A widely cited estimate suggests people now take more photographs in about two minutes than were taken during the entire 19th century. The number may not be exact, but it says something true about the groundbreaking development of photography.

Photography is one of the finest inventions of our world, which allows us to freeze a moment inside a frame. Every year on 19 August, World Photography Day is observed to honour the long path that led to that ability.

Anything simple and revolutionary starts with a simple idea. The idea behind photography came much earlier than the technology. Around the 5th or 4th century BC, the Chinese philosopher Mozi described the concept of photography, how light passing through a small hole could project an inverted image onto a surface. This was the principle behind the camera obscura. The concept existed for over two thousand years before anyone could fix that image permanently.

That breakthrough came from the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce. Around 1826 or 1827, he produced the earliest surviving camera photograph called “View from the Window at Le Gras”, using a process called heliography. It took approximately eight hours of exposure to capture.

In 1829, Niépce started working with Louis Daguerre to develop the process further. After Niépce died in 1833, Daguerre carried the work forward alone. In 1837, he developed the daguerreotype. It was announced publicly in 1839 and became the first photographic process to reach a wide, commercial audience.

Many say the French painter Paul Delaroche remarked upon seeing a daguerreotype, “From today, painting is dead.” Painting obviously is not dead, but the fact that anyone believed it says enough about what the daguerreotype meant at the time.

Daguerreotypes remained a luxury of the elite. It took another few decades to make photography available to the mass people. In 1888, George Eastman introduced the Kodak camera. It was a portable box preloaded with a 100-exposure roll of film. After clicking 100 pictures, users simply sent the whole camera back to Kodak to have it reloaded. It was the beginning of photography as something anyone could do, not just something done to you by a professional.

The shift to digital, and eventually to the smartphone, removed whatever friction was left. There is no film to send away anymore, no weeks of waiting. Every phone today holds two or three thousand photographs, most of them never printed and many never looked at twice.

The shift is visible in physical space too. In the early 2000s, photo studios were a common place. People used to get dressed up. They simply walked in, and posed for a portrait against a painted backdrop of hills or sea, then waited weeks for the print. Most of those studios are gone now. The ones that remain mostly print passport and ID photos.

In tourist spots like Cox’s Bazar, photographers who once made a living taking tourists’ pictures for money have thinned out too, because everyone carries a camera in their own pocket now. The photo album and the framed print, once a common gift, have quietly disappeared from that tradition as well.

Someone from the 1800s, watching us photograph a blank ceiling just to keep a Snapchat streak alive, would find it senseless, and maybe it also is.

World Photography Day is celebrated every year to make us realise that the path of photography was not always easy. It took almost an entire century to make photography accessible for common people.