Joseph Nicéphore Niépce had spent years trying to 'fix' images from a camera obscura — the ancient device that projects a scene onto a wall. In 1826, he coated a pewter plate with bitumen of Judea, a tar-like substance that hardened where light hit it. He loaded the plate into a camera pointed at the courtyard of his estate in Burgundy. Then he waited.

The exposure took at least eight hours. When he finally developed the plate, it showed a blurry scene of rooflines. The sun, during those hours, had traveled across the sky — so both the east and west sides of every building appeared lit simultaneously. The image is called 'View from the Window at Le Gras' and it's the oldest surviving photograph.

Exposure times dropped fast. Daguerre's process, announced thirteen years later, got it under a minute. Calotype negatives arrived in 1841. Dry plates in 1871. George Eastman's Kodak in 1888 — 'You push the button, we do the rest.' The 35mm film, the SLR, digital sensors, phone cameras. Each halved the friction of capturing an image.

Today the world takes about 24 billion photos per day. More images are made in two days than existed in the first 150 years of photography combined. Any moment, anywhere, you can freeze in a fraction of a second.

The strange thing is that photos, in becoming infinite, have become almost worthless individually. The scarcity that made Niépce's eight-hour image precious is gone. We take a photo of a meal and forget we did. Abundance kills reverence.

Niépce waited eight hours for a single blurry rooftop. We lose that many images from our phones every year, undeleted.