarily a passionate screed against Daguerre, denouncing him as more or less a thief of both Niépce’s secrets and his proper place as photography’s founding father. But it also contains text from many letters that passed between Nicéphore and his brother Claude during their major working years, and there is enough detail in the Fouque book alone to make clear that if Niépce’s career and its context were properly understood, his name would rank with those of -Edison and Tesla in the pantheon.
This will seem like hyperbole or special pleading until we consider that photography was not the only major invention Niépce can claim. He also helped invent a machine known today by the name of: the combustion engine. He and Claude worked on it together and called it the pyreolophore (the fire-wind-producer), and spent years struggling to perfect it. They used not gas or oil but solid fuel, various substances sometimes pressed into little cakes. A decade later, they were on to petroleum. They built a model efficient enough to power a small boat along the Grande Saône, the wide river that cuts through the city. For a long time, you could still find people in Chalon-sur-Saône who remembered being children and watching the brothers Niépce piloting their strange experimental craft along the river.
Another thing Nicéphore invented? The bicycle. Well, partly. He is one of several people who designed early bikes, which lacked pedals (he called his a velocipede). But it was Niépce who may have made the first one with a movable front wheel, a wheel that would pivot, and he certainly invented the adjustable seat. He wanted to put a motor on the velocipede! But he didn’t live to do it. Since he was a young boy, Niépce had looked at things and saw how they might change.
At the Le Gras house, we began our quiet tour, pausing about once a minute to take in Mahé’s entertaining mini-lectures, Shapton framing iPhone shots she would turn into watercolors back home. At one point, looking through a window into a side yard, we got onto the subject of the grounds outside the house. I asked if any archaeology had ever been done out there. In fact, Mahé said, there were two wells on the property, very old and very deep. A scuba diver had been brought in to explore them, but when he got to the bottom of one, he found an unexploded World War II–era bomb and “returned to surface quickly.” I expressed surprise. Had the Germans dropped so many bombs here that one had eventually fallen straight into a well? “No,” Mahé said, “there was a reason.” In the old days the city authorities, when dealing with unexploded bombs that had landed in people’s yards or what have you, and possessing no sure methods for disarming them or blowing them up safely in a field somewhere like we prefer to do now, would drop them into deep wells. “That way, if they went off, at least no one died.” And the second well? “Just a lot of sand!” said Mahé.
We stopped abruptly — there had come a knock from the door downstairs. A friend and collaborator of Mahé’s, Jean-Louis Bruley, had joined us for the tour. A retired professor of mechanical engineering, he looked to be in his 60s, wearing a raincoat. Next to Mahé’s smooth, round, taut face, Bruley’s was square and stolid and bearded. He had a beard without a moustache, an Abe Lincoln beard, which did nothing to detract from his overall impression of gravitas. When Bruley told me (politely, sheepishly) that he spoke only a few words of English, I felt like saying, But serious people don’t speak English!
And so on we went with two guides, Mahé and Bruley, one a photographer and one a mechanical engineer — same division of powers as the brothers Niépce, who seemed at moments reincarnated in the bodies of these two Frenchmen. Bruley became most animated in talking not about photography but about the combustion engine. “That is my specialty,” he said. He’d been working for years with a partner to re — create and perfect the pyreolophore. “Of the two Niépce brothers,” he said, “Claude was more interested in the engine. He let Nicéphore handle the cameras.” But the two collaborated extensively. That is, before Claude went mad. But Bruley didn’t say that. He just said, “Claude became ill.” In his small choice and sad smile there was an air of respect for the household ghosts.
Mahé stopped in another hallway and directed my eyes to the wallpaper. In places it was fraying and sort of blowing away from the wall. “We believe that this was here in Niépce’s time,” he said. The wallpaper was covered in pretty little blue designs, like flowers or snowflakes but neither, abstract. I wondered if it had been made here at Le Gras, and if perhaps the blue dye had been extracted from woad. (I had read that morning in the Fouque book that this was another of the Niépce brothers’ pursuits, cultivating and experimenting with woad to extract dye for making blues, since indigo could not be grown in France. It seemed that wherever you poked your head, investigating some interest of Niépce, other projects lay piled in the corner. Yet another one: Nicéphore figured out a way to make a cotton from milkweed — his descendant Janine Niépce has a pair of socks made from this material, and they are said to feel like fine cotton.) “We don’t think the brothers were involved in making this paper,” Mahé said. “Only that they would have seen it.” He rubbed a fraying piece briefly between his fingers, to show us that it didn’t break or snap off like other old wallpaper would. “C’est souple,” he said. I lifted up my phone and snapped a picture.
We reached the second floor of the house and entered the larger rooms where Niépce had conducted many of what he called his “experiments with light.” Here it was possible to have the sense of ghostly presence that Mahé had spoken of feeling when he had first stepped into the building. He told me it felt like Niépce could be walking just ahead of me, through the door. It was like the brothers had just left.
But there had been changes, too.
“We had to tear through a layer of flooring to reach the original,” Bruley said, gesturing to the scuffed wood beneath his feet. They had wanted visitors to see the actual boards that Niépce had stood on. Daguerre had walked there, too, I remembered. He was there, looking over Niépce’s shoulder. Absorbing his secrets. Wondering about the contents of Niépce’s little brown bottle, which held the magical fixative.
“We discovered that by finding the places where the scuffing of the feet had been particularly heavy on the wood, that was where Niépce had stood,” Bruley said, with an air of reverence. Those were the marks of the thousands of days and nights Niépce had spent serving his strange god, a god of light that would consent to appear in a box full of darkness.
Mahé and Bruley loved this place. At times they were like boys showing me a tree fort they had made. They had an anecdote for each object. This window casing, when they had opened it, was full of gigantic spiders. This table was riddled with worms. “But we stopped them,” Mahé said, laughing. “We stopped the worms.” At one point while we were standing there talking, rain began to pour down through a fresh hole in the roof, right onto a desk. Mahé and Bruley grumbled to each other in French and seemed to make a mutual note of adding the leak to their list of needed fixes.
Mahé had slept over a couple of times, keeping vigil with a photographer and filmmaker. It was when you were there in the wee small hours, I imagined, that you’d really feel Niépce’s presence.
“Did he seem happy?” I asked of those overnights. “Do you think his ghost is happy?”
“Not yet,” said Mahé, “because he is not well-enough known yet.”
In the center of the floor of one room stood a little metal bathtub like I had seen only in 18th-century engravings. The Niépces’ own tub? It was tiny. Looking at it, one could not help but imagine a naked Niépce folded up in a semifetal position, scrubbing his back with a long scrubbing stick. Or whatever they did. Mahé said, “No, it was not his actual tub. But one just like we think they would have used.” He had added several touches like this. The early tripods, for instance, were authentic, just the type Niépce is known to have used. Mahé and his co-conspirators had been adding to the house this way, acquiring old items slowly and with scholarly care.
Most extraordinary in this augmented-reality category was a room at the end of the house, a kind of museum within the house, which contains the remnants of a photo — chemistry lab, once owned by a prominent local citizen who lived at the same time as Niépce, just up the river from Le Gras. It had been preserved by a collector, the bottles still on the shelves with paper labels, equipment, everything — just the sorts of chemicals and apparatus that Niépce would have used himself. Some of the chemicals had been dangerous, substances that modern-day chemists know not to go near or at least to handle with protective gear. Mahé had installed it here entire, sans dangerous chemicals.
With a twinkle he could not suppress, he handed me a pan with a chunk of something black on it. It was tarry and smelled like a freshly paved road. It was bitumen: asphalt, a kind of pitch. They called it bitumen of Judea because it floats up naturally from the bottom of the Dead Sea, and the substance had many strange names: Jew’s pitch, funeral gum, amber of Sodom. Mummy balm, because the Egyptians used to employ it in the act of preserving the dead. (In fact, the Arabic word for asphalt, mūmiya, is the root of the word mummy.)
After my nostrils had been thoroughly cleared, Mahé led me into a room where all the different stages in Niépce’s photographic process had been laid out. I smelled bitumen and lavender, the combination that created the greatest breakthrough for Niépce. It was a time when chemistry still carried the smell of alchemy. When he mixed bitumen of Judea and lavender oil together, something happened. The lavender dissolved the bitumen, but only those areas that had been exposed to light. Of the many small chemical discoveries that made modern photography possible, few were as crucial as that one. I couldn’t help savoring the fact that his humble flowering plant, growing outside in profusion as we spoke, had been at the center of it all.
In leading our tour, Mahé had very carefully (and effectively) saved the best room — the room with the view — for last. Eventually the moment came. He led us up to a doorway, where he paused and pivoted. “This is it,” he said. We had come to the second-story room where Nicéphore Niépce made the View from the Window at Le Gras. I felt excited and numb, the way I’ve always felt when life arranged it so that a place I’d dreamed of seeing became a place I’d seen. There is something distancing at first about the less-than-perfect overlap, but it settles out. My eyes went to a window against the wall on our right, the south — facing wall. The south being where you get the longest exposure, if you are in the Northern Hemisphere, and Niépce needed as many hours of light as he could get for his process.
Not saying I knew or sensed any of that — it was immediately clear which window. The camera stood in front of it, pointing at it. A window to the left of a fireplace, as you faced the southern wall. I walked up to the glass and looked out, saying something along the lines of, So, this is the actual view… I have a gift for profundity at important moments.
“Well, not exactly,” said Mahé.
He explained that in the course of studying every inch of the room, which he and his colleagues have spent years doing, they’d found that the window was in a slightly different place on the wall than it had been in 1827. “This fireplace,” he said, “was not original to the house.” When it was added, the window was moved to accommodate it. “About 70 centimeters to the left,” Mahé said.
One of the other prominent neo — Niépcians, Jean-Louis Marignier, had used computer modeling to overlay and compare the current view from the window with the one in the View from the Window. Proceeding geometrically (“like a surveyor,” Mahé said), Marignier had detected this almost imperceptible shifting of position. A few of the objects in the picture were still out there to be used as fixed points.
“In fact,” Mahé said, “we just found a new one!” His excitement about it was still fresh and so less guarded. “Yes, this is something interesting,” he said. “You know, I have held the actual plate of the View from the Window in my hands two or three times. But the last time I saw it” — at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, where it is housed — “I noticed a little white smudge in the corner, and I realized it shows a building that still exists on this landscape.” He put his face almost against the glass and pointed out, over the fields and houses of Saint-Loup-de-Varennes. I followed his gaze. In the distance one could make out a wall. It was partly obscured by a tree, barely visible. But the team had checked it out, and it was old enough to have been there. Its position on the plate corresponded to where it was standing, once the 70-centimeter adjustment had been allowed for.
I asked Mahé about his experience handling the plate at the Ransom Center, which triggered in Mahé a story not from his personal history but from the past of the picture itself, which he knew almost as well as his own. The plate, he told me, had almost been lost, “passing through many hands,” as the auction catalogs say, before disappearing for a good 50 years starting around the beginning of the 20th century. The art of photography flourished and became dominant, but the image that had started it all was missing. In 1952, one Mrs. Pritchard — the daughter-in-law of one of the many men who’d once owned the plate, and recently widowed — was taking inventory of her late husband’s estate and noticed mention of an unmarked trunk, which according to the records had been lying there for more than 30 years, in a kind of storage locker down by the Thames. Inside it, she found old clothes, family relics, and the Niépce plate.
Part of the violence done by Daguerre, in his vainglory, calling his pictures daguerreotypes, was that Niépce’s contributions to photography were neglected and even snobbishly dismissed in the decades immediately following his death, Mahé told me. Much was lost that way.
His story moved me 70 centimeters to the left. Or not the story so much as the alternative reality it implied, one in which the plate was never relocated, was thrown into the Thames, and so for modern historical purposes never existed. The View was Niépce’s pinky on the stirrup of the galloping horse of history. Had it vanished, he would be, I suppose, a legend or a phantom in the footnotes of early photography — the Frenchman with the strange name, who was supposed to have preceded Daguerre and taught him, but got rubbed out of the narrative. And of this mysterious person’s pictures, none survive except some sun prints, basically photocopies. Yes, we would speak of Niépce with the fascination that attends great obscurity, but with a spoonful of sophisticated doubt, too, saying things such as, “Perhaps his pictures were not quite so astonishing as observers would have us believe, especially considering that Daguerre’s advances were still years off when Niépce died.”
I would not be standing in this room. Would never have been haunted by these rooftops. Would not really understand that it started here. Would not have the true sense of what photography’s dream-like primordial origins looked like.
It wouldn’t matter. Because we wouldn’t know we didn’t know it, but what a disaster. We would have the story so wrong.
At that moment I saw maybe the last thing I would have predicted, had you told me that I would look out that window one day: a backyard trampoline. The family who owned the property lived in one of the other buildings, but I had forgotten about them, so complete was the time-travel effect. I pictured the floppy-haired heads and faces of provincial French schoolchildren sailing into the air, into my line of sight, down again, then bouncing back up. It was jarring, but also, somehow, a perfect addition to the View. There was life in it, and a spirit of play that Niépce had known and held onto longer than some. What had Niépce given us, after all, in what he invented here, if not a way to maintain our grip a bit longer on the spectacle of the world?
I retrieved my phone from my pocket and took a picture.
About the author: John Jeremiah Sullivan lives in North Carolina. He is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. This year he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his research into early African-American music.
