2025 № 4 (55)

UDC 77

BBC 85.163 

DOI: 10.51678/2226-0072-2025-4-106-135 

For cit.: Smolev D.D. Seriality at the Dawn of Photography: The Problem of Temporality. Hudozhestvennaya kul’tura [Art & Culture Studies], 2025, no. 4, pp. 106–135. https://doi.org/10.51678/2226-0072-2025-4-106-135. (In Russian) 

Smolev Daniil D. 

PhD (in Philosophy), Senior Researcher, Western Contemporary Art Department, State Institute for Art Studies, 5 Kozitsky Lane, Moscow, 125375, Russia 

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4944-8792 

ResearcherID: ABA-5523-2020

danilasmolev@mail.ru 

Seriality at the Dawn of Photography: The Problem of Temporality

Abstract. The 19th century became the first ‘Golden Age’ of seriality, having subordinated key spheres of public life to the principles of discreteness, decomposition, repetition, and variation: from the prolonged presentation of news and literary works (the feuilleton novel) to ‘serialized’ scientific concepts (the evolution theory). The nascent photography did not remain unaffected by modernist processes either. Having quickly and spontaneously adopted the serial format, within just a few decades it mutated into cinema (essentially, a series of images arranged on a timeline). 

The author of this article proposes to consider the 1820s — 1850s as a liminal period in the transformation of the one medium into the other, and seriality as a technical and aesthetic necessity for this transformation. If in its early years photography erased temporality from its genome attempting to capture the instant, future cinema, by contrast, undertook to recreate time on film. While photography, in its pursuit of clarity, stripped away movement, history, and context, cinema incorporated them into its poetics. If photography is akin to forgetting, cinema is akin to remembering. 

Addressing the theme of seriality in early photography, the author touches upon the issues of dissimilarity of the subject and its two-dimensional representation, dissolution of the portrayed into the canon, the search for individuality, as well as the practice of keeping a photo album for oneself and for posterity. 

Keywords: photography, seriality, camera obscura, studium, punctum, carte de visite, chronophotography, captured time, decomposition, repetition and variations, photo album, N. Niépce, L. Daguerre, W. Talbot, A.A.E. Disdéri 

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Received 21.09.2025 

Accepted 16.10.2025