Taken by Louis-Jacques Mande Daguerre in 1838; that in itself is enough for me to respect it, but adding to that what it actually is – without being nostalgic this truly is an opportunity, a view directly into the past. Those houses might still be there, and they look like houses you can see now but in so totally a different context.
It reminds me of how preoccupied you can be, and that’s ‘you’ very much including me, and not really take in what’s around you. Then, on the first day of your holiday, say, or when you go to the beach at the weekend, or go to a new city and step out of the train station (different again to what you feel when you’ve lived there a while), whatever it might be; it’s like all that is taken away and your are free again to experience a place with your whole concentration and sense. The particular smell of a particular town, how it feels to be there, how light the air is and what you can see; sounds easy to say but it adds up doesn’t it? It’s the smell that most does it for me, sometimes a smell can take me back decades and then it takes ages to work out where, which house or town, and when.
And then a photograph like this appears and it makes me wish I could feel what people in this city felt then. According to Wikipedia this is the first ever photograph of a person. The pavements are full of them and the traffic is moving, but the picture took ten minutes to expose so all you can see are two people; the man getting his shoes cleaned and the person cleaning them, and the blurriness of the figures even shows you what they were doing. Motion revealed too. A true window into the past.
I like the way this early photograph looks scratched and bleached to pieces; god knows people spend long enough trying to recreate the same effect in photoshop today (I know I have, but these effects didn’t make sense until I started with the paper negatives and home development). It isn’t superficially about how it makes you respond, as if the presentation of the negative and the print in a battered form somehow makes it more ‘real’ and earthy, and I don’t think it’s merely that it’s more difficult to produce a flawless image when chemicals and trays and cameras and film or paper are involved (although certainly more can go irreversibly wrong that it can with PS). Maybe it really is that these battered images are more linked to the past than their seamless ‘modern counterparts’. There’s the history of photography like the opening of the eyes and more intense self-awareness (examination?) as the industrial history of the world moves on, and then I guess there actually *is* the way so many things can go wrong; if you do a film image these days you have to really mean it, and work hard for a good one. I don’t mean that you can be lazy in using PS, it’s working hard in a different way; different cumulative steps are involved, and if the element of chance and/or prediction is less, perhaps you end up planning and previsualising more to make up for it.
Anyway, according to the bloke in the camera shop nearby there’s this new invention which might catch on soon; it’s a round thing called ‘the wheel’ – I’ll keep you posted :)..meanwhile, more on daguerrotypes here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Daguerre
This guy makes his own, and very beautiful too http://www.shinyphotos.com/
Southern UK daguerreotypes http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/DShistoryindex.htm
Dagguereian Soctiety http://www.daguerre.org/
[...] start of ‘history of photography’ courses learning about Daguerre (more here and also here) and also other early images perhaps, or just independent exploration? I’m interested, and [...]
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