Out of focus

A friend sent me an old photograph.

Boulevard du Temple, Paris, by Louis Daguerre, the caption read. Then she added, almost casually, “Taken in 1838, it’s believed to be the earliest photograph showing a living person. Or two, actually, near the bottom left corner. One is clearly visible, apparently having his boots polished; the other is only half-there, blurred by motion.”

My friend is an engineer, deeply interested in the history of technology and breakthrough inventions. But she’s also a sharp observer of human behavior. Human condition, she calls it. So I wasn’t surprised when her message included, alongside Daguerre’s image, a photograph I had sent her just a few days earlier. It was a selfie of me and my wife. Our smiling faces filled almost the entire frame; in the upper-right corner, a busy street dissolved into blur. “Now in Paris,” I had written, sending it off on WhatsApp without a second thought.

And that was my friend’s commentary, I suppose, two images taken nearly two centuries apart. In the first, a man is preserved because he pauses. In the second, the city disappears because we do not.