Incredible 200 year history of photography in pictures, from first colour photo to Queen Victoria's hippo

In 1826, French inventor Joseph Nicephore Niepce pointed a crude camera out of his window in Le Gras and waited. The blurry result, a rooftop and a barn, is the world’s oldest surviving photograph. The whole process took eight hours. Two hundred years on, we take more photos in a day than existed in the whole of the 1800s. A new book, This Is Photography, looks back over the two centuries, one photo at a time, from Niepce’s rooftop to the first snap sent from a mobile. Editor Nathalie Herschdorfer, who put the book together, calls it “a story that is always in motion, always being rewritten”. The 1830-40s gave the world the first faces, streets and books ever caught on camera. By the 1860s, photographers were hauling gear up mountains and on to battlefields for the first news photos. In 1888, George Eastman introduced the Kodak, a simple box camera loaded with a roll of film instead of fragile glass plates. Colour was introduced in the 1890s, then Kodak’s Brownie went on sale for a dollar in 1900, bringing photography to the masses. By the 1920s, people could sit in a coin-operated photo booth on Broadway and get a strip of black and white portraits back eight minutes later. The 20th century used photography as propaganda in two world wars, with glamour shots taken for Vogue, and in 1946, a camera strapped to a captured Nazi V-2 rocket took the first photo of Earth from space. In 1975, Kodak engineer Steven Sasson built the first digital camera, a toaster-sized battery-operated device that weighed 8lb. It took 23 seconds just to record one black-and-white image onto a cassette tape, and another 23 seconds to play it back on TV. Kodak patented the technology, then shelved it, worried it would kill off its film business. It then spent the next two decades selling film instead, before going bankrupt as digital cameras took over. By 1997, the first photo ever sent from a phone, a newborn baby in a maternity ward, was received by 2,000 people the second she was born. Nathalie calls photography “a universal language”. Two hundred years later, it still shapes how we see everything. BOULEVARD DU TEMPLE: Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, 1838 The exposure took so long that this busy Paris street looks empty. Only a man having his boots shined stood still long enough to show up in the picture, making him possibly the first person ever photographed. It's one of just twenty-five Daguerre photos that survived a fire at his studio the following year. PHOTOGRAPHS OF BRITISH ALGAE: Anna Atkins, 1843 A homemade book of seaweed prints, self-published by Anna Atkins. It's now reckoned to be the first book ever illustrated with photographs. Fewer than twenty copies still exist. THE HIPPOPOTAMUS AT THE ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS Juan de Borbón, 1852 The hippo was a gift to Queen Victoria and pulled crowds of 10,000 a day at London Zoo. The man who photographed it had his own claim to fame: he was in line for the Spanish throne. ALICE LIDDELL AS “THE BEGGAR MAID”: Lewis Carroll, 1858 The real Alice who inspired Alice in Wonderland, dressed up and posed as a beggar by Carroll. One of the earliest photographs clearly meant as art, not just a record. THE ASCENT OF MONT BLANC: Auguste-Rosalie Bisson, 1861 Twenty-five porters hauled the camera gear up the mountain. The dramatic shots of climbers on the ropes were actually staged on the way back down, after they'd already reached the top. SAMURAI, YOKOHAMA: Felice Beato, 1864–65 For years this was one of the only images of Japan most people in the West ever saw. The samurai class in the photo was abolished not long after it was taken. AL-AZHAR MOSQUE, CAIRO: Félix Bonfils, c. 1870–72 One of thousands of shots churned out by a Beirut studio that sold Egypt, Syria and the Middle East as picture-postcard souvenirs to European tourists. JOHN HOWELL, AN INDIANAPOLIS NEWSBOY: Lewis Hine, 1908 Hine shot child labourers to help get them banned. You can see his own shadow in the picture, camera and all. AUTOCHROME COLOUR SERIES OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE: Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii, 1905–15 Paid for by the Tsar, shot using three colour filters on one glass plate. Nobody could turn them into proper colour pictures until the Library of Congress worked out how, in the 2000s. JOSEPHINE BAKER George Hoyningen-Huene, 1929 A glamour shot for Vanity Fair, Baker dripping in jewellery by the designer Jean Dunand. The same year, it went on show in a major photography exhibition in Germany. ELLA WATSON WITH THREE GRANDCHILDREN AND ADOPTED DAUGHTER: Gordon Parks, 1942 Shot for a US government agency in Washington DC. Part of the same series that produced Parks's famous American Gothic photo. FROM THE ANONYMOUS PROJECT: Lee Shulman collection, 1953 A stranger's old holiday slide, saved from a private stash of nearly a million just like it: snapshots that would otherwise have been binned or lost to rot. CONVICTS FETCHING WATER, BAODING, HEBEI PROVINCE: Liu Zheng, 1995 From an eight-year project photographing people on the fringes of Chinese society: monks, labourers, prisoners. SOPHIE LEE KAHN BIRTH PICTURE: Philippe Kahn, 11 June 1997 Cobbled together from a laptop, a flip phone and a digital camera in a maternity ward. It's the first photo ever sent from a mobile phone, dispatched to 2,000 contacts the moment Kahn's daughter was born. THE GORGE, FROM ARCHITECTURE OF DENSITY: Michael Wolf, 2010 Wolf photographed Hong Kong's stacked, overflowing housing blocks after moving there in 1994. No sky, no ground, just wall-to-wall flats. FROM THE SERIES CARPOOLERS: Alejandro Cartagena, 2011–12 Shot from a motorway bridge in Monterrey, Mexico: labourers asleep in the back of pickup trucks on their way to building sites. *This is Photography: The First 200 Years, edited by Nathalie Herschdorfer (£40, Thames & Hudson Ltd), is out now