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Vintage Camera Photography Blog

What does “imago capta” mean and why is it here

The Latin language has not aged very well. It is all but forgotten today, yet it is one of the most powerful roots of most of the popular languages in the modern world. English, whether American English or British or Australian, would not exist without Latin origins.

Imago capta is a Latin phrase for a captured image.

The Latin language didn’t conjugate verbs like we do today, didn’t use tense the way we do today, and therefore didn’t care all that much about the order of subject and action. Imago is image. Capta is from “to capture”, and applies to the general concept of an image captured.

So imago capta literally means “captured image”, which is the essence of photography. This phrase is pretty much identical to capta imago, since the order doesn’t matter much… but since we humans tend to like the sound of “captured image” more than “image, captured”, and the domain name is more easily understood in this order than with two vowels in a row i.e. “captaimago”, this web site was named ImagoCapta.com