Birth of Photography on the Boulevard
“Boulevard du Temple, Paris, 1838. Louis Daguerre captures the first photograph of a person on a daguerreotype plate. Foreground shows a bootblack and his customer, still long enough to be recorded while a busy street blurs into emptiness; midground reveals the wooden camera atop a tripod on a balcony; the boulevard's gas lamps and chimney pots define an early commercial city's frozen instant.”
