About this Poem
“In what is believed to be the earliest photograph that records the image of a person, (Daguerre’s ‘Boulevard du Temple,’ 1838) the rich shadow of a bootblack kneels on a corner, bent over, shining a customer’s shoe. Though the entire boulevard was very populated when Daguerre shot this canonical photograph, early photographic technology could not record all the city bustle because the camera was too slow—or were we, then, too fast? For me, this photograph has always been such a rich metaphor for the thin border between colonialism and modernism, or history and intimacy. A technical accident, a subservient subject was the only figure Daguerre could visually record, kneeling in the middle of the nineteenth century. And yet.”
—Robin Coste Lewis
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