Here Are 38 Of The Most Unhinged Historical Photos Creepier Than Horror Movies

I don’t know about you, but I found some of these pictures quite petrifying. I mean, what was the obsession with those bizarre masks, right? However, it got me thinking about how novel cameras were back then; people probably didn’t even know what was truly “aesthetic.” In fact, it was not until 1839 that the word “photography” was coined by the British polymath, Sir John Herschel.

He used two Greek words: phos, which means “light,” and graphê, meaning “drawing” or “writing.” So quite literally, it means “drawing with light.” The technology behind it is actually a cool mix of two sciences. First, optics bends light to project an image inside the camera. Then, chemistry steps in to permanently freeze and record that image onto a light-sensitive surface.

Despite the word’s invention in 1839, the camera has been around longer than that. Way back during the Renaissance, artists were already using a primitive type of it called a camera obscura, which is Latin for “dark room.” They used it as a tool to help them draw nature much more accurately.

The concept relies on natural physics that people had actually noticed for thousands of years. Basically, if you have a completely dark room or box with just a tiny pinhole on one side, light from the bright world outside streams through that hole. Those light rays cross and project a perfect, upside-down image of the outside world onto the wall opposite the hole.

However, the camera obscura could only show the image in real time. If an artist wanted to keep a permanent copy of it, they still had to sit inside the dark space and trace the projected lines by hand.

Around 1800, an Englishman named Thomas Wedgwood actually managed to capture a black-and-white negative image inside a camera obscura. He did this by coating paper and white leather with silver nitrate, a chemical people knew would turn dark when light hit it.

There was just one massive problem, as he couldn’t figure out how to freeze or fix the image. The moment he took the paper out into the light to look at it, the remaining light-sensitive areas would also turn dark within a few minutes, ruining the picture.

Even though it wasn’t perfect, a chemist named Humphry Davy wrote about Wedgwood’s breakthrough in a scholarly journal in 1802. The news eventually got translated into French, spreading the word to other inventors.

Flash forward to 1816, a French inventor named Nicéphore Nièpce managed to capture some small camera images on paper treated with silver chloride. Unfortunately, just like Wedgwood, he hit a wall when it came to making them permanent.

Realizing he needed a different approach, he began experimenting with other light-sensitive materials. By 1822, he had developed a brand-new process called heliography. Keeping with the Greek trend, this basically translated to “sun drawing.” 

Then, somewhere between 1826 and 1827, Nièpce finally made history by snapping the world’s earliest surviving photograph. He captured the view outside his estate window in Le Gras, Burgundy, by coating a pewter plate with a mix of bitumen and lavender oil. It worked, but it wasn’t a quick job, as the exposure time took several days.

Nièpce later partnered with Louis Daguerre to improve the process. After Nièpce's demise in 1833, Daguerre discovered that exposing treated silver plates to mercury fumes brought out hidden images in just minutes, rather than hours. In 1839, the French government bought the rights to this daguerreotype process, making it free to the public while granting Daguerre a lifetime pension.

It became an overnight global sensation, offering the rising middle class an affordable alternative to painted portraits. Photo studios quickly popped up everywhere. In fact, there are even historical suggestions that gear was sent to St. Helena in 1840 to photograph Napoleon Bonaparte’s exhumed body, though the equipment failed.

Right around the same time, William Fox Talbot was working on his own method. By 1841, he perfected the calotype. While his paper negatives weren’t quite as sharp as Daguerre’s metal plates, they had one massive advantage.

As they were translucent, you could use a single negative to print unlimited positive copies. This genius concept of a negative-to-positive process became the foundation of all film photography for the next 150 years, until digital took over.

Not everyone was thrilled about photography. Traditional artists feared for their livelihoods, and critics mocked it as pure narcissism. Yet, some painters embraced the medium. Gustave Le Gray pioneered the “wet collodion” glass negative, which combined the best of both worlds: the sharpness of a daguerreotype with the ability to print multiple copies like a calotype.

Le Gray became the official photographer for Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte. Like Queen Victoria, Louis-Napoleon used mass-produced photos, such as pocket-sized visiting cards, as a powerful PR tool to humanize the royal family.

The medium quickly expanded into documentary work. It was used to catalog historic buildings for restoration. Research shows that by the 1850s, the Crimean War was the first conflict in history to be recorded through a camera lens.