Filippos Margaritis was born in Smyrna in 1810 and is generally acknowledged as the first Greek photographer. He studied in Rome on a scholarship received by Ioannis Kapodistrias. He returned to Greece and became a teacher at the School of Fine Arts before focusing his attention on photography in the late 1840s. A well-travelled and pioneering photographer, he produced daguerreotypes before moving to calotypes and albumen prints.