Boulevard Du Temple, Louis Daguerre, 1839
Louis Daguerre’s groundbreaking image of the man and a customer is the first known instance of human beings captured in a photograph. Before Daguerre, people had only been represented in artwork. That changed when Daguerre fixed his lens on a Paris street and then exposed a silver-plated sheet of copper for several minutes, developed and fixed the image using chemicals. The result was the first mirror-image photograph.