The First Faked Photograph by Hippolyte Bayard

5/01/2019 ISO 1200 Magazine 0 Comments

In 1839, Hippolyte Bayard invented photography. And nobody cared.

In this episode of Darkroom series from Vox, producer Coleman Lowndes explains the story about the first faked photograph:

People usually associate the birth of photography with Louis Daguerre’s Daguerreotype. But there were actually multiple inventors of photography, and one of them was an amateur French tinkerer named Hippolyte Bayard. Even before Daguerre’s process was revealed, Bayard had achieved photographic results.

However, François Arago, the chair of the French Academy of Sciences, overlooked Bayard’s accomplishment and elevated Daguerre’s instead. And as a protest to this perceived injustice, Bayard took a self-portrait depicting himself as an unidentified man in the Paris Morgue who took his own life.