There is a man whose name nobody knows. Only a photograph remains.

All that can be said with certainty is that he stood on Boulevard du Temple in Paris in the autumn of 1838, one foot slightly raised while a bootblack knelt at his feet. The boulevard was a lively Parisian street. In the image, it appears strangely empty — wide, still, almost abandoned.

Nearly two centuries later, we’re still thinking about him. Because while he stood there, patient and oblivious, he became the first person in history to have his likeness captured by a photographic camera. All the passing carriages and pedestrians, anything that moved, vanished.

Only stillness endured.

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To understand how this came to be, one has to leave France and go back nearly a thousand years to eleventh-century Cairo, where a scholar named Ibn al-Haytham was wrestling with a phenomenon that had puzzled the world since antiquity. Many, including Aristotle, had noticed that if you poke a small hole in the wall of a darkened room, the scene outside projects itself onto the opposite wall in a perfectly detailed, albeit upside-down manner. People had been observing this for centuries. Nobody could explain why it happened…

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