Artefact

So, this kid was playing with photos on his iPhone - he kept on increasing the brightness, over and over - and he found this, hiding in the shadows. But get this, it was in more than one of his photos. It was in lots of them. All photos of his family. Weird, eh? But it got really weird when we started looking back at the family’s old photos. This guy was there, deep in the shadows, in pictures going back all the way. The first photo was over eighty years old. What is he doing? And what is he?