First photograph of a human

The first photograph of a human was taken by Louis Daguerre (France) c. 1838. The long exposure necessary for early photographs meant that the street scene on the Boulevard du Temple in Paris, France, appears almost empty apart from from a man who was still because his boots were being cleaned. He and the shoe-shiner are the first humans to be captured for posterity.

Louis Daguerre would have taken the picture using his own daguerreotype, one of the first photographic processes. He exposed a silver-coated copper plate for ten minutes.