Daguerre's Paris, by Charles Tarlton

Daguerre’s Paris: Boulevard du Temple, Eight O’clock in the Morning*

J'ai capturé la lumière fugitive et l'ai emprisonnée ! J'ai contraint le soleil à peindre des images pour moi.**   – Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre
 
What is uncanny about this image is the emptiness of the Paris street, a street that was actually always busy according to everyone who knew it independently of this daguerreotype. But, if the emptiness of the street is surreal, it is still not as strange as the explanation for it.  Daguerre’s process took ten to fifteen minutes to fix an image on the silver plate.  During that time, only objects that remained perfectly still, like the gentleman getting a shoeshine down in the lower left of the picture, would be photographed. If you were just walking along, shopping for coffee and a newspaper, sweeping water and detritus along in the gutters, or just passing by in your luxurious carriage, you did not register; it was as if you were invisible.
 
Parisian sunup
old streets are quiet, empty
there’s no place to find
coffee or a newspaper
but you could get a shoeshine
 
taking a snapshot
of sheer silence, palpable
hush. If the frock coat 
getting his shoes shined had sighed
we’d have heard him way up here
 
daguerreotypes, like
mirrors, show everything backwards
your right-handed mother
caught with a teacup balanced
forever in her left hand
 
Whenever you are up high enough up to see the rooftops of Paris, out of a hotel window or from a friend’s balcony, the main things you notice are the chimney pots. Every building has a row of them (some made of simple red clay, but others are more ornate, made of small mortared stones) corresponding to what once was the number fireplaces in the building. Then city residents woke in those days to the stifling smell of coal smoke hanging in the air and to black soot in their nostrils; now Paris air is polluted by internal combustion engines and the dangerous pall of diesel hangs over the city.
 
when everyone but
the shoeshine and his client
had fled from the streets
did you picture them indoors
cowering at their windows?
 
measuring the age
dating the present city’s
oldest chimney pots
they’re not working anymore
drifting smoke a memory
 
daguerreotype--
a small sheet of copper or tin
where a faint image appeared 
on a thin silver layer 
under mercury vapours
 
Our vacation in France was over and we were driving into Paris for a last night in a hotel and a final Parisian supper. We got onto the Périphérique at Paris/Val-de-Marneheading west and north toward our hotel in the 15th Arrondissement. The road was crowded even for a Sunday and the traffic was stop and go. Motorcycles roared past us, coming up between the lines of stopped traffic. “Look!” Jim yelled. “It’s Claude!” Claude was an old but now long-estranged French friend.  We were behind him in the traffic and on his right.  We could see him in his imported PT Cruiser (“pay-tay-cruz-aire,” he called it), but he didn’t see us. I stayed behind him, watching and knowing he had no idea we were there.  When he turned off at the Port-de-Vanvesexit heading for his house in the 14th, we followed, but we went left as he went right. I never saw or heard from Claude again.
 
emptiness is what
cannot be seen. The too bright
light, the darkness
that descends invisibly
on ghosts who leave no trace
 
friends who disappear
into our memories, changed
features dissolving
into the subtle gray mists
then stripped of all their colours
 
after Monsieur Daguerre 
painting was forever changed
no need to be real
pigment and canvas were freed
to feel, to know the modern 
 
Charles Tarlton
 
Notes
 
*Charles Chevalier, Guide du photographe, Paris, 1854, cit. in Helmut et Alison Gernsheim, L. M. J. Daguerre. The History of the Diorama and the Daguerreotype (1956), New York, Dover, 1968, p. 49. 
 
**“I captured the fugitive light and imprisoned it! I forced the sun to paint pictures for me.” https://journals.openedition.org/etudesphotographiques/126
 
 
Charles Tarlton: "I am a retired professor who has been writing poetry full time since 2010. I am especially addicted to ekphrasis and have published ekphrastic tanka prose in KYSO Flash, Haibun Today, Atlas Poetic, Contemporary Haibun Online, Review American, Ekphrastic Review, and Fiction International. Next year a collection of my ekphrastic work will be published, entitled Touching Fire."