World Photography Day
Next: August 19, 2027
Every picture tells a story.
The story
Where it comes from
World Photography Day marks 19 August 1839, when the secrets of the daguerreotype, the first practical photographic process, were explained step by step at a joint meeting of the French Academies of Sciences and Fine Arts in Paris, with a crowd spilling into the courtyard outside. The French government had bought the rights from Louis Daguerre and Isidore Niépce for lifetime pensions so that the process could be given to the world. The idea of a day came from the Indian photography teacher O. P. Sharma in 1988, and it was first observed in 1991.
How it's celebrated
Photographers and camera clubs hold exhibitions, workshops and photo walks, and people everywhere share their pictures online and what photography means to them. The Australian photographer Korske Ara helped spread the day online as World Photo Day from 2010, and some accounts call him its founder, so both names are used. Anyone with a phone can join in: take one picture that tells a story, and share it.
Did you know
- When the doors finally opened, an eyewitness reported, people rushed out shouting the names of the secret chemicals: 'Silver iodide' cried one, 'Quicksilver' another.
- Each daguerreotype was one of a kind, an image on a highly polished sheet of silver-plated copper.
- The only surviving daguerreotype known to have been taken by Japanese photographers is a portrait of the Satsuma lord Shimazu Nariakira, made on 17 September 1857 and now an Important Cultural Property of Japan.
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