Heliography Project 1827–2027

Przemek Zajfert

I move through the image spaces of Google Street View, searching for moments that were not meant to be seen.

A woman bending forward. Two bodies cut off by the edge of the frame. Moments lasting less than a second—recorded by a machine that did not know it was capturing anything.

When I find such a moment, I begin a slow process. I dissolve bitumen in lavender oil, coat sheet metal, and expose it to sunlight. Each plate is exposed only once. There is no correction, no repetition.

The path from screenshot to plate is a sequence of losses. What remains is what the light inscribes.

The material is asphalt—the same substance the street is made of, where the image was recorded. The street returns to the image.

Many of these images no longer exist. They have been overwritten, updated, deleted. The moment has disappeared twice: in life and in the database.

What remains is the plate: fragile, unpredictable, irreproducible.

In 1827, Niépce needed days to fix light on asphalt. Two hundred years later, I expose images made by machines and erased by machines. The process is the same. The question is different.

Sometimes the reference leads to nothing. Then the heliograph is the last image.