Captured here: View Of Boston, The Oldest Surviving Aerial Photograph Ever Taken. October 13th, 1860. Made in 1860, it is the kind of image that turns a date in a history book into something you can actually see.
The 1860s was the first decade in which photography documented events on a large scale. Wet-plate cameras were hauled to battlefields and city streets, and portrait studios spread through towns on both sides of the Atlantic, making a photograph an ordinary family possession for the first time.
Pictures of ordinary life are some of the most valuable historical documents we have. Grand events were always going to be recorded, but a normal day — how people worked, dressed, shopped, and passed the time — survives only when someone happened to point a camera at it.
