The first permanent photograph was made in 1826 by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce using a sliding wooden box camera made by Charles and Vincent Chevalier in Paris. However, while this was the birth of photography, the camera itself can be traced back much further. Photographic cameras were a development of the camera obscura, a device dating back at least to the 11th century which uses a pinhole or lens to project an image of the scene outside onto a viewing surface. Before the invention of photography, there was no way to preserve the images produced by these cameras apart from manually tracing them. The first camera that was small and portable enough to be practical for photography was built by Johann Zahn in 1685, though it would be almost 150 years before technology caught up to the point where this was possible.

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