No it wasn’t Porn. The first image ever uploaded on the Internet was actually a homemade promotional shot for Les Horribles Cernettes.
Les Horribles Cernettes is based near the CERN laboratory and they’re a comedic band.
Ahh… the days of 2400 baud modems and reading The Mentor‘s “Manifesto“, those were the days.
The image was uploaded on July 18, 1992 and its 20th anniversary is soon coming up.
Next Wednesday, July 18th, the photograph at the center of that image — a homemade promotional shot for Les Horribles Cernettes, a comedy band based at the CERN laboratory near Geneva — will turn 20 years old. Despite the artifact’s world-historical significance, its full story has never been told. Few enthusiasts of art or photography or technology will be marking its 20th birthday, in no small part because it’s such an odd and un-artistic image.
“It’s sort of terrible and charming,” said Lesley Martin, a photo scholar at the Aperture Foundation, after being shown the image for the first time. But she added that that’s par for the course with photographic firsts. The first known photograph, for example, was of a semi-visible rooftop, seen through a window.
“They’re always semi-accidental and seemingly inconsequential at the time,” Martin told me. “The first photos are always, from the perspective of a sophisticated viewer today, somewhat non-events and of non-subjects.”
The first Web photo was no exception. It wasn’t even taken for the purposes of science or technology. The photographer, Silvano de Gennaro, was an IT developer at CERN who worked near Tim Berners-Lee and the other inventors of the Web. But “I didn’t know what the Web was,” he recalled.
Original Image unedited:
Source & Image: motherboard.vice.com
