PHOTOGRAPHY RELICS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 17 March 1939, Page 2

PHOTOGRAPHY RELICS

CENTENARY OBSERVANCE. Strange old boxes with a round hole in the side, a primitive bellows camera, glass jars and other objects in the museum of Chalons-sur-Saone, represent the beginnings of photography. Beside these odds and ends is the bust of Nicephore Niepce, the inventor. The official celebration of the centenary took place at the Sorbonne, Paris, on January 7, exactly a hundred years to a day after Arago, the celebrated astronomer, read before the Academic des Sciences a paper on the sensational discovery of the means of fixing an image caught by a lens. The presentation had been awaited with eagerness, and a legend had grown up that Niepce and Daguerre had discovered means by which a picture could be painted in an hour, with every detail and colour true to nature. Arago’s first words fell in the deepest silence on wondering ears. “Messieurs, you all know of an apparatus called a camera obscura,” he said, “and everyone after admiring the image reproduced on its screen has expressed the regret that it could not be preserved. This regret will be expressed no more.” To the astonished assembly he showed photographs of a part of "the Louvre, a view of the island of the Cite, and the towers of Notre-Dame, views of the Seine and several of its bridges. When today enthusiastic tourists turn their cameras towards the Louvre and the Tuileries gardens they are retaking the first scenes recorded when photography was born a hundred years ago.