The Heartbreaking Truth Behind “History’s First Fake Photo”

A morgue, a dead man, a vase with flowers, a straw hat, a small garden statue… This image, which looks like the final version of a deceased person, is actually containing criticism a self-portrait.

Why did this man who painted his own dead body do such a thing? What message do you want to give? Let’s go into the details of the picture, which even entered the Guinness Book of Records.

First, let’s take a brief look at the interesting history of photography.

In fact, the first cartridge of photography dates back to the 1700s. A German professor named Johann Heinrich Schulze discovers that silver nitrates are affected by sunlight. In the early 1800s, inventor Thomas Wedgwood used light to image the object. by chemical methods It manages to record on the surface, but this image is not permanent.

The inventor named Joseph Nicephore Niepce, who made experiments and additions to this method; images on a paper that he made transparent with varnish, with stone printing technique recording on a tin plate. According to records, the first photograph was taken in 1826, exposed for 8 hours, resulting in the first known photograph in history.

So how did history’s first “fake photo” emerge?

This picture, which is a ‘self-portrait’ and looks like a photograph, is actually a bit scary. Hippolyte in the picture The man named Bayard; in the morgue, where there is a garden statue, a vase with flowers and a straw hat his own dead it depicts.

He was experimenting with photography. Even if he is not the inventor of photography inventor of fake photo had happened. There was a reason why it was like this.

He could have been among the inventors of the real photograph, not the fake photograph.

Photographer Bayard was persuaded by his friend to delay announcing his process to the French Academy of Sciences. This postponement one of the main inventors of photography It cost him not recognizing him as someone.

He tried to express the injustice he was exposed to and felt through a drawing. Even though the picture seems scary when you look at it from the outside, when you learn its story… to a self-portrait of pain had transformed.

On the back of the painting was an inscription by the painter:

“The body you see here belongs to M. Bayard, the inventor of the method. The government, which was very generous to M. Daguerre, told M. Bayard that they could do nothing, and the poor man drowned himself. Ah, the vagaries of human life! He had been in the morgue for several days and no one recognized or claimed him. “Ladies and gentlemen, you had better pass through here for fear of offending your sense of smell, for as you can see the gentleman’s face and hands are beginning to rot.”

The French morgue of the time made Bayard’s protest more meaningful.

At that time, the Paris morgue was open to the public. Visitors came to identify victims of unsolved murders and suicides. Bayard’s morgue picture It was a metaphor about being recognized and defined. Actually.

Besides the people exhibited in the Paris morgue, there were also a few items related to them. Bayard also to describe himself a straw hat, He chose a vase with a statue and flowers.