In 1838 only one motionless man made it into the photo of Paris

In the spring of 1838, Louis Daguerre, a theatre scenery painter turned inventor, set his camera at a high window on the Boulevard du Temple, one of the busiest streets in Paris. The silvered plate needed about ten minutes of exposure to record anything at all. When he developed the image the street looked deserted: the carriages, the horses and the hundreds of people walking past were moving too fast to leave a trace, and the plate erased them all but one.

That one is in the bottom left corner: a man standing still, one foot up on a box, and crouched in front of him a bootblack shining his boot. Polishing a shoe takes roughly as long as an exposure did. They are the first people to appear in a photograph, and neither of them ever knew it: nobody posed, nobody signed anything, nobody was paid.

That is why the earliest photographs of cities look deserted: for years photography could only record what stayed still. Portraits required an iron brace invented to hold the sitter’s neck in place.

Daguerre gave the plate to King Ludwig I of Bavaria in 1839 and there it still is, in the municipal museum of Munich. In 1974 an attempt to clean it ruined it for good, so the sharpest image we have of the first two people ever photographed is a copy made before that day.