Today is #WorldPhotographyDay, a day I’ve marked before, seeing others posting about it, but as it comes this year in the midst of my Expo musings, I thought I should probably read up on it a bit.
Every August 19, photographers celebrate the strange and enduring power of this craft that’s become so synonymous with modernity—a medium that’s been shaping how we see, remember, and share the world for nearly two centuries. The date honors a turning point: in 1839, the French government publicly announced the daguerreotype, a photographic process developed by Louis Daguerre, and offered it as a “free gift to the world.” And the rest was history.
But it wasn’t until 1991 that this history became “historical,” so to speak. An Indian photographer called O. P. Sharma began noticing “August 19” recurring in photography history books and rallied over 150 photography clubs—including the Royal Photographic Society and the Photographic Society of America—to make World Photography Day official. And that’s why we post what we post today every year.
What’s striking to me—especially as I go through these photos I took from the latest @expo2025japan—is how photography has always been intertwined with the spectacle of world fairs. Since the 19th century, both have shared a similar function: turning “progress” into something visible, memorable, and shareable. And France was once again at the heart of that fusion. London’s Great Exhibition in 1851 gave photography a modest role, but it was the 1855 Paris Exposition that truly elevated it, dedicating space to photographic pioneers like Gustave Le Gray and Édouard Baldus, and framing photography not just as a curiosity, but as a vital part of modern storytelling and mythmaking. That’s the legacy we step into when we take our snapshots at the Expo.
Expos co-evolved with and are codependent on photography, without which, much of what goes on for six months would be forgotten, save for one or two legacy constructions like the Space Needle here, the Eiffel Tower there, etc.
I’m curious to see what’s kept after Osaka 2025 is done.
But that dependency also means that Expo memory is selective, a mish mash of overly-represented monumentalism and highly-individual mundanity—a symbol of progress here, a family outing there.
That’s what fascinates me most about these mega-events; that confluence and clash of grand narrative and intimacy, all wrapped up in ideology and play.
I’ve been collecting slide photos from various Expos and was looking forward to generating my own little icons like these, perhaps to be sourced and scanned over one day in this ever-moving circulation of contemporaneousness and oblivion.
By the 1867 Paris fair, photography was pulling double duty. Inside the exposition, it was celebrated as both art and technology. Outside, photographers were documenting the event itself—the architecture, the machines, the crowds. Their images were turned into albums and stereographs, letting people around the world experience the fair without ever stepping foot in Paris.
By 1878, photography had fully arrived. It wasn’t just experimental anymore; it was essential part of experiencing the modern. And they both shared the same logic: world fairs arranged nations, inventions, and empires into a tableau, and photography was there to capture and circulate that spectacle.
So today, I’m thinking about “world photography” not as a celebration, but as a kind of reckoning. Since its inception, it has carried a strange duality: both a mirror and a mythmaker, both a witness and a trickster.
The early bond between photography and world fairs wasn’t just about documenting progress—it was about staging it, framing it, making it legible to the eye and palatable to memory. In that sense, photography has always been complicit in the construction of modernity, not just its archive. The camera doesn’t just preserve—it selects, isolates, and transforms. And in doing so, it asks us to consider what it means to see something, to believe it, to share it.
These images from Osaka aren’t just records of a mega-event—they’re fragments of a larger question: what kind of “future” do we make visible, and what remains just outside the frame?