Selections From The Complete History Of Photography, VOL. 1
Cal Barton
Boulevard du Temple
It is widely considered to be the first photograph to include a human being. The Parisian streetscape outside Louis Daguerre’s studio window (seen here at eight in the morning) was also known as Crime Boulevard because of the wrongdoings staged in its many theatres. This daguerreotype was taken between April 24th and May 4th. It was 1837, or maybe it was 1838. The street was in fact busy with horse traffic but the four-minute exposure time meant that only static things could be recorded—in order to be immortalized one must be motionless—so although we see no horses we do see two smudged shapes of a bootblack and his customer. It takes a long time to shine a shoe. (Some claim to see a third figure across the way a child right there pulling back a curtain and peeking out a window and this might be proof that every story is a ghost story.) Just a year after capturing this scene, a fire destroyed Daguerre’s studio. He reportedly told the firemen: let it burn. He also (according to legend) once he figured out how to fix a photographic image onto 13 x 16 centimeters of highly-polished silver-plated copper—sensitized with iodine vapors—exposed in a large box camera—developed in mercury fumes—stabilized with salt water—once he did this he opened his window and announced I have seized the light! I have arrested its flight! The Sun itself shall paint my pictures!
Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man
The corpse which you see here is that of Monsieur Hippolyte Bayard. The Government, which has been only too generous to Monsieur Daguerre, has said it can do nothing for Monsieur Bayard, and the poor wretch has drowned himself! He has been at the morgue for several days and no one has recognized or claimed him! First instance of photographic fakery. First use of photograph as protest. First photographic practical joke. Even in monochrome you can tell his hands are blue. French civil servant who, in his spare time, happened to invent a way of capturing images on paper. By the time M. Bayard presented his work to the Académie, they’d already made a substantial investment in Daguerre. They gave Bayard less than nothing: they assured him his process was so inferior as to be essentially useless. A common metaphor compares art to freediving. Seeking the unknown, the artist-diver goes to the ocean floor, comes back. Employers of this metaphor might not know about a cause of drowning called ascent blackout, or deep water blackout, in which the pressure of oxygen in the lungs at the bottom of a dive is adequate to support consciousness, but as water pressure decreases on the ascent, just as the lungs are approaching the surface, body-signals trigger a neurological state of emergency. Significant amounts of water enter the lungs relatively late in the process.
The Horse in Motion
Eadweard Muybridge came across a letter written by his wife. It was addressed to Harry Larkyns, a local drama critic, and enclosed was a photograph of Muybridge’s son with the words Little Harry written on the back. Muybridge boarded a train. He found the cabin where Larkyns was playing cards. He knock-knock-knocked. He studied his shoes while someone went to get Larkyns. Then Harry Larkyns came to the door, and Eadweard Muybridge said, “I have a message from my wife,” and then he shot him dead. Point-blank. Aimed at the heart. Muybridge’s lawyers made much of the fact that he was once involved in a stagecoach accident: the horses bolted, throwing the photographer off the back. Next thing he knew he was in Arkansas and it was tomorrow and he had the worst headache of his life. A jury of married men listened carefully to this story and decided that Muybridge’s actions were of course completely justified. This was the late 1870s, a time when the convention for representing horses in visual art was to show them mid-stride in a sort of flying gallop, with all limbs extended to the end of their reach. We remember Muybridge because a horse named Sallie Gardner ran at a 1.40 gait past twelve evenly-spaced tripwires that released twelve camera shutters for one one-thousandth of a second. As Muybridge hung the white sheets and spread white marble dust on the track (to enhance the horse’s black silhouette) he had already convinced himself that all images are wrong, that we only see what we want to see, that four-year-old Florado Helios Muybridge did not share his face (and never had). The Sally Gardner photographs were celebrated as a success. The Sacramento Daily Union reported on June 18th, 1878: “It was shown that the supposed superior grace of the horse while running is in reality a delusion.”
Cal Barton is a student at Yale University majoring in English.
ABOUT THE ART | Bass on Steel by Katya Agrawal, 2025. Katya Agrawal is a student at Yale University.
