The First Photographs on Every Continent: Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa, Australia, and Antarctica

The earliest surviving camera photograph of any continent is a grainy rooftop view that Nicéphore Niépce recorded in the Burgundy countryside in 1826 or 1827, and burning it onto a sheet of pewter took at least many hours of daylight and possibly several days. Every other landmass had to wait. As the daguerreotype spread out of Paris after 1839, cameras reached North America within weeks, then Africa, Asia, and South America, then Australia, and finally, roughly sixty years later, the ice of Antarctica.

Chase the "first photograph" of each continent and the same problem keeps surfacing. On most of them, the true first image is gone. The plate was polished down and reused, or lost in a family attic, or copied into an engraving and then discarded. What survives is often the second or third attempt, or a print pulled from an original that no longer exists. So this is really two questions wearing one coat: what was the first photograph made on each continent, and what is the earliest one you can still stand in front of today. The two answers almost never point to the same picture.

Here is what the record actually holds, continent by continent, and where the honest answer is still "we are not sure."

Europe: A Rooftop That May Have Taken Days

Niépce called his process heliography, or sun writing, and the surviving proof of it is a plate about 6.4 by 8 inches. He coated the pewter with bitumen of Judea, a light-sensitive asphalt, slid it into a camera obscura, and pointed it out an upper window of his family estate, Le Gras, at Saint-Loup-de-Varennes near Chalon-sur-Saône. The bright areas hardened; the shaded areas stayed soluble and washed away in a bath of lavender oil and white petroleum. The exposure ran so long, at least many hours and by the Harry Ransom Center's account several days, that buildings on both sides of the courtyard appear lit from opposite directions.

The plate dropped out of sight for about half a century before the historian Helmut Gernsheim tracked it down and had it photographed in 1952, producing the retouched reproduction almost everyone has actually seen. The original plate is held today by the Harry Ransom Center at UT Austin. It is not just Europe's first surviving camera photograph. It is the oldest surviving camera photograph anywhere, which is why every other continent's story starts after it.

North America: A Blurry High School in Philadelphia

France announced the daguerreotype in August 1839, and the recipe crossed the Atlantic within weeks. The first daguerreotype made in the United States is usually credited to D.W. Seager, who photographed St. Paul's Church in New York in September 1839. That plate is gone. So is any record of what it truly looked like beyond a written description.

The oldest American photograph you can still examine was made a few weeks later in Philadelphia. Joseph Saxton worked at the United States Mint, and from an upper window he aimed a camera cobbled together from a cigar box and a spectacle lens across the rooftops at Central High School. The resulting daguerreotype is tiny, barely two inches square, and soft, but it exists, held today by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. The exact date is debated between late September and October 16, 1839. That same autumn, in the yard behind his family's Philadelphia lamp business, Robert Cornelius made a wide-eyed self-portrait now often called the first photographic self-portrait, which means two of the oldest surviving American photographs were both made within a few blocks of each other.

South America: An Emperor, an Abbe, and a Lost First

The daguerreotype reached South America on January 17, 1840, when a French chaplain named Louis Comte set up on the waterfront in Rio de Janeiro and, in under nine minutes, produced an image of the Largo do Paço so detailed that a local paper said it looked drawn by the hand of nature. Three days later he repeated the demonstration in front of the fourteen-year-old emperor, Pedro II, who caught the bug for life and became an obsessive collector and practitioner. Comte's first Brazilian plate does not survive, and the earliest camera photograph of the continent that you can still look at is not cleanly established, which is a fair thing to admit rather than paper over.

South America also carries the medium's strangest side story. In the town of Campinas, years before Daguerre went public, a French emigre named Hercule Florence was already printing images with silver salts and light and calling the result photographie, coining the word independently. His surviving 1833 print of pharmacy labels is described by the Instituto Moreira Salles as the oldest surviving photographic record on the American continent. It is a contact print of flat artwork rather than a camera view of the world, so it does not settle the "first photograph of South America" question so much as complicate it beautifully.

Asia: Two Sets of Plates From the Mid-1840s

Asia's first photographs were made almost as early as North America's, and they are almost as thoroughly lost. In late 1839 and 1840, French travelers carried daguerreotype outfits into the Ottoman Middle East and exposed plates in Jerusalem, Baalbek, and along the Levantine coast, all of it geographically Asia. Those originals are gone. They survive only as aquatint engravings copied from the plates for a lavish Paris publication called Excursions Daguerriennes.

The earliest surviving actual photographs of Asia come a few years later, and there are two strong claimants. Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey spent a three-year expedition beginning in 1842 making close to a thousand daguerreotypes across Greece, Egypt, and the Levant, reaching Jerusalem in 1844. The Metropolitan Museum of Art calls his plates the earliest surviving photographs of Greece, Palestine, Syria, and Turkey, and they only came to light when they were found stacked in the attic of his estate in the 1920s. Meanwhile, in East Asia, the customs official Jules Itier made more than forty daguerreotypes of Macau and Canton in 1844 that are the earliest preserved photographs of China, now mostly held at the Musée français de la photographie. Itier had even carried a camera to India in 1842 and 1843, which is one more reason the single "first photograph of Asia" refuses to sit still.

Africa: The First Images Survive Only as Engravings

The first photographs taken in Africa were daguerreotypes of Egypt, made in November 1839, only weeks after the process was published. The painter Horace Vernet and his nephew Frédéric Goupil-Fesquet exposed plates in Alexandria, including a view of the exterior of Muhammad Ali's harem, and other French travelers photographed the pyramids at Giza around the same time. None of those original plates survive. What you can see instead are the engravings made from them for Excursions Daguerriennes, which means the very first images of the African continent reach us secondhand, redrawn by an engraver's hand.

For a photograph of Africa that is still an actual photograph, the trail again leads to Girault de Prangey, whose Egyptian daguerreotypes from that same 1842 expedition are counted among the earliest surviving images of the country's monuments. Sub-Saharan Africa entered the frame separately and a little later. Itier had exposed plates in Senegal in the early 1840s, and studios reached the Cape of Good Hope by mid-decade, so the continent's photographic record, like its geography, has more than one starting point.

Australia: A Sydney Street No One Can Find

In 1841 a visiting ship's captain, Augustin Lucas, is generally credited with making Australia's first photograph, a daguerreotype looking down Bridge Street in Sydney. No copy of it is known to exist. The earliest surviving Australian photograph belongs to George Goodman, the colony's first professional photographer, who arrived in 1842 holding the exclusive right to work the daguerreotype process in the British colonies and opened for business at Sydney's Royal Hotel that year. His portrait of the surgeon William Bland came later, dated by the State Library of New South Wales to sometime between December 1844 and January 1845. That small plate, held by the State Library of New South Wales, is the oldest Australian photograph anyone can still put under glass, and it is a face rather than a landscape, a reminder that once the medium turned professional it turned quickly toward portraits people would pay for.

Antarctica: The One Continent With No Famous Lost First

Antarctica breaks the pattern, because it had no residents to photograph and almost no visitors until the camera was already old. The first sustained photographs of the Antarctic region were made during the Belgian Antarctic Expedition aboard the ship Belgica, whose crew became the first people to spend a winter inside the Antarctic Circle after the ship froze into the pack ice in 1898. The expedition's surgeon, an American named Frederick Cook, photographed the peninsula, the icebergs, the penguins, and the trapped ship itself, and his plates are among the earliest surviving photographs of Antarctica. His most famous frame is a moonlit exposure of the Belgica held open for about ninety minutes in temperatures near forty below.

The next year, Carsten Borchgrevink's Southern Cross expedition became the first to winter on the Antarctic mainland at Cape Adare, photographed by Louis Bernacchi. Strip away the chemistry and these polar plates are the same subjects that fill modern landscape and cityscape work: a horizon, a structure, a face against the weather. What sets Antarctica apart is simply that nobody got there early enough to lose the first attempt. Cook's plates, unlike Comte's Rio or the pyramids of 1839, are still in the archive. Nobody has established which exposure was the first made on the continent itself, and the Belgica spent its winter locked in the pack ice rather than ashore, so the honest claim is narrower than the one usually made: Antarctica is the continent with no famous lost first, because the camera arrived with the first expeditions that stayed.

Line the seven up and the timeline itself tells the story of the technology escaping France: a single lost decade of experiments in Burgundy, then a two-year sprint in 1839 and 1840 that put cameras on four continents at once, then a slow drift toward the poles that did not finish until the last continent had been photographed. The first photograph of the world was a window. It took another seventy years to photograph the one place with nothing outside the glass but ice.

Lead image by Nicéphore Niépce, public domain (Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin). Source.