ABSTRACT
As a twenty-first-century artist looking back at the early history of photography, the author is inspired by an imaginary reading of the medium's origins. We may know a few things about the First Photographers such as where they went, what they made, and to whom they spoke, but are unaware of what did they think and what did they dream. The technical history of photography is written as a straight line toward greater clarity and detail. The author's artistic intervention into the history of photography is meant clarify, to tease out the dreams and desires we project onto the past, and to lay bare the underlying truth of the photographic record. More than just representing a contemporary view of the past, the author's photographs were able to embody it by their physical presence. Through their respective chemical processes and material manipulations, they could seem just barely authentic enough to be real, a forgotten or overlooked part of the own past.
