How an Anonymous Parisian Became the First Person Ever Photographed

On a clear spring morning in 1838, the French painter and inventor Louis Daguerre positioned a tripod holding a small wooden box on the roof of his Paris studio. It was a camera obscura, a simple device used by centuries of artists to capture light and project inverted images. But Daguerre was attempting something revolutionary. Using light-sensitive chemicals and polished silver plates, he was trying to produce some of the world’s first high-resolution, lifelike photographs.  

Daguerre aimed his rooftop camera at the bustling street scene below. The Boulevard du Temple, known to Parisians as the “Boulevard du Crime,” was home to a half-dozen popular theaters, and even at eight in the morning the street was filled with pedestrians, hawkers and horse-drawn carriages.  

Daguerre opened the camera’s lens and timed the exposure for five minutes, long enough to fix a temporary image on the treated plate inside the box. Back in his studio, Daguerre completed the photographic process he'd been perfecting for 14 years, producing a shiny, crystalline image of the Boulevard du Temple that was an early example of what would become known as a daguerreotype.  

That 1838 daguerreotype, titled View of the Boulevard du Temple, wasn’t particularly special to Daguerre. It was one of three test photos he took that same day to demonstrate how the daguerreotype process performed under different light conditions. Because of the minutes-long exposure times, the Boulevard du Temple appears to be completely empty in the photos. Anything in motion was rendered invisible or hopelessly blurred, including all carriages and pedestrians.  

Except for one person.  

In the lower left third of the photo taken at 8 a.m., there’s a man standing on the sidewalk near a bend in the boulevard. He appears to have one foot up on a box, presumably getting his shoes shined. The bootblack—or shoe shiner—is obscured from view. Daguerre didn’t intend to photograph the man, but he was the only living thing in frame that stood still for the full five-minute exposure.  

The identity of the standing man is unknown, which is a shame, because historians now believe that Daguerre’s 1838 View of the Boulevard du Temple is the world’s oldest known photograph to clearly depict a person. Its story dates to the very invention of photography and was almost lost to history—twice.  

Before photography, Louis Daguerre was famous as the creator of the Paris Diorama, a theatrical spectacle that was like an early version of cinema. Audiences entered a barn-like building and sat before a large painted canvas depicting, in one exhibition, a peaceful alpine village.  

“When the painting is observed by light on the front, you see one effect, and then inside the Diorama there are mirrors and reflectors, pulleys and cables that alter where the light is coming from,” explains Mike Robinson, a Daguerre scholar and practicing daguerreotype photographer. By manipulating the lighting and adding sound effects, Daguerre brought the static scene to life with a landslide appearing to swallow the village. 

The Diorama opened in 1822, and just a few years later Daguerre began experimenting with photography. He wondered how much more immersive his Diorama shows could be if he could create truly lifelike images of the scenes depicted. A savvy businessman, Daguerre also wanted to reproduce souvenir-sized replicas of the Diorama paintings to sell to tourists. 

In the late 1820s, Daguerre began corresponding with Nicéphore Niépce, another French inventor who was working on the same problem—how to use chemistry and light to capture permanent images. The two entered into a formal partnership in 1829. Niépce developed a technique called a heliograph (“sun writing”) that could record a faint image on a polished pewter plate treated with light-sensitive chemicals.   

Niépce’s 1827 heliograph, View from the Window at Le Gras, is now considered the oldest surviving photograph. It required an exposure time of six full days, but even with all that light, the resulting image was still dark and blurry. Niépce and Daguerre experimented with more powerful lenses and different combinations of chemicals and materials. After Niépce died in 1833, Daguerre continued experimenting with his own photographic process, eventually developing the daguerreotype, which was introduced publicly in 1839.

Making a daguerreotype is an exacting process. Daguerre started with a highly polished, silver-plated sheet of copper that was treated with light-sensitive iodine vapors. The plate was then set inside a camera and exposed to several minutes of focused light, anywhere from three to 25 minutes depending on the conditions. The plate was then sealed in a box and treated with fumes from boiled mercury. The mercury reacted with the light-sensitive surface to form microscopic granular crystals on the reflective silver surface.  

“Imagine dust on a mirror,” says Robinson. “The dust is white and the mirror reflects black, which gives you your shadows. It produces a remarkable image that to this day has yet to be equaled in terms of resolution.”  

By the late 1830s, Daguerre was drumming up publicity for his world-changing invention. His business plan, formulated in partnership with Niépce’s son, was to sell subscriptions for his daguerreotype technology. To create buzz, Daguerre started offering private studio tours to show off his early daguerreotype images, including View of the Boulevard du Temple, to journalists and other influential figures.  

Jules Janin, a prominent French journalist, was floored by what he saw. “No drawing by the greatest of great masters has ever come close to it,” wrote Janin in the journal L’Artiste. “If the mass is admirable, the details are infinite.” 

The American inventor Samuel Morse was another prominent visitor to Daguerre’s studio. The inventor of the telegraph held a magnifying glass to View of the Boulevard du Temple and reported his impressions of the photo to the New York Observer, making special note of the solitary human figure.  

“Objects moving are not impressed,” said Morse. “The Boulevard, so constantly filled with a moving throng of pedestrians and carriages, was perfectly solitary, except an individual who was having his boots brushed. His feet were compelled, of course, to be stationary for some time, one being on the box of the boot-black, and the other on the ground. Consequently, his boots and legs are well defined, but he is without body or head because these were in motion.” 

While View of the Boulevard du Temple is the oldest known surviving photo of a person, Robinson says that there’s evidence that Daguerre experimented with portraits in the late 1830s, but none of those images survived. In a letter from 1839 to the British photography pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot, for example, a friend informed Talbot that “Daguerre has done a portrait of himself, said to be excellent.”  

Daguerre ended up abandoning the subscription scheme, and the French government acquired the rights to his daguerreotype process, awarding him and Niépce’s son lifelong pensions.

On August 19, 1839, French authorities announced that the daguerreotype would be France’s gift to the world. Daguerre published a 79-page instruction booklet, and the revolutionary technology was freely available for anyone to use (except in England, where Daguerre had secured a patent).  

“Within days, all the optician shops in Paris were sold out of lenses and all the iodine in the city was bought up,” says Robinson. “People were hammering coins into silver plates and suddenly there were tripods with boxes all over Paris. From there, the daguerreotype spread like wildfire across the world.”  

Because of its “open source” release, other inventors were able to rapidly improve the daguerreotype process and cut the exposure time from five minutes down to less than a minute. Now that people didn’t have to sit still for ages to get their photo taken, daguerreotype portraiture became a boom industry in the 1840s. Soon cities across America had daguerreotype studios offering portraits to a growing middle-class clientele.

After the heyday of the daguerreotype in the 1840s and 1850s, the technology was replaced by systems that could produce multiple prints from a single negative. With the release of the Kodak camera in 1888, taking photographs became part of everyday life.  

By the turn of the 20th century, photos of people were so ubiquitous that no one bothered to ask when the first one was taken. As it happened, View of the Boulevard du Temple had almost been lost to history. On March 8, 1839, a fire broke out in the Diorama and burned down Daguerre’s studio, but the photo was one of the few that survived. In October of that year, Daguerre gifted View of the Boulevard du Temple to King Ludwig I of Bavaria along with two other early daguerreotypes as part of a framed “triptych.”  

Daguerre’s gift was hung in a quiet corner of the Bavarian National Museum, where View of the Boulevard du Temple was photographed in the 1930s. Those photographs, which first appeared in Beaumont Newhall’s 1949 book, History of Photography from 1839 to the Present Day, once again saved Daguerre's historic image from total extinction.  

As reported by scholar Steffen Siegel, during World War II, conservators at the Bavarian National Museum made a fateful error. While attempting to restore the three daguerreotypes in the triptych, they ended up badly damaging the plates. Another failed restoration effort was made in the 1970s, rendering the images completely ruined.  

The only images that survive today of View of the Boulevard du Temple and the first photographed person are copies of the photos taken in the 1930s. Since even the best modern photographs lack the resolution and detail of a daguerreotype, says Robinson, “what we’re seeing of that image probably isn’t even close to what the original really looked like.” 

Visitors to the Bavarian National Museum will only see a high-quality recreation of View of the Boulevard du Temple.