The First Photograph
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Heliography
"I have the satisfaction of being able to tell you that through an improvement in my process I have succeeded in obtaining a picture as good as I could wishÂ…. It was taken from your room at Le Gras with my biggest camera and my largest stone. The objects appear with astonishing sharpness and exactitude down to the smallest details and finest gradations. As the image is almost colorless, one can judge it only by holding it at an angle, and I can tell you the effect is downright magical." —Joseph Nicéphore Niépce's letter to his brother, Claude. 16 September 1824.
The following firsthand account is taken from Helmut Gernsheim's article, "The 150th Anniversary of Photography," in History of Photography, Vol. I, No. 1, January 1977:
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce.
Photoetching of an engraving of Cardinal Georges D'Amboise.
1827.
19.5 x 13 cm.
The term "heliography" was first coined by its inventor, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, to identify the process by which he obtained the first permanent photographic images. With its classical derivation from the Greek—helios meaning sun, and graphein denoting writing or drawing—the term encompassed both the source and the process in describing this first successfully permanent means of letting light record itself.
Niépce was the first individual to secure permanent images by photochemical means. His heliographic process would actually grow out of his early experiments with lithography. Niépce, like William Henry Fox Talbot and others who followed him, was not a good draughtsman and, following the loss of his artistic son, Isidore, to the army in 1814, he began seeking other means of producing images with light-sensitive substances. During the next few years he began experimenting with light-sensitive varnishes and then with silver chloride images produced in camera, but, like pioneers both before and after him, he was unable to permanently secure the images from fading. In the course of these experiments Niépce produced his best results by coating his materials with a solution of bitumen of Judea, an asphalt compound dating back to the time of the Egyptians but used in his day as a resist in engraving methods coupled with lithography. He discovered that not only was the bitumen bleached to a light gray color by its exposure to sunlight, but also it had the property of hardening against its support material due to the action of its solvents, oil of lavender and turpentine.
In 1822, Niépce coated a glass plate with bitumen and exposed it by contact under an engraving of Pope Pius VII. The engraving had been oiled to make the paper nearly transparent. The sunlight passing through the clear portions hardened the coating to the glass, but those portions shadowed by the lines of the engraving remained soluble. When developed in the oil of lavender the unhardened portions dissolved away, leaving a clear, fine-lined imaged. Viewed by transmitted light the image was composed of bright lines in the darker field of the remaining opaque coating on the glass; when held against a dark surface and lighted from the front, the image looked black in its surrounding light gray field. This first permanent example of a heliograph was destroyed during an attempt to copy it some years later.
Over the next few years, Niépce experimented with bitumen on pewter or zinc plates that could actually be inked for printing. His best results came in 1826 with an engraving of the Cardinal Georges d'Amboise. He followed the same bitumen of Judea/oil of lavender process but this time employed a pewter plate in place of the glass one. He contact printed the engraving, dissolved out the soluble bitumen, and put the plate in an acid bath. The hardened areas of the bitumen acted as a resist, so that the acid etched only the uncovered metal in the lines left by the engraving. The resulting intaglio heliographic plates were used to make final proofs. Thus, Niépce also invented the first successful form of photomechanical reproduction.
Finally (and most likely also in 1826) the chemical process, the power of the camera, the successful quest for permanence, and the combined curiosity and clarity of the inventor, all came remarkably together; Joseph Nicéphore Niépce made the first permanent photography from nature. After coating a pewter plate with the same solution of bitumen of Judea, he placed the plate into a camera focused upon the sunlit scene looking out from the third-floor window of his house at Le Gras. The exposure is recorded as having been around eight hours in duration. The brightest parts of the scene bleached and hardened the bitumen. When developed in the oil of lavender and turpentine, some coating in the partly exposed middle tones and all the coating in the unexposed shadow areas, was dissolved away, revealing the dark gray metal beneath. The resulting image is therefore a direct positive: the light sections being the hardened bitumen, the darks ones being the actual pewter plate surface.
Joined in partnership with Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre in 1829, Niépce did little more with the heliograph. Upon his death in 1833, his son Isidore would take his place in the partnership but no further improvements in the process were forthcoming. By the time of their public announcement in 1839, Daguerre and his daguerreotype process far outshone his associate's pioneering contribution to photography. A few remaining examples of Niépce's heliographs still exist today, but they cannot surpass the uniqueness and beauty of this first permanent photograph from nature.
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