THE SUN PICTURE TAX

To appreciate the designation “sun picture” is to understand the story of photography. The earliest known “photographs” were made during the 1820s by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce and were known as “heliographs” or, literally translated from the Greek, “sun writing.”

Niépce worked with a young protégé named Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, who went on to perfect the photographic process that came to be known as the daguerreotype. Although much more sophisticated than the heliograph, the daguerreotype (popular from 1839 to about 1860) still relied on sunlight for producing an image, as did later formats in photography such as ambrotypes (popular from