The Miracle of Photography
More shadows than men, really; just silhouettes, might as well be smudges on the lens. Hard to notice at first, the two undifferentiated figures in the lower left-hand of the picture, at the corner of the Boulevard du Temple. A bootblack squats down and shines the shoes of a man contrapasso above him; impossible to tell what they’re wearing or what they look like. Obviously no way to ascertain their names or professions. At first they’re hard to recognize as people, these whispers of a figure joined together, eternally preserved by silver-plated copper and mercury vapor; they’re insignificant next to the buildings, elegant Beaux-Arts shops and theaters, wrought iron railings along the streets and chimneys on their mansard roofs. Based on an analysis of the light, Louis Daguerre set up his camera around eight in the morning; leaves are still on trees, so it’s not winter, but otherwise it’s hard to tell what season it is that Paris day in 1838. Whatever their names, it was by accident that they became the first two humans to be photographed.
“I have seized the light,” Daguerre supposedly said. “I have arrested its flight!” About six by five inches of metal were polished to a sheen, all traces of detritus burned away with nitric acid, placed into the plate holder opposite from a lens placed into a wooden box, treated with iodine fumes, and exposed to heated mercury until an alchemical miasma reproduced a Paris morning. The boulevard should have been filled with people, busy rushing to work or purchasing groceries, perhaps stopping for pan de chocolate, and yet the street is silent, everything quiet except for these two men unified in anonymity. 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. There are some who claim they see a child looking out of a window, or a horse standing stationary on the boulevard. Like most of us, just ghosts in a vacuum.
In the beginning there may have been the Word, but several millennia later there was the Image. The two most revolutionary technological advances in human consciousness are the invention of writing and then the ability to record life as-it-is in the form of photography and sound recording. Neither ‘s printing press or ‘s computer come close in importance. At best they extended those earlier revolutions, but ultimately print and digital were just means of disseminating words and images more efficiently. When Daguerre unveiled at the Academy of Fine Arts and Academy of Sciences in 1839, it was as if delivered by angels. Reflecting in 1859 on how surprising the invention was, Oliver claimed in The Atlantic Monthly that “in all the prophecies of dreaming enthusiasts, in all the random guesses of the futurewas exhibited it must have seemed like a miraculous surprise, for as writes in “Unlike other transformational technologies such as air travel and automobile, photography was not foreseen in the centuries before it was invented.”
