Rollfilm posted a series of early photographs today, one of which was Louis Daguerre’s amazing “Boulevard du Temple”, apparently the first photograph to show a person (bottom left, at the sidewalk shoeshine):
The relative crispness of the shot hides the fact that this was a ten-minute exposure. The traffic was moving too fast to appear on the photograph, which also accounts for the eery absence of people in this Paris street-scene, dating to 1839.
Nearly 170 years later, motorised traffic crawls through our cities slower than a horse and cart (or a chicken), whilst we, les citoyens, frantically dash around on foot and underground. We communicate faster still, at the speed of light, with people we have never seen or even heard. We see a thousand faces on the street and on the screen, and remember none.
But you and I are not forgotten. Unlike the inferred denizens of Daguerre’s Avenue, our traces are recorded at every step. No smoky trails for us. Unable to forget, the panopticon dutifully digitises our lives, although we will never read what biographies it creates.
Photographer, inventor, chemist and illusionist, maker of mirrors, Daguerre was perhaps the first modern visual alchemist. His daguerrotype technology helped revolutionise the way we perceived the world and ourselves. Daguerre’s inadvertent magic was to make the population of Paris disappear – or, possibly, to begin the process of allowing people to reappear on film, reconstituted and reinterpreted. Our magic is to disappear ourselves, yet leave ineradicable tracks wherever we move. We thereby allow others to reinvent us on our behalf.
Update: Magic? In a modern corollary to Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law, Bruce Sterling once stated:
Any sufficiently advanced garbage is indistinguishable from magic.
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