All of us here in the 2010s have, at one time or anoth­er, been street pho­tog­ra­phers. But up until 1838, nobody had ever been a street pho­tog­ra­ph­er. In that year when cam­era phones were well beyond even the ken of sci­ence fic­tion, Louis Daguerre, the inven­tor of the daguerreo­type process and one of the fathers of pho­tog­ra­phy itself, took the first pho­to of a human being. In so doing he also became the first street pho­tog­ra­ph­er, cap­tur­ing as his pic­ture did not just a human being but the urban envi­ron­ment inhab­it­ed by that human being, in this case Paris’ Boule­vard du Tem­ple. Daguer­re’s pic­ture begins the his­tor­i­cal jour­ney through 181 years of street pho­tog­ra­phy, one street pho­to per year all sound­tracked with peri­od-appro­pri­ate songs, in the video above.

From the dawn of the prac­tice, street pho­tog­ra­phy (unlike smile-free ear­ly pho­to­graph­ic por­trai­ture) has shown life as it’s actu­al­ly lived. Like the lone Parisian who hap­pened to be stand­ing still long enough for Daguer­re’s cam­era to cap­ture, the peo­ple pop­u­lat­ing these images go about their busi­ness with no con­cern for, or even aware­ness of, being pho­tographed.

The ear­li­est street pho­tographs come most­ly from Europe — Lon­don’s Trafal­gar Square, Copen­hagen’s for­mer Ulfeldts Plads (now Gråbrø­dretorv), Rome’s Via di Ripet­ta — but as pho­tog­ra­phy spread, so spread street pho­tog­ra­phy. Rapid­ly indus­tri­al­iz­ing cities in Amer­i­ca and else­where in the for­mer British Empire soon get in on the action, and a few decades lat­er scenes from the cities of Asia, Africa, and the Mid­dle East begin to appear.

Each of these 181 street pho­tographs was tak­en for a rea­son, though most of those rea­sons are now unknown to us. But some pic­tures make it obvi­ous, espe­cial­ly in the case of the star­tling­ly com­mon sub­genre of post-dis­as­ter street pho­tog­ra­phy: we see the after­math of an 1858 brew­ery fire in Mon­tre­al, an 1866 explo­sion in Syd­ney, an 1874 flood in Pitts­burgh, a 1906 earth­quake in San Fran­cis­co, and a 1920 bomb­ing in New York. Each of these pic­tures tells a sto­ry of a moment in the life of a par­tic­u­lar city, but togeth­er they tell the sto­ry of the city itself, as it has over the past two cen­turies grown out­ward, upward, and in every oth­er way nec­es­sary to accom­mo­date grow­ing pop­u­la­tions; trans­porta­tion tech­nolo­gies like bicy­cles, street­cars, auto­mo­biles; spaces like squares, cin­e­mas, and cafés; and above all, the ever-diver­si­fy­ing forms of human life lived with­in them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Humans of New York: Street Pho­tog­ra­phy as a Cel­e­bra­tion of Life

19-Year-Old Stu­dent Uses Ear­ly Spy Cam­era to Take Can­did Street Pho­tos (Cir­ca 1895)

Vivian Maier, Street Pho­tog­ra­ph­er, Dis­cov­ered

Pris­tine Footage Lets You Revis­it Life in Paris in the 1890s: Watch Footage Shot by the Lumière Broth­ers

See the First Pho­to­graph of a Human Being: A Pho­to Tak­en by Louis Daguerre (1838)

The His­to­ry of Pho­tog­ra­phy in Five Ani­mat­ed Min­utes: From Cam­era Obscu­ra to Cam­era Phone

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

The 17th and 18th cen­turies in Eng­land marked a peri­od of osten­ta­tion for a grow­ing, and increas­ing­ly wealthy, landown­ing class. These were also times of inter­nal reli­gious wars between Catholics and Protes­tants, a peri­od that saw the regi­cide of Charles I, the restora­tion of Charles II to the throne, and William and Mary’s “Glo­ri­ous Rev­o­lu­tion,” depos­ing his suc­ces­sor, James II. All of this over the span of 28 years. Anti-Catholic sen­ti­ment ran high among the peo­ple, and it made a par­tic­u­lar­ly con­ve­nient polit­i­cal tool.

But there are two groups you might not have found at anti-Catholic ral­lies dur­ing the most heat­ed of polit­i­cal times, not, at least, dur­ing the final, for­ma­tive years of their edu­ca­tion. Both young scions of gen­try and nobil­i­ty on a gap year, and artists and poets seek­ing out the finest train­ing, took the Euro­pean Grand Tour, for sev­er­al months or sev­er­al years, a sojourn through the most­ly-Catholic con­ti­nent. No clas­si­cal edu­ca­tion was com­plete with­out a vis­it to Flo­rence, Milan, Rome, Vien­na, and, of course, Paris.

Here, gen­tle­man picked up the lat­est fash­ions and dance steps, bud­ding archi­tects stud­ied cathe­drals and Catholic art, and every­one, Catholic and Protes­tant alike, gawked at the tow­er­ing Notre Dame. The impor­tance of the Grand Tour, remarked his­to­ri­an E.P. Thomp­son, “showed that rul­ing class con­trol in the 18th cen­tu­ry was locat­ed pri­mar­i­ly in cul­tur­al hege­mo­ny.” Tour­ing gen­tle­men wrote mem­oirs and guide­books and com­mis­sioned paint­ings. Artists sent back draw­ings and poems, as both sou­venirs and proof of their cul­tur­al mas­tery.

Through these aris­to­crat­ic tourists the rest of the world came to see Europe as a suc­ces­sion of mon­u­ments, like the Greek and Roman cities of antiq­ui­ty. At the same time, an impe­ri­al­ist craze for Neo­clas­si­cal archi­tec­ture began to make Europe’s biggest cities resem­ble clas­si­cal mod­els more and more.

The last half of the 18th cen­tu­ry saw the con­struc­tion of the Pan­théon, La Made­line—the Catholic church first ded­i­cat­ed as a tem­ple to Napoleon—and the Lou­vre, all mon­u­ments to clas­si­cal archi­tec­ture.

The Grand Tour approach to look­ing at cities and the cor­re­spond­ing Neo­clas­si­cal wave of build­ing came togeth­er in the age of pho­tog­ra­phy, when prints of the great places could give their view­ers a sense of hav­ing been there, or at least hit all the major entries in the guide­book. Wan­der­ing gen­try and artists became entre­pre­neurs, using the new tech­nol­o­gy to not only sim­u­late a Grand Tour, but to sell prints for post­cards and the rare pho­to­graph­ic book.

By 1890, when the pho­tos of Paris here were tak­en, such prints were com­mon­place. They rep­re­sent­ed a democ­ra­ti­za­tion, in a way, of Europe’s great land­marks, and of the lit­er­ary and fine arts tech­niques once pri­mar­i­ly used to record them. No doubt some few peo­ple saw the devel­op­ment as a vul­gar one, but art his­to­ri­ans today can be grate­ful that Paris at the end of the 19th cen­tu­ry was so well-doc­u­ment­ed. In this dig­i­tal col­lec­tion from the Library of Con­gress, Beaux-Arts mas­ter­pieces like the Paris Opera House sit beside the Goth­ic Notre Dame and Neo-Clas­si­cal Pan­théon.

It is a shame these pho­tos do not let view­ers go inside to expe­ri­ence first­hand the build­ings that inspired The Phan­tom of the Opera and The Hunch­back of Notre Dame, and in which are buried such lit­er­ary roy­al­ty as Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile Zola, and Vic­tor Hugo him­self. But this rich archive of ear­ly col­or pho­tographs from just before the turn of the cen­tu­ry does capture—for all time, per­haps, now that they are online—the great­est feats of archi­tec­tur­al engi­neer­ing from the old Medieval  order, the Ancien Régime, the Repub­lic, and the Empire.

The col­lec­tion rep­re­sents yet anoth­er way of dig­i­tal­ly pre­serv­ing the mem­o­ries of these grand build­ings should they one day be lost, as Notre Dame near­ly was just a few days ago. It also shows the state of pho­tog­ra­phy at the dawn of the post­card boom, when Pho­tochrom prints like these could be pur­chased cheap­ly and mailed for a few cents or cen­times. See many more of these stun­ning pho­tos at the Library of Con­gress Dig­i­tal Col­lec­tions here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Rome Comes to Life in Pho­tochrom Col­or Pho­tos Tak­en in 1890: The Colos­se­um, Tre­vi Foun­tain & More

Venice in Beau­ti­ful Col­or Images 125 Years Ago: The Rial­to Bridge, St. Mark’s Basil­i­ca, Doge’s Palace & More

Tsarist Rus­sia Comes to Life in Vivid Col­or Pho­tographs Tak­en Cir­ca 1905–1915

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

We’ve all heard sto­ries of kids who ask their par­ents if the world was real­ly black-and-white in the 1950s, or maybe even been those kids our­selves. With that mat­ter cleared up, chil­dren who’ve seen even old­er col­or­less pho­tographs — say, from around the turn of the 20th cen­tu­ry — may fol­low up with anoth­er ques­tion: had­n’t they invent­ed smil­ing back then? If they ask you (or if you’ve won­dered about it your­self), you can take care of it in just three min­utes by pulling up this Vox explain­er on why peo­ple nev­er smiled in old pho­tos. Why, in the words of Phil Edwards writ­ing on the video’s accom­pa­ny­ing page, “did peo­ple in old pho­tos look like they’d just heard the worst news of their life?”

“We can’t know for sure, but a few the­o­ries help us guess what was behind all that black-and-white frown­ing.” The first, and the one you may already know, has to do with the cam­era tech­nol­o­gy of the day, whose “long expo­sure times — the time a cam­era needs to take a pic­ture — made it impor­tant for the sub­ject of a pic­ture to stay as still as pos­si­ble. That way, the pic­ture would­n’t look blur­ry.” But by the year 1900 that prob­lem was more or less solved “with the intro­duc­tion of the Brown­ie and oth­er cam­eras,” which were “still slow by today’s stan­dards, but not so slow that it was impos­si­ble to smile.”

Oth­er the­o­ries explain­ing the smile-free pho­tographs of old include the lin­ger­ing influ­ence of the paint­ed por­trait on the pho­to­graph­ic por­trait; the dom­i­nant idea of pho­tog­ra­phy as a “pas­sage to immor­tal­i­ty” that “meant the medi­um was pre­dis­posed to seri­ous­ness over the ephemer­al”; and that Vic­to­ri­an and Edwar­dian cul­ture itself took a dim view of smil­ing, sup­port­ed by a sur­vey of smil­ing in por­traits con­duct­ed by Nicholas Jeeves at the Pub­lic Domain Review that “came to the con­clu­sion that there was a cen­turies-long his­to­ry of view­ing smil­ing as some­thing only buf­foons did.” Yet late 19th-cen­tu­ry and ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry pho­tog­ra­phy isn’t a com­plete­ly smile-free zone, as the Flickr group The Smil­ing Vic­to­ri­an proves.

Edwards includes a pic­ture, tak­en cir­ca 1904, of a man smil­ing not just unmis­tak­ably but huge­ly. He does so as he pre­pares to dig into a bowl of rice, that being an impor­tant part of the cui­sine of Chi­na, where Asian-lan­guage schol­ar Berthold Laufer took an expe­di­tion to cap­ture the every­day life of the Chi­nese peo­ple on film. “His rice-lov­ing sub­ject may have been will­ing to grin because he was from a dif­fer­ent cul­ture with its own sen­si­bil­i­ty con­cern­ing pho­tog­ra­phy and pub­lic behav­ior,” Edwards writes. What­ev­er the rea­sons for the smile on that Chi­nese face or the lack of one on all those Vic­to­ri­ans and Edwar­dians, we must pre­pare our­selves to answer an even more dif­fi­cult ques­tion from pos­ter­i­ty: one about why, exact­ly, we’re doing what we’re doing in the bil­lions of pho­tos we now take of our­selves every day.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The First Pho­to­graph Ever Tak­en (1826)

See the First Pho­to­graph of a Human Being: A Pho­to Tak­en by Louis Daguerre (1838)

See The First “Self­ie” In His­to­ry Tak­en by Robert Cor­nelius, a Philadel­phia Chemist, in 1839

The First Known Pho­to­graph of Peo­ple Shar­ing a Beer (1843)

The His­to­ry of Pho­tog­ra­phy in Five Ani­mat­ed Min­utes: From Cam­era Obscu­ra to Cam­era Phone

Vis­it a New Dig­i­tal Archive of 2.2 Mil­lion Images from the First Hun­dred Years of Pho­tog­ra­phy

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.