The Legacy of Niépce

The very first photograph in history, created through the efforts of Nicéphore Niépce, was neither a royal portrait nor a landscape of the Palace of Versailles in the morning light. That image was a straightforward example of what is insignificant: an uneven rooftop, a pigeon’s nest, a short chimney, and a patch of light on an unmarked wall.

Photography began with the "mundane," and this humble, marginal appreciation has continuously extended throughout the history of photography: Eugène Atget’s abandoned carts in the streets of Paris, William Eggleston’s child’s tricycle, an unpleasant eaten watermelon in Wolfgang Tillmans’ frame, a packet of French fries on a café table through Stephen Shore’s gaze, and a folded carpet in the lens of Mehran Mohajer—all stubbornly assert the same proposition: “being” precedes “necessity.”

To echo Wittgenstein, wonder lies not in how the world is, but in the fact that it is.