1827–2027 — The Last Photographs
200 Years of Photography.
Project concept.
The Search
I move through Google Street View searching for moments that were not made for the gaze. 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 camera operating without photographic intention.
Every Street View capture is part of an automated sequence. As the vehicle moves, photographic records are made at regular intervals. The same person may appear in several consecutive frames, seen from slightly different angles.
I am not looking for a place or an event. I am looking for this one frame.
When I find it, I translate this already existing photograph into a physical, light-fixed object.
Asphalt
The light-sensitive material with which I fix the images is bitumen — the binding agent of asphalt, the surface over which the Street View cameras travel.
The road returns to the image.
The Last Photographs
Google Street View is one of the largest attempts to automatically photographically record the visible world — mechanically, continuously, and without photographic intention.
Yet at the origin of each of these images there is still a real photographic process: light from an actual situation reaches a camera sensor and leaves a photographic trace.
What happens to the image afterwards — stitching, smoothing, anonymisation, compression, or later updating — changes the conditions of its digital existence, but not the fact that a photographed situation stood at its beginning.
A Street View frame can be altered, replaced, or become inaccessible years later. The photographic record of a moment can disappear even though the moment itself took place.
This is where my work begins.
I do not create a synthetic image. I take an already existing photographic record and transfer it into another photographic process.
The Heliographic Process
When I find such a frame, the slowest process in photography begins.
I dissolve bitumen in lavender oil, coat a metal plate, and expose it to sunlight. The process is heliography — the process developed by Nicéphore Niépce, through which the oldest surviving photograph was created in 1827.
Each plate is exposed only once. There is no correction and no repetition.
The path from the digital frame to the heliograph passes through an internegative — a transparent intermediate image, inverted and still capable of being altered. It is the last state in which the image could be corrected.
I do not correct it.
What remains is what the light inscribes.
Time
Many of the original Street View frames I have found are no longer accessible today. They have been replaced, updated, or removed by later imagery. Sometimes neighbouring frames from the same sequence still exist; sometimes even that trace has disappeared.
For each work, I document the status of the original frame at the time the work was made.
A QR code leads to the original location in Google Street View — provided the frame is still accessible. The viewer can follow the trace themselves.
Sometimes they find a changed street.
Sometimes nothing at all.
Then the heliograph remains as a material trace of a photographic record whose digital state has disappeared.
In 1827, Nicéphore Niépce needed days to fix light onto bitumen.
Two hundred years of photography later, in the year of the bicentenary of photography, I fix photographs whose digital existence is at risk of disappearing.
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.