the daily flashkube

In Manhattan, ‘downtown’ refers to any place south of you and ‘uptown’ to any place north of you. In Tampa, downtown refers to a specific area regardless of where you stand. We have no uptown.

I’m fascinated by the history of photography. If you have never heard the term ‘camera obscura’ you should look it up. Can you imagine people creating such amazing representations of real life before electricity? We take photography for granted because we are exposed to thousands of images a day. For these early ‘camera operators’ this was something unfathomable.

On August 19 of 1839, Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre made public the technical details of his daguerreotype process. An eye-witness to the event commented thusly:

“A few days later, opticians’ shops were crowded with amateurs panting for daguerreotype apparatus, and everywhere cameras were trained on buildings. Everyone wanted to record the view from his window, and he was lucky who at first trial got a silhouette of roof tops against the sky. He went into ecstasies over chimneys, counted over and over roof tiles and chimney bricks, was astonished to see the very mortar between the bricks—in a word, the technique was so new that even the poorest plate gave him indescribable joy.” (Newhall 23)

Indescribable joy. To have been there in the beginning…

Newhall, Beaumont. The History of Photography. The Museum of Modern Art. New York: 1982.