In 1840, Hippolyte Bayard took a photograph in which he staged himself: he wrote on the back that it represented him having committed suicide by drowning, following the lack of recognition of his invention by the Academy of Sciences (which had chosen the process developed by Daguerre and bought by France state to make it publicly available to all).
The originality of Bayard's invention lies in the fact that he directly obtained an image on paper, whereas Daguerre's was produced on a metal plate (the "daguerreotypes"), as an extension of his work with Niepce.
Bayard's "drowned" man thus became the first invented image in the history of photography.
