WHAT is believed to be the world's oldest photograph of a living animal – as in alive at the time – has recently been displayed in New York by Hans P. Kraus Jr. Fine Photographs. The image, of cows resting in a market in Rome's ancient Forum, was taken as a daguerreotype by French photographer Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey (1804–1892). Photography historian Stephen C Pinson, who wrote a book on de Prangey, has worked out that he took the image between April and July 1842, while on a Mediterranean journey (De Prangey took the earliest-surviving images of Greece, Palestine, Egypt, Syria, and Turkey). Louis Daguerre had announced his daguerreotype process only three years before, so the innocuous image, with the comically abrupt title of ‘Rome, Forum, Boeufs', dates back to…
