The Impact of the First Photograph of a Human

Yes­ter­day I wrote an arti­cle on the first pho­to­graph of a human which I had enhanced. After read­ing that oth­ers didn’t have the tools to enhance the pho­to­graph, I decided to make use of my archi­tec­tural ren­der­ing and image edit­ing skills  to see if there was any­thing else hid­den. I think that there’s a deeper mes­sage we should think about.  The Boule­vard du Tem­ple by Daguerre arti­cle sig­ni­fies how this pho­to­graph inad­ver­tently shaped our entire world view till this very day.

I don’t think there are too many sin­gle pho­tos which can tell such a grand story. We have the first Civil War pho­tographs, the use of pro­pa­ganda dur­ing the first and sec­ond World Wars, Pearl Har­bor, the Holo­caust, the after­math of nuclear weapons, JFK’s assas­si­na­tion, the Viet­nam War, the moon land­ing, and 911. I’m cer­tain that there are other impor­tant exam­ples of how pho­tog­ra­phy impacted our world which escapes me at this moment, but all of that still comes back down to this one sin­gle image of a human being either oper­at­ing a water pump, or get­ting his shoes shined.

Once we start to inves­ti­gate this pho­to­graph by Daguerre, most of our first incli­na­tions is to look even fur­ther within the photo to see what else we can dis­cover. We ask our­selves, is it just one human stand­ing there or were there mul­ti­ple peo­ple that were cap­tured in this fairly innocu­ous his­tor­i­cal moment? What else is there to see — is there a cat in the win­dow? Are those trees or peo­ple stand­ing on the oppo­site side of the road? Where are the horses and car­riages? What time of day is it and what sea­son? What direc­tion is he fac­ing when he took this? All of this man­ages to hap­pen within a sin­gle, noisy and scratched image of a Paris boulevard.

If it resem­bled more of a mod­ern pho­to­graph, would we all be equally inter­ested? It’s the early state of this image in of itself which brings up these rel­e­vant ques­tions and gets us to start think­ing about things.

The Boule­vard du Tem­ple doesn’t look like much at first glance. We real­ize there must be some his­tor­i­cal impor­tance. But in a much deeper sense, we are look­ing at one of the first, beau­ti­ful pho­tographs of every day life and society.

In today’s mod­ern era, I would argue that most peo­ple take pho­tog­ra­phy for granted. It’s become such a com­mon part of our cul­ture, from the first news­pa­pers to scans, from tele­vi­sion to even the Inter­net. A lot of us even have cam­eras on our cell phones — instantly, we can take a pic­ture and the rest of the world can see it in near real-time. We oper­ate these devices and really don’t appre­ci­ate the tech­no­log­i­cal mir­a­cle we hold in our hands. The sig­nif­i­cance of this first pho­to­graph of a human is that has given rise to a deeper under­stand­ing of the human con­di­tion — it’s taught us about war, med­i­cine, pol­i­tics, news, cul­ture, tech­nol­ogy, and never ceases to enter­tain us. But with­out peo­ple, pho­tog­ra­phy might have been some­what point­less. It is this sin­gle act of cap­tur­ing a per­son which has brought us to where we are today. As the old proverb says, “a pic­ture is worth a thou­sand words.” In this case, I don’t think any­thing else could be more telling.