ABSTRACT
Photography is the result of three processes announced in the 1820s and 1830s that made it possible to record, fix and reproduce an image. The first in-camera photograph was a unique, permanent image made with a camera obscura. In 1826 or 1827, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce created the world's first in-camera photograph by placing a pewter plate coated with the bitumen preparation inside a camera obscura. News of Daguerreotypy spurred William Henry Fox Talbot to announce the findings of his own experiments. His hopes to fix the image projected by a camera obscura led to the 1833 discovery of what he called the 'photogenic drawing': an image made without a camera by placing objects directly onto paper coated with a light-sensitive silver chloride solution that darkens on exposure to sunlight. John Hershel's 1842 invention of the cyanotype followed the same basic principle, but he used a solution that turned bright Prussian blue upon exposure.
