Shooting the Past

On the famous Promenade des Anglais in Nice, it seems life is recorded in realtime. Most walks along the 'Prom' end up on a tourist's i-phone. On screens from Seattle to Shanghai, there you are; in the background of someone's holiday selfie. Recording life is a global phenomenon supercharged over the past 25 years by the increasing affordability of good camera phones. Google estimates 25 billion selfies are uploaded worldwide every year and youtube reports upwards of 300 minutes of new video footage appearing on their platform every minute. If you want to know how this visual overload started; look at the faded picture below. 'Boulevard du Temple'; taken by Louis Daguerre in Paris, 1838. Examine it closely and you'll see a boot polisher and his client unwittingly become the first ever human beings to appear in a photograph. The street would have been full of people but as the picture took seven minutes to expose, the two near stationary figures were the only ones who made it to the final composition. Its an incredible, haunting image, taken in the same year that transatlantic steamers made their first voyages, Zulus battled 'Voortrekkers' in the Battle of Blood River and more than half a million people made use of the first railways to descend on London for Queen Victoria's coronation. Perhaps it was one of these events that the two discussed long enough to claim their place in history. Whatever it was, they truly are prisoners of time and unless, later on, Monsieur Daguerre took another, undiscovered photograph; they were not only the first but also the only people in the world to have their picture taken on that day in 1838.

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