Joseph Nicéphore Niépce created View from the Window at Le Gras at his estate in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France. Usually dated to 1826 or 1827, it is the earliest surviving photograph produced in a camera. The image required an exposure lasting many hours on a treated metal plate.

Photography transformed ideas about memory, evidence, portraiture and visual truth. Poets including Baudelaire, Whitman and later modernists responded to a world in which people, places and historical moments could seemingly be preserved by mechanical sight.