Before August Sander and Diane Arbus and Olan Mills, before Facetune and duck face, there were two: a shoeshine boy and his client, captured by Louis Daguerre on the Boulevard du Temple in 1838, in what is thought to be the first photograph to depict human beings. The bootblack squats beside a chest containing the tools of his trade. The patron stands, hands clasped behind his back, with a foot perched on the box. We know it’s spring, because the leaves are coming in on the plane trees. The two were hardly the only people out that day on the bustling stretch of cabarets. But they were the only people who held still long enough to be captured by Daguerre’s curious new machine, which required an exposure time of up to ten minutes. The next year, presenting the daguerreotype to the Assemblée Nationale, the physicist François Arago noted, “In this genre, it’s the unforeseen that one must count upon.” Soon, the French state would buy the rights to the invention and offer it as a free gift “to the world.” The names of the boy and his client were never recorded, but they live on as the accidental embodiment of photography on the brink of conquering the world.
One night in 2024, Maximilien Van Aertryck went out for drinks with his colleagues Axel Danielson and Kalle Boman. Van Aertryck is a producer who works with the Swedish filmmaker Ruben Östlund and has co-directed a documentary about the history of image-making. In other words, he knows a lot about photography. He had always loved the Daguerre picture: “It’s so poetic, with those two lonely people on that huge frame.” As he and his friends drifted out of the café, they crossed the Boulevard du Temple. It was June. The trees were nearing lushness. “We were, like, ‘Wait a minute! It must have been taken somewhere around here!,’ ” Van Aertryck recalled, visiting the area the other day. They punched a few keywords into Google, and found some articles, “in pretty big newspapers,” surmising that the photograph might have been snapped near the Filles du Calvaire Métro stop. “We knew immediately that there was no way it was there,” Van Aertryck said. “If you look at the photo, it just doesn’t make sense. So we went home and went to bed, promising that we’d meet at the same place at eight the next morning, and we’d figure this out.”
“Just like a Cro-Mag to bring a club to a rock fight.”
Cartoon by P. C. Vey
Thus began an eighteen-month quest to pinpoint the exact location of the shot, involving everything from archival research to drones to very long measuring tapes. It wasn’t easy. For one thing, Baron Haussmann had demolished swaths of the neighborhood in the mid-eighteen-hundreds to create the Place de la République. Van Aertryck and his colleagues turned to prints, paintings, real-estate registers, and topographical maps to re-create Daguerre’s environs, but these pre-photographic renderings had their limits. “We kept just finding engravings of one particular building, because some emperor got shot there,” Van Aertryck recalled. Both Daguerre’s workshop, on what is now Rue Léon-Jouhaux, and a theatre that he owned, called the Diorama, burned in 1839. “No one, not even the biggest nerds who have researched this,” can agree on where, exactly, Daguerre took the photograph, Van Aertryck said, but he and his team were able to determine that three buildings from the era are still standing today. They brought their findings to an architectural firm, which used a 3-D scan of the entire square to triangulate the shoeshiner’s location. Another architectural firm, using the same data, homed in on a point just a few feet away. “We decided to split the difference,” Van Aertryck explained, scuffing his shoe over a red “X” that had been painted on one of the paving stones, not far from some wads of gum. “A colleague ran out to buy nail polish to mark the spot!” he explained.
For nearly a century, the Bavarian National Museum, in Munich, possessed a photographic plate of the image, which Daguerre had sent to King Ludwig I, but it was badly damaged by restoration efforts during the Second World War—the only remaining physical trace of “Boulevard du Temple” is a photo of the photo that the MoMA curator Beaumont Newhall took in the nineteen-thirties. On October 15th, however, the City of Paris will unveil a plaque commemorating the shoeshine pair—an “unforeseen” detail, the world’s first photographic portrait sitters and the original photobombers at the same time. “I hope people will make it theirs and embrace it as the starting point for something,” Van Aertryck said. May it spawn a million selfies. ♦