4: 'First' Photograph
View from the Window at Le Gras, 1826 or 1827
'Heliograph' on pewter plate, w8" x h6.5" (pictured above is a clarified reproduction of the image on the plate, plate itself below)
Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX USA
One of the neat oddball places we got to see in Austin was the Ransom Center, which is probably best described as a shrine to the creative process. It's primarily a research library (originally for literature, since expanded significantly) that just happens to have a very small public museum attached, and what it does is collect not just finished works, but all the available miscellaneous bits and scraps and notes that go into a final work's creation. So, for example, they have one of Poe's writing desks, various marked-up versions of poems, plays and books from famous writers, and a 'look-book'/early script drafts from a season of Mad Men on display downstairs, and upstairs in the research section they have just piles of paper documents, drafts, and first editions from artists, writers, scientists, significant historical personages, etc. (The research section is available to the public but is by appointment/on site only — do think it'd be really neat, if I *had* a project some day that would benefit from such material, to go back there and poke around with purpose.)
There are a couple flagship possessions in the Ransom, and above would be one of them1: the first photograph, or more correctly, a clarified reproduction of the oldest surviving2 photograph. Although it was called a 'heliograph' by its creator, because the process involved coating a plate with light-sensitive varnish (made from bitumen of Judea, a kind of natural asphalt), putting it into a camera to concentrate the light, and then leaving it to expose in the sun (which basically bakes on the asphalt) for, in this case, 8-ish hours.
This is what the plate actually looks like:
For more information on the plate, the process, and the inventor(s), see the Ransom Center's web exhibit. (I recommend the videos on e.g. the 'Process' and 'History' pages - find the tabs across the top.)
But basically I just think it's the coolest thing when art collides with other interests/fields/technologies, and this first mechanical reproduction of nature represents a pretty hard collision.
NOTES:
1. The other, in case you're wondering, is a Gutenberg Bible.
2. To clarify, it's not that it's believed someone else invented the process. It's just that earlier successes by Niépce might have been lost or destroyed.