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On Boulevard du Temple First human beings photographed.
“I have seized the light,” Daguerre supposedly said. “I have arrested its flight!
Two men are seen.
Such quietude is illusory, for when Daguerre set up his mechanism, no doubt the boulevard was filled with people. Yet their existence was too wispy to ever be recorded, the exposure being at least eight minutes long. Unknown to the photographer, only the bootblack and his customer stood still long enough to be observed by eternity.
Nicéphore Niépce - View from the Window of Le Gras, in 1826 requiring an exposure of several days.
Daguerre understood what he was offering—not just representation, or artifice, or even mimesis. His invention, he wrote, was “not merely an instrument which serves to draw Nature; on the contrary it is a physical and chemical process which gives her the power to reproduce herself.” Photography gave reality itself the ability to self-generate.
a portrait, a landscape, or any view […] leaves an imprint in light and shade, and thus presents the most perfect of all drawings (preserved) for an indefinite time.
In the last two minutes the cumulative number of pictures taken—uploaded to Facebook and Instagram, sent in emails and texts—surpasses the number of photographs from the entirety of the nineteenth-century. Since that anonymous bootblack and his customer had their portraits shot, there have been an astounding 3.5 trillion photographs taken.
A perfect photograph is a lyric poem. It gestures towards narrative, but does not spell it out; it relishes in detail, but is not didactic; it’s as in love with the granularity of beach wood or the smoothness of a mirror as much as it is with any abstraction
How much more incomplete would our love of Abraham Lincoln be if the camera had been invented later?