On a spring morning in 1838, Louis Daguerre carried his experimental camera to the window of his upstairs Paris studio and pointed it at the street below. The image that resulted, View of the Boulevard du Temple, captured two figures — a boy shining shoes and his seated client — who stayed still long enough to register on a plate that needed five to ten minutes of exposure. Everyone else on the busy boulevard simply vanished. It was the first photograph of human beings, and the first time a camera recorded people at all.

Nearly two centuries later, a bronze plaque has been set into the pavement at the exact place where the two figures once stood. Daguerre's studio and adjoining theatre occupied what is now Rue Léon-Jouhaux, and he was photographing ground that Baron Haussmann would soon rebuild as Place de la République. Pinning down the viewpoint took two years of work by filmmakers Maximilien Van Aertryck, Axel Danielson and Kalle Boman, who had already used Daguerre's image in their 2023 Sundance-awarded documentary about two hundred years of image culture.

Their method combined a 3D scan of today's Place de la République with a reconstruction of the neighbourhood as it looked in 1838, drawn from paintings, prints, engravings and maps held in Parisian archives. They handed the data to two independent architecture firms, which each landed on spots six feet apart — so the trio split the difference. One complication: the famous image mostly survives through a copy made by MoMA curator Beaumont Newhall in 1937, because Daguerre had sent the original plate to Ludwig I of Bavaria in 1839 and it was badly damaged by Allied bombing in the Second World War. The filmmakers are now hunting for a negative.

Van Aertryck told Radio France that the plaque serves as a reminder that earlier generations also lived through technological upheaval and had to learn to manage its consequences. The marker was inaugurated on October 15 as part of the bicentenary celebrations of photography's invention.