Something magic

The official invention of photography is hard to pin down, but it's possibly 200 years old this year. Michael Pritchard takes a closer look at one of its pioneers

- Michael Pritchard

Inventions are rarely devised by one person or appear at a precise date. Often there are several individuals working to the same end, at different times and unaware of the others. Think of the motor car, telephone, personal computer or the cinema. Eventually one comes out ahead and is hailed as the 'inventor'.

Coming up with a date when photography was 'invented' is a fraught exercise: 1727, 1802, 1826, 1834 and 1837, are all potential candidates. But like so many inventions photography has its origins in the work of many people working from the late 18th century and, of course, it depends on how one defines photography.

If you took a poll then 1839 would be the date that most people would say that photography was 'invented'.

That year was the culmination of several decades of work and it saw the announcement of two separate photographic processes: Frenchman Louis Daguerre's daguerreotype and Britain's Henry Talbot's photogenic drawing process.

Of these, Daguerre's was by far the most successful commercially, leading to the growth of portrait studios as it, arguably, produced the better image. Daguerre's process made a single image, Talbot's produced a negative from which multiple positive prints could be made. It was Talbot's process, which he patented as the Calotype in 1841, which formed the basis of photography, with later improvements, until the advent of digital photography from the 1990s.

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce

AP reader Jose Casas-Finet from the United States wrote to the editor recently suggesting that AP commemorate the 200th anniversary of photography this month. He suggested that 16 September 1824 was the first evidence of a photograph from life being made in a letter from Joseph Nicéphore Niépce to his older brother, Claude.

Niépce has a better claim than most for the invention of photography and his experiments in the 1820s helped Daguerre in his invention of the daguerreotype.