Today is World Photography Day
172 years ago today, the nation of France gave a gift to the world that just keeps on giving. They gave us the gift of photography by sharing Louis Daguerre’s invention of the daguerreotype process.
This process has been refined by others, William Henry Fox Talbot and George Eastman of note to me. Their contributions, with many others, have brought us to the photographic techniques we know and love today.
These gifts have allowed many artists to find their voice and add beauty (and sometimes ugliness) to our lives. They have also allowed every person the ability to supplement memories with images, giving us touchstones to our past, sometimes giving us glimpses of the future.
I’m looking at a photo of me as a child. I am sitting with my grandfather who has passed from this earth. Simultaneously I am in touch with my past and unknowingly I have been seeing the future with the same image. I look at myself in the image and note how much my son looks like me, and my father for that matter. But you never know it’s the future until the present, but the photo lets me see that fact.
A photograph is not merely a pretty picture. It is truthfully a fossil. Let me explain that analogy.
When we see, at its basest, our eyes are capturing light photons that are bouncing off the subject. These photos travel in a wavelength that denotes colors. Our eyes receive these wavelengths and process that data into images that allow us to interact with the world.
Cameras allow us to focus these wavelengths onto a medium, be it film or a digital sensor. When we take a picture, these photons, which just bounced off the subject, are altering silver halide or altering voltage on a silicon wafer, recoding the image of the subject.
This is creating our “fossil”. The image was created by photons physically changing silver halide molecules or digital sensors.
When we develop the film, or when the camera or we render the sensor data, we render an image with these crystals or data. We are still in a sense touching that very light that bounce off our subject.
When we make a print, that same light is in a sense being transferred to paper. We have captured light, and made it ours. Be it 5 minutes ago or 100 years, we are seeing what was then, we have frozen light, and in turn time. We have made lights ours and in a sense gained immortality.
The print you have on your wall or on your desk, it is a fossil. Much like fossils are the mineralized remains of life past, a photograph is the light of the past rendered in silver, dyes and inks. These silvers, dyes and inks allow modern light to create a time warp, letting us look back into the past.
We are gods who have mastered time. Thanks to France.
Happy World Photography Day!
