historians helmut gernsheim and alison gernsheim tracked down the photograph in 1952 and brought it to prominence, reinforcing the claim that niépce is the inventor of photography. they had an expert at the kodak research laboratory make a modern photographic copy, but it proved extremely difficult to produce an adequate representation of all that could be seen when inspecting the actual plate. helmut gernsheim heavily retouched one of the copy prints to clean it up and make the scene more comprehensible, and until the late 1970s he allowed only that enhanced version to be published. it became apparent that at some point in time after the copying in 1952, the plate was disfigured and acquired bumps near three of its corners, which caused light to reflect in ways that interfered with the visibility of those areas and of the image as a whole.