You know, that rays of light reflected from different bodies form pictures, paint the image reflected on all polished surfaces, for example, on the retina of the eye, on water, and on glass. The spirits have sought to fix these fleeting images; they have made a subtle matter by means of which a picture is formed in the twinkling of an eye. They coat a piece of canvas with this matter, and place it in front of the object to be taken. The first effect of this cloth is similar to that of a mirror, but by means of its viscous nature the prepared canvas, as is not the case with the mirror, retains facsimile a of the image. The mirror represents images faithfully, but retains none; our canvas reflects them no less faithfully, but retains them all. This impression of the image is instantaneous. The canvas is then removed and deposited in a dark place. An hour later the impression is dry, and you have a picture the more precious in that no art can imitate its truthfulness.

—Giphantie(1760) Tiphaigne de la Roche, Charles-François (Incidentally, this description of photography was written 65 years before Niépce fixed his first bitumen plate and officially kicked off the era of photography)

Ah, Bastille Day! An excuse to prop my feet on the table, crank some François Joseph Gossec (Perhaps the Grande Messe des morts) on the stereo, dig out my best-of collection of political pamphleteers (My favorite political cage match today is between Edmund Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution and Mary Wollstonescraft's Vindication of the Rights of Man), and be generally disagreeable all day. In honor of Bastille Day we're going old school, whipping out the Holga, some poorly marked bottles of chemicals, donning the rubber gloves and hanging out in the basement. All you iPhone-toting, Camera Bag-using, digital-vignetting photographers out there (you know who you are cough-Chase Jarvis-cough) can eat my shorts. The photos above are shot with old Ilford HP5 Plus, developed in T-Max for 7 minutes at 18ºC and it gets its vignettes the old fashioned way: from a poorly designed lens.

If you don't hear from me again it's probably because in the dark it can be surprisingly difficult to distinguish between the bottle in which I keep my fixer and that old 1978 Château Lafite Rothschild hidden behind the Jobo rotary processor.

…Aux armes, citoyens, Formez vos bataillons, Marchons, marchons!