News

World Photography Day

On 19 August 1839, the physicist Francois Arago presented the “daguerreotype“, the first photographic procedure for developing images, at the Academy of Sciences and Visual Arts in Paris.

Therefore, it was on that day that the whole of mankind began to immortalise moments, instants, details and to imprint them through the retina in a process that has continued unabated ever since.

But history must be honoured, always and in any case, to preserve its memory, the same memory that, thanks to a photo, we are able to preserve intact down to its smallest detail.

It was in fact in 1826 that Joseph Nicéphore Niépce was able to take the world’s first photo with a camera obscura. He managed not only to capture an image, but also to fix it on a physical medium. The result was the world-famous heliograph on a tin plate, “View from the window at Le Gras” (in French “La cour du dolmaine du Gras”), which is still preserved today.

Niépce began collaborating with Louis Daguerre in 1829 to further develop this invention, but he died four years after this partnership; therefore, Daguerre had to improve this new method on his own right up to the date on which we celebrate his invention as we know it today.

Camera obscura

A new art

Furthermore, it has been World Photography Day every 19 August since 2010, thanks to the Australian photographer Korske Ara.

Declared not too long ago to be an art in its own right, photography sums up its importance starting from the etymology of the word itself: from the Greek “phos“, meaning light, and “graphé“, meaning literally “the writing of light“.

There are many artists who, over time, have decided to devote their lives to photography, beginning to produce pieces related to fashion, art, dance and theatre that still manage to excite and thrill us today.

Of all time periods, it was Surrealism – around 1920 – that used the most peculiar way of taking pictures: i.e. by juxtaposing elements that were paradoxically distant from each other and had no meaning to each other, with the intention of imprinting messages related to the deepest, hidden, dreamlike sense of our emotions.

Freedom, the watchword of the photographers of the Surrealists – among whom we recall the famous Man Ray -, a freedom acted upon and willed through the manifestation of a subconscious impossible to decipher rationally but made exceptional thanks to the human psyche when even explainable through dreams.

Credit photo: Samantha Jade Royds

A photo made by Man Ray

All in all, talking about photography and its exponents really risks getting us lost in the meanders of signifiers and signifieds, because it is precisely the freedom to be able to interpret each image put in front of us according to our individual emotions and consciousnesses that brings this art to be the protagonist also of digitisation.

As a matter of fact, through new technological devices, we no longer print anything but store our memories inside digital boxes, at the risk of losing their permanence and emotion.

It is for this reason that the BiHoliday villages each year take up a common thought: to raise their eyes to the sky, imprint memories, capture emotions and then make them even more real and perceptible thanks to a real print: which passes from hand to hand; which lives by touch and sight; which does not remain just a memory but becomes a page to be written over and over again. Let it be a lesson and a tale; a choral tale of what we have really been lucky enough – this is the constant hope – to experience in our individual or collective lives.

Sometimes all it takes is a “click” and you don’t even need words. Are you going to choose your favourite photo now? Perhaps, it will be the one you still have to take…