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rfmcdonaldJoseph Nicéphore Niépce (1765-1833) was a researcher in photography who, in 1826, took the world's first photograph, View from the Window at Le Gras (La cour du domaine du Gras).
"Niépce captured the photo with a camera obscura focused onto a sheet of 20 × 25 cm oil-treated bitumen. As a result of the 8-hour exposure, sunlight illuminates the buildings on both sides."
Louis Daguerre, Niépce's sometime collaborator, went on to develop the commercially successful daguerrotype, overshadowing Niépce's innovations.
Jim Lewis' 2002 Slate essay is fantastic.
It's all too easy to think that an interesting picture is a picture of an interesting thing—this is the power of photojournalism, some snapshots, certain forms of portraiture, and so on. But the truth is trickier: The quality of a photograph lies not in its subject matter but in the irreducible entanglement of photographer, apparatus, and image. The most interesting fact to contemplate is that someone had the will and the opportunity to take it at all. You're looking at the specific and fleeting relationship among those three things—artist, camera, world. What makes the aesthetics of the photograph different than the aesthetics of, say, painting are the constraints put on that triangle; there's a different relationship to time, a different relationship to machinery, and, of course, a different (though no less complicated) relationship to truth, to memory, to history, and so on.
For example, consider this: Somewhere Nabokov writes that, while many of us are terrified by the expanse of empty time that awaits us after death, few feel any fear of the endlessness that preceded our birth. But looking at the Niépce picture reverses death's order of sentiments; it induces a deep unease over the blankness of the past. You can't help but think of the things and lives that, before 1826, were never caught on film—all those men and women, with nothing to mark their presence or their passing. It inspires a kind of light-headedness. Photographs are not our only—or even our best—reminder of the past, but they are now our most common, so much so that, from sonograms on, there's probably not a person living in the United States who has never been caught on camera. Look at the world's first gasoline engine, and you may feel a twinge of pity for all the miles walked before automobiles came on the scene; look at the first light bulb, and you may pity all the hours people spent in the dark. But the vertigo experienced in response to Niépce's picture is deeper than that: It's an almost metaphysical awe at the utter newness of the relationship being announced, between representations and the things they represent.
I took this copy here, from the Wikimedia Commons.
"Niépce captured the photo with a camera obscura focused onto a sheet of 20 × 25 cm oil-treated bitumen. As a result of the 8-hour exposure, sunlight illuminates the buildings on both sides."
Louis Daguerre, Niépce's sometime collaborator, went on to develop the commercially successful daguerrotype, overshadowing Niépce's innovations.
Jim Lewis' 2002 Slate essay is fantastic.
It's all too easy to think that an interesting picture is a picture of an interesting thing—this is the power of photojournalism, some snapshots, certain forms of portraiture, and so on. But the truth is trickier: The quality of a photograph lies not in its subject matter but in the irreducible entanglement of photographer, apparatus, and image. The most interesting fact to contemplate is that someone had the will and the opportunity to take it at all. You're looking at the specific and fleeting relationship among those three things—artist, camera, world. What makes the aesthetics of the photograph different than the aesthetics of, say, painting are the constraints put on that triangle; there's a different relationship to time, a different relationship to machinery, and, of course, a different (though no less complicated) relationship to truth, to memory, to history, and so on.
For example, consider this: Somewhere Nabokov writes that, while many of us are terrified by the expanse of empty time that awaits us after death, few feel any fear of the endlessness that preceded our birth. But looking at the Niépce picture reverses death's order of sentiments; it induces a deep unease over the blankness of the past. You can't help but think of the things and lives that, before 1826, were never caught on film—all those men and women, with nothing to mark their presence or their passing. It inspires a kind of light-headedness. Photographs are not our only—or even our best—reminder of the past, but they are now our most common, so much so that, from sonograms on, there's probably not a person living in the United States who has never been caught on camera. Look at the world's first gasoline engine, and you may feel a twinge of pity for all the miles walked before automobiles came on the scene; look at the first light bulb, and you may pity all the hours people spent in the dark. But the vertigo experienced in response to Niépce's picture is deeper than that: It's an almost metaphysical awe at the utter newness of the relationship being announced, between representations and the things they represent.
I took this copy here, from the Wikimedia Commons.
