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Daguerre was also driven by the evolving sciences of the 1830’s and 1840’s, with their strong emphasis on the development of machines and technology for industrialization, transportation and communications. He saw an opportunity to join the fine art of photography with technologies of display and with the science of chemistry. In 1725, all of the chemical and optical necessities for the invention of photography existed and yet it took over a century for Henry Fox Talbot and Louis Daguerre to produce images on silver plates. It took another hundred years for cameras to be developed that were cheap enough and good enough to be sold in large quantities. It has taken us another seventy years to develop cheap and easy ways of creating digital images whose resolution will soon far exceed what analogue media have been able to produce. It only took a few years for photographs to turn into files that could be transmitted over high-speed networks. All of this activity has changed the meaning of analogue images as much as establishing the foundation for digital forms of expression. But, for Daguerre as for many others, capturing reality even in the reduced format of a copper plate and later prints, suggested that here was a medium that could give meaning to the unknown and the unknowable. This is why Daguerre focused on scientific photography as he tested the medium and improved the quality and outcomes of the images he created. The magic of the new, the unknown and the exotic has remained a part of photographic work, a set of impulses that far exceeds the constraints of data or networks. One of the early clues to the ensuing power of photography and its central role in the development of new ways of seeing the world was the idea that photographic images were representations of what they depicted. The assumption among nineteenth century pioneers was that the gap between photos and reality could be overcome either because the image depicted reality with enough force to bring all its variables into some order or that reality itself was imprinted, if not transferred onto copper and subsequently, paper. Today, that same impulse has been translated into pixels and data. This central concept of representation and of a link between reality and what is pictured was sustained for 150 years until digital technologies transformed images into hybrids. This short essay examines how images have become hybrid forms of representation and visualization and how the role of screens has changed not only what we mean by images, their production and their use, but also how their aesthetic character has been transformed. The interface between reality and human perception has shifted from our eyes to eyes/screens/ events/experiences/screens. This is because most photographs are now shot using iPhones, iPads and Android devices. There is some irony in the use of phones for photography, given that the telephone was also invented in the 19 th century and was initially seen as an impediment to human communications and not as an aid. Phones were seen as distractions from the real tasks of communicating directly with friends, business associates and family. As phones became more integrated into daily life, their essential qualities were recognized in much the same way as photography.