Nicéphore

It took a unique combination of ingenuity and curiosity to produce the first known photograph. The man who made the discovery was a French inventor. In the 1820s, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (commonly known or referred to simply as Nicéphore Niépce) had become fascinated with the lithographic printing process and the possibility of creating images automatically. He set up a device called a camera obscura, which captured and projected scenes illuminated by sunlight, and trained it on the view outside his studio window in eastern France. The scene was cast on a treated pewter plate that, after many hours, retained a crude copy of the buildings and rooftops outside. The result was the first known permanent photograph.

There is a ghostly monochromatic quality to these early photographic images, and they have informed this batch of ghosts created with black pigment only. Some are more deeply marked with seams of black, while on other ghosts the greys softly shift from tone to tone.

Batch of 42

Release date: 5/6/20