Nicéphore Niépce (1), who managed to produce a fixed image by exposing a metal plate covered with asphalt inside a camera obscura in 1826, keeps track of the vague reflections of light on the structures visible from the window of his house. The photographs produced by Fox Talbot (2) and Louis Daguerre (3) in 1835 and 1839 are also examples of similar views taken from the inside out. Is the threshold-position where these images settle, as the first examples of mechanical image production, only a coincidence? Or do the factors that push these proto-photographers to work at the border between the inside and the outside, the private and the public, point to the logistical constraints of the media they are using? Nowadays, as I watch the walnut tree and the surrounding buildings behind a similar border, the archaic world represented in these photographs and the now gone world of our recent past seem closer than ever before.

1. Nicéphore Niépce, "View from the Window at Le Gras”, 1826-1827.

2. Henry Fox Talbot, “Latticed Window at Lacock Abbey”, 1835.