Light from Distant Stars

I saw this photograph in an exhibition in Tucson, Arizona. It was taken by Edouard-Denis Baldus in 1855, and it is an albumen print of the church of Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois in Paris. It stands across an open plaza from the Louvre, and the contemporary view is almost unchanged from 164 years ago. But it was the date of this photo, plus the razor sharpness of the image, that put me in a great state of wonder.

As far as I understand it, the great detail and high contrast in such photographs was made possible because the image was printed onto paper coated with egg white, and so it was dispersed over the surface of the paper rather than sinking into the paper fibres. That's what makes this photo seem like it was taken yesterday, perhaps with one of those Instagram filters added to it. But then, when you realise that the picture was taken in 1855, the mind starts to get dizzy at the sudden collapsing of all that time, a century and a half disappearing in an instant.

164 years ago, particles of light emitted from the stone and marble of the church were caught on a silver nitrate coated plate of glass and then fixed on a sheet of paper coated with chloride and egg whites. Decades pass, and every person who walked in or near the church on that day in 1855 is dead, soon to be followed by every person alive on the planet on that day. But the light-image from that moment survives, travelling in time to be recreated by the eyes of people alive today.

This reminds me of the light from stars located light years away: they appear to shine brightly for us in the present moment, but in fact the light may have taken thousands of years to reach Earth, making it possible sometimes for us to be seeing light from a star that no longer exists. Just like the experience of seeing this old photograph, where you become lost in the details of an image that appear to be so present, when in fact every square inch of it is a record of a cosmic disappearance.