Joseph Nicephore Niepce, one of the inventors of photography (along with, for example, Louis Daguerre), produced the world’s oldest surviving photograph. The image (“View from window at La Gras”) depicts the view from his room in Saint-Loupe-de-Varennes, taken with a camera obscura focused on a tin alloy plate coated with Judean bitumen, or Syrian asphalt, collected locally. The exposure was necessarily very prolonged, lasting at least several hours, if not days.
