1839 was long spoken of as the year of the invention of photography – a notion since deconstructed and now considered an untenable cliché. There is no such thing as one kind of photography, nor even one single protagonist; rather, since the beginning there have been a diversity of photographic procedures and a substantial group of pioneers. However, 1839 takes on its full meaning when we look into the publication strategies linked to photography. In January of that year Jacques Louis Mandé Daguerre was the first to bring the procedure into the public arena – or the almost public arena. This article tries to reconstruct the reasons for a strange distancing: why did Daguerre never, in 1839 or afterwards, consent to display the results of a procedure so intimately linked to his name? The fact of the matter is that the beginning of the history of photographic exhibitions is actually an exhibition that never took place.