1827–2027 — The Last Photographs
200 Years of Photography.
Project concept.
The Search
I wander through Google Street View, searching for moments that were never meant to be seen. A woman leaning forward. Two bodies cut off by the edge of the frame. A fleeting gesture. A moment lasting less than a second—recorded by a machine that did not know it was preserving anything at all.
Every Street View image is part of an automated sequence. As the vehicle moves, the camera records photographs at regular intervals. The same person appears in several consecutive frames, seen from slightly different viewpoints.
I am not looking for a place, nor for an event. I am looking for that one frame.
I extract it from the screen and transform it into a physical object fixed by light.
Asphalt
The light-sensitive material I use to fix these images is bitumen—the same material from which the street itself is made.
The street returns to the image.
The Last Photographs
Google Street View is perhaps the last great attempt to photograph the visible world automatically—mechanically, continuously, and without photographic intention.
Everything begins with light. A real moment leaves a photographic trace. Whatever happens to the image afterwards—stitching, smoothing, or anonymization—does not change the fact that its origin lies in an actual moment in time.
AI-generated images have no such origin. They are produced not through light, but through probability—patterns calculated from billions of existing images.
A photograph says: This was.
An AI image says: This is what it usually looks like.
The two may appear identical.
Yet they bear witness to fundamentally different things.
This sadness, which often overcomes me while searching, isn’t tied to the moment’s existence, but to its certainty: that it actually happened. With this loss of certainty, photography as we know it disappears too.
The Heliographic Process
When I find such a frame, the slowest process in the history of photography begins.
I dissolve bitumen in lavender oil, coat a metal plate with the solution, and expose it to sunlight for hours. The process is heliography—the technique with which Nicéphore Niépce produced the oldest surviving photograph in history around 1827.
Each plate is exposed only once.
There is no correction.
There is no repetition.
The journey from screenshot to heliograph is a sequence of losses. Between the screenshot and the plate lies the internegative—a transparent intermediate image, inverted and still open to alteration. It is the final moment at which the image could still be corrected.
I do not correct it.
What remains is what the light inscribes.
Time
Many of the original Street View frames no longer exist. Google has updated, overwritten, or removed them. Some survive only as adjacent frames from the same sequence, showing the same instant from a slightly different angle.
For each work, I document the status of the original frame at the moment the piece is made. A QR code leads to that exact location—or to its absence. The viewer can follow the trace for themselves.
Sometimes they find a different street.
Sometimes nothing at all.
Then the asphalt plate becomes the only remaining image of that moment.
In 1827, it took Nicéphore Niépce days to fix light onto asphalt. He fixed what was there. 200 years of photography later, in the year of the Bicentennial of Photography, I fix what is disappearing right now.
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.