Huh?
According to Keith Laidler in his book “The Divine Deception” (2000, Headline Publishing ISBN 07472 7484), it’s very possibly the Shroud of Turin.
According to “Art History” by Marilyn Stokstad
Around 1826, Jospeh-Nicephore Niepce suceeded in making the first positive-image photograph of views from a window of his estate at Le Gras, France.
As one might expect, it’s a bit rough.
If you mean an image recorded my means of light on some light-sensitive material, Niepce’s photograph has priority.
The image on the Shroud of Turin is some sort of image, but not a photograph.
Laidler postulates that the Shroud image was produced in medieval times (late 13th century) using a camera obscura. To say much more about his theories would send this discussion to GD, but he does at least make a competent case for the technological capability to have existed and been utilised to produce the Shroud.
Does he claim that it was made using a photographic process or just using the camera obscura to project an image onto the cloth with the pigment applied by hand?
I know this is headed to GD, but… An image similar to that on the Turin item cannot be reproduced by laying a cloth over a supine, 3 dimensional human figure; it won’t look the same when the cloth is laid out flat again. (You can test this with old sheets or towels, some water based paint, and a friend). However, an image essentially the same as that on the Turin item can very easily be made using a bas-relief. So rather than a photographic process, it seems to have been more of an intaglio print.
Niepce’s photograph, referred to above, is generally acknowledged to be the first photograph. There have been a lot of drawings made using the Camera Obscura and the Camera Lucida. Joh Herschel himself (who discovered the ability of sodium thiosulfate to “fix” photos early on, but everyone ignored this for twenty years)used to do a lot of lucida sketches, and I swear they look like your typical amateur snapshots. He was a pre-shutterbug shutterbug. (The camera lucida was a portable prism with mount – I think they’re the things they used to advertise on the back covers of comic books in the 1960s). But sketches ain’t the same as photographs, so the first intentional photo using chemical processes (as opposed to fortuitous sun bleaching) was Niepce’s
As for the Shroud of Turin, I’d suggest you read Joe Nickell’s book Inquest on the Shroud of Turin. Eye-opening stuff. It seems to me highly unlikely that the Shroud is anything but an artist’s work, as even the Catholic Church evidently felt when it was first displayed.
Discover magazine had a great article on the chemistry of photography. It explains how that first picture was done, and where non-digital photography is headed. Read it here.
Regarding the use of a camera obscura, the artist David Hockney wrote a piece in the New Yorker a few months ago - his central hypothesis was that many, if not most, artists used a camera obscura (actually, given the definition above, a camera lucida might be a more accurate description) for their work. He sites a number of paintings (e.g., a Holbein that has an apparently distorted skull - painted to look normal when viewed at an extreme angle - it would be extremely difficult to paint by eye but very straightforward if a camera lucida was used to project the image onto the canvas; he also sites a painting, I think of a Venetian Doge, which has a detailed cloth pattern reproduced - his claim is that the pattern could not be done by eye and appear proportionately regular.) The fact that these tools have not turned up frequently (if at all?) is addressed by Hockney by claiming that artists treated this approach as a trade secret. Because he is a master artist himself, Hockney’s knowledge helps him paint a compelling case (sorry, should have alerted you to the impending pun) for the use of these tools, even though most art historians disagree…
Just found url=“http://www.digitalcentury.com/encyclo/update/photo_hd.html”]this site which has Tom Wedgwood creating photographic images (IIRC they were mostly contact prints of botanic specimens) at least by 1802. He was unable to ‘fix’ the images so they faded with exposure to daylight over time.
In a Vermeer thread from a couple of weeks back I ranted about that Hockney article. Synopsis: “Because I, Dave Hockney, can’t draw as well as Holbein or Bellini, they must have used some sort of aid.” Puh. I think these guys were more rigorously schooled than Hockney. See the other threat for a talk about the camera obscura.
Anyway, as noted, problem of definition: there were “photographs” of a sort before Niepce-- called heliographs, where people would, for example, lay a leaf on a piece of photosensitive paper so that it left a silhouette. If we start to get more inclusive than this (and start citing, sigh, the shroud) we have to get into a fat discussion of achieretic images-- images “not made by the hand of man”-- non manufactum, and this would neccessitate discussing any other putative miracles in history (the “sudarium,” Veronica’s veil, as you will recall (open to view in Constantinople and Rome up into the 16th C.), dates back to Christ, no? It should be about 15 hours older than the shroud) as well as, more realistically, print mechanisms-- back as far as Mesopotamian stamp-seals and the “printing” of coins.