Leaf could be world's oldest photograph
By Richard Savill
Last Updated: 3:49PM BST 06/05/2008

A 200-year-old image of a leaf, which lay for years in an album, may be the world's oldest photograph, according to research by a scholar.

The photogenic drawing, a negative obtained by laying the leaf on light-sensitive paper and exposing it to the sun, has been attributed to Henry Fox Talbot, one of the pioneers of photography.

It was believed to have been dated 1839, but now an American scholar, Larry Schaaf, a Fox Talbot authority, thinks it may have been made more than 30 years earlier, possibly by Thomas Wedgwood, a member of the Wedgwood china family.

Wedgwood began experiment with making solar pictures in the 1790s, in the same way that Fox Talbot did in the 1830s, using paper made light sensitive by treatment with silver nitrate.

Full story, source: The Telegraph

Strange subject to take a photo of? A suppose it wouldn't have moved, lol.

Hooray for Henry

I thought the oldest photograph was a glaze of a persons face on a plate or something like that. Da Vinci did some experimental photography didn't he?

Negative, he just (supposedly) invented the device that would be used to make photos three centuries later, the camera. Both he and Canaletto used it to make accurate drawings (models) for their paintings.