Paris marks photography’s bicentenary with an early image mystery
To mark the bicentenary of photography, Paris is paying tribute to a shoeshiner and his customer, accidentally captured by Louis Daguerre in spring 1838. The story turns on a small street scene that became an early landmark in the history of looking.
The article asks a deceptively simple question: who was the first person ever photographed? For the bicentenary of photography, Paris is drawing attention to an anonymous pair — a shoeshiner and his customer — inadvertently immortalized by Louis Daguerre in the spring of 1838.
For painters and draughtsmen, the interest lies in how an ordinary scene can become a lasting visual record. The image is not just about identifying figures; it is about framing, attention, and the way a brief moment of everyday life can acquire historical weight.
Early photography did not replace drawing or painting, but it introduced another way of holding on to reality. It shows that an image is never neutral: it selects, isolates, and preserves, sometimes by accident, what is most fleeting in the world around us.
Source : Le Monde – Art, édition anglaise