Dreaming the Acropolis: Freud, Imagination and Ruin of Futures

In 1842, Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey , a French photographer, draughtsman, and early pioneer of the daguerreotype process, produced what is now regarded as the oldest surviving photograph of the Acropolis in Athens. What resulted is the oldest surviving photograph of the site. The metallic plate, small, fragile, shimmering with undeveloped silver halides in mercury vapour holds a faint but persistent impression of the Parthenon and brought to the world. The image, captured only three years after Louis Daguerre announced his invention to the world, occupies a singular place in both the history of photography and the cultural imagination of antiquity. The daguerreotype —meticulous, fragile, and unique—fixes the Acropolis in a trace of light drawn directly from the stones that had already endured two millennia of weathering, destruction, and rebuilding. The faint plate is rarely seen now- but each time and with every encounter we are being transported back into the exact moment, where light entered the camera – remembering.