On the trail of Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, the inventor of photography

with Martin Hein, March 2015

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce – * 7 March 1765 in Chalon-sur-Saône, France; † 5 July 1833 in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes.

Niépce, who had a sister and two brothers, was an officer in the French army from 1789 to 1811; he administered the district of Nice between 1795 and 1801, and devoted himself to mechanical and chemical work as well as lithography with his brother Claude Niepce in his father’s town from 1815. From 1816, Niépce was engaged in the production of images with a Camera Obscura.

“To reproduce the images taken by the camera obscura with the gradations of tones from black to white by the action of light itself” from the “Notice sur l’Héliographie, 1829.

For his first experiments, he positioned sheets of paper coated with silver salts on the back of a camera obscura. It was known that silver salts (silver chloride) darken when exposed to light. In May 1816, he produced the first picture of nature: a view from the window. It was a negative and the image was not durable. After opening the camera, the exposure process continued, the image increasingly blackened and eventually disappeared completely. Niépce called this process “Retina”. The recording technique from the project “THE 7th DAY” is based on this process. Disappointed that there was no way to make this first photograph durable, Niépce turned his attention to other processes.

In March 1817, Niépce focused his attention on guaiac resin. This yellow resin changes color to green when exposed to daylight. It is also sparingly soluble in alcohol. In principle, it could be used to make permanent photographs. However, this property of the resin is only caused by UV light. The glass lenses of his camera obscura largely filtered out this light and the guaiac resin did not change its properties in the camera. Contact prints in direct sunlight were possible, but unfortunately no photographs were taken with his camera obscura.

Disappointed, Niépce turned to other substances, especially natural asphalt, also known as “Bitume de Judée”. The tough black-brown mineral was extracted from the Mine du Parc at that time, a mine near Seyssel, located about 100 kilometres from his country home in France. Finely powdered natural asphalt is dissolved in lavender oil and applied very thinly to metal plates (copper, tinplate), stone or glass. After drying on a hot iron plate, the coated material can be exposed. The exposure time for contact prints is several hours with sunlight. In a camera obscura the exposure takes several days. Depending on the amount of light, the asphalt hardens to different degrees. After exposure, the softer areas (where less light reached) can be washed out with a mixture of lavender oil and white oil. He describes his method in detail in his “Notice sur l’Héliographie”.

Although the invention of photography can be dated to 1824 based on Niépce’s letters, the image that has survived to this day is from 1827. The images Niépce created in 1824 have disappeared, probably due to the reuse of the expensive materials of the time.
On September 16, 1824, Nicéphore Niépce wrote to his brother Claude, who was living in England at the time:

“I am pleased to finally inform you that, thanks to the refinement of my methods, I have succeeded in obtaining an image as I had hoped, though I hardly dared to expect it, as my results so far had been very incomplete. This view was taken from your room, which faces Le Gras; and for this purpose, I used my largest Camera Obscura and my largest plate. The image of the objects is reproduced with astonishing clarity and fidelity, down to the finest details and their subtlest shades. Since this negative print is almost uncolored, its effect can be best judged by viewing the plate at an angle: Then it becomes perceptible to the eye through the shadows and light reflections; and I must say, my dear friend, this effect really has something magical about it. (…) In the meantime, you can, as of today, consider the success of applying my methods to views, whether on stone or glass, as a proven and indisputable fact.”

Following in the footsteps of Joseph Nicéphore Niépce

Maison de Nicéphore Niépce” in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, where the world’s first photograph was taken.