Boulevard du Temple, taken by Daguerre in 1838 in Paris, includes the earliest known candid photograph of a person. The image shows a street, but because of the over ten-minute exposure time the moving traffic does not appear. At the lower left, however, a man apparently having his boots polished, and the bootblack polishing them, were motionless enough for their images to be captured. Louis Daguerre (1787-1851) was a French artist and photographer, recognized for his invention of the daguerreotype process of photography. The daguerreotype process, or daguerreotypy, was the first publicly announced photographic process, and for nearly twenty years it was the one most commonly used. |