Soubor:Facsimile-print Thomas Wedgwood.jpg

English: Photograms like these are made without a camera. They record the shadows cast by actual objects placed on or near a sheet of photographic paper, which darkens where it is exposed to light. The first reliably documented images of this kind were made by Thomas Wedgwood around the year 1800. As a result he is sometimes called "The First Photographer". Wedgwood's primary goal was to capture the images formed by a lens in a camera obscura, but the chemically treated paper he created was not sensitive enough for that purpose. He did successfully capture shadow images of the type shown here, but he was unable to chemically "fix" them: they could only be viewed for short intervals in subdued light because further exposure to light eventually darkened them all over. As early as the 1860s and as recently as 2008, it was occasionally claimed that some of Wedgwood's experimental photographs still survived, but no such claims have ever been proved and some have been very definitely disproved.