"Impressed by his observations, Krulwich visited Hokumburg's own blog, the Hokumburg Goombah, where he came across a photograph taken almost a decade earlier. The photo, shown below, was taken by the inventor of the Daguerreotype himself, Louis Daguerre, on the streets of Paris in 1838. Hokumburg claims, in his post, that this is the first photograph of a human being.

The image, haunting in its absence of, well, life, reminds me of Abelardo Morell's long-exposure digital photographs, a modern-day play on old technology. One of the first photographic processes, the daguerreotype required very long exposures to form an image on the surface of a silver plate. It's likely that this was a busy street at the time, but because the image would have taken several minutes to form, only the figure standing still -- getting his boots shined? -- shows up."