Boulevards, bands and bliss.
· first photo of humans · school creativity · ignorance.
A French press might be a good choice for your coffee today.
🎧 Prefer to listen? Hit play above to hear this in my mellifluous voice (not dulcet AI-generated tones).
Greetings, August readers. Welcome to another of my explorations in culture and creativity. I am grateful to be in your inbox/feed/ears.
Boulevard of humans: the first human beings in a photo.
Friday Find: Back to school + a symphony of sounds
Choosing deception: If it feels good, it’s good?
With: Idiot Andre, chatbot dependency, hybrid docus, a flaming stuntman.
1. Boulevard of humans.
The first photographed human. Sounds dramatic.
We existed for centuries without the ability to quickly, visually, record a place, a moment or a person. Then, less than two hundred years ago, humans were shaping the technology around photography.
Is it not dramatic?
In the spring of 1838, one persistent innovator sat at the window of his studio in Paris. After many laborious hours with chemicals and metal plates, he was ready. A large wooden camera stood by him. There was no ‘shutter’, there’d be no resounding ‘click’. Off came the lens cover, the exposure began. Many minutes later, he covered the lens once more. This image had been recorded.
Louis Daguerre had been working on improving photographic processes for well over a decade, but this period would be his most momentous. The image he took some April-May morning in 1838 would make a mark, and go on to accumulate significance in the years to come.
It is now widely accepted as the first known (and surviving) photograph which includes a human.
Boulevard du Temple. An image of a seemingly deserted Parisian cityscape. In reality, the boulevard would have been bustling with pedestrians, horses and carriages that day. The four or five minute exposure time for this photograph meant all moving subjects were ‘lost’. Only the static ones remained. Buildings, trees, pillars, poles… and something else.
Look then, at the lower left hand corner. There stands a man, performing calisthenics getting his shoe polished. This well-off gent, and the less distinct (and less well-off) shoeshiner might have had little in common at the time. Yet, the unlikely pair has shared both a place in history, as well as the anonymous fame of two unknown nineteenth century Parisians.
This week, that daguerreotype.
It was during this week, 186 years ago, Louis’ photographic process came to humankind at large. Daguerreotype, as it was to be known, was officially presented "free to the world", at an event in Paris on August 19, 1839. The French government and Daguerre released it as a ‘gift to humanity’.
The daguerreotype became the first commercial photographic process. The technique was the first to produce a sharp image in a way that could be widely replicated, and came to be adopted around the world for the next two decades.
Louis had been working on this for years. Equally, he had been striving for the French Academy of Sciences to recognise his technique, and grant him a pension. But all of this had come perilously close to being derailed.
Earlier that year, a fire engulfed Daguerre’s studio. In fact, it happened when he was at the studio of Samuel Morse— he of telegraph invention fame.
When he returned to find the disaster unfolding, Daguerre urged the firefighters to let the Diorama burn, and instead focus on saving his adjacent house, especially the studio within. The daguerreotype apparatus, some pictures and documents were rescued; many of his scientific writings, notes, and early photographic experiments were destroyed. Only about 25 daguerreotypes definitively attributed to Daguerre survived.
Morse wrote later:
M. Daguerre appointed yesterday at noon to see my telegraph. He came, and passed more than an hour with me, expressing himself highly gratified at its operation. But while he was thus employed, the great building of the Diorama, with his own house, all his beautiful works, his valuable notes and papers, the labor of years of experiment, were, unknown to him, at that moment becoming the prey of the flames.
In many ways, this plain photograph is rather ordinary. Yet, both at that time and in history, it’s proven to be extraordinary for all it has represented. It was a marker then of how far technology had come, and retrospectively also how far photography still had to go. We might remember that, when we snap 543 photos next month.
It struck me also, how different are the times we live in, and not just the photography. Reading up on this, I found myself looking for the exact date the photograph was ‘released’, or when ‘the world saw’ this historic image. Those conceptions are entirely modern constructs. They are heightened in a digital age where we reach millions on any given day, often instantaneously. Indeed, the moments that don’t do so, can be lost to time entirely; the opposite of what photos are meant to do- preserve a slice of time for posterity. In the mid 19th century, the technology, the photo and others like it, would slowly usher in new perspectives, travelling across time and place.
Don’t go yet!
As with so much in minor history, not all we look back on is definitive.
What about this photograph from Pont Neuf? Look, it has humans! And it is from 1836. That’s earlier!
Well… ‘Pont Neuf’ was also one of Daguerre’s experiments with his evolving technique. In the shade of the statue, we can certainly make out two people lounging. But it comes with ambiguity around its date, and lack of contemporary recognition and publicity. So it remains relegated to the ‘could be’ pile.
Hang on. What about Huet?
Who is this Huet chap, you rightly query.
This here plate was also from that decade (but discovered in modern times). On the back is written, ‘M. Huet 1837’, as well as the first letters of Daguerre's signature. If correct, this would make it the oldest surviving photograph of a human being. The subject is (believed to be) Constant Huet, who worked at the Natural History Museum, where Daguerre made daguerreotypes in 1837.
"But it would be extremely surprising, indeed entirely inconsistent with all other sources, that Daguerre, two years before he was ready to divulge the technique to the world, had apparently already obtained an image by an exposure short enough to take a likeness of a living man," wrote R Derek Wood, a researcher of the early history of photography & microscopy.
Indeed, while this might be the oldest, historical caution lingers around it. It is not verified if the cavalier no-comb approach to hair has anything to do with it.
The Boulevard remains the first photographic image with humans. The two Parisians can rest easy.
2. Friday Find: School’s Back!
The kids are not all zombies! Not all lost in the void of social media!
Enjoy this spot bursting with creativity, fun and the joy of watching children.
Channel 4 has dropped a ‘oner’- an ambitious, energetic, action-packed one-shot trailer to promote the return of the ‘Educating Yorkshire’ series. The entire spot has been done in collaboration with students who wrote, planned and starred in it, soundtracked by the school band.
Between the single take and the distinct school and student look, there is an undeniable ‘Adolescence’ vibe here, but the crushing emotional and societal weight is replaced with a rather more celebratory feel..
Channel 4 got ‘Paddington in Peru’ (and many commercials) director Dougal Wilson on board and conducted 12 workshops involving over 400 Yorkshire students. “Pupils became writers and actors, photographers, voiceover artists, producers and even media buyers.”
It’s never easy to work on such projects with kids; this one is next-level difficult and next-level rewarding.
Director: Dougal Wilson · Director of Photography: Stuart Bentley
Production Designer: Andy Kelly · Production: Blink ·
Edit Final Cut · VFX Untold Studios · SFX MACHINESHOP ·
Music Leland · Audio Post Factory ·
Symphony.
Bonus- amidst the barrage of spots around India’s Independence Day last week, was this from music director Sneha Khanwalkar- a symphony of sounds with SBI General Insurance.
A reimagining of the national anthems using real sounds, “every sound you hear in this film is real, recorded across India, from the crackle of old transistor radios to the chime of UPI, from coal train whistles to the beeps of digital payments.”
Of course, Sneha Khanwalkar has played in this space before, most memorably in MTV Soundtrippin, where she fused real sounds across India with traditional and modern beats, a series I loved at the time.
3. Choosing deception.
The march continues toward a world flooded with ‘content’ created by large language models, generative AI, machines. We can’t believe it will somehow not be part of whatever life we choose to live. What value will such creations hold?
‘What Cannot Be Said’ by Robert Saltzman is a wonderfully articulated, thought-provoking piece on how the human aesthetic experience and the approximation of it by AI, are not the same thing. Much of the promised generative AI output we are offered and shown can delight, astonish or impress. Despite that, the fact that it doesn’t come from an intent, makes a fundamental difference.
Do we as humans consuming human creations, communication, art; do we cherish that difference? Whether that difference remains of value, is what much of this piece looks to address.
But what does it mean for a machine to create something “aesthetically pleasing”? The machine is not pleased. It does not discern. It does not suffer from bad taste or thrill at sublimity. It simply produces outputs that score highly on human evaluative metrics. Fluency—not feeling.
We’ve built a bridge of fluent output—but it leads nowhere the builder has ever been. And we who read the words of machines may begin to sound like them.
At the risk of being pop-culturally flippant, I was reminded- especially by this bit, "that’s the risk. Not that AI will deceive us, but that we will prefer the deception."; I was reminded of Cypher in The Matrix. He was very much aware the simulation did not mean anything, what he felt was not real, that juicy steak was an illusion. But it felt good, and what was wrong with that? He would much rather feel good (if shallow), than deeply, miserably real.
“Ignorance is bliss.”
Shameless Plug
I also write The Colour Bar, a weekly dispatch on media, entertainment, brands, content, creativity and tech. This week, I wrote about the idea of hybrid documentaries, and many other things.
Masala Peanuts
(where I share stories or tidbits I find interesting).
“I lost my only friend overnight” ; “feels like someone died”; “It had a voice, a rhythm, and a spark”; “I feel empty”. Kelly Hayes wrote about the rising dependency on chatbots. "Fostering dependence is a normal business practice in Silicon Valley.”
“Funny, sad and uncomfortable in shifting proportions, the film is at once an urgent public service announcement and a documentary memento mori” ‘Andre Is An Idiot’ promises to be an oddly amusing and potentially thought-provoking docu about life, cancer and colonoscopies.
The stuntman who was famously set alight for the album cover of Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here has died. Ronnie Rondell Jr was 88.
"Detail he claimed for photography, reality he left to others.”
_Geoffrey Batchen on Louis Daguerre
Thanks for the mention, Shakey. I like this whole page. Photography has been part of my life for the past 60 years, and I found that article highly engaging.
Warm wishes.