The First Candid

In 1838 Louis Daguerre made a daguerreotype of the Boulevard du Temple that, because of its long exposure, recorded only two people who stood still long enough: a shoeshine boy crouched beside his box and a client with a foot propped on it. That image is widely regarded as the first photograph to include human beings and became emblematic of photography’s sudden power; when François Arago presented it the following year, the process was hailed and the French state bought the rights to share the invention “to the world.” The original Bavarian plate sent to King Ludwig I was later damaged in wartime restorations, leaving only later reproductions such as Beaumont Newhall’s MoMA photo of the photograph.

In 2024 Maximilien Van Aertryck and two colleagues set out to locate exactly where Daguerre had stood, confronting mid‑nineteenth‑century demolitions by Haussmann and sparse pre‑photographic engravings. They combined archival sleuthing, maps, prints, drones, long measuring tapes and 3‑D scans produced by architectural firms to triangulate a spot on today’s Boulevard du Temple; two independent teams came within a few feet of each other and the group marked a compromise point with nail polish and a painted X. Paris will install a plaque on October 15 to commemorate the shoeshine pair as the first photographic sitters and a symbolic origin for portraiture and our modern, selfie‑inflected gaze.