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The London Magazine Catalan Issue 2026
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A note on the advent of photography:
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Dearest reader,
In 1837, overlooking a bustling Parisian boulevard, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre climbed onto the roof of his studio and took a photograph. It would become the first image to capture human figures. Despite the busyness and crowds on the street below, only a young boot polisher and his client remained still long enough to be seen. Everyone else disappeared.
From our Catalan Issue, Oriol Ponsatí-Murlà’s essay begins here: with a photograph that forces us to imagine everything missing. From the first Daguerreotype to the documentation of the dead, the essay reflects on images, memory and the human desire not only to represent reality, but to trap it.
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Imaging the Invisible
Oriol Ponsatí-Murlà (trans. Douglas Suttle)
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On a morning that we have good reason to believe was in the autumn – October of the year 1837 to be precise – Louis-Jaques-Mandé Daguerre went up onto the roof of the studio he occupied at number 5 Rue des Marais in the French capital. In the adjacent building was what had been up to that point his best work: the Diorama. Viewed objectively, what was on display there doesn’t seem to have been particularly impressive. And yet, from its inauguration on the 11 July 1822 until its destruction in a fire caused by a clumsy worker on the 3 March 1839, thousands of Parisians and people from all over France flocked to admire this most unique spectacle. The Diorama building was of an exceptional height and had been designed by Daguerre himself. Once inside, its visitors could look upon scenes both natural and urban, as well as various famous monuments: a view of Paris from Montmartre, Napoleon’s tomb on the island of Saint Helena, Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome, even a rural Neapolitan landscape. To do this, Daguerre skilfully played with the layout of miniature objects that stretched back before the viewer’s eyes on an inclined plane for about fifteen metres. In the background, a painted canvas a colossal thirteen metres high and twenty metres wide rose up. The lighting from above contributed to an effect of aerial realism which meant the spectators fell immediately under the impression that they were flying over the landscape on display.
Daguerre was, after all, an illusionist first and foremost. Born in 1787 – on the eve of the French Revolution – into a moderately poor family, he had received a fairly modest education, like most others at the time, and from a very young age he’d taken refuge in a world of illusions he was able to create for himself using crayons and watercolours. By learning the respectable craft of opera set design, he began to acquire the skill of making the spectator believe that the narrow limits of the theatre stage might house a whole repertoire of imagined spaces. The kind of illusion that allowed him to create a theatre stage or the Diorama was, however, on the whole quite rudimentary. Simply put, it was the transposition of a large, even enormous, area into a small space. It was nothing that any minimally gifted painter or architect would not have been able to do centuries ago. For example: Andrea Mantegna’s Camera Picta in the Castello di San Giorgio in Mantua, completed in 1474; the deceptive gallery that Francesco Borromini created for the palazzo of Cardinal Spada in 1632; or, a few years later, the apotheotic ecstasy by which Andrea Pozzo lifted Saint Ignatius into the dome of the church in Rome that bears his name. All these attempts to capture a multiplied reality were nothing more than a rather banal trick, a game of perspective if you will, a trompe l’oeil. Daguerre was not content to merely recreate reality; he wanted to capture it. That’s why, on that October morning, he climbed onto the roof of his studio with a tripod and the instrument that he’d been working on obsessively for years.
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"To really look at this photograph means to see all sorts of things which are not there but that, in fact, simply have to be there."
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It cannot be said that it was his invention. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, his business partner and the person who’d revealed to him the art of what he called ‘heliography’, had died four years earlier. Niépce had been a visionary, but his work had remained in its infancy. By discovering the photosensitive properties of bitumen and spreading it on a metal plate, he had managed to immortalise the landscape as seen from his house in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes. The result was fairly disappointing. In order to capture something with a certain amount of definition, the plate had to be exposed to broad daylight for about twelve hours, and so the sun had had more than enough time to leave improbable shadows on the left, right and most of the central part of the image. Upon looking at it, one must admit to not really being able to see anything: there’s the shape of a tower on one side, another opposite it, two windows and the slope of the roofs. The rest is all black or so diffuse that it could be anything.
Daguerre knew that it was only a matter of time before he could improve this rudimentary technique. All he had to do was find a film with the right sensitivity to reduce all those hours of exposure to just a few minutes. Trying it for years with all possible combinations, he eventually spread a layer of iodine on a silver plate, placed it inside the small box he called ‘the darkroom’ and, after developing it with warm mercury and washing it with water and kitchen salt, managed to get the image that entered through the single hole in the box to print onto the plate. Having spent days locked in his studio without sleep or food and doing all kinds of indoor tests while trying to find the right sensitivity, he finally felt confident that he could go out and hunt for the image of reality waiting for him beyond those four walls.
He placed the box on the tripod and faced southwest to where the wide Boulevard du Temple met the Rue de Saint-Martin. It was early in the morning, and though the city was only just waking up, there was always a hustle and bustle in that faubourg. There was a reason as to why the boulevard was known throughout Paris as the ‘Boulevard du Crime’, and it wasn’t because delinquency was more prevalent there than in any other corner of the capital, but rather because of its concentration of theatres where all manner of lurid things were performed. They were: the Lyrique, the Cirque Olympique, the Folies Dramatiques, the Funambules, the Délassements Comiques, et cetera. Why Daguerre had chosen that set for his Diorama was obvious. It being the very centre of Paris, he knew that he would never lack spectators. At that time, the comics, vedettes and late risers were still asleep, but the cafés and shops were open and all sorts of people were out and about: the raspy voice of a child newspaper seller could be heard close by singing out the news of the day; young boys were carting all kinds of goods up and down the street; and on the cobblestones of the boulevard clopped the constant hooves of the pack horses and of those pulling delicate carriages populated by young ladies of rank who were hurrying to attend the first service of the recently inaugurated church of Saint-Denys-de-Saint-Sacrament.
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"A painting or a photograph that shows everything is nothing more than one of those icons banning us from smoking or indicating where the emergency exit is."
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In the midst of all this movement, Daguerre noticed a boy no more than eleven or twelve years old who had just arrived and was arranging his tools near the edge of the boulevard. He was a boot polisher. Arranging a two-step stool on the sidewalk, he sat down with a rather battered box full of rags, brushes and pots of bitumen to his right. Before long a customer stopped by. Middle-aged, he wore a long jacket and a short-brimmed hat and was empty-handed. Raising his right leg slightly, he placed his foot on the first step of the stool. Daguerre waited. It wasn’t yet time to activate his device. The changing of the client’s legs would have blurred everything. Taking out his pocket watch, he began to count how long it took the boy to finish the first boot. Neither of them seemed to be in a hurry. The young man raised his head from time to time – no, stay still! – to talk to the customer. The man, on the other hand, maintained a perfect and forced immobile balance – that’s better – with both hands clasped behind his back and his leg nice and still on the stool. The boy worked carefully, spending almost two minutes on the first boot alone. If he took the same amount of time on the second, there would be hope. Then came the change of foot. The customer raised his left leg and Daguerre ran to open the shutter on his darkroom. Though an atheist, he prayed under his breath that the boy would take his time and leave the left boot as clean and shiny as a whistle. Once again, he counted the seconds. Once again, it was almost two minutes. It was still not enough. The exposure had to be extended a little longer. The customer crossed the street and was immediately lost in the traffic of people and other animals. The boy remained seated, moving little, now looking to one side, now to the other. Neither of them knew or would ever know that theirs had been the first two human figures to be immortalised in a photograph. After five minutes of exposure, Daguerre closed the shutter.
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Order the latest issue to read the full essay in print, alongside more poetry, fiction, essays and art by some of Catalonia’s leading voices.
You can also subscribe today to have the new issue delivered to your door, and save 20% on the cost of a year’s subscription with code APR20.
Best wishes,
Zadie
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