He was a retired owner in the vicinity of Chalon sur Saone. He devoted his hobbies to scientific research.

His photographic research seems to go back to 1814. He is then 49 years old.

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In 1826, Niepce is virtually ruined. The indiscretion of an optician from Paris where he had a lens made for his darkroom, told him then that Mr. Louis Jean Mandé Daguerre, painter decorator, owner and operator in Paris Diorama was busy experiments also aim to fix images of the dark room. A correspondence was soon begun between the two scientists, in which they entrusted each other their attempts with more or less abandonment, and it was the emulation, rather than the union of their efforts, which, a few years later, was to give birth to photography.

By 1827, however, M. Niepce had succeeded in copying engravings and even reproducing, though imperfectly, the image of the dark room.

A memoir and specimens he presented to the Royal Society of London establish without dispute his prior art in all inventions relating to photography.

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The process he used consisted of applying resinous and bituminous substances to a polished metal plate. The image, obtained with extreme slowness, (it took several hours of exposure to record a drawing) was then fixed in an unalterable way. Niepce gave to his method the name of Heliography (drawing by the sun)

In 1829, he joined forces with Daguerre. He died unfortunately on July 5, 1833 at 68 years old. Isidore Niepce, his son, did not know, or could not keep an eminent place in the association. In 1837, Daguerre was the only one to defend the invention already called daguerreotype.