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Essay

Open Access

Absent Pictures, Present Images: How Time Reshapes the Photographic Archive

Steffen Siegel

Published online:

06 Oct 2025

Abstract

Abstract

This essay aims to complicate our understanding of photographic materialities. Tracing the object biography of Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre's View of the Boulevard du Temple, taken in 1838—one of the most prominent photographs from the medium's formative period—helps to reveal photography's character as not only reproductive but also reproducible. Variant photographic sources of the same motif can result in various histories that inform and transcribe each other. These multiple layers of meaning turn each photographic representation into a palimpsest loaded with information that is both visible and invisible, present and absent. A closer look at Daguerre's photograph unfolds a puzzling photographic ontology that deals with present images but an absent picture. This case evokes a pivotal question for the medium's historiography: Upon what traces are we basing our photographic histories?

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Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte Issues

Volume 88 (2025)
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Volume 79 (2016)

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