Photographing the World

A historical marker on Chestnut Street, in central Philadelphia, commemorates the place where the earliest photograph created in the United States occurred. Taken on 25 September 1839, Joseph Saxton captured, with a crude lens and a cigar box, an image of the Central High School for Boys. It was not the first photograph in the world. The previous month, there was an announcement in France that Daguerre the successful capturing and saving of a photograph.

The simple sign on Chestnut, a busy city street in Philadelphia, does not allude to the monumental cultural impact these early experiments had on our world. Today, the primary feature on our telephones today is a camera; we live in a time where photographs and moving images are ubiquitous. Yet, we rarely consider the lasting impacts and the changes in society that photography has had.

The invention of photography allows us to capture a moment in time. It is an artifact of documentarian efforts. We capture a moment in space and time as a visual reminder of people, places and things. Prior to the invention of photography, we had to rely on words and artistic representations, such as paintings and sculptures, for documentation. Almost incomprehensible today is a fact that we have no photographs of George Washington and a handful of photographs of Abraham Lincoln. There are no photographs of the Irish Famine (1845-1850), but numerous images and videos of the Rwandan Genocide (1994). 

At first, very few people had access, or could afford, to have photographs made. Early on in photography, because of exposure times, the subject had to remain motionless for several seconds to capture a clear image. The equipment and materials were delicate and, sometimes, difficult to handle. For example, the last portrait of Abraham Lincoln had only one print made from the original glass negative, after which the negative was discarded because it was cracked. But because of the limited availability of cameras in the nineteenth century, the rise of momento mori photography, the photographing of deceased loved ones and family members as a souvenir. While the photographs may appear disturbing to us today, in many instances, they were the only images families would have had of individuals.

Krauss Photo Shop (Port Jervis, NY)
established 1907

As camera became increasingly popular, an entire industry emerged to develop negative and make prints. Small towns would have places, often drugstores, where people could take their film to be developed. Rather than the instantaneous gratification of phones and digital cameras, we would have a week or so to wait for our prints to return. Opening the envelope that contained prints was a chance to briefly relive the captured events over again.

In the twenty-first century, with billions of people having cameras in some form or another, and with the popularity of documenting events, from the momentous to the mundane, we have reached a point where virtually the entire planet, and most of its human inhabitants, have been recorded through photographs. It is impossible to know how many times we have been photographed in our lives. When I was a Boy Scout growing up in Louisville, parking cars on Derby Day, a woman, perhaps in her late twenties, rolled down the window of her car, leaned out and took a picture of me holding a sign advertising our parking spaces for five dollars. One of my friends turned to me and said, “You’ve just made someone’s photo album!” I think about this event often, especially while traveling in touristy areas. I like to consider how many times I have inadvertently appeared in the background (or foreground) of someone treasured photograph of a monument, church, building, landscape, or friends and family.

LPQ, 12 Nov 2017

Our photographs do not tell a complete story, however. I can take a photograph of a restaurant where I enjoy breakfast; a place where I feel inspired to write. But within seconds, what I have captured on my smart phone can change dramatically. I captured an orderly restaurant, neatly arranged and waiting for customers. Within two minutes of the capturing of that image, a French-speaking couple and their three young children inhabit the table that is the center of the picture. The scene instantly becomes populated with people; the orderly table becomes disarranged as the children explored and inspected the condiments and decorations. It disrupts what the restaurateurs, and perhaps customers, believed was aesthetically pleasing. I find it interesting that this scene as well is probably worthy of recording, but it is not ethical to do so without consent. The propriety of privacy matters when the people, especially children, are the subject of the photograph.

I am very fond of photography and photographs. But these images are not always sufficient in telling stories. Near the historical marker where Saxton created that first American photograph, on an early Sunday morning in November, I watch two different men carefully scouring the sidewalk, looking for cigarette butts that still contains minuscule amounts of tobacco in an effort to collect enough to create a makeshift cigarette of their own. Another man, clad in a black knit hat and a blue flannel shirt, was working diligently using a pocket knife to pry loose a penny that had been pressed down into the asphalt when cars had runover it. He repeated watched the traffic light at the end of the block so that he could gauge whether he had a few seconds to work the coin loose. I do not feel comfortable capturing images such as these. As intriguing as I found the story, I do not find it necessary or desirable to photograph these individuals. As evocative as these photographs might have been, the process of storytelling requires more than a photograph. It requires context. A good storyteller, like George Orwell, examining and relaying the stories of the desperate poor in Paris and London during the 1930s, gives us a fuller understanding of these lives. It helps to explain what is not observed in the photograph.