Heliography Project 1827–2027
The Last Photographs
The Search
I roam Google Street View looking for moments that were never made to be seen. A woman leaning forward. Two bodies cut off by the edge of the frame. Moments of less than a second — recorded by a machine that did not know it was capturing anything.
Every Street View image is part of an automatic sequence. The vehicle moves, the camera records at regular intervals. The same person appears in several consecutive frames, from slightly different angles. I am not looking for a place, or for an event in general. I am looking for this one frame.
The Last Photographs
Google Street View is the last great act of photographic recording of the world — automatic, mechanical, without intention. A camera, light, a moment, a place.
What comes after are no longer photographs. AI systems do not work with light. They work with probability — with patterns drawn from billions of images, compressed into a single result.
A photograph says: This is how it was.
An AI image says: This is what it usually looks like.
Both can appear identical. Epistemologically, they testify to fundamentally different things.
The Heliographic Process
When I find such a frame, I begin a slow process. I dissolve bitumen in lavender oil, coat a metal plate, and expose it to sunlight.
Each plate is exposed only once. There is no correction, no repetition.
The path from screenshot to heliograph is a sequence of losses. Between the screenshot and the plate lies the internegative — an intermediate image on transparent film, inverted and still changeable. It is the last moment at which the image could be corrected. I do not correct it.
What remains is what the light inscribes.
Asphalt and Time
The light-sensitive material is asphalt — the same substance the street is made of, the street where the image was taken. The street returns to the image.
Some frames no longer exist. Others are still there — as an adjacent frame of the same sequence, from a different angle of the same moment. For each work I document the status of the original frame at the time of production.
In 1827, Nicéphore Niépce needed days to fix light onto asphalt. Two hundred years later, I fix images that were recorded by machines and overwritten by machines.
The process is the same.
The question is different.
Theoretical Deep Dive: Indexicality and Authorship
What does a photograph prove when the machine has already forgotten the moment? Reflections on the theoretical foundation of the project can be found in my essay “The Spectrum of the Real” on Medium.