Fixing the Shadows

I found this documentary 'The Genius of Photography' to be very interesting and I was surprised of the date in which photography was officially invented; 1839.  Before, I had assumed it to have been first invented much later, more so in the early 20th century than the 19th.  The aspect of photography mentioned in this documentary which interested me most was camera obscura.  This was a term conjured to describe how the image captured is then reproduced upside-down.  This process is easy to do but it is very hard to believe how such a type of photography can be created so easily.  I found myself wondering how the photographer can focus on what he or she is capturing if the image they see is upside-down.  In the documentary, one of the speakers mentioned how this process is not necessarily something that someone has invented but a natural thing.  By this I think he means how simple objects already invented can be used in creating camera obscura.


I personally find it astonishing how one single object that can be easily created can almost freeze time itself and captures a moment which may be precious or accidental.  Photography is mentioned to be a looking glass word and considered to be intentional and important, no longer random.  This documentary shows how the camera can reveal a world of detail and how time had moved too fast before photography.  Many photographers struggled to fix the fleeting shadows of their photographic scene, which I would see as a problem related to photography.  Also, what I gathered from this documentary and found interesting was how the importance of most scenes of photographs are not solely relying on the scenery itself but the everyday people who appear in them by accident mainly.  

'Boulevard du Temple' by Louis Daguerre

A photographer who was featured in this documentary who I found interesting was Louis Daguerre.  I found his photography processes to be unique in comparison to Henry Talbot's process of putting his photographs on paper.  Daguerre's process was named 'Daguerreotype' , this was the first practicable photography process and used camera obscura.  At the time of his invention of this process it was seen as magical.