Lately I keep thinking: images are getting easier and easier to shoot, retouch, and even generate outright—so why do I, instead, cherish even more those moments when I have to wait a bit before pressing the shutter?
Dadaocheng night view, photo by Paul Lai
I revisited this question on the C/O Berlin event page for “200 Years and Counting.” It talks about photography’s bicentennial, and also places AI, digital infrastructure, and the flood of images into the same discussion. 1 That’s when I realized I’d been thinking about photography as something too close to the camera.
There are more and more photos in my phone. After I press the shutter, the scene in front of me immediately stays on the screen; color grading, retouching, and sharing are just a few seconds of finger swipes. It’s easy, in that smoothness, to forget that in photography’s earliest days, light had to linger on a photosensitive plate for a long time just to barely hold on to rooftops and sky beyond a window. If we count from the image Joseph Nicéphore Niépce left around 1826–1827, then around 2026 is precisely a fitting two-hundred-year point for looking back. 2
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, “View from the Window at Le Gras,” ca. 1826–1827. Public-domain version from Wikimedia Commons. 3
Two hundred years later, what are we actually photographing now? I shoot street scenes, portraits, and travel, often focusing my attention on light, expressions, and the instant that comes from waiting. But on C/O Berlin’s open-air screening list, I saw the artist Daphné Nan Le Sergent’s video essay Silicon Islands and War. 1 She looks at Taiwan through the lens of the “silicon shield” and resource pressures—an artistic question on her part, not a verdict on industrial facts. 4 I don’t want to turn every photo into a semiconductor industry report, and I don’t want to pull out a calculator while shooting to tally carbon emissions. Still, two hundred years after photography, I’m starting to feel that a photo’s frame is larger than I used to imagine: inside it are people, light, and the present moment; outside it are all the conditions that allow images to be captured, retouched, stored, and transmitted.
And I’ve just started reading 晶片島上的光芒 , so this topic has been sticking with me. One book begins from the history of Taiwan’s semiconductor industry; a video essay pulls digital photography, war, energy, and geopolitics into the same picture. The two lines happen to intersect right in front of me.
I love photography, which is why I care especially about this bicentennial moment. France’s Ministry of Culture is planning 2026 to 2027 as a public celebration period for the bicentennial of photography; what it discusses isn’t only art history, but also documentary practice, science, education, and different forms of participation. 5 Photography has continually changed how we preserve evidence, come to know others, understand the world before our eyes, and decide what is worth keeping.
What I want to write for the bicentennial of photography is a new practice of seeing: to look at the people, light, and moment within the photo, and also to look back at the factories, servers, energy, and the weight borne by an island outside the frame. So that when I press the shutter, I can better remember what kind of world I’m standing in.