Born one hundred and fifty years apart the achievements of the struggling landowner and inventor Nicéphore Niépce and the groundbreaking photo historian Helmut Gernsheim were inextricably linked when Gernsheim rediscovered Niépce’s long-lost first photograph in a trunk. Graham Harrison looks at the exploits of the photographer turned historian and of the brilliant, but ill-fated, Frenchman who Gernsheim proved was the true inventor of photography.
Making History: The Gernsheims and Nicéphore Niépce on Photo Histories.
With thanks to Michael Pritchard who provided information concerning Helmut Gernsheim’s membership of the Royal Photographic Society and to Sir Roy Strong who kindly answered questions about the Gernsheim Collection in Oxford in March 2013.
