The modern city and photography emerged at the same historical moment. As industrialization reshaped space and cities expanded according to a new logic of organization and power, photography introduced another form of mastery, that of the image. For the first time, the world could be fixed, observed, and preserved. Modernity thus seemed to open under the sign of a double promise, transforming reality while retaining its appearance.
Industrial and urban civilization was built around an unprecedented sense of power. Humanity appeared capable of organizing its environment, transforming landscapes, and imposing its logic upon the territory. The city became the most visible expression of this confidence, its space entirely shaped by human intelligence.
Photography accompanied this affirmation. By capturing the world as it appears, it gave the impression that reality could be grasped, held, almost possessed. The image became the trace of a moment, the visible proof of what is, or at least of what once was.
Yet every form of mastery rests upon a balance far more fragile than it seems. The visible maintains an intimate relationship with the invisible. Presence only exists in contrast with what is unseen, and proof always implies the possibility of refutation. These polarities do not oppose one another. They respond to and condition each other. Separated, they cancel each other out. Together, they make the world possible.
Perhaps the same is true of our relationship to time. Behind us lies a past that continues to act, even when it escapes our gaze. Ahead stretches a future just as invisible, sometimes imaginable, sometimes predictable, yet always uncertain. Between these two horizons, the present seems to belong to us. Yet it constantly slips away.
Photography exists precisely within this interval. It records reality in the present moment with mechanical precision, yet at the same time it transforms it into image, into abstraction. It is at once trace and illusion, truth and falsehood, presence and apparition.
Within this tension something larger may be revealed, the very fragility of modernity. The contemporary city, often perceived as the ultimate expression of human power, nevertheless remains inseparable from the living world upon which it depends. Every appearance of mastery rests upon this precarious balance, and the future of our cities, like that of our societies, depends on our ability to respect this interdependence.
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From the 19th Century to the Present: A Contemporary Daguerreotype Project
The photos has been printed with the daguerreotype process. The project has been labellised by the French Ministry of Culture for the 200 years anniversary of the invention of photography.
Historical Context
The daguerreotype, one of the earliest photographic processes, was developed in the early 19th century by French artist and inventor Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre. Following a collaboration with Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, Daguerre succeeded in permanently fixing the image produced by light, preventing it from fading. This breakthrough paved the way for a major visual and cultural revolution.
On 19 August 1839, the official presentation of the daguerreotype at the Académie des Sciences in Paris caused a sensation. Aware of the significance of this discovery, the French government purchased the patent from Daguerre in order to make it public and free of use, thus offering the world an invention that would profoundly transform the representation of reality.
The daguerreotype quickly spread throughout Europe and the United States. Studios opened in major cities, and portraiture became a popular art form: anyone could preserve their own image or that of their loved ones. This democratization permanently transformed the relationship between individuals, memory, representation, and time. Although it was replaced as early as the 1850s by simpler and reproducible processes, the daguerreotype remains a foundational invention, symbolizing the moment when light became a tool of memory.
Contemporary Context
Today, the practice of daguerreotypy is gradually disappearing, despite the efforts of The Daguerreian Society, an American association bringing together around one hundred collectors. Worldwide, only about twenty people still master this know-how, and barely a dozen possess true expertise and produce daguerreotypes professionally.
This rarity can be explained by several factors: the high cost of equipment, the toxicity of the chemicals involved, and above all the extreme technical complexity of the process. Specialists agree that the daguerreotype is the most difficult photographic process ever invented.
The Daguerreotype: A Unique and Timeless Image
Originally, the daguerreotype is a unique and unalterable image: light fixed on a silver-coated copper plate remains forever. There is no negative; the photograph is directly positive, and each image is non-reproducible, simultaneously an artwork and an object.
By contrast, in film photography or digital photography, the negative – whether film or a RAW file – is only an intermediate stage that must be developed and transferred onto a support, most often paper, in order to become visible.
It is nevertheless possible to produce a daguerreotype image from a negative by simulating a camera and exposing the silver-coated copper plate through the negative to light. The result is a daguerreotype print that is just as unique, since the preparation of the silver plate, the exposure time, and the post-exposure treatment are entirely manual.
Production of a Series of Contemporary Daguerreotype Photographs
The project consists of producing daguerreotypes from RAW files, combining historical origins with contemporary technologies, past and present. In Nanjing, Studio HLiiC, led by one of the ten remaining world experts mentioned above, will support photographer Laurence Chellali in this work, in the same spirit as the traditional collaboration between photographer and master printer.
Laurence Chellali will produce a series of 10 photographs exploring the modernity of our world through contemporary – sometimes futuristic – urban architecture, while incorporating reflections of vegetation that introduce a double reading of the image. This thematic choice aims to anchor the daguerreotype firmly in the present and to give it full contemporary relevance. The play of reflections blurs the boundaries between what is in front and what is behind, the direct and the indirect, the positive and the negative, thus echoing the very nature of the daguerreotype.
Moreover, as mentioned above, one of the unique characteristics of the daguerreotype lies in the way the image seems to elude the viewer’s gaze. Through this series, Laurence Chellali questions a form of modernity that no longer appears self-evident, allowing a latent nature to re-emerge and, in doing so, revealing the fragility of so-called modern civilization.
Finally, the combination of this theme with the daguerreotype illustrates what photography fundamentally is: at once illusion and representation, yet also profoundly objective, as it captures what exists—or has existed—at a given moment in time.
The partnership between Studio HLiiC and Laurence Chellali aims to help sustain and perpetuate this exceptionally rare heritage that is the daguerreotype, by combining historical expertise with contemporary innovation.