World's Oldest Photo Heading To L.A.
One summer morning, Joseph Nicephore Niepce peered from an upstairs window in his home in the French countryside, framed the view of a pear tree, the sky and several farm buildings and did something remarkable: He took a picture.
Opening the lens of a rudimentary camera for eight hours that day in 1826, Niepce exposed a polished, thinly varnished pewter plate to produce an image that is acknowledged as the world's first photograph.
In June, 176 years later, the faint image will arrive at The Getty Conservation Institute, where scientific experts will analyze it for the first time since it was rediscovered and authenticated in 1952. Before it turned up, the photo had been missing for decades, misplaced by its owner after it was last exhibited in 1898.
Exact details of its chemistry remain a mystery, leaving experts with precious little information about the science behind the photo.
"There are legends about how it was done and with what materials, but no one really knows," said Dusan Stulik, a Getty senior scientist who calls the work the "Mona Lisa" of the photo world.
The analysis is part of a joint photo conservation project involving Getty, the Image Permanence Institute at the Rochester Institute of Technology and France's Centre de Recherches sur la Conservation des Documents Graphiques.
The goal is to understand all the chemical processes used since Niepce's day to produce photographs, which conservators say is essential to preserve the art form.
During the 8-by-6.5-inch photograph's two-week stay in Los Angeles, scientists will study it with advanced scientific instruments, assess its state of preservation and construct a new airtight case.
In 2003, it will go on display again at the University of Texas at Austin's Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, its home since 1964.
Conservators have a theory about how Niepce's photograph was produced. They believe light hardened the bitumen, a petroleum derivative sensitive to light that Niepce (pronounced NEE-yeps) used to coat the plate. Washing the plate with a mixture of oil of lavender and white petroleum dissolved the unexposed portions of bitumen.
The result was a permanently fixed, direct positive picture - the first ever captured from nature. Niepce called his work a "heliograph," in a tribute to the power of the sun.
"What we are so familiar with today in terms of images and being able to snap pictures, this is where it all began," said Barbara Brown, who will accompany the artifact to California as head of photographic conservation at the Ransom Center.
In the Getty Institute's laboratories, scientists will use spectrometers to determine the photograph's chemical makeup. They hope to discover what substances Niepce may have used to enhance the bitumen's properties.
Using a digital microscope, they plan to map the image's surface in detail. Multispectral imaging will look for oxidation that could threaten the photograph.
Meanwhile, conservators will repair the gilt frame. And experts will try to photograph the work, an almost impossible chore because the image is so faint and can be seen only at oblique angles.
All the methods will be quick, reliable and noninvasive, said Herant Khanjian, an assistant scientist at the Getty.
Stulik, the Getty senior scientist, said he fears the days of traditional, nondigital photography are numbered, making the need to understand its chemistry — from Niepce to Polaroid — all the more pressing.
Ultimately, he said, advances in digital photography may do for its chemical counterpart what the printing press did to the handwritten manuscript in the 1400s.
"It ended it," Stulik said.
By Andrew Bridges
By Andrew Bridges