Pankaj Kumar reinterprets many moods of his city
Some days are big enough to dedicate a page to. So it is with the World Photography Day, which was celebrated worldwide yesterday. And in a life flooded with images by the second, moving and flashing by on our screens, why is it that we still get drawn to the static moment of a photoframeIJ Because a photo still speaks a thousand words. In today’s clutter of media platforms, photography makes for a universal language. And in an increasingly android world, photos lend a humanising touch as they document every shade of emotion.
The date behind World Photo Day originates from the invention of the Daguerreotype, a photographic process developed by Joseph Nicèphore Nièpce and louis Daguerre in 1837. On January 9, 1839, the French Academy of Sciences announced the Daguerreotype process and a few months later, on August 19, 1839 to be precise, the French government purchased the patent and announced the invention as a gift “free to the world”.
It should be noted that the Daguerreotype wasn’t the first permanent photographic image. In 1826, Nicèphore Nièpce captured the earliest known permanent photograph known as “View from the Window at le Gras”, using a process called heliography.
Every big project starts with an idea. Turning that idea into reality is almost always harder than it looks. The World Photo Day project started in 2009 and it was celebrated for the first time on August 19, 2010. Thanks to digital cameras on mobile phones, more than 350 billion photos are now taken worldwide every year. The earliest known use of the word “photograph” was in 1839 by the astronomer Sir John Herschel. The earliest known use of the abbreviation “photo” was by Queen Victoria in a letter in 1860.