200 Years of Photography in 12 Historic Images

Photography learned to see one impossible thing at a time.

France’s Bicentennial of Photography begins in September 2026 and runs through September 2027, marking the first permanent images made near Chalon-sur-Saône in the 1820s.

These twelve images trace moments when photography expanded what could be recorded—from a city street and a human face to the Moon, lightning, a tornado, an underwater scene and Earth from space. It is a selection, not a complete history.

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🌅 The Niépce Heliograph (“View from the Window at Le Gras”) — Nicéphore Niépce, France 🇫🇷

Roofs, a courtyard and distant land appear on a bitumen-coated pewter plate. Niépce made the image at his Le Gras estate in 1827. The Harry Ransom Center identifies it as the earliest known surviving photograph produced with a camera obscura.

💡 What We Could Verify: It is Niépce’s only known surviving point de vue, or camera-made view. The exact exposure time was not recorded. The Harry Ransom Center says the plate was exposed to sunlight for several days.

Original heliograph: Joseph Nicéphore Niépce · Image shown: enhanced reproduction by Helmut Gernsheim, circa 1952 · Location: Le Gras, Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France · Source and public-domain record

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👞 “Boulevard du Temple” — Louis Daguerre, Paris 🇫🇷

The Paris boulevard looks almost empty, although it was busy. The long exposure did not record moving traffic. Two figures near the lower-left corner—traditionally identified as a customer and a bootblack—remained still long enough to appear. They are among the earliest people visible in a surviving photograph.

💡 What We Could Verify: The Bayerisches Nationalmuseum dates the view to around 1838. It formed part of a triptych that Daguerre dedicated to King Ludwig I of Bavaria, and its label reads huit heures du matin—eight in the morning.

Photo: Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre · Location: Paris, France · Source and public-domain record

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📸 Robert Cornelius’s Self-Portrait — Philadelphia, USA 🇺🇸

Cornelius faces his improvised camera with his collar raised and hair untidy. He made the photograph in the yard behind his family’s lamp and chandelier store in October or November 1839. The Library of Congress catalog describes it as the earliest extant American portrait photograph.

💡 What We Could Verify: According to the Library of Congress, Cornelius’s makeshift camera used a lens fashioned from an opera glass, and he would have had to remain motionless for 10 to 15 minutes.

Photo and subject: Robert Cornelius · Location: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA · Source and public-domain record

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🌕 “View of the Moon” — John Adams Whipple, Cambridge, USA 🇺🇸

A pale lunar disk appears against black space. Whipple made this daguerreotype at Harvard College Observatory on February 26, 1852, using its 15-inch Great Refractor as part of a collaboration with astronomers William Cranch Bond and George Phillips Bond.

💡 What We Could Verify: Installed in 1847, Harvard’s Great Refractor remained the largest telescope in the United States for 20 years. Whipple’s plate was an early astronomical photograph, but not the first successful lunar image: New York University holds a John W. Draper lunar daguerreotype dated to around 1840.

Photo: John Adams Whipple · Location: Harvard College Observatory, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA · Collection: Harvard College Observatory Plate Stacks · Source and public-domain record

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🎈 “Boston, as the Eagle and the Wild Goose See It” — James Wallace Black, USA 🇺🇸

Streets, roofs and church towers flatten into a map beneath the camera. On October 13, 1860, Black photographed Boston from Samuel King’s tethered balloon, Queen of the Air. It is widely regarded as the oldest surviving aerial photograph.

💡 What We Could Verify: The Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that Nadar had made aerial views near Paris two years earlier, but those photographs do not survive. Oliver Wendell Holmes gave Black’s surviving Boston view its wonderfully literal title.

Photo: James Wallace Black · Location: Boston, Massachusetts, USA · Source and public-domain record

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🌈 “Tartan Ribbon” — Thomas Sutton and James Clerk Maxwell, London 🇬🇧

For Maxwell’s 1861 experiment, photographer Thomas Sutton made three monochrome lantern-slide images of a tartan ribbon through red, green and blue-violet filters. At the Royal Institution in London on May 17, Maxwell superimposed the three filtered projections on a screen to demonstrate additive color.

💡 What We Could Verify: The color version shown here is a 1930s Vivex print made from what are believed to be the original 1861 three-color separation negatives. It is not an original color print from the demonstration. Sutton’s wet-collodion plates were chiefly sensitive to blue and could not faithfully record red or green. A technical study of the experiment argues that the result is better understood as an early three-color separation experiment than as a conventional color photograph.

Photographs: Thomas Sutton · Experiment: James Clerk Maxwell · Image shown: 1930s Vivex reconstruction from the 1861 separations · First demonstrated at the Royal Institution, London · Source record

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🐎 “The Horse in Motion” — Eadweard Muybridge, Palo Alto 🇺🇸

The twelve frames separate a run into movements too quick for the unaided eye to see. The Library of Congress identifies the horse as Sallie Gardner, owned by Leland Stanford and photographed at a 1:40 gait over the Palo Alto track on June 19, 1878.

💡 What We Could Verify: The University of Pennsylvania Archives records that Muybridge placed cameras in a row, with each camera’s shutter triggered when the horse broke a trip wire. The sequence showed that all four hooves left the ground at once and helped lay the groundwork for motion pictures.

Photo: Eadweard Muybridge · Location: Palo Alto, California, USA · Source and public-domain record

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⚡ An Early Photograph of Lightning — William N. Jennings, Philadelphia 🇺🇸

A branching flash cuts across the dark image. Research published in Panorama identifies this Franklin Institute print as a Philadelphia exposure made on September 2, 1882. Jennings used photographic plates sensitive enough to record the brief discharge.

💡 What We Could Verify: Despite the print’s historic title, “First Photograph of Lightning,” it was not literally the first. The Franklin Institute was unable to verify that Jennings was the first, while the Missouri History Museum preserves a cabinet-card copy made in 1874–78 of Thomas M. Easterly’s now-lost 1847 lightning daguerreotype.

Photo: William N. Jennings · Location: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA · Collection: Franklin Institute · Source and public-domain record

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🌪️ “Tornado in Anderson County, Kansas” — A. A. Adams, Garnett 🇺🇸

A slender funnel crosses the horizon beyond Garnett on April 26, 1884. The Kansas Historical Society identifies the image as a stereograph made by A. A. Adams from a street corner near the United Presbyterian Church as the tornado passed northwest of town, near Central City.

💡 What We Could Verify: The Kansas archive says the image is reported to be the first photograph of a tornado. For decades, F. N. Robinson’s August 28, 1884, South Dakota photograph was also described as the first. The South Dakota State Historical Society notes that Adams’s April 26 image predates Robinson’s. The two recorded dates are 124 days apart.

Photo: A. A. Adams · Camera position: a street corner near the United Presbyterian Church in Garnett · Tornado location: near Central City, northwest of Garnett, Kansas, USA · Source and public-domain record

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🩻 “Hand with Rings” — Wilhelm Röntgen, Würzburg 🇩🇪

The image shows the bones of a hand and a dark ring. The Science Museum Group identifies it as the left hand of Röntgen’s wife, Anna Bertha Röntgen (née Ludwig), exposed on December 22, 1895, about six weeks after he discovered X-rays in Würzburg.

💡 What We Could Verify: The exposure lasted 15 minutes, according to Siemens Healthineers’ MedMuseum. Many physics laboratories already had equipment similar to Röntgen’s, so other researchers could quickly repeat the experiment. By mid-January 1896, X-ray experiments were under way internationally.

Image: Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen · Subject: Anna Bertha Röntgen (née Ludwig) · Location: Röntgen’s former laboratory, Würzburg, Germany · Source and public-domain record

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🤿 “Portrait instantané d’un scaphandrier” — Louis Boutan, Banyuls-sur-Mer 🇫🇷

A helmeted diver crouches among seagrass and holds a sign reading “Photographie sous-marine.” In Boutan’s own account, the subject is the Laboratoire Arago mechanic David and the exposure is dated September 22, 1898.

💡 What We Could Verify: Boutan recorded that the camera and diver were both at a depth of three meters, with David four meters from the lens. The exposure relied on sunlight. Boutan operated the submerged shutter from the surface with a long cord whose upper end was kept above water by a cork.

Photo: Louis Boutan · Subject: David · Location: Banyuls Bay, Banyuls-sur-Mer, France · Source and public-domain record

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🌍 The First Photograph of Earth From Space — New Mexico, USA 🇺🇸

Clouds and land form a grainy band beneath a black sky. A 35 mm motion-picture camera aboard V-2 No. 13 took the first photographs of Earth from space after the rocket launched from White Sands, New Mexico, on October 24, 1946.

💡 What We Could Verify: NASA records that the camera exposed a frame every 1.5 seconds and reached about 65 miles (105 kilometers). The rocket crashed back to Earth, but the film survived.

Photo: White Sands Missile Range / Applied Physics Laboratory · Location: White Sands, New Mexico, USA · Source and U.S. government public-domain record

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Which one is your favorite?