Photography in the United States
In spring 1839, the daguerreotype was introduced into the United States by an Englishman named D.W. Seager, who took the first photograph of a view of St. Paul’s Church and a corner of the Astor House in Lower Manhattan in New York City. Painter and inventor Samuel Finley Breese Morse had met Louis Daguerre in Paris in the spring of 1839, becoming the first American to see his photographic process and becoming enamored with it as a result. When he returned to the United States later that year, he enthusiastically promoted the daguerreotype while hailing Seager's prototypical image. Morse had painted "The Gallery of the Louvre" in 1833, and the appeal of the medium of the daguerreotype was an obvious one to him: it was a means of making faithful copies of artworks, in addition to anything else that would be still in front of the slow eye of the camera.
Filippos Margaritis
Filippos Margaritis (1810–1892) is generally acknowledged to have been the first Greek photographer, whose earliest daguerreotypes, of the Acropolis of Athens, date from 1847. Having studied painting in lithography in Paris, he opened a studio in [Athens] in 1837 and began teaching at the School of Fine Arts in 1842. He learned the techniques of the daguerreotypes from the French photographer Philibert Perraud who arrived in Greece in 1847, and in turn passed on his knowledge to the students of Athens Polytechnic around 1850.