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The wikimedia caption of the photograph “Boulevard du Temple” by Louis Daguerre states:

This is “Boulevard du Temple”, the first ever photograph of a person. The photo was taken by Louis Daguerre in late 1838 or early 1839 in Paris. It is of a busy street, but because exposure time was over ten minutes, the city traffic was moving too much to appear. The exception is a man in the bottom left corner, who stood still getting his boots polished long enough to show.

High Resolution Image on wikimedia.org

Via Blake Andrews blog i found this video, which shows an event that took place at New York’s Grand Central Station and could be read as a hommage to “Boulevard du Temple”. Downshift in a constanty rushing environment.

Sitenote regarding Daguerre’s “Boulevard du Temple”

In his blog-post “traces” Nicholas Jenkins (literary historian at Stanford University) deals with the question of absence and presence of people in the daguerreotype “Boulevard du Temple”.