Something that hasn't changed after 200 years of photography

Take a look at humanity's first photo below. It was a photo that took many hours, maybe even days, for the photographer to appear. Today, artificial intelligence systems can generate thousands of photos in just one second. Between those two milestones is a journey spanning more than 200 years of photography history. People are constantly looking for ways to make image creation faster, easier and more perfect. From the first metal plates of Nicéphore Niépce, through the era of Leica, film, digital cameras of all kinds, smartphones to AI, it seems that every revolution has the same goal: to shorten the gap between the real world and the image of it. From a technological perspective, creating a photo has never been as easy as it is today. After all these years of photography's evolution, when everything has changed, is there still something that remains the same? Or to put it another way: as it becomes easier and easier to create images, what still makes photography meaningful?

Nicéphore Niépce, "View from the Window at Le Gras" (1827), the oldest surviving photograph in the history of photography. 1. The first photo is a wait

Leica Rifle (1938), one of Leica's strangest designs, symbolizes the "hunting for moments" era.

Today's AI not only edits photos, but also with just a few lines of description helps change expressions and create different versions of the same face. 3. No more hunting In the AI era, there are many, from software that I have tried such as Midjourney, Evoto, Flux, GPT Image, Adobe, Topaz lab... to AI simulation in recording devices like smartphones that can automatically create images, classify images and batch edit them in a very short time. Photomodels can create portraits, landscapes or completely imaginary scenes, simulated with just a few lines of description. For the first time in history, creating images is no longer the biggest challenge. We won the war with speed. A photo that once took days to appear can now be created in less than a second. What the pioneers of photography could not have imagined has become an everyday occurrence. And perhaps for the first time in history, the ability to create images no longer belongs to a small group of people with specialized knowledge or skills. It is becoming a common ability for almost anyone.

Photos I took of my family going out months after the pandemic. There are photos that are not technically perfect, but contain things that no algorithm can measure. 5. What hasn't changed after 200 years? After 200 years, the most difficult thing about photography remains unchanged. The hardest thing is not creating a photo. It's about learning how to see. Cameras keep getting better. Algorithms are getting smarter. Tools are getting more powerful. But every technology ultimately only answers the "how" question. The question "why" still belongs to humans. Why stop before a street corner? Why lift the machine in front of a rainstorm? Why preserve the face of a loved one? Why do you want to preserve a passing moment? I really like and think a lot about presence, including people with each other. There are things that only appear when we stay with them long enough. A face. One road. A city. A memory. And sometimes myself. I think that's what Niépce's first photograph still wants to tell us after nearly two centuries. That before photography is the art of creating images, it is the art of learning to see. Two hundred years have passed. Technology has changed almost everything. But amidst all those revolutions, the photographer is still there. Perhaps after 200 years, what has not changed is not the camera, nor the photo. What doesn't change is the very human desire to preserve something before it disappears: a ray of light at the end of the day, a familiar face, a rain on the street, a moment of life. Before being the art of creating images, photography is perhaps still the art of learning to be present. That was two hundred years ago. And maybe two hundred years from now too.

"Some things only appear when we stay with them long enough." I took this photo when I worked for Khacten.com These are personal thoughts, along with long-term experiences of taking photos, evaluating equipment, voting on photos, guiding photography, learning... please share with everyone.