Perhaps that explains why magazine and newspaper editors place such a high priority on photographs, fully aware that they draw the consumer s attention toward their publication. Photography, in many instances, does portray a story more powerfully than words. Images of warfare by contemporary photographers, including the suffering of civilians and children in Vietnam, convey anguish in a way that would be difficult to describe with words. That s when the French inventor Louis J. M. Daguerre produced the first popular form of photography known as the daguerreotype. Daguerre exposed a light-sensitive metal plate and developed the image with mercury vapor.
Daguerreotypes are recognizable by their dark, portrait-like quality.
They have exceptionally fragile surfaces and, for this reason, they were always furnished behind glass, in frames or small folding cases. A photograph he made in 1826 still exists today. The camera itself probably dates back to the early 1500s and some historians have credited its invention to the great Italian artist Leonarda da Vinci. Cameras of this time were large enough for a person to enter. This light formed an image on the opposite wall.