First human in a photograph

When was the last time you watched the birdie or said cheese while looking at a camera? Photos are ubiquitous, everyone has a phone camera in their pockets and we snap constantly. Try running a red light and see what you get in the mail.

But who was the first person to be photographed? Was it a king, a president, one of the world’s wealthiest people? Not really. It was a regular Joe who, while strolling down Boulevard du Temple in Paris, decided to stop and get his shoe shined. Him and the shoeshine boy who provided the service. The year was 1838 and Louis Daguerre had invented the first useful sort of photography, the Daguerreotype: a copper plate with a thin coat of silver that was exposed to iodine vapor to form iodine crystals on the surface. Developing the mirrored image that formed involved heated mercury and the exposure time was a horrendous 10 minutes. Because of the extended exposure time, portraits were not viable. Previous methods required exposures of up to 8 hours; that’s a long time to watch a birdie or say cheese.

Anyway, when Daguerre snapped this 10 minute exposure everything that was moving did not register in the picture including street traffic and people. Except for the shoeshine boy and his customer and perhaps a person reading a newspaper on a bench to the right of the main characters.

What I find most interesting about this picture is that we don’t know who these two people were, and they lived the rest of their lives never knowing the significance of that one brief pause in that day in 1838. Regular Joe didn’t go home and announce he had been photographed; he probably never even mentioned having his shoes shined. It was an unimportant, highly forgetful moment in his life and yet it was a highly significant milestone in the history of humanity. “That's one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind" only in this case, no one ever knew anything about it. Could you be going about your day making history and not know anything about it?

And I love that the honor of being the first human photographed doesn’t go to a head of state or a millionaire, it goes to a lowly shoeshine boy living in Paris in 1838 and his customer.

Boulevard du Temple by Daguerre. First photograph of a human being. 1838