World's First Photograph (1826):
"View from the Window at Le Gras"

Centuries of advances in chemistry and optics, including the invention of the camera obscura, set the stage for the world’s first photograph. He produced the photograph used a sliding wooden box camera with a silver and chalk mixture that darkened under exposure to light.

In 1826, French scientist Joseph Nicephore Niepce, took that photograph, titled View from the Window at Le Gras at his family’s country home.

Niépce produced his photo—a view of a courtyard and outbuildings seen from the house’s upstairs window—by exposing a bitumen-coated plate in a camera obscura for several hours on his windowsill.

The history of the camera can be traced back much further. Photographic cameras were a development of the camera obscura, a device dating back to the Book of Optics (1021) of the Iraqi Arab scientist Ibn al-Haytham (Alhacen), which uses a pinhole or lens to project an image of the scene outside onto a viewing surface.

Before the invention of photographic lapel processes there was no way to preserve the images produced by these cameras apart from manually tracing them. The earliest cameras were room-sized, with space for one or more people inside; these gradually evolved into more and more compact models such as that by Niepce's time portable handheld cameras suitable for photography were readily available.

The first camera that was small and portable enough to be practical for photography was built by Johann Zahn in 1685, though it would be almost 150 years before such an application was possible.