As many other human inventions, photography is not a brainchild of just one person. There were people who gave initial ideas, people who took it further but missed and people who made something out of it. Read more about photography inventors.
William Henry Fox Talbot was many things but the thing he is the most famous of is calotype, one of the earlier methods of photography which used paper as material and made negatives that can be copied many times.
Thomas Wedgwood didn’t live long, was ill all his life and didn’t have much of a formal education but he experimented with chemicals and planted a seed of photography as we know it today.
Nicéphore Niépce (born Joseph) was the first to successfully experiment with photography and set foundations for future experimenters and photographers. His photographs needed long time of exposure but could be fixed to last in light without darkening.
Louis Daguerre, inventor of daguerreotype, pushed the photography (which was a young art at the time) in a right direction by shortening the time of exposure from few hours to few seconds.