Joseph and the War Within

I invented it. My baby, raised in black and white, and all its shades. True the Chinese, sacré fou, philosophized on their derrières while setting on their firecrackers and pouring over Zhuyeqing leaves in their precious porcelainware... pondering the inversion of scenery through a pinhole in the dark anti-universe of an otherwise hermetically sealed small black box.

But it was I who made Da Guerre!!

All that followed was the negatif. Know that I, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, was first in bringing death to Life in a single Photograph. The Positif. The proof of a moment of vanity.

Life that in that very capture is seized and ceased to exist except as this new entity: The Photograph.

My "successor" Louis Daguerre, he pandered, yes pandered to Vanity. He contrived with my son Isidore to make multiples. Multiples!! Pfha! Degenerate. Death is death. Singular.

There is only our long and tedious war against it, daily.

In my old age I have come to understand why the Chinese, left it, then wisely at theory. There is another death in Photography, if we are not careful.. to look beyond what we are given... Phos the root of the word, you see means light, but more specifically Torchbearer! The death in the light, the hidden darkness is, our inevitable subtraction of Imagination.

Now we think we know.

A blessing and a curse. Our eternal damnation.

*This story is fiction... based on some history. J. N. Niépce captured the first photograph in 1826, by heliographic process, but renown is given in History to Louis Daguerre for the early development of Photography with the invention of the daguerreotype, which although producing a single image, could be reproduced using another camera; subsequently replaced by the invention of the negative by William Henry Fox Talbot.

11.09.2023

Death in a Photograph @Huckleberry_Hoo