It’s hard to think back to a time when photography was rare, but it wasn’t really all that long ago. Photography was not commercially viable until Louis Daguerre developed the daguerreotype process in 1839. That process became widely used in the 1840s and 1850s, and gave us some of the earliest landscape photos of international cities.
The long exposure times associated with the process meant that a lot of early photographs were of empty landscapes, either urban or rural. Images with human subjects required them to pose for long periods of time.
Take a look back at how much our world has changed.
1865 or 1866: Panorama of Edo (now Tokyo) showing daimyo residences, Japan. (Felice Beato)
1877: Cityscape photo shows Los Angeles, California, with Southern Pacific Railroad facilities in the distance and many houses, yards, and empty streets in foreground. (Carleton E Watkins/LOC)
1855: Sydney. Sterograph of St. James Parsonage on Macquarie St. (Robert Hunt)
Macleay Museum
1844: Singapore. Daguerreotype of Singapore Town. (Alphonse-Eugene-Jules Itier)
1844: Jerusalem (Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey)
1838: View of a Paris street entitled “Boulevard du Temple, Paris, 8 in the morning”, a daguerreotype by Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre 1838. (Getty Images)
Getty Images
1846: Washington, DC. Old Patent Office. The building is now the National Portrait Gallery and Smithsonian Museum of American Art. (LOC)
1855: Chicago. Daguerreotype of the Cook County Court House and City Hall. It’s the oldest photo in Chicago History Museum’s collection and very possibly the oldest photo in the city’s history. (Chicago History Museum)
1860: Boston. Aerial photograph taken from a hot air balloon (James Wallace Black)
1850 or 1851: San Francisco harbor (LOC)
Library of Congress
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