In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of “world history” — yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Heliography Project 1827-2027
Forever and forever

Heliography for my sons

The oldest photograph has been “living” among us for 200 years. Here’s the recipe for “eternity”:

Dissolve 3 grams of Syrian asphalt in 15 ml of lavender oil. Wait a few days. Apply the emulsion with a brush onto white tin. Let the emulsion dry on a hot cast iron plate for about 20 minutes. Expose the plate to sunlight for two to three days. Rinse off the unhardened asphalt emulsion with turpentine or lavender oil.

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce called this process heliography. He described it in 1829 in his “Notice sur l’Héliographie”. This was the first photographic process in which the image captured by a camera obscura was permanently fixed on a metal plate.