Back in ancient times, workers used to collected Judea bitumen from the surface of the Dead Sea, where it keeps surfacing continually from the bottom of the sea. The Dead Sea is the lowest exposed point on the Earth's surface and is an endorheic body of water, meaning that there's no outflow of water either through a river basin or underground. The only way water leaves the Dead Sea is by evaporation, which is why it's so full of salt. The water evaporates, leaving the salt, and since the water is now hypersalinic, nothing can survive. And that's why it's called the Dead Sea.

By Nicephore's time, the technology was already available to extract Judea bitumen from shale, sandstone, or limestone, bituminous rocks that can often contain traces of petrochemicals or tar. Interestingly, the Judea bitumen Nicephore used in his first photo didn't actually come from Judea.

Primitive porn
Pornographic photographs were still a few years away when Nicephore started playing with pictures of praying Popes, priming pewter plates with a patina of petrified petrochemicals, and learning his own limitations with lithography.

The practice of creating pornographic images, of course, is ancient. But the first photos of naked people started showing up around 1845 and were distributed at opticians, instrument makers, and art dealerships. Yep, you could get your early photo porn from the guy who made your glasses. Nicephore would be so proud. From Pope Pius to porn in 23 years!

But before the local pervs could see a spectacular spectacle while picking up their spectacles, Nicephore needed to get his images to stick. And that brings us to 1826, the year Samuel Morey also patented an internal combustion engine, this time in America.

Saint-Loup-de-Varennes
By the summer of 1826, Nicephore was ready to paint the town pewter. If you travel southeast from Paris to Saint-Loup-de-Varennes in Burgundy, north of Lyon, you might come upon Le Gras, shown in Figure A.

FIGURE A


The first photograph was taken in this house. Roll over picture for a larger image.

This was where Nicephore lived. If you go inside the house and climb the stairs, you'd come to the restored upper-story room where Nicephore set up his camera obscura. 180 years ago, when he first began the chemical preparations that would lead to the first photograph, Nicephore started by dissolving powdered Judea bitumen in lavender oil.

He carefully spread this saturated solution in a very thin layer on a pewter plate, using it as a base. Using a hot drying process (nope, folks, he didn't have a hair dryer back then!) he got a shiny varnish with a cherry red color. Finally, he placed the coated pewter plate inside the camera obscura.

Throughout the prior year, Nicephore acquired a wide variety of lenses from Vincent and Charles Chevalier, Paris opticians, in order to perfect his camera obscura. Now, in his second floor workroom, with the pewter plate covered with varnish installed inside the camera obscura, Nicephore uncapped the lens he'd finally chosen.

The moment was spectacularly anti-climactic.