If you have followed me for a while, you know how much I love old photography… On morning in 2015, one of my friends told me about a new app that allowed people to make their pictures look like daguerreotypes. When he showed me the images he had created with it, I was floored. After playing with the app for a few moments, I started feeling uneasy. It was too easy! I am not a daguerreotypist, but I know from reading about the process, that it is complex. It takes time and special gear to make a daguerreotype. Each photo is a work of art in itself. With that said, the discussion with my friend triggered my desire to experiment with the Digital tools I had. I quickly found out tutorials that taught people to make fake tintypes with Gimp. For several weeks, I created images after images. No matter how hard I tried, I was never able to fully emulate the look of a daguerreotype or tintype. But it was not the end of the world. I was having fun, and loved the old-fashioned yet unique look of each resulting image. Goal achieved! My digital images, which I call “reminigrams”, pay homage to the early days of photography, while taking advantage of modern technology. The word is a portmanteau consisting of the following elements: “reminiscence”, which stands for a memory or the act of recovering it. “-gram”, a suffix of Greek origin meaning “something written” or “drawing”. Reminigrams seek to capture scenes that could have existed in the past. Their defects offer a stark contrast to the sharpness and flawlessness of most modern digital photography, hence reframing the debate around storytelling. Digital technology cannot and will never be able to emulate old photographic processes like the daguerreotype, tintype or collodion process. Reminigrams are just a way for me to allow my images to speak a unique language inspired by the one we all know. The process Creating reminigrams is a fun and fascinating process that can take up to five hours. First, Cendrine selects a photo from her personal archives that she wants to turn into a reminigram. Then she searches on the internet for an old image whose mood fits her vision. Finally, she “borrows” as many elements from that mood as possible (thanks to the use of several pieces of software), including scratches, blurriness, contrast, etc. The result is an image that arouses curiosity. — Extract from “Seizing the Bygone Light: A Tribute to Early Photography” by Cendrine Marrouat, David Ellis, and Hadiya Ali Examples of Reminigrams