[Rue des Batignolles]

Creator

French Photographer · 1801–1887

Frenchman Hippolyte Bayard was one of the earliest experimenters in photography, though few will recognize his name today. While working as a civil servant in the Ministry of Finance in the late 1830s and early 1840s, he devoted much of his free time to inventing processes that captured and fixed images from nature on paper using a basic camera, chemicals, and light. The announcement of the invent