Friday Art Find: Two Photographic Artifacts

We're a bit closer to Friday this week. Progress.

We wanted to share these two photographic artifacts that represent interactions between human, technology, and our surrounding realities—producing changes in how we see, conceive of, and can represent those realities.

#1 View from the Window at Le Gras (1827)

This photograph is believed to be the earliest surviving camera photo. The original (left) captures this liminal moment in time and space. The colorized reoriented enhancement (right) shows one interpretation of the image. With photographs and images as ubiquitous as they are now, can we imagine how our lives, histories, and ways of seeing would be differently shaped without them?

#2 Photograph of Nitrate Film Vault Test, Beltsville Maryland Fire Pattern (1949/2019) (Version II) (2020)

These are much more recent "black and white silver gelatin photographs exposed to firelight." Rather than depicting firelight as a subject in the image, these represent radiated firelight as an agent in the process of the photograph's creation. Abstracting the fire in this way allows the photographs to translate the energy of the fire differently, perhaps more directly. How can we use our sight differently to sense and "see" energies in other ways?

1. Niépce, Nicéphore. 1827. View from the Window at Le Gras. [Public domain image]. Wikimedia Commons. Retrieved from: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:View_from_the_Window_at_Le_Gras_colorized_2020_new.png.
2. Jonnychiwa. 2020. View from the Window at Le Gras. [Colorized version of the image]. Wikimedia Commons. Retrieved from: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:View_from_the_Window_at_Le_Gras_colorized_2020_new.png.
3. Oppenheim, Lisa. 2020. Photograph of Nitrate Film Vault Test, Beltsville Maryland Fire Pattern (1949/2019) (Version II). [Image]. Artsy. Retrieved from: https://www.artsy.net/artwork/lisa-oppenheim-photograph-of-nitrate-film-vault-test-beltsville-maryland-fire-pattern-1949-slash-2019-version-ii.