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Louis Daguerre, father of photography born 1787

On November 18, 1787, the father of photography, Louis Daguerre, was born in Cormeilles-en-Parisis, Val-d’Oise, France. 

France issued a stamp commemorating the announcement of Daguerre’s work. 

On January 7, 1839, members of the French Académie des Sciences were shown products of an invention that would forever change the nature of visual representation: photography. The astonishingly precise pictures they saw were the work of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851), a Romantic painter and printmaker most famous until then as the proprietor of the Diorama, a popular Parisian spectacle featuring theatrical painting and lighting effects. Each daguerreotype (as Daguerre dubbed his invention) was a one-of-a-kind image on a highly polished, silver-plated sheet of copper. Daguerre (1787–1851) and the Invention of Photography | Essay | The Metropolitan Museum of Art | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

Louis Daguerre

Centenary of Photography 1839. Niépce and Daguerre
Released in 1938 by LaPoste
Designer and engraver Antonin (Jean) Delzers

View of the Boulevard du Temple, taken by Daguerre in 1838 in Paris, includes the earliest known verified photograph of a person. The image shows a busy street, but because the exposure had to continue for four to five minutes the moving traffic is not visible. At the lower right, however, a man apparently having his boots polished, and the bootblack polishing them, were motionless enough for their images to be captured.

View of the Boulevard du Temple, Taken sometime in 1839
The photo was taken during a busy time, and the exposure took about 5 min. which meant the traffic moving about was not captured. However, in the lower right Daguerre captured a man having his boots polished. Because he stayed motionless long enough, he and the shoe shine became the first known photograph of people. .

This day in stamps