Monday the 19th of August is World Photography Day so I thought I’d take a minute to examine how photography impacts our lives through history and now.
I’ll start with a question. How many years has photography been with us?
The answer might surprise you.
In fact, the person credited with taking the oldest known photograph was a serving officer in Napoleon’s army. The image here, “View from the Window at Le Gras” taken by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce around the year 1827 and is the oldest surviving photograph. Not a simple image to take, the exposure time is thought to be at least 8 hours.
But that means photography has been with us for around 200 years!
Photography has played an important part of our history, it allows us to freeze a moment and capture important events. Historic protests, assassinations, personal celebrations and even men landing on the moon have been captured in images to preserve the record for future generations.
Photographs are not just about the past, they have been powerful enough to change the future. Through photographs we engage with people, places, events and cultures beyond our own lives. Images in newspapers such as a warzone or a famine have been brought into our living rooms and into the seat of power, mobilising both people and governments to bring about change, offering help to those that might need it. This kind of photography can be used to bring a nation together in empathy or demand change with anger.
A picture that had a great impact on me (there are many) is by National Geographic Photographer James Stanfield. It shows Professor Zbigniew Religa and his sleeping assistant, Dr Cichoń. They had just performed 2 successful heart transplants in over 23 hours of surgery.
Photographs can also be very personal. We’re all fond of our family albums. They’re not just images, they feel like the living heart of our families. They bring the members of our family right back into the room with us. From friends and family we may not have seen for a while to the people we hold dear and are no longer with us, their comfort and presence can be felt through a photograph. In addition to my professional work, I think of photography as a bit of a hobby, something to fill my time. It is clearly so much more than that.
So on World Photography Day, go take a picture. Share it with the world, easy to do now with social media and some 350,000,000 images are uploaded to Facebook every day.
