Filmmakers Locate Site Of World's First Photograph With Humans

(MENAFN- USA Art News) A team of filmmakers has successfully identified the precise location of the first photograph to capture human subjects, a mystery that has endured for 188 years. The image, Louis Daguerre's View of the Boulevard du Temple from 1838, features a shoeshine boy and his client on a Parisian thoroughfare.

Daguerre captured the scene from the window of his upstairs studio in Paris during a spring morning in 1838, utilizing an invention he had been developing for nearly a year. The photograph is notable for including humans because its long exposure time, estimated between five to 10 minutes, meant only stationary subjects would register. The shoeshine boy and his customer remained still long enough to be recorded, unlike others on the busy boulevard.

The exact spot where the two individuals stood is now marked by a bronze plaque. Daguerre's studio and an adjacent theater were located on what is now Rue Léon-Jouhaux. He was photographing a site that corresponds to modern-day Place de la République, which Baron Haussmann later designed in the mid- 1850s. For the past two years, filmmakers Maximilien Van Aertryck, Axel Danielson, and Kalle Boman have been dedicated to pinpointing this precise spot.

The trio incorporated Daguerre's early photograph into their 2023 Sundance-awarded documentary, And the King Said, What a Fantastic Machine, which chronicles 200 years of image culture using archival footage. While in Place de la République in 2024, they decided to solve the longstanding puzzle.

Their methodology involved creating a 3D scan of Place de la République and the Boulevard du Temple to calculate building distances. They then reconstructed the neighborhood's 1838 appearance using historical paintings, prints, engravings, and maps from various Parisian archives. This data was provided to two architectural firms, who independently identified two spots separated by six feet. The filmmakers determined the midpoint between these two findings.

Further complicating their research, the original daguerreotype plate was sent to Ludwig I, King of Bavaria, in 1839 and was significantly damaged during Allied bombing in World War II. The image primarily exists today through a copy made in 1937 by Beaumont Newhall, a curator at New York's Museum of Modern Art. The filmmakers are currently searching for a negative of the image.

Source: Artnet News

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