He invented his own process that produced direct positive paper prints in the camera and presented the world's first public exhibition of photographs on 24 June 1839.

Because of the paper's poor light sensitivity, an exposure of about twelve minutes was required, so that still-lives were favoured and human sitters were told to close their eyes to eliminate the eerie, "dead" quality produced by blinking and moving the eyes during a long exposure.

In the summer of 1851, along with photographers Édouard Baldus, Henri Le Secq, Gustave Le Gray, and O. Mestral, Bayard travelled throughout France to photograph architectural monuments at the request of the Commission des Monuments Historiques.

He eventually gave details of the process to the French Academy of Sciences on 24 February 1840, in return for money to buy better equipment.

the first staged photograph, Self Portrait as a Drowned Man, in which he pretends to have committed suicide, sitting and leaning to the right.

Ladies and gentlemen, you'd better pass along for fear of offending your sense of smell, for as you can observe, the face and hands of the gentleman are beginning to decay.Despite his initial hardships in photography, Bayard continued to be a productive member of the photographic society.