stevenbrisson:

The First Photograph of a Human. An 1838 Daguerreotype of the boulevard du Temple, Paris taken by Louis Daguerre.

One of the first photographic processes, the daguerreotype required very long exposures to form an image on the surface of a silver plate. It’s likely that this was a busy street at the time, but as the image would have taken several minutes to form, only the figure standing still—perhaps getting his boots shined—appears.