Photography marks its bicentennial this year. Two hundred years since French inventor Niépce permanently fixed the world’s first photographic image. I woke up this morning and found my phone on the floor. I must have dropped it dozing off while doom-scrolling. My phone unlocked on an image I screenshotted last night – a recipe I saw on Instagram. Today is also World Photography Day, commemorating the first publicly available photographic process – the daguerreotype in 1839. My algorithm is showing me posts of institutions commemorating this day, and a meme of a trojan horse. Photography supposedly collapses time, between the ‘then’ and the ‘now’. Two hundred years ago, Singapore was combined with Penang and Malacca to form the Straits Settlements, a territory under the control of the British East India Company. Now, hundreds and thousands of images taken during colonial rule are stored in digital archives, which I have downloaded, saved, and indexed on my Google Drive. The drive is now three-quarters full.

I used to keep a dream diary – images and scenes that played out in my head at night, I then typed into my notes app the second I woke up. I have since stopped, the last recorded dream was six months ago (after a year’s hiatus). Instead, I am reminded of deadlines, grand productions I may never realise, and that I need to get a new phone. I received a notification – a seller has offered a special discount for an ambrotype of a ghostly image of an unnamed boy. Pre-owned.

I do not quite remember the last time I took a photograph. Well, minus the grid-load of selfies, a label to remind me of the artwork I saw the other day, and attempts to look at the bruise that has grown on the underside of my arm. I came across an image on Wikipedia last week, an image of the interior of the studio where many of these images I have collected were taken. A large format camera sitting on a wooden tripod in the middle of the room. The image was so pixelated I could hardly tell where a chair began and where the oriental-looking rug stopped. I zoomed in and all I saw was black, black, grey, kind of grey, white, grey, black, black, black.

When I was younger, I was often on stage in school productions. Aged thirteen, I played a young lion cub trapped in a cage. The camera has the tendency to freeze, capture, flatten, subject, trap. What does it mean to free someone from an image? What does it mean to make something (or someone) visible? The ‘pre-owned’ boy continues to haunt me to this day.

An image comes into being across various stages. As a scene that plays out in my head, as a performance and dialogue between my camera and me, as a reminder to the world that I am indeed alive and still making, as matter that one holds, encounters, dismisses, swipes, circulates. I took my camera to Hampstead about a month ago, I set the tripod on earth that has started to dry in this cumulative heatwave. I took off my shoes and socks, and gingerly crossed to the other side of the pond (now, more a puddle). The sun shone through the canopy and onto the bank. I entered stage left. A man sun-tanning on a tree trunk sneezed.

Having photographed myself countless times, I am at once familiar and foreign with my own face. I have seen his face as a thumbnail in a digital repository, as a life-size cardboard figure tucked behind my shelf, as the algorithm attempts to colour him in. But still I know nothing of him. Not his name, not his age, nor where he came from. I can now imagine the studio he was photographed in, but could still be very wrong. I imagine someone a century later dressing up as me, dressing up as him.

Niépce’s plate was exposed for eight hours (though scholars argue that it could have been several days), before the latent image of a view from his window was rendered visible. Light hardened the bitumen, and lavender oil washed what was unhardened. The spinning rainbow wheel of death is a constant companion. A thirty second clip takes about two hours to render. If at full resolution, the time would most likely double. I stare at the wheel as time compresses into an image. Latency is the in-between stage before an image becomes. In the darkroom, a latent image sits in a liquid bath, as chemicals develop the photograph into visibility. In machine learning, an image is represented as a point in a latent space, selected according to mathematical probabilities, thus generating something that has never existed. Not something captured, but still trapped. Today I received another email saying thank you, but no. I receive one of such emails every other week. I turn my laptop off before it decides to crash.

Growing up, my parents told me my cousin has a ‘third eye’, which meant that he could see ghosts and spirits that walk amongst us. Hartman suggests that the archive is a morgue. The archive is also an unmarked grave, an altar, an offering. Last Thursday was the first day of the seventh month in the lunar calendar, when it is believed that the gates of the underworld opens into ours. I saw a boy (I think) in Hampstead that evening. They were wearing a full-red traditional Chinese costume, gliding through the forest. We locked eyes momentarily. My heart skipped a beat, and I walked away from them. As I was walking away, I glanced back, but they were nowhere to be seen. As a child, I was warned not to turn around when someone calls your name in the night. I looked at my phone – it was definitely time to go home. I did not take any photographs on this World Photography Day.

SEAN CHAM is an artist and historian working across photography, performance, and spatial intervention. Through his research-based practice, he questions power structures, exploring the ways in which historical narratives are constructed and manipulated. Cham was a participating artist in the in the Guangzhou Image Triennial and commissioned by the Singapore Art Museum in 2025.