Life through a lens: Celebrating 200 years of photography

Home Shows arts24 Video content Program Culture To display this content from YouTube, you must enable advertisement tracking and audience measurement. One of your browser extensions seems to be blocking the video player from loading. To watch this content, you may need to disable it on this site. Cover image: arts24 © FRANCE 24 12:45 Issued on: 12/11/2026 - 16:56 From the show A passport photo, a selfie, an award-winning film and even the evening news: all of them were made possible thanks to a "fantastic machine", the camera. As France celebrates the bicentenary of the first fixed photographic image, we discuss the image-obsessed society we live in with filmmaker Maximilien Van Aertryck and artist Alina Frieske. In his award-winning documentary "What a fantastic machine!", Maximilien explores the industry that swiftly grew up around photography, and its capacity to influence, manipuate and entertain. We also learn more about Alina's very personal use of photographic material in her artwork, which interrogates the aesthetics and politics of self-representation in the age of social media.