IN CELEBRATION
Food rations being distributed in Beirut during the famine of World War I. © Mohsen Yammine Collection
F or thousands of years, people did not know their own faces as we do today. They imagined them, inferred them from others’ gazes, or caught fleeting glimpses of themselves in the trembling surface of water or in the hazy reflection of polished metal. Then, two centuries ago, photography transformed that relationship forever. For the first time, a person could see their own face fixed before them, as another eye had seen it at a particular moment— and preserve that moment after it had passed.
Fixing the face was only the beginning. Photography soon became a mirror not only of the individual but also of the world: a repository of faces, places, and events, and a vessel through which we could travel through time. Through photographs, we recover those who are gone; we see cities that have changed beyond recognition, wars that have ended, and moments we never experienced. They survive because the photographic image has, at least in part, resisted time’ s erasure.
Nearly two hundred years after photography’ s birth, and after the dizzying succession of technological developments that have transformed it, the words of the American writer, critic, and filmmaker Susan Sontag remain relevant. In On Photography, she reflected on the appeal of photography’ s earlier forms, when images still bore the visible marks of their making and possessed a distinct material aura. This nostalgia helps explain the enduring fascination with daguerreotypes, stereoscopic cards, photographic identity cards, family snapshots, and the forgotten rural and commercial photography of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Perhaps this is partly a reaction to the extraordinary power of today’ s photographic technologies. Yet the story of photography began with very different instruments. In the 1820s, Frenchman Joseph Nicéphore Niépce produced images using a small camera obscura, while Louis Daguerre continued experimenting with processes that would lead to the daguerreotype. Niépce’ s early exposures could take many hours. Daguerre’ s subsequent developments made it possible to obtain a single, highly detailed image on a metal plate in a fraction of that time.
In 1839, the French astronomer and politician François Arago publicly announced Daguerre’ s process, which the French government backed and presented as a gift to humanity. Photography quickly began to transform the visual arts. Artists such as Eugène Delacroix and Claude Monet incorporated photographic images into their studies, while the poet Charles Baudelaire famously expressed his disdain for what he saw as society’ s rush to contemplate its own trivial image on a metal plate.
Around the same time, the Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot was developing a very different photographic process
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