1 Photography and film have often been touted, especially by their fans, as distinctively twentieth-century media. Disinterested historians, however, have traced the origins of both photography and film back into the nineteenth century.

2 Perhaps the most important pioneer of photography was Louis Daguerre, a Frenchman born near Paris in 1787. Daguerre worked as a tax inspector, but his heart lay in the visual arts. Building on his experience as a scene painter for the Paris opera, he began to create exhibitions he called “dioramas.” First presented in Paris in 1822, and subsequently in London, these shows consisted of groups of immense pictorial views of famous places and historical events, painted on translucent paper or muslin fabric. Daguerre used ingenious changes in lighting, enhanced by appropriate music, to produce a wide range of emotional effects. With the dioramas, Daguerre could well be considered a forerunner of today's theatrical lighting designers.

3 In the mid-1820s, Daguerre learned of the efforts of another Frenchman, Joseph- Nicéphore Niepce, to produce images by the action of sunlight. The two men shortly formed a partnership. Although Niepce is held to have produced the first actual photograph from nature—a view of his country estate made around 1827—it was Daguerre who, after Niepce's death in 1833, perfected the process. In 1835, he discovered that if an iodized silver plate were exposed in a camera to mercury fumes, the latent image could be developed and then fixed by using a table salt solution. Niepce's process had required an exposure time of 8 hours, but Daguerre's technique cut the exposure time to 30 minutes.

4 Named for their inventor, daguerreotypes had several important limitations. They were very fragile, and the relatively long exposure time meant that moving objects would not register on the image. Thus, an 1839 picture of a city boulevard gives the impression of empty streets, with the single exception of a man who stopped to have his shoes shined. (The two anonymous individuals captured in that daguerreotype may be the first people ever to have been photographed.) Finally, daguerreotypes suffered the drawback of being non-reproducible. One important challenge in the next phase of photography's development was to discover how copies of a picture could easily be made.

5 For a few decades in the mid-19th century, however, daguerreotypes were the cutting edge. Daguerre's process was officially announced in early 1839. Isidore Niepce, Joseph Niepce's son and heir, and Daguerre sold the rights to the French government in exchange for a lifelong pension. By the end of 1839, Daguerre's booklet describing the process had become a best-seller, going through 29 editions and translations. His keen sense of theatrics, his ingenuity, and his curiosity had assured him a permanent place in the annals of photography.