A Photography First: People in Pictures

This photo, taken in 1838 by Louis Daguerre, is one of the earliest surviving photos in existence. But did you know that it’s also the first photograph ever to include a person in the frame? Because of the fact that exposure times for a daytime shot were often around the ten-minute mark, portrait photography was hardly practical at the time, but in this particular scene in Paris, the man on the street corner in the lower left part of the frame was getting a shoeshine, and stood relatively still for long enough to appear in the photo. He probably never even knew that he became a part of history.