Building culture: magic and identity of place

Abstract

The document of a historical place: the Boulevard du Temple in Paris, photographed by one of the ingenious technical pioneers of the 19th century. The painter Louis Daguerre states that on that day in 1838, the boulevard was “filled by a busy crowd” yet the photograph does not show any sign of this. Because the inventor of the “light-stylus art” had to expose his glass plate for minutes, only entirely still objects would be fixed: chimneys, houses, trees. The mobile parts of the scenery — the smoke above the roofs, the pedestrians, the horses and carriages — have left no trace on the image, with one exception: In the bottom left corner, bathed in sunlight, a small figure is standing on the pavement, his right foot on the ground, the left foot on the stool of a shoeblack. Out of the many fleeting incidents of this day and place, solely this scene alone has been captured — a shadowy message of long gone times, the only witness of a moment that made history.