Which person is the earliest born to be depicted in a photograph, and what year were they born? 1770? 1780?

Question

In early photographs from the 1830s, one often sees rather elderly people. I am curious about the oldest person to be seen in any photograph - what year is the farthest back in history reached by photography of people born in that year?

Answer 1

I think there is a slight misconception here, as you really don't see a great deal of elderly people depicted in Dagguerian or wet plate photography. The reason for this is simple, the average life expectancy during this era was around 45 years old. Also as another person pointed out, there really wasn't the meticulous documenting of personal information such as there is now, especially for those living in the western frontier regions of the time. Even if someone were to claim they were the oldest living human, without documentation of proof there is no way to prove for sure. As you may know the first practical photographic process which yielded the first portraits was the dagguereotype process invented in the late 1830's. So what dagguereotype image portrays the oldest living human of the time? Well of the remaining Daguerreotypes the best resource for finding this information would be through the dagguerian society who has been maintaining a database of remaining dagguereotypes http://207.97.221.221/daguerrewww/fm2/search.php
Search all the portraits and look at the birthdays of each person. Granted these photos do not represent all dags, but they give you represent some of the photos which are out there. In addition you can take a look at the collection of dagguereotypes in the library of congress for which I provided a link to.

Answer 2

Wow...it would take a ton of research to answer these questions, photography was developed over a long span of time. there were literally thousands of pictures taken before most people were even aware that it could be done...................

Answer 3

That would be a hard answer to find, as records of such things as births and deaths weren't even taken.