Paris Boulevard (1838) by Louis Daguerre
Daguerre’s first photographs of the streets of Paris, which were a precursor to Eugene Atget and the surrealists, serve as a metaphor for the elusive nature of film. The first photographs by Daguerre showed Paris streets empty of people except for one in which a man is frozen in time. He held still to have his shoes polished, and so unconsciously preserved his image while everyone else disappeared from the film stock which was not fast enough to preserve movement. The view in that photograph appears as an ordinary world view, but inspection leads us to realize that the people filling the streets are there, but not there, on celluloid.
from The Medium Viewed: The American Avant-Garde Film by John G. Hanhardt.
