Heliography Project 1827-2027

Miniatures / Uniques

The First and the Last Gaze
Heliographs in the Age of Algorithmic Imagination

In 1827, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce exposed a pewter plate over several days to the view from his window — a heliograph drawn with sunlight: the first permanent photograph in the world. This moment marked the beginning of an era in which light became testimony, a material proof of lived time. Two hundred years later, in the digital age, this notion is beginning to dissolve.

Today, images are created in real time and in unimaginable quantities. Cameras mounted on Google cars, drones, and backpacks systematically capture the world. The technology behind Google Street View documents our everyday lives — emotionless, automated, seemingly objective. Yet it is precisely these images, fleeting and algorithmically generated, that reveal something about our present. They show people in passing, glances at phones, waiting bodies, random shadows — fragments of a daily life never meant for eternity. I intervene in this digital archive, extract fragments, and bring them back into the material world using the technique of heliography. This retranslation is, for me, a gesture of resistance — against forgetting, against the fleeting surface of digital images. For only in physical form, exposed to aging, touch, and light, can an image unfold its original power.