ilhouettes, but there was no way of making the image permanent. The first successful picture was produced in June/July 1826 by Joseph Nipce, using a process called Heliography, using Bitumen of Judea, which hardened on exposure to light. This picture required an exposure of eight hours.On 4 January 1829 Nipce agreed to go into partnership with Louis Daguerre to perfect the process, but Nipce died four years later. Daguerre continued to experiment, discovering a way of developing photographic plates, which reduced the exposure time from eight hours down to half an hour. He also discovered that an image could be made permanent by immersing it in salt. Following a report on this invention by a leading scholar of the day, Paul Delaroche, the French government bought the rights to it in July 1839 and the process was made public on 19 August 1839. Daguerre named it the Daguerreotype. Because the Daguerreotype allowed people who couldn't draw to "draw", it became a craze overnight. But, not everyone welcomed this exciting invention. A newspaper report in the Leipzig City Advertiser said: "The wish to capture evanescent reflections is not only impossible... but the mere desire alone, the will to do so, is blasphemy. God created man in His own image, and no man- made machine may fix the image of God. Is it possible that God should have abandoned His eternal principles, and allowed a Frenchman... to give to the world an invention of the Devil?". Artists at the time saw photography as a threat to their livelihood, and some even believed that painting would cease to exist.The Spectator (2 February 1839) called daguerreotypes the "self operating process of Fine Art." Carl Dauthendey, the first professional daguerreotype photographer in St. Petersburg, makes an commented that "People were afraid at first to look for any length of time at the pictures he produced. They were embarrassed by the clarity of these figures and believed that the ...
