Looking back at the origin of photography, the daguerreotype, invented by Louis Daguerre, is the perfect combination of ancient mirrors and modern photography. The light and shadow etch the silver iodide when the mechanical pupils open and close, instantly confining the wandering soul in the mirror into an image, subjecting it to eternal life. Photography can be seen in two ways from the very beginning. It is not only the most perfect replication of reality, but also the most mysterious art of illusion.
Photography has achieved the separation of the subject and object, but photography also compresses time and space, causing it flatten spatially and staticize temporally. The resulting contemporary visual culture tends to be symbolic and representative, and the soul hidden in the symbol and representation only occasionally reveals its true face amid the electronic flashes. No matter how unparalleled its accuracy is, we all know that images could never replace reality. Photography is a projection of the real world, a representation of an illusion, a visual symbol, and a signifier, but it only cannot replace the body of things.
With the help of 3D panoramic scanning, we obtain not only an image, but also something that is infinitely close to reality. 3D data analysis allows us to separate the bones, muscles, skin, and hair under the facial appearance, and from this, we can reconstruct different facial expressions, ages, and even body fatness. If reality refers to the present moment,then the three-dimensional reconstruction replicates the different possibilities of various realities in a set of parallel time series, which completely separates my ego from the physical body that confines it, thus gaining the freedom to gaze, define and dissect again. This experience is what we usually describe as ekstasis.
Personage
In 1900, the Folding Pocket Kodak was just introduced. A large number of non-professional photographers used their own lens to record the new century or take pictures of each other, so that I could carry out archaeological studies in the stratum of the images and gazed at each other with them. It is a pity that the protagonists of the incident, the specific personages among the Boxers, remained only as the silent objects of the image hunting. Their words are only imagined through memoirs and diaries.
