Smart Investor: Earning It, December 2012
1 December, 2012Photography on the front line: Finbarr O’Reilly interview
1 December, 2012Discovery Channel Magazine, December 2012 
They seem to stand alone, two slightly blurred figures amid an empty Parisian street. One is shining the other’s shoe on a wide avenue, Boulevard du Temple; smokestacks dominate the skyline. The year is 1838, and the two figures – nobody has ever known who they are – are the first people ever to have been photographed.
Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre’s View of the Boulevard du Temple, Paris is a famous and important picture, as old as you can find. “It is one of the earliest examples of a time and place frozen for eternity,” writes Gerry Badger in The Genius of Photography. “It takes you there. And it also establishes immediately one of photography’s great themes – the urban experience.”
And, for all its grainy archaism, it sets some themes that resonate to this day. One, it’s not an accurate depiction of a real event: the streets would have been filled with people, but the length of exposure the primitive technology of the time required meant that only people who were staying still – having their shoes shined – were captured in the image. And two, neither of them had any idea they were being photographed, and probably never found out. Camera tricks? Voyeurism? The candid camera? These things have been with us, it turns out, since 1838.
In less than 200 years of history, the camera has undergone an extraordinary evolution in technology, access, usage and influence. Today, we’re all photographers; try buying a phone that doesn’t have a camera built into it. This combination of vision and communication means we’re all journalists too, the first on the scene, capturing the moment and freezing it for history. “Photography,” Badger says, “began as a way of collecting the world. It still functions extremely effectively in that role.” And it is the most democratic of all arts, because we can all do it.
To read more, please contact the author or Discovery Channel Magazine
Linked with this article: Photography on the front line, an interview with Finbarr O’Reilly
