Inadvertent Images: A History of Photographic Apparitions 9780226471907

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Inadvertent Images

Inadvertent ​Images A History of Photographic Apparitions

Peter Geimer T r a n s l at e d by G e r r i t Jac k s on

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2018 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2018 Printed in the United States of America Originally published as Bilder aus Versehen: Eine Geschichte fotografischer Erscheinungen. © Philo Fine Arts Stiftung & Co. KG, Hamburg, Germany. 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18   1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­47187-­7 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­47190-­7 (e-­book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226471907.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Geimer, Peter, author. | Jackson, Gerrit, translator. Title: Inadvertent images : a history of photographic apparitions / Peter Geimer ; translated by Gerrit Jackson. Other titles: Bilder aus Versehen. English Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017038031 | ISBN 9780226471877 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226471907 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Photography—Psychological aspects. | Photography—History. | Photography— Philosophy. | Phenomenology. Classification: LCC TR183 .G4513 2018 | DDC 770—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017038031 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/ NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Introduction  1

1

History and “Prehistory”  11



2

Visibility by Destruction/ Disturbance Incidents of Photography  31



3

Case Study I: Signs of Life or “False Flames”? Jules Luys and the Controversy over “Effluviography”  77



4

Case Study II: A Self-­Portrait of Christ or the White Noise of Photography? Paul Vignon and the Earliest Photograph of the Shroud of Turin  99



5 Visible/Invisible Critique of a Dichotomy  140



6

The “Optical Unconscious” of Photography  170 Notes 201 Index 231

Introduction

In 1929 the Hungarian photographer André Kertész took a picture of the Paris cityscape. The photograph shows a steeply descending street in the 18th arrondissement, with the spire of Notre Dame de Clignancourt behind it and a sea of houses stretching to the edge of the frame. The photograph was presumably meant to bear a title such as Paris or View of Paris. When the glass negative was subsequently shattered, Kertész gave his picture another title: Broken Plate (fig. 1). It shows Paris but also, simultaneously, the glass of which the photograph is made. An accident has made visible what usually disappears in the vitreous transparency of the photographic medium. So Broken Plate keeps the beholder’s gaze wavering indefinitely: between the picture of the city and the material of the picture, between the representation and the web of cracks that disrupts it. In his phenomenology of the photograph, Roland Barthes describes primarily one side of this indissoluble figure—the transparency of the photographic image. In this connection, he also brings up a picture by Kertész (fig. 2): “There is a photograph by Kertész (1921) which shows a blind gypsy violinist being led by a boy; now what I see, by means of this ‘thinking eye’ which makes me add something to the photograph, is the dirt road; its texture gives me the certainty of being in Central Europe; I perceive the referent (here, the photograph really transcends itself: is this not the sole proof of its art? To annihilate itself as medium, to be no longer a sign but the thing itself?).”1 As is well known, Barthes saw this art of disappearance as the essence of photography. In contradistinction to other pictorial techniques, photography succeeds in “annihilat[ing] itself as medium”; by simply showing “the thing itself,” it ultimately becomes invisible. “A specific photograph, in effect, is never distinguished from its referent (from what it represents), or at least it is not immediately or generally distinguished from its referent (as is the case for every other image, encumbered—from the start, and be-

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Introduction

Fig. 1  André Kertész, Broken Plate, 1929. © Estate of André Kertész/Higher Pictures.

cause of its status—by the way in which the object is simulated): it is not impossible to perceive the photographic signifier (certain professionals do so), but it requires a secondary action of knowledge or of reflection.”2 Barthes illustrates his utopian vision of the disappearance of the photographic substance with a peculiar comparison: “The Photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the windowpane and the landscape.”3 The old metaphor of the picture as a window on the world has been turned on its head: the picture Barthes writes about is not manufactured by artifice but shows itself of its own accord, appearing like a landscape in the field of view demarcated by the window—without indirection, mediation, or the likelihood of divergence. We see through a photograph as we see through a glass pane. A picture like the shot of the blind violinist who walked down a Hungarian village street decades ago, in this reading, allows our gaze to fall upon a moment in the past, but as the medium of such rendering-­visible, it is itself intangible.

Fig. 2  André Kertész, Violinist, 1921. © Estate of André Kertész/Higher Pictures.

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Introduction

Kertész’s Broken Plate tells a different story. We see the city with its façades, chimneys, and mansard roofs, but we also see that part of the field of view has broken out. From the black hole at its center, a web of hairline cracks spreads across the picture, occupying the picture of the city. In this instance, we can see the “photographic signifier” at work even without the “secondary action of knowledge or of reflection” Barthes mentions. “Like the signs of language, images [. . .] are able to produce an effect along with its negation.”4 The present book studies this interplay of effect and negation, of the image and its disruption. Kertész’s photograph stands at its beginning as the emblem of a history of the picture whose program Georges Didi-­Huberman sketches as follows: “This would be a history of symptoms in which representation shows what it is made of, at the very moment that it agrees to strip itself bare, to suspend itself and exhibit its fault.”5 The term “symptom” must not be taken in its psychoanalytical sense here, nor in the sense Erwin Panofsky gives it when, in his quest for the “intrinsic meaning” of pictures, he describes them as “symptom[s] of something else.”6 “In Greek, symptōma designates that which chooses or falls with: a fortuitous encounter, a coincidence, or an event that disturbs the order of things.”7 The study of the appearances of photography in the following pages accordingly seeks to complement the widely explored history of photographic images with a corresponding history of their symptoms, their precarious visibility and the disruptions threatened by image noise. I am interested in more, and something other, than a mere iconography of destruction, which we might elaborate in the examples, say, of Walker Evans’s Torn Movie Poster (fig. 3) or Brett Weston’s shot of a broken windowpane (fig. 4). Evans interweaves three layers of representation: the movie poster advertising a melodrama, which features the outsize faces of the two lead actors; the delicate materiality of this picture, parts of which hang in shreds, exposed to the vagaries of the weather; and finally, the piece of paper, measuring 16 by 10.9 centimeters, on which this give-­and-­take between figuration and disintegration appears. Not unlike Kertész’s Broken Plate, Evans’s photograph shows a picture that is coming apart at the seams: are we looking at a photograph of a tattered picture or a tattered photograph? Our gaze wavers between the photographic image of a scene of destruction and the presence of the photograph itself as a medium. And yet Evans leaves no doubt that he is merely quoting the visual medium’s liability to destruction: it becomes conceivable that a picture may be shredded, but the photo paper that compels us to imagine this disruption remains immaculate and intact. Like Kertész’s Broken Plate, Weston’s photograph guides our gaze into an impenetrable blackness. Here, though, the gaping hole is so large that we perceive it, not as a partial disruption of an otherwise unimpaired surface, but as the central motif dominating the picture. However insistently we seek to penetrate its secret, to get something out of it, the opaque black remains without depth, flat as the paper on which it appears. The gaze, Karlheinz

Fig. 3 Walker Evans, Torn Movie Poster, 1931. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ford Motor Company Collection. Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987 (1987.1100.59). © bpk/Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Introduction

Fig. 4  Brett Weston, Untitled (Broken Window), 1937. © The Brett Weston Archive.

Lüdeking writes, perpetually wavers “between two competing aspects: now we see a hole in the pane held at a slight tilt by the hinge that is the bottom edge of the picture; now we see—almost as in Malevich—­nothing but an abstract black form, located no longer in the oblique plane of the window depicted in the photograph but instead in the plane of the photograph itself.” Weston’s picture is thus an example of “photographic self-­reflection”: the opaque black area, Lüdeking argues, is where photography, otherwise transparent, exhibits its own nature as a medium. “So what is shattered at the heart of the photograph is not just the windowpane it depicts, but also the transparency of the picture. We no longer see through it; instead, we are confronted with nothing but the mute substance of the developed photographic paper.”8 Perhaps what appears for a brief moment as we gaze at Weston’s photograph is indeed that “mute substance” of photography: its blank ground, the pure and “meaningless” facticity of the material the picture is made of. But there is nothing to stop us from returning a moment later to seeing the jagged figure as the photographic image of a broken windowpane, bringing the almost Malevichian element back from the world of abstraction to the domain of unimpaired representation. Kertész’s Broken Plate, by contrast, exemplifies a different form of photographic “self-­reflection.” Even if the deep black of the circular fault resembles—indeed, is virtually indistinguishable from—the black in Weston’s picture, it means a very different sort of darkness. There is a hole in the photograph from which the image of

Introduction

the city has disappeared. A piece of the depiction is missing. A part of the photographic representation been shattered with the glass. Unlike Evans and Weston, who merely quote the event of destruction/disruption, Kertész exhibits the real damage to the pictorial medium. Our gaze cannot get through, coming up against the opaque ground of photography. With the simultaneity of imaging and image noise, Broken Plate exemplifies a nexus that will be crucial to the discussion in these pages: once the transparency of photography is disrupted, it becomes conspicuous. The beholder then no longer sees (merely) the motif for whose sake the picture was taken, its style or its form, but (also) the material in which it manifests itself. Even then, the photograph does not cease to “transcend itself ” toward the thing it depicts, but the material conditions on which this transcendence rests become visible as well. That is why the conspicuity and obtrusiveness of the disruption entails a second and no less fundamental insight: image noise is not a deficit, not a negative mode of the pictorial register—on the contrary, it is a specific potential of photography. There is a visibility engendered by destruction or disruption. The shattering of the photographic plate has revealed what was hitherto invisible: its vitreous existence. What is lost in terms of the motif ’s visibility is gained as the pictorial medium emerges into view. And Broken Plate represents only one possible form of such photographic irritation: the subsequent damage suffered by an originally intact picture. The history of photography re­cords countless instances in which the motif never came out at all, was lost somewhere along the way to visibility, or mingled with the fogs of photochemistry to the point where one became indistinguishable from the other. Interwoven with the familiar history of photography is a secret history of photographic artifacts, spots, and hazes that the handbooks of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries described as “spurious phenomena,” “parasites,” and “enemies of the photographer” (figs. 5 and 6). With these photographs, it is virtually impossible to tell where a “picture” has been disrupted, where the representation ends and the image noise begins: the disruption or noise is the picture, and once again, it takes no “secondary action of knowledge” (Barthes) to perceive it. The material becomes obtrusive. But when a medium that has been regarded from its infancy as an inscription of the real confounds that real with the visible traces of its own nature as a medium, that goes to the heart of the question concerning the truth of representation. This brief sketch already suggests a basic methodological choice underlying the following considerations: the irreducible materiality of photography requires us to examine not just the finished product—the isolated and fixed picture—but also, and no less closely, the process of its generation; to study not just visibility, but also the rendering-­visible. It is true that the “meaning of images [. . .] is not sufficiently explained by a description of the causal trajectory of their genesis”9—but neither does this meaning of

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Introduction

Fig. 5  Anonymous, “Fremdlichteinwirkung” (effect of extraneous light; exposure). From Eder et al., Verarbeitung der photographischen Platten, Filme und Papiere (1930).

the image exist independently of the conditions and particularities of its genesis. Pictures generated by technical implements in particular can be so enmeshed in the processes of their production that the contemplation of the resulting image cannot be divorced from how it came into being. The individual chapters of the present book explore this nexus from a variety of perspectives. Chapter 1 delves into the “prehistory” of photography—those countless nonrepresentational, ephemeral, or accidental figures that light inscribed upon sensitive materials for centuries long before anyone knew how to harness it for the purposeful production of images. Why do the classical treatments shunt these unintended formations off to the realm of a “prehistory” distinct from the history of “photography properly speaking”? And what would a genealogy look like that took these evanescent and indeliberate traces into account as a no less integral part of the body of photographic imagery? Chapter 2 traces the photographic contaminations from the early pictures of the French and English pioneers of photography to the scientists, artists, and amateurs who began to investigate them in the late nineteenth

Introduction

century. The abovementioned ambivalence of image noise comes into view: although it initially appeared primarily as “defect,” “flaw,” or even “enemy,” it soon revealed its specific surplus value. Artists like August Strindberg now elaborated an aesthetic of noise and exploited the vicissitudes of the photochemical processes to produce unpredictable images. In the field of scientific photography, researchers recognized that ostensible defects and contaminations frequently turned out to reveal phenomena that had hitherto gone unnoticed. Around 1900 attention increasingly turned to the depiction of objects, fluxes, or radiations that were virtually invisible to the naked eye (distant galaxies, objects in rapid motion, or phenomena like electricity, X-­rays, or radioactivity). Light, it became clear, was only one of countless phenomena capable of affecting photographic plates and producing images. Photography turned out to be exemplary of those technologies of visualization that frustrate the attempt to compare the representation of a phenomenon “to the ‘real’ thing, since the thing becomes coherently visible only as a function of representational work.”10 The highly sensitive photographic materials confronted scientists and amateur photographers with an exces-

Fig. 6  Anonymous, “Blasige Schichtablösung” (bubble layer dissolution). In Fritsche, Das große Fotofehler-­Buch (1959).

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Introduction

sive production of traces whose invisible sources were often virtually undetectable. These photographic plates once again raised the question of the truth of photography: Did what they rendered even exist outside photography? Or were the traces that emerged from the developing bath products of the photographic apparatus itself? Chapters 3 and 4 examine this dialectic of fact and artifact in two case studies. One concerns “effluviographs,” which, toward the end of the century, were regarded as proof of the existence of an invisible fluid of life; the other, the first photograph of the Shroud of Turin, which was said to reveal more and something other than the cloth itself. In both instances, skeptics objected; in the alleged discoveries of photography they saw photographic artifacts, mere defects and phantoms. Indicatively enough, however, they relied on photographic means to demonstrate that photography suffered from such dysfunctions. At stake in these debates, then, were conflicting interpretations of photography—the system of photographic recording that underlay them both was not in dispute. Photography had long ceased to be exclusively an instrument of research and had become an object of investigation as well; I will seek to show how these two functions interpenetrated and indeed sometimes coincided. Chapters 5 and 6, in conclusion, consider the question of what “seeing” might even still mean in this world between visibility and invisibility, between message and noise. How is one to conceive of “rendering-­visible” if doing so has become the mission of photographic implements that are not themselves capable of “seeing,” even though they allegedly operate in the depths of the invisible realm as the scientist’s “artificial retina”? Does this retina actually accomplish a technical “extension” of natural vision? Or does it engender artifacts of a mere quasi-­vision that obey their own laws and whose compatibility with natural perception is subject to major limitations? Some of the reflections I set forth in the following case studies of photographic examples will, I hope, be applicable to other techniques of rendering-­visible as well. This book, in other words, is not primarily meant as an extended note on the history of photography. It uses photography as an example to contribute to the question of the underpinnings of technologically generated imagery more generally.

1 History and “Prehistory”

1.1 What is not (yet) a picture?

“We know that things and people are always forced to conceal themselves, have to conceal themselves when they begin. What else could they do? They come into being within a set which no longer includes them and, in order not to be rejected, have to pro­ject the characteristics which they retain in common with the set. The essence of a thing never appears at the outset, but in the middle, in the course of its development, when its strength is assured.”1 Deleuze refers to the obscure origins of film in this passage; but the issue of photography’s genesis raises the same question. The difficulties commence once we try to trace a thing that has taken definite form— film or photography—back to its unstable beginnings; to the point, that is to say, when it was not yet the thing it would become “in the course of its development.” Historians have long sought to identify the historical origin of photography, the moment when it was first “discovered” or “invented,” and have come back with a variety of findings. Yet what has been said of the beginnings of the cinema applies no less to the provenance of photography: “in a certain sense, it has too many pasts to have an origin.”2 The following discussion will develop this idea more fully. My objective is not to recount yet again the early history of photography, which is well documented, nor to argue that the existing accounts should be regarded as obsolete. Instead, I want to inquire into the conception of the photographic image these accounts have presupposed, usually without rendering it explicit. Michel Frizot has rightly spoken of the “invention of the invention” of photography: “as though, because there is ‘photography,’ there also must be, somewhere, the ‘invention’ of what did not exist before.”3 So various historians have moved the inception of photography hither and thither along the axis of time, dating it back and forward, amending or correcting or rejecting altogether the genealogies outlined by earlier scholars. Some regard Johann Heinrich Schulze as the inventor of photography (Eder, Schiendl);

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Chapter 1

others identify Nicéphore Niépce (Potonniée, Gernsheim, Baier) or Jacques Louis Mandé Daguerre (Brunel); yet others point to a scattered collective of photographers and “proto-­photographers” who, around 1800, felt a “desire to photograph” (Batchen). They hardly ever ask which definition of the photographic image these stories about its invention and its inventors are based on. We may find a precise portrayal of the situation in an observation by Georges Canguilhem: “Of what is the history of sciences the history? That this question has not been asked is related to the fact that it is generally believed that the answer lies in the very expression ‘history of sciences’ or of a science.”4 The “history of photography” has likewise seemed to be quite simply the history of what came to be established and institutionalized as “photography” over the course of the nineteenth century. This “photography” then serves as the point of departure for a retrospective search for its origin, its inception and invention. Identifying this historical origin inevitably entails another determination: the creation of a “prehistory,” which, though it somehow already belongs to the matter under consideration, is not part of the history of photography “properly speaking” and accordingly does not quite count. But why should the evolution of photography be divided into a “history” and a “prehistory”? Which distinguishing features of photography have had to be displaced into a historical antechamber so that its actual “invention” could be localized in the first decades of the nineteenth century? On July 18, 1689, lightning struck the belfry of the Church of the Holy Savior in the French village of Lagny-­sur-­Marne. The thunderbolt pierced the church’s vaulted ceiling and shot straight down into the missal, which lay open on the altar. The men who came to remove what was left of the ruined book encountered a strange sight: the book was open to the rite of the Eucharist, and the lightning had burned the letters into the altar cloth on which it lay. The words of the Consecration were clearly legible in inverted black letters on the white cloth. To the clerics’ great consternation, however, a gap loomed where the crucial message of the Last Supper—Hoc est corpus meum/This is my body—should have appeared. The lightning had skipped the words of the transubstantiation. Some claimed that the occurrence could not but be a miracle. But then the scholar Pierre Lamy was consulted, and he gave a more mundane explanation. The text of the Eucharist had been written in black letters, except for the climactic Hoc est corpus meum, which was written in red. Lamy knew that the black ink contained four parts essence of turpentine and four parts oil and was therefore extremely greasy. The red ink, by contrast, contained considerably less oil and instead an admixture of vermillion, making it very dry. “Are there two things more dissimilar than these two inks?” Lamy asked. “And where but in this dissimilarity should one seek the reason why the flame of thunder imprinted the black letters but omitted the red ones?”5 Even more interesting for our purpose than the incident itself is the con-

History and “Prehistory”

text in which it is recalled two centuries later. Emmanuel N. Santini, editor of the popular-­science magazine Science en famille, recounts it in his work La photographie à travers les corps opaques par les rayons électriques, cathodiques et de Röntgen. Santini’s treatise is one of the many late-­nineteenth-­century studies to address the potentials and characteristics of a “photography” produced not by natural light—as the etymology of the term, which means “light-­writing,” would seem to stipulate—but by other forms of physical radiation. The causes Santini mentions in the title of his study are electricity, cathode rays, and the X-­rays discovered in 1895, subsuming their image-­ producing effects under the concept of a photography through opaque bodies. At a time when the existence of these invisible rays was no longer in doubt, it made sense to look for additional forms of such inscription. The image of letters imprinted, through the paper and binding of the missal, upon the altar cloth by lightning in 1689 suggests a novel variant of such lightless photography. Based on the official French account—­according to which the first photograph was taken by Nicéphore Niépce in 1822 and the process was patented in 1839—this meant backdating the genesis of photographic images by a century and a half in one fell swoop. The numerous other cases Santini recounts suggest, moreover, that such natural images had always existed. And Santini is not the only one who sees the genealogy of photography coming apart. The astronomer Camille Flammarion, in his book Les caprices de la foudre (1905), addresses the “images produced by lightning,” adding a whole series of events similar to the incident at Lagny: lightning “tattoos” the letters DD, the metal monogram on a purse, through the owner’s clothes into his thigh; it shreds the pants and shoes of a day laborer caught in a thunderstorm in an open field, and outlines the “picture of a pine” on his skin.6 This last instance goes beyond the shadow-­images of a few letters on an object in immediate physical contact with the receptive surface: a virtual image of the landscape has allegedly been transferred to the victim’s skin and fixed there. Flammarion remains vague on whether he credits the reports he has compiled, many of which must strike today’s reader as fantastic. Yet he treats the effect they describe as a physical fact whose cause must be sought in a phenomenon that requires further study: “ceraunic rays emitted by lightning that produce correct or laterally reversed, blurry or clear photographic pictures of proximate or distant objects on human skin, animal hides, or plants.”7 To describe the “caprices” of lightning, Flammarion relies on the same explanatory model Santini used before him: lightning “photographs”; the pictures it engenders are “reproductions”; the victim’s skin serves as a “sensitive photographic plate” in this natural imaging process.8 The comparison of skin to a photographic plate locates the functional principle of a familiar pictorial medium in a prehistory that did not yet know this technique at all. Human skin or animal hides, in these authors’ ac-

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Chapter 1

counts, function “in lieu of ” a sensitized glass plate; the lightning at Lagny serves “in the capacity of ” the photochemically active light used two hundred years later to produce photographic images. And yet the comparison of the “ceraunic” imprint to the photographic image is more than an exchangeable metaphor. The interpretation of the lightning image as light-­ writing reveals a minimal definition of photography: “a body engraves its likeness on another body.”9 This likeness may be engendered in immediate physical contact or from a distance. Its medium is the thunderbolt; but most importantly, the inscription happens naturally, which is to say, without human involvement: it is “spontaneous” (spontané). If lightning “photographs,” if the photographic image of a page of a book appeared on an altar cloth in 1689, then the history of photography is as old as lightning itself: before photography properly speaking, there was a photographic process, a photography without camera, lenses, or chemically prepared surfaces. This “photography” could have laid claim to the name long before the inventors of the new medium adopted it for their art in the early nineteenth century. Light-­writing, in this perspective, always existed; invented by no one, it is an infinite series of “spontaneous images”10 without a clearly datable origin. In tracing photography’s roots back into the seventeenth century, Flammarion and Santini outline a genealogy very different from the one favored around the same time by their countrymen Alphonse Davanne and Maurice Bucquet. Looking back at the photography section of the 1900 Paris world’s fair, the Exposition Universelle, Davanne and Bucquet posit a definition: “The general term photography designates all processes that allow us to obtain the intended and durable image of a real object by virtue of the effects of rays visible or invisible to the eye.”11 This definition does not limit photography to imprints caused by visible light, acknowledging the pictorial effects of “invisible rays” (X-­rays, radioactivity, electricity). Still, Davanne and Bucquet’s “retrospective museum of photography” knows only the “intended image” (l’image voulue). The genesis of images that appear “spontaneously” on plants and fabrics, on hides and skin, does not indicate a clear intention (unless one reads them as covert messages from higher beings, as the clerics at Lagny did), and so they are excluded from the realm of photographic phenomena. Davanne and Bucquet were perfectly aware of the contingent quality of their definition: “It would be difficult to determine the date of [photography’s] origin if one sought to take into account all remarks or studies about the changes in coloration effected by light—be it that such remarks or studies did not in fact aim to capture visible objects, be it that they did not achieve that aim. One ought to begin by defining what is meant by photography, and we propose the following definition.”12 The difficulty recognized in this preface to their definition strikes at the core of any attempt to historicize photography. For the question of the inception of photography cannot be resolved by simply drawing up a chronicle of events or settling on an

History and “Prehistory”

exact date. It points to the far more fundamental problem of what should properly be regarded as photography and what should not (yet). By alluding to “remarks and studies” they choose not to address, Davanne and Bucquet suggest another, already conceivable history of photography: a long history that would integrate widely scattered knowledge about changes in coloration effected by light, an archaeology of discolorations, instances of darkening, and other chance formations whose existence had not infrequently been observed, interpreted, and recorded long before the “inventors” of photography came up with the idea and the means for turning such photochemical effects into a durable and intended image. Davanne and Bucquet name two categories of “remarks and studies” they will exclude from their project of a history of photography: those that “did not in fact aim to capture visible objects” and those that “did not achieve that aim.” The former include the numerous observations, going back as far as the early seventeenth century, of silver salts darkening when exposed to light, which were widely known to scholars around 1900. In Davanne and Bucquet’s perspective, these observations do not come under consideration as events in the history of photography because they were not recorded with the intention of one day using the effect described to produce faithful likenesses. Also irrelevant were the notes of scholars who intended to use light-­sensitive substances to create recognizable images, but whose experiments failed due to the intractability of the material. All of these “experimenters,” Davanne had remarked as early as 1879 in a lecture on “photography, its origins, and its applications,” “did not even come close to rendering a likeness of nature.”13 If Flammarion and Santini were willing to register even an unintended imprint on an altar cloth as an event in the history of photography, the corpus of photographic images Davanne and Bucquet demarcated around the same time was far more narrowly defined. In their view, photography was a controlled and deliberate technique whose result must necessarily represent “a view of nature” (une vue de la nature). In one way or another, all historians of photography have had to align their accounts of the new medium’s beginnings with some such definition, as though their retrospection found the contours of photography’s provenance manifestly etched in the irrefutable figure of what “photography” had eventually become. Despite the very different perspectives, motives, and interests shaping the writers’ views, a basic narrative pattern ultimately came to prevail. In his 1938 book Die Photographie in Kultur und Technik, Erich Stenger put it as follows: “Photography in our sense came into existence only when the optical image of the camera obscura (and not the shadow-­image of some translucent or sharply edged object) could be permanently recorded on a light-­sensitive layer.”14 Photography, that is to say, grew out of two strands of historical development: an optical one (the history of the camera obscura) and a photochemical one (the history of experiments concerning the light-­sensitivity of silver salts). Depending on how far

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afield a historian was willing to venture in tracing the optical prehistory of photography, he might start with Aristotle (who had observed the image of the sun reduced to a crescent as it fell through the leaf canopy of a plane tree during a partial solar eclipse) or, nineteen hundred years later, with Giovanni Battista della Porta (who in his 1558 Magia naturalis recommended that artists use the image projected by the camera obscura as a drawing aid). Via the mobile and miniaturized box cameras of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this strand finally led to the cameras with lenses and light-­ sensitive pictorial media used by Nicéphore Niépce, Jacques Louis Mandé Daguerre, and William Henry Fox Talbot in the 1820s and 1830s to create their first durable photographs. The second strand, the exploration of light and its photochemical properties, could be traced to classical antiquity, with the “ancients’ intimations of the effects of light” (Eder); to 1614, when the Italian doctor Angelo Sala studied the darkening of silver nitrate powder in sunlight; or to a century later, when the German physician Johann Heinrich Schulze, using a solution of silver salt as a light-­sensitive ground, applied stencils to make inscriptions emerge as an effect of sunlight. This strand continued with Jean Senebier, who, around 1780, directed discrete parts of the visible spectrum onto horn silver and noted the different degrees of darkening they caused; Johann Wilhelm Ritter, who discovered ultraviolet rays using a silver chloride–­soaked strip of paper; and Thomas Wedgwood and Humphry Davy, who made the silhouettes of leaves and insects’ wings appear on leather and paper. At long last, the two strands merged in the studies and laboratories of Niépce, Daguerre, and Talbot.15 This story has been told many times. Indeed, the shifting motivations, perspectives, and methodological premises informing these “histories of photography” have themselves been historicized and subjected to critical scrutiny.16 “Any history of photography,” Mathias Bickenbach rightly argues, “is faced with an unruly multiplicity of origins, precursors, and inventors. The genealogy of the unity of the medium of photography is fractured in several places. It does not form a single—straight or meandering—line of development.”17 In asserting the prevalence of a basic narrative pattern, I do not wish to suggest that these many authors have agreed on the historical origins of photography. Nor is it my intention to support one or another side in this historiographers’ quest, or to move the “hour of photography’s birth” (Stenger) back or forward along the axis of time by a few decades. I am instead interested in the more fundamental question of what the scheme of a photographic prehistory and the establishment of “antecedent stages” are in fact about. Why does the history of photography need a prehistory, something alien yet pertinent to its substance? And how does the deficient, unrealized photography of this prehistoric time relate to the medium’s subsequent, fully valid history, the history of photography properly speaking? No matter whether the authors of the surveys I have mentioned fixed the date of their object’s first emergence a few centuries earlier or later,

History and “Prehistory”

Fig. 7  Nicéphore Nièpce, view of Saint-­Loup-­de-­Varennes, 1822.

most adhered to the basic pattern suggested above, according to which the history of photography commenced only when the old knowledge of the light-­sensitivity of silver salts was successfully combined with the functional principle of the camera obscura. It was only then, as Stenger put it, that “photography in our sense came into existence.”18 Walter Benjamin similarly thought that the “fog that surrounds the beginnings of photography” was not indeed so impenetrable in this regard: the “hour of invention” could be dated, and its arrival “was sensed by more than one—by men who strove independently for the same objective: to capture the images in the camera obscura, which had been known at least since Leonardo’s time [. . .] After about five years of effort, both Niépce and Daguerre simultaneously succeeded in doing this.”19 A few years earlier, Georges Potonniée, in his “history of the discovery of photography,” had offered the same account, and half a century later, Wolfgang Baier and Helmut Gernsheim similarly describe Niépce’s famous picture of the view from the study at his Maison du Gras at Saint-­Loup-­de-­Varennes (fig. 7) as “the first photograph ever taken.”20 Differences in the details notwithstanding, these accounts converge in a definition of photography that by and large pares the contingent field of pos-

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sible criteria down to three qualities that are supposedly indispensable for a photograph in the proper sense of the word. First, a photographic image has to be the product of a purposeful technique; it must not have come into existence “spontaneously,” as an effect of a natural process. Second, it may be permitted across the threshold separating the “prehistory” of photography from its “history” only if the photographer succeeded in fixing it permanently, which is to say, for the eyes of posterity. And third, it must render nature in a recognizable image; an artifact that preserves nonrepresentational traces or mere patterns generated by chemical-­physical effects is not fully acceptable as a photograph. It is instructive to take a closer look at the contingent choices implicit in this threefold definition and to ask which recordings, images, and artifacts were thus excluded from the history of photography, or at least shunted off to its margins. 1.2 The exclusion of unintended images

In 1737 the members of the Paris Académie des sciences received a report concerning various effects of sunlight. “Among the examples I might adduce,” a Captain Dufay wrote, “I will mention only a curtain made of crimson-­stained taffeta that had hung before a window for a long time; all parts that had directly faced the windowpanes were utterly discolored, whereas those shielded by the frame showed much less fading.”21 It is easy to imagine what this curtain looked like: a rectangular piece of cloth that showed the window’s framework as a crimson figure on a pale ground. This image was not the result of any recognizable design; still, Dufay’s window had produced what was arguably a durable light-­image. One could have taken the faded cloth off the curtain rail, moved it to a different location, and presented it there as a—more or less exact—picture of the window. Windows would play a significant part in the history of photography, not only as descriptive models and in variations on Alberti’s conception of the picture as a window, but also as a recurrent compositional element. In such pictures, the window may serve as the invisible frame, as in Niépce’s view from his study (fig. 7), or become a visible motif in its own right, as in the famous latticed window Talbot captured in the south wing of his country estate, Lacock Abbey, in August 1835 (fig. 8).22 The potential for pictorial self-­reflection implicit in the window motif, as I mentioned in the introduction, was certainly in play in these early shots. Given the comparatively low photosensitivity of the chemicals, however, another crucial factor was probably that windows were usually where the most light filtered into indoor spaces. The same fact explains the image that appeared on Dufay’s curtain. There are no doubt decisive dissimilarities between the early photographs and Dufay’s light-­image. Niépce and Talbot used sunlight to darken light-­sensitive chemicals, whereas in the phenomenon described by Dufay, its effect was the opposite: it bleached the curtain. On the other hand, the light-­image in the fabric already conformed to the fundamental principle of

History and “Prehistory”

Fig. 8  William Henry Fox Talbot, Latticed Window, 1835.

the photograms for which Talbot would later be identified as one of the inventors of photography (fig. 9). In both instances, it was not the image projected by a camera obscura that was fixed on the light-­sensitive surface but the outlines of objects themselves. And as in Talbot’s photograms, the motif appeared on Dufay’s curtain as a negative image, delineated where its silhouette had shielded the medium from the influence of light: the red cross of the window muntins on otherwise sun-­bleached fabric; a pattern of white lace on paper darkened by light. My point is not to unearth the unintended figure on an early-­eighteenth-­ century curtain as a forgotten incunabulum of the history of photography or to honor its discoverer as an unsung pioneer of photography. But the example clearly illustrates where one of the boundaries between the history

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Fig. 9  William Henry Fox Talbot, photogram, around 1840.

and prehistory of photography was drawn. The light-­drawing in the fabric had two of the qualities that would later be required by the conventional definition of photography. First, although it had not been fixed in the true sense of the word, the imprint was somewhat durable; and second, it possessed a mimetic quality, if a very limited one: the figure on the curtain was distinctly recognizable as the image of a window. Yet no historian of photography has considered Dufay (or another observer of the same phenomenon) a contender for the title of discoverer of the technique, a fact that cannot be explained simply by arguing that his report had faded into obscu-

History and “Prehistory”

rity. Eder’s history of photography gives an account of the “effects of light on colored fabrics” and mentions Dufay’s observation in an excursus “on the contemporary level of knowledge about the impermanence of colors.”23 If Dufay was nonetheless not counted among the discoverers of photography, it was because he had not deliberately produced the phenomenon in question. The cross-­shaped silhouette of the window framework was not, to come back to Davanne and Bucquet’s term, an “intended image.” Like the “photographic” effects of lightning described by Flammarion and Santini, this light-­drawing had come into existence “spontaneously”—or certainly not as the result of a purposeful recording technique. Dufay had reported to the Académie des sciences about a phenomenon he had encountered, one that had no doubt existed for a long time and in innumerable places but gone unremarked. For a neat example, we may look to a pictorial broadsheet in the Imagerie d’Épinal series in 1880, an illustrated “history of photography” in a sequence of sixteen plates.24 It begins with della Porta’s use of a biconvex lens in the camera obscura, highlights the successes of Niépce and Daguerre, and concludes with homing pigeons carrying film packs and the particular merits of the family portrait. The second plate, which shows the alchemist Georg Fabricius’s observation of the darkening of silver salts, is followed, rather abruptly, by a domestic scene (fig. 10): a woman has approached a window and holds up the patterned fabric of the curtain, a look of dismay on her face; “for the rest,” the annotation remarks, “everything is sensitive to the effects of sunlight: window curtains, which fade to the chagrin of the lady of the house, clothes, fabrics, wallpapers, paper. Silver salt is merely more sensitive than everything else.”25 Unlike their twentieth-­ century successors, Eder and the anonymous graphic artist who created

Fig. 10  Imagerie d’Épinal, 1880.

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the broadsheet are at least willing to list such unintended alterations in ­materials exposed to sunlight under the title of a “history of photography,” although they too would not consider numbering the witnesses to the phenomenon among the “inventors of photography.” Dufay’s, Flammarion’s, and Santini’s reports are by no means anecdotes or marginal phenomena from the dawn of photography. The questions they provoke concern nothing less than the identification of the historical “origin” of photography, and hence also the issue of what should in fact be seen as constituting the essence of photography, of what must—or must not (yet)—be regarded as a photographic image. Eder’s Geschichte der Photographie illustrates the theoretical challenge that lurks at this point with particular clarity. In 1888 Eder had founded the Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt für Photographie und Reproduktionsverfahren, or Training and Research Institute for Photography and Reproduction Techniques, in Vienna; in 1925 he established photochemistry as a discipline at the Technical University of Vienna. His history was published as the first volume of the sixteen-­volume Ausführliches Handbuch der Photographie, or “comprehensive handbook of photography.” His account of the origins of photography begins with light: “Light, the reason why everything created is visible, this most beneficent shared patrimony of all creatures in the universe, is designed for too important a purpose in nature for the most ingenious nation of the ancient world to have failed to examine its properties more closely.”26 As the “reason why everything created is visible,” light did not owe its existence to a causal agent, if we set aside theological interpretations. Like the thunderbolts described by Flammarion and Santini, it had existed since time immemorial and done its work regardless of the presence of human observers. So if Eder lets his history of photography begin with the properties of natural light, the question that arises, quite literally with the first sentence, is how this natural basis of photography is to be reconciled with the narrative about the inventors and inventions that follows in the next chapters. Perhaps more than any other writer, Eder portrays the history of photography as a story of inexorable progress driven forward by “pioneers” and “brilliant men from the most diverse professional backgrounds.”27 And yet he paints a detailed picture of the centuries-­long prehistory during which the photographic image in the sense defined above did not even exist. His historical account notes the significance of sunlight for the “flourishing of plants,” as well as the “light-­sensitive secretion of the purple dye murex,” the “effects of light on certain paints used by artists,” and the discoloration of fir, lime, and oak woods exposed to sunlight.28 Finally, he turns his attention to the scattered notes and treatises that, starting in the early seventeenth century, mention the darkening of silver salts under the influence of sunlight. In Eder’s account, too, these phenomena are inseparably associated with the names of the scientists who observed and interpreted them: Angelo Sala, who reported in 1614 that silver nitrate powder turned dark under the light of the sun; Robert Boyle, who in 1663 described the darkening of sil-

History and “Prehistory”

ver chloride when exposed to air; Wilhelm Homberg, a German lawyer, who in 1694 stained an ox bone with a solution of silver nitrate, let the sunlight turn it black, and then abraded parts of the darkened layer to reveal white sections of bone, creating a marbled black-­and-­white pattern.29 And yet to Eder’s mind, none of these scholars were inventors of photography. They observed, brought about, or remarked on phenomena but failed to appreciate their potential for an imaging technique. Eder identifies the inception of photography properly speaking with precision. Having devoted a hundred pages to the chemical effects of light, he turns, on page 101, to the “invention of photography by Johann Heinrich Schulze of Altdorf in 1727.”30 The choice of this date unmistakably highlights the contingencies surrounding the photography historian’s determination of the beginning. Eder places the “invention of photography,” its “true discovery,” roughly a century earlier than, say, the abovementioned accounts by Potonniée and Gernsheim.31 In 1727 Schulze, a German professor of anatomy looking for a way to extract phosphorus, had produced a mixture of clay and nitric acid. He noticed that the solution darkened when exposed to sunlight. After initially believing that clay and nitrates were responsible for this effect, he determined that an accidental admixture of silver had caused the darkening. He then raised the silver content of his solution, and as expected, the darkening appeared more rapidly and was more intense. Schulze manufactured little stencils spelling individual words and sentences, and wrapped them around the vessel containing the silver solution; when he removed them a little later, the letters, inscribed by the sun’s rays, could be read on the lighter ground of the solution. With this light-­ writing in a silver solution, Eder argues, Schulze had accomplished the “fabrication of the earliest photograph.”32 We know, of course, that none of these “earliest photographs” survived. Schulze did not have a fixative, so he was unable to stop the ongoing process of darkening. Once he had removed the protective stencils, the light striking the solution gradually stained it a uniform black: Schulze’s messages in the silver salt vanished forever without a trace. This has led Gernsheim to argue that the German professor had no legitimate claim to the title of inventor of photography: Joseph Maria Eder [. . .] called Schulze the “inventor of photography,” a view he continued to assert in the various editions of his “history of photography” despite numerous objections. If we translate “photography” verbatim, as “light-­writing,” Eder was right, of course, since Schulze “wrote” words and sentences on the bottle. But the term “photography” as it was introduced in 1839 was used to designate more narrowly the production of light-­resistant images through exposure to light.33

What Gernsheim here understands as photography “more narrowly” conceived is equivalent to the abovementioned definition. By that standard, it

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was not enough that Schulze had achieved his results as the consequence of purposeful experimentation. Gernsheim refuses to acknowledge the letters in the silver salt as a photographic image, although he does not give a more precise indication of what he believes should be regarded as an “image” properly speaking. The fact that Schulze’s light-­writings were legible as strings of letters does not negate the fact that this was not merely writing but also the photochemical depiction of an object. If the photograms Talbot produced by placing feathers, leaves, or lace on the photosensitive surface (fig. 9) are “light-­images”—an assessment Gernsheim does not dispute— it is hard to see why Schulze’s photochemical recordings should be denied the same status. The more substantial reason for Gernsheim’s objection to Eder’s history, however, is their lack of light-­resistance. Being impermanent, it seems, they were not true products of photography. Yet this stipulation is likewise far from self-­evident. Schiendl, for example, in 1891 describes Schulze’s “silhouettes on a light-­sensitive silver salt” as “light-­images,” adding, for precision’s sake, “although they were perishable.”34 Gernsheim’s far stricter interpretation raises the question of whether we should consider as photographs only such pictures as remain permanently manifest. Without a doubt, photography would not have had much of a future without the discovery of a suitable fixative. A recording technique whose products are bound to vanish forever after mere minutes could hardly have succeeded as a new imaging technique. But does it necessarily follow that the photochemical phenomena that antedated the manufacture of light-­ resistant images were not photographs? By the same logic, the Englishmen Thomas Wedgwood and Humphry Davy have been displaced into the inglorious prehistory of photography: “Indeed Wedgwood’s failure to make his images permanent is still sometimes taken as reason enough to exclude his and Humphry Davy’s names from the list of photography’s inventors.”35 In their “Account of a Method of Copying Paintings upon Glass, and Making Profiles by the Agency of Light upon the Nitrate of Silver” (1802), Wedgwood and Davy reported their experiments trying to capture the images in the camera obscura by photochemical means. So an attempt to combine light-­sensitive silver salts with camera images—according to the authors quoted above, the inception of photography—had already taken place in England in 1802. But it came to nothing: the images, Wedgwood and Davy noted, were “too faint to produce in any moderate time an effect upon the nitrate of silver.”36 By contrast, the two successfully produced contact prints by placing objects on the prepared medium; they used white leather impregnated with silver nitrate, which responded with greater sensitivity due to the gallic acid contained in the tannin. The method they devised, they wrote, “will be useful for making delineations of all such objects as are possessed of a texture partly opaque and partly transparent. The woody fibres of leaves and the wings of insects, may be pretty accurately represented by means of it; and in this case, it is only necessary to cause the direct solar light to pass

History and “Prehistory”

through them and to receive the shadows upon prepared leather.”37 Wedgwood and Davy also succeeded in copying “the images of small objects, produced by means of the solar microscope, [. . .] without difficulty on prepared paper.”38 If later historians of photography agreed with Vogel, who wrote as early as 1874 that this was not the invention but merely “the first step toward the invention of photography,”39 it was once again due to the lack of light-­ resistance the results showed. Wedgwood and Davy’s unstable images have not survived. “The exposure” to daylight “should be only for a few minutes,” they write, suggesting that the pictures be regarded by the light of candles instead.40 That these delicate artifacts existed for no more than a few hours or days in the early years of the nineteenth century has led historians to conclude that they must be excluded from the history of photography. Even Michel Frizot, in his New History of Photography, calls them “most decisive (though ultimately unsuccessful) pre-­photographic experiments.”41 Again, the arbitrariness of such definitional choices is unmistakable. If they seem self-­evident, that is not because their criteria for the “origin” of photography are incontrovertible but because they have prevailed historically as a plausible descriptive model. Other choices would have been perfectly conceivable. One might easily have waived one of the three abovementioned criteria (that the image must be light-­resistant, representational, and intended). Conversely, one might have added criteria: for instance, one might have declared the reproducibility of the photograph an essential feature, something that, as we know, was achieved not in France but in England, with Talbot’s negative-­positive process. By consequence, Daguerre and Niépce would have been not “inventors” but—like Schulze, Wedgwood, and Davy—mere “precursors” of photography, brilliant men who had come as far as the production of light-­resistant pictures but then failed to accomplish the crucial step toward reproducible images.42 I am not here advocating such a hitherto unwritten genealogy of photography as an alternative and superior descriptive model. My point is neither to remove the appearance of the first pictures “properly speaking” to a different historical scene, nor to champion new and obscure candidates for the honor of the inventor of photography. What interest me are the fundamental theoretical choices associated with the quest to identify the historical origin and invention of photography. An invention, Jacques Derrida notes, marks “a site of creation, of art [. . .] It is about finding, making come, making come-­to what has not yet been there.”43 Once this innovation arrives, however, the question also surfaces whence it became possible so unexpectedly. “If this invention has been rendered possible by the structure of a field (at a certain moment, a certain architectural invention is rendered possible because the social state of affairs, the state of the history of architecture, of architectural theory rendered it possible), that invention is not an invention. Precisely because it is possible. It merely implements or explicates a possibility, a potentiality that is already present.”44 The discussion of the inven-

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tion of photography, too, is entangled in this paradox. Once the inception of photography had been identified, there were a history and a prehistory, an invention and its imperfect “precursor stages.”45 In this antechamber of photography, scholars warehoused what was not supposed to be part of its history properly speaking and yet, in complicated ways, already belonged to it. Eder’s Geschichte der Photographie unmistakably reveals the genealogical dilemma of this scheme. The narrative begins centuries before the “inception” of photography; the first hundred pages recite a series of photographic artifacts, traces, and discolorations that, the author argues, must nonetheless be excluded from the history of photography because they neither resulted in adequately representational pictures nor constituted an “invention” in the true sense of the word. Eder—like the authors of subsequent overviews of the history of photography—stumbled over the paradoxical existence of chemical-­physical phenomena that were already “photographic” and yet unacceptable as “photography” based on the criteria he had adopted. Like all narratives about origins, the story of the invention of photography hits a wall at this point: on the one hand, photography supposedly came into existence by virtue of the deliberate and historically defined act of an inventor; on the other hand, that act presupposed a series of events and preconditions that defy integration into this origin narrative and therefore remain stuck “on the threshold of invention.”46 That is why those who assigned the invention of photography to a specific historical locus were often puzzled that it had not been invented much earlier. Considered in the perspective of the unambiguously defined origin, the “prehistory” appeared in retrospect as a time rife with possibility, during which many protagonists were close to inventing photography but failed to take the decisive action. So Eder’s narrative of the “evolution of photography” went hand in hand with his sincere astonishment at the “peculiar developmental history of the earliest beginnings, which proceeded by leaps and bounds.”47 Once the origin had been determined, everything that preceded it appeared in an odd light: it seemed that a great distance had remained to be covered before photography could be invented (an arduous and winding path that, looking back, one could now survey), while at the same time it seemed that no more than “a single step” had forever separated the precursors, groping in the dark, from the nearby light of invention.48 The teleological view misses photography even where it allegedly could not have existed: in the “prehistory” that paradoxically already held the seeds of photography in hand but then failed to invent it. 1.3 Photography: “invention” or “discovery”?

So is photography in fact an invention at all? Or was what happened in the first decades of the nineteenth century merely its discovery? In other words,

History and “Prehistory”

are we looking at the conception of a technique that had not existed? Or at the act of discovering, of finding, a natural process that had always been there, in the long history of natural discolorations, instances of darkening, and photochemical traces? Should “the identity of photography,” as Geoffrey Batchen frames the question, “be confined to the realm of nature or to that of culture”?49 To put it in such starkly contrasting terms is obviously to ask the question the wrong way. Batchen accordingly argues that the relation between “culture” and “nature” should be thought as a “play of differences” (though his study soon puts a stop to such play in favor of photography’s cultural and social components).50 Evidently, photography cannot be entirely subsumed under either side—nature or culture, discovery or invention. The accounts of early photography mentioned above avoid this problem from the outset. They do not even attempt to distinguish “discovery” from “invention,” using the two terms as though they were synonyms.51 In this manner, the historians reproduce the indecision that is already a pervasive feature of early photographers’ own descriptions of their work. Talbot, for example, operates with two static conceptual frameworks. On the one hand, he calls photography “a little bit of magic realised:—of natural magic.”52 On the other hand, he sees himself as the author of this process: having developed a technique for the production of images in a series of targeted experiments, he believes he has the right to obtain a patent on it. In a letter dated January 29, 1839, Talbot announces to the three experts appointed by the Académie des sciences to review the daguerreotype—François Arago, Jean-­ Baptiste Biot, and Alexander von Humboldt—that he intends to claim priority over Daguerre’s invention. So Talbot’s account paints a highly contradictory scene: he litigates in order to legally tie a process to his name while claiming that the same process is based on natural magic. In his introductory remarks to The Pencil of Nature, he writes that he has been “so fortunate as to discover [. . .] the principles and practice of Photogenic Drawing”; a few pages on, the very first sentence of his “Brief Historical Sketch of the Invention of the Art” promises to lay out “the circumstances which preceded and led to the discovery of it.”53 But the term “discovery” is no less questionable than the narrative about a succession of great inventors. As “part of a positivistic lexicon,”54 it paints the picture of a science that simply finds its objects in an ahistorical world. In this view, the phenomena have always been out there, and researchers merely expose their presence. Discussing the example of Louis Pasteur’s “discovery-­invention-­construction of lactic yeast,” Bruno Latour explicates this peculiar tension between our ability to date a discovery and the apparent timelessness of what is discovered. When Pasteur “discovered” lactic yeast, in 1857, it had “always already been there, from Neolithic times in the gourds of homo sapiens.”55 In contrast with the inventor, that is to say, the discoverer simply comes upon the scene and reveals what has been there all along and would also have been there had he not appeared. The re-

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searcher’s object, then, would seem to be representable only in one of two contrary modes: it belongs either to the domain of human invention, whose history is easy to write, or to the domain of nature, of ahistorical objects, which have always been there and may at most be discovered by man.56 Latour proposes to resolve the dilemma by historicizing both sides—not just the local context, motives, and actions of the human agents, but also the activity of the objects involved. “Action is simply not a property of humans but of an association of actants.”57 This proposal grows out of Latour’s attempt to situate his descriptions in a space “before we can clearly delineate subjects and objects.” An event such as the discovery of lactic yeast takes place in a “collective of humans and non-­humans.”58 The agents in this collective do not face each other as monadic subjects and objects but interact in a shared play of relations: “The more activity there is from one, the more activity there is from the other.”59 Latour emphasizes that this thinking in relations does not aim at “a sort of golden mean or dialectic between objectivity and subjectivity.” Rather, it encircles “the position left empty by the dichotomy between the object and the subject or the external world and the mind,” “the blind spot in which society and matter exchange properties.”60 Without immersing ourselves too deeply in the epistemological premises and problems of these reflections, we can see how Latour’s theory of hybrid authorship is in some ways applicable to the history and theory of photography. Photography, in this view, neither came into existence unexpectedly, through human invention, nor had always already existed, latent, in nature, waiting to be discovered. There would have been no photography without the construction of mobile cameras and high-­aperture lenses, without successful experimentation and hard thinking, without the sharing of notes, exchanges of letters, and personal encounters; nor could photography have come into being without the wavelengths of light and the chemical reactions of salts that could not be invented. So Schulze, Wedgwood, Niépce, Daguerre, Talbot, et al. were involved in making it possible, as were mercury vapors, lavender oil, and gallic acid, as well as the lighting conditions in Chalon-­sur-­Saône in the spring of 1822. Parts of this historical amalgam do not appear until the beginning of the nineteenth century, while others had been present for a long time. Drawing up an exhaustive list of factors of significance for the genesis of photography is as impossible as it would be pointless. We would suffer the fate of the novelistic hero in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, whose account of his life never even reaches his adolescence because he believes he must first particularize the circumstances of his conception, the midwife’s background, and so on. So we should not hold it against the existing histories of the genesis of photography that they fail to achieve such completeness or that they draw up their subject’s genealogy from specific points of view. But we would do well to remember that their quest for a datable inception entailed a determination of what photography is that is neither self-­evident nor inevitable. The quest for

History and “Prehistory”

Fig. 11  William Henry Fox Talbot, view of Lacock Abbey, 1840.

the origin is an “attempt to capture the exact essence of things, their purest possibilities, and their carefully protected identities.”61 Photography, however, is not a thing that became present in 1727, 1822, or 1839, after dwelling for some centuries in the shadowy barrens of “prehistory.” The history of photography as a history of intended, durable, and mimetic images exacted a price: unintended, ephemeral, and “nonrepresentational” visual recordings had to be stowed away in a paradoxical antechamber, outside photography proper. If we choose, by contrast, not to detach the history of photography from its putative prelude, if we allow it to begin before its “invention,” then the legendary view from the window (fig. 7) is part of it, but so are, before it, the countless discolorations and traces of light, the evanescent pictures produced by Wedgwood and Davy, and the photochemical hazes of Talbot’s early experiments (fig. 11). The decision to describe not only the intended and durable representations but also these early traces as photographic “images” goes hand in hand with an “inflection of the word that speaks neither of imagery, nor of reproduction, nor of iconography, nor even of ‘figurative’ appearance. It would be to return to a questioning of the image that does not yet presuppose the ‘figured figure’—by which I mean the figure fixed as representational object.”62 Considered from this perspective, the genesis of photography appears not only as the success story of photographic representations, but equally as a long history of instances of discoloration, bleaching, and destruction. As Eder’s treatment illustrates, this knowledge seems to have been much more

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present in the decades around 1900 than in later accounts of the history of photography, which usually cleave to a teleological pattern. For example, the photochemist Gaston-­Henri Niewenglowski, editor of the journal La Photographie, notes that “light can cause a remarkable number of reactions; some of them have been known for a very long time, such as the destruction of many colored materials effected by prolonged exposure to sunlight.”63 Light, that is to say, not only has properties that allow it to play a productive part in imaging; it is also a factor from whose effects substances and materials needed to be protected. Vitruvius already reported the darkening and “damage” suffered by cinnabar under the influence of sunlight and even moonlight in the ninth book of his treatise De Architectura.64 The “destructive effects of light on certain paints used by artists” have been described in numerous treatises on painting.65 What would later become “the foundation of a new scientific media technology,” Friedrich Kittler writes, initially and for centuries appeared as a “mistake or offence.”66 That is not to say that the photography of the nineteenth century was already “present” in these processes of discoloration, darkening, and bleaching. The unintended light-­drawing on an eighteenth-­century curtain is not a latent prefiguration of a future photograph. To see it as one would be to take the teleological approach that dominates many works on the history of photography to a boundless extreme. But as Latour’s conception of hybrid actors would suggest, photography is constituted in the interplay between conscious and unconscious, between cultural and natural factors, and some of these factors existed long before the nineteenth century and without genealogical or causal ties to their later application.

2 Visibility by Destruction/ Disturbance Incidents of Photography

2.1 Losing the picture I: Effacement (fading, yellowing, degradation)

So far I have discussed the historical conditions of the genesis of photography and the fragility and impermanence of the earliest images. Yet even after pictures were first successfully fixed, their immutability and durability was far from guaranteed. Daguerre’s views of the Boulevard du Temple, for example (fig. 12), incunables of the history of photography, reproduced in countless publications, have long ceased to exist. Iconographic ruins, they sit in the storage unit of the Stadtmuseum in Munich, “discolored beyond recognition by external influences,” as the municipal museum’s director noted in a 1974 essay dedicated to “the first time a human being appeared in a photograph.”1 He referred to one of the three daguerreotypes in Munich, the one that shows two men by the side of the boulevard—a bootblack and his client standing before him, who had moved relatively little during the long exposure, unlike the hurried passersby and vehicles that animate the scene. It is primarily to these motionless figures on the otherwise deserted boulevard that the picture owes its fame. In describing it, however, the museum director had to work with an extant reproduction of the early photograph. The original copper plate—daguerreotypes, after all, were unique copies—no longer showed any human beings or objects but only a nonrepresentational pattern of iridescent glistening silver sulfide deposits (fig. 13).2 So Daguerre’s most famous photograph haunts the standard works on the history of photography as a phantom image. The reproductions that ensure its survival there as View of the Boulevard du Temple—“ca. 1838, daguerreotype, Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich”3—obscure the fact that this early view of a boulevard in Paris has long been engulfed by darkness. Similarly, a patron of the New York Public Library who would like to consult one of the few extant copies of Talbot’s Pencil of Nature will learn to her dismay that the precious volume must no longer leave the storage unit in which it is kept. As Carol Armstrong reports, the twenty-­four individual original prints

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Fig. 12  Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, Boulevard du temple, 1838.

on paper that Talbot and his assistants pasted into the book more than a century and a half ago are virtually unrecognizable—“faded almost beyond visibility.”4 The destruction of pictures can occur as a slow and gradual process or can happen suddenly, by the accidental infliction of damage. It may be due to the natural degradation and chemical mutability of the material or be caused by incompetent restoration. So the surviving pictorial inventory of the history of photography stands in for a larger reservoir of effaced and vanishing images. Soon after the introduction of the albumen print in the 1850s—a photographic paper coated with albumen from egg whites, it was supposed to yield a homogeneous and even surface—photographers noticed that the photographs unexpectedly faded and yellowed. Pictures sent to exhibitions started disappearing even before the presentation was over. In 1856 Victor Regnault, president of the Société française de photographie, summed up the situation as follows: “Unfortunately, the experience of the first period of photography to which we have been witnesses is anything but reassuring in this regard: many of the prints that have been in existence for no more than a few years are now extremely disfigured, and some of them have been altogether effaced.”5 In England, a “Fading Committee” was established in 1855 with the purpose of stopping the vanishing

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of the images. In Paris, the archaeologist de Luynes offered a reward of ten thousand francs for the development of a process that would guarantee the permanent durability of photographs. Alphonse Davanne and Jules Girard identifie sulfur as the cause of the yellowing observed in the albumen prints and were able to contain the effect by staining the paper with gold salts; still, in 1895, a full four decades later, Hermann Vogel writes, “I now hear more complaints about yellowing prints than I have in the past thirty years.”6 So the photographer, far from being concerned solely with the successful production of a stable image, also needed to take the possibility of its subsequent degradation into account. The following chapters will address such disfigurements only in passing. I am less interested in the problems of storage and preservation of undamaged images or the possible threat of destruction by influences in play after their production. Instead, I will focus on the “disturbances,” “spurious phenomena,” and “enemies of the photographer” that were already at work during a picture’s genesis and interfered with the process of emergence into visibility.

Fig. 13  Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, Boulevard du temple (present condition).

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2.2 Losing the picture II: The accident is original

“Initially,” we read in the late-­nineteenth-­century handbook Les insuccès dans les divers procédés photographiques, “the operation seems to go as desired; the negative emerges from the developing bath pure and radiant; but during the subsequent development process, the plate takes on a homogeneous complexion, a discoloration spreads across the entire surface, and the picture disappears almost completely. A haze darkens or veils it; in other instances, the gelatin detaches from the medium and the negative is lost.”7 The clear-­cut distinction between these two forms of destruction—gradual degradation and subsequent damage on the one hand, the loss of the picture at the moment of its production on the other—is ultimately untenable. The photograph by Kertész mentioned on the first page of this book, for example (fig. 1), may be regarded as an image that existed as an intact view for decades before an unfortunate incident suddenly ruined it. In that sense, we may say that the physical impact that disfigured it was unconnected to its production. Then again, the fragility of this sort of photograph is already implicit in the use of the glass medium. “Accident,” Paul Valéry writes, “is the appearance of a quality in a thing that had been masked by another of its qualities [. . .] This vase serves me, but on the other hand it is a glass exposed to a world in which things get struck.”8 Even if no actual destruction ensues, its possibility is an intrinsic property of the picture. And even if the abovementioned fading and vanishing of an image did not commence until days, weeks, or years after its successful manufacture, the potential for these processes was implicit in the material. Paul Virilio has called this the “original accident” that accompanies every technology from its inception. “We are forced to expand the question of technology not only to the substance produced, but also to the accident produced [. . .] Every technology produces, provokes, programs a specific accident.”9 The possible destruction is not an event that suddenly befalls a technological product—or a technique of depiction—from somewhere else. The accident is original. To manufacture an apparatus and set it in operation is also to produce “a specific failure, or even a partial or total destruction.”10 By consequence, it is virtually impossible to maintain a systematic distinction between internal and external, immediate and subsequent, agents of destruction. The history of photographic representations cannot be detached from the corresponding history of contaminations, disturbances, and destructions. Johann Heinrich Schulze already experienced this “old production mode/destruction mode dialectic”11 when he experimented with the photosensitivity of silver in 1727 and inscribed words and sentences on the sensitive silver solution with his templates (see section 1.2). Since Schulze had no fixative, light destroyed his samples. When he removed the templates from the containers, the black photogram was visible on a light ground, but then the entire silver solution gradually blackened and the writing was lost

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in homogeneous darkness. “Darkened by the sun” is how Schulze describes this effect of encroaching invisibility: “Fair judges will forgive me the presumptuous title. For I have called this experiment ‘scotophorus’ (darkness-­ bearer) for no other reason than to suggest the effects of darkening I have observed.”12 It was light—according to Eder, the “reason why everything created is visible”—that also brought about the disappearance of this visibility. Schulze’s neologism—emphasizing not the demonstrated feasibility of a photogram but only its progressive darkening—describes the ambivalence of a process that both creates and destroys images. Parts of the salt had to be exposed to the sun; parts of it had to be shielded from the sun’s light. One and the same cause effected the appearance of the image and its disappearance. Whether the legible writing in the silver solution was engendered or destroyed was a question of time, since the “darkness-­bearer” produces darkness until its chemical activity is interrupted. In that sense, a photographic image comes into being only when the natural process of its destruction is disrupted. The blackening of the images is not an accident, not a mishap that befalls photography, but an integral part of it. Photography itself is the accident of photography. The cause of the images: light; the cause of their disappearance: too much light. Despite this fundamental agency of accident and disturbance, we may distinguish in each instance at which point in time, on which scene, and with which consequences the material of the picture reacted. In this perspective, it makes a difference whether a picture was not threatened by disappearance until weeks or years after its successful manufacture or whether its integrity was at risk at the very moment of production. The following chapters will primarily explore the use of the photographic process to render natural phenomena visible, and so their focus will be on the circumstances of the production of the pictures rather than the question of their survival. It was the unstable phase of the production of the pictures that determined the extent to which what materialized was a representation of the object depicted or a self-­representation of the photographic technique. Visible interventions of the material are pervasive in the history of photography, and not only in its formative stage. They affected early photographs on copper plates (Daguerre) or paper (Talbot) as much as later pictures on glass plates or celluloid. They might occur at the moment of exposure, during the development in the darkroom, or again as a subsequent deformation of the picture. In his novel Measuring the World, Daniel Kehlmann describes a pertinent incident from the early history of photography. Kehlmann unites Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Friedrich Gauß in Berlin for a fictional encounter. Monsieur Daguerre, also present, sets about capturing the historic moment in a photograph for eternity When Humboldt inspected the exposed copper plate with a magnifying glass that same night [. . .] he could recognize absolutely nothing on it.

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Only after a time did he think he saw a maze of ghostly outlines begin to emerge, the blurred sketch of something like an underwater landscape. In the middle, a hand, three shoes, a shoulder, the cuff of a uniform and the lower portion of an ear. Or then again, not? With a sigh he threw the plate out of the window and heard a dull crash as it landed in the courtyard.13

It is a fine punch line that a novel dedicated to the “measuring of the world” would relate this story of a failed representation: of a process that visualized the world precisely not in a photographic mapping but as a “blurred sketch” and “maze of ghostly outlines.” The conclusion of the scene calls to mind a problem that today’s student of such noisy records inevitably faces: Humboldt throws the plate out into the courtyard, where it will presumably soon be disposed of, vanishing forever from visual memory. That describes the fate of most photographic accidents fairly well. No one collects them. They are generally of no interest to museums, unless an artist (such as Kertész [fig. 1] or, later, Polke) declares them an integral part of his oeuvre. A teleological historiography mentions them only in passing, if at all: as a short-­ lived technical obstacle that was fortunately overcome in the inexorable progress of photography. And yet their appearance left traces. Their effects were treated at length in handbooks and trade magazines of photography and in natural-­science journals. Those few images that were preserved rather than discarded convey an impression of the intrinsic dynamic of the material and the apparatuses involved. Besides the faithful and sharp rendition of detail, a quality many writers have emphasized, the surviving daguerreotypes evince the effects Kehlmann describes. In their own way, Daguerre’s portrait of the painter Nicolas Huet, created in 1837 (fig. 14), and the self-­portrait the American photographer Henry Fitz took two years later (fig. 15) illustrate what Benjamin meant when he wrote that “fog [. . .] surrounds the beginnings of photography.”14 The sitters emerge from the past behind a dense chemical haze. Unlike Huet, who regards the beholder, Fitz has closed his eyes— he had to sit in bright sunlight during the long exposure—lending his self-­ portrait an air of absorption. The more conspicuous are the artifacts that spread across the picture like a photochemical galaxy. The “purity of the forms” of the daguerreotype, its “fidelity to truth” and “incredible accuracy,” which, in the words of two contemporary art critics, stand up even to the “most exacting scrutiny” with the “acutest magnifying glass”—at least in these parts of the picture, they are nowhere to be seen.15 A reproduction of only the bottom quarter of the picture would pre­sent a virtually unidentifiable thing to our eyes. Does the foggy figment render the undulations of fabric falling in folds? Or does it show a haze that was not in fact present at the scene of the exposure and came into being only in the mercury vapors of the developing process? The right-­hand corner of the man’s shirt collar

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Fig. 14  Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, portrait of the painter Nicolas Huet, 1837.

Fig. 15  Henry Fitz, self-­portrait, 1839.

might just as well be an immaterial luminous apparition. And what is the source of the bright streak shooting up from the bottom edge of the picture like a comet? This early photography already clearly shows how the artifacts take on an iconographic life of their own. Some appear as spots and mere supplements on the surface of the picture, while others penetrate the pictorial space, colliding with details of the depiction and often fusing with them to the point where the two become indistinguishable. Besides being technical disturbances that impede our identification of the motif, these traces often also suggest other readings. Looking at Fitz’s self-­portrait, we may draw a connection between the peculiar luminescence between the sitter’s eyes and around his forehead and his somnambulistic absorption. The cloud of ethereal radiance framing his forehead cannot but call to mind the later pictorial practice of occultist and spiritistic circles. In any case, as I will show in the following chapters, the aesthetic surplus and the rich iconographic-­ interpretive potential of such photographic artifacts were what fueled the debates over the photographic visualization of invisible fluxes a few decades later. Yet the materiality of the pictures was conspicuous, even obtrusive, even where it did not generate additional readings in this manner. The beholder’s gaze always apprehends both: the photographic likeness and the visibility of the material that likeness is made of. Many of Talbot’s early photographs similarly show the unmistakable imprints of their photochemical origins. Unlike Daguerre, Talbot used paper media, and his method at once estab-

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lished the possibility of making multiple prints of his pictures. Paper negatives were produced by exposure in the camera obscura, and a second exposure onto photographic paper turned them into positive images. But if the paper medium brought the advantage of reproducibility, it also led to the appearance of “disruptive veins, spots, clouds, fibers in the paper negative,” as Vogel noted in retrospect in 1874.16 Talbot presented the first samples of his method to the members of the Royal Society in his 1839 “Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing,” noting of a picture of his residence at Lacock Abbey, “This building I believe to be the first that was ever yet known to have drawn its own picture.”17 But these putative self-­depictions refused to appear instantly, and sometimes they did not appear at all. Many paper negatives from the 1830s and 1840s certainly permit the question of whether it is actually the building’s “own picture” that emerges: have not the traces of the recording process itself left their marks on the image with equal insistence (fig. 11)? A sharply delineated silhouette rises before the sky over Lacock, and a single spire towering over the western façade is clearly recognizable. Toward the edges, however, this drawing is veiled in photochemical fog. We may recognize the form of the building in the massive block at the center of the image, but parts of the monochrome expanse, instead of depicting the structure, might also signify the emptiness of unexposed paper. Another picture, likely taken in the summer of 1835, shows the window in the south gallery of the abbey. Larry Schaaf has compared this early photograph’s effect on the beholder to the moment of waking from sleep: the picture of the world is still in flux and slowly settles into its contours.18 The motif looms before us but does not yet reach the distinction required for recognizability. Toward the edges, the image dissolves into its elements, with unmistakable traces of the developing solution Talbot poured over the exposed paper. A few years later, Talbot brought out a first user’s manual of sorts for photography in his Pencil of Nature. A famous photograph shows a number of porcelain objects (fig. 16); in the accompanying note, Talbot argues that a picture of this sort constitutes a photographic inventory of the collection and, in the event of theft, may serve as “evidence of a novel kind”—a “mute testimony of the picture [. . .] in court.”19 One of Talbot’s most impressive pictures, a still life created in March 1841 (plate 1), refutes this idea of the photographic image as incorruptible evidence. The objects are lined up before the white oval of the set table like the characters of an inscription. As though to highlight the fact that each is individually recognizable, they are neatly isolated, without any overlap between their outlines. And yet only some of the objects in this assembly can be identified: the candle towering above the entire arrangement dissolves into a haze, a piece of crystal glassware barely stands out from the surrounding white, a gravy pitcher (?) at the center of the table rises so delicately from the bright light that it looks more like a gossamer ink drawing dashed off in a few masterful strokes of

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Fig. 16  William Henry Fox Talbot, Articles of China, before 1844.

the brush. Most importantly, the jury hearing this “mute testimony of the picture” would learn nothing about where exactly this free-­floating table stood. The arrangement hovers in a cloud of photographic haze. We can just make out a few elegant folds of the tablecloth; then the depiction is lost in the noise of bright and dark vapors. The classic histories of photography have barely considered this fragile visibility of the pictures. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, discussions focusing on the history of technology dominated the field. In the narrative of progress and invention these histories lay out, the pictures tend to appear as secondary products of the technical processes or serve as samples and manifest demonstrations of their function.20 When these teleological stories do note the marks of the medium, they see mere detritus, a by-­product of inexorable progress. Art historians proved equally incapable of integrating these early examples of photographic abstraction into their narratives of modernism: they hardly manifest creative purpose; they are just too unintentional and laconic. That is why it would be misleading to

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incorporate them into a genealogy of “nonrepresentational” or “abstract” work in photography analogous to that in the history of painting: the inevitable references to the developmental histories of modern painting would make for no more than a very inadequate description of their particular nature. In contradistinction to paintings, the artifacts described here are not the results of methodical artistic creation. The label “abstract photography,” moreover, is already taken and bears connotations that make it seem unsuitable to the perspective of this book. In 2000 Kunsthalle Bielefeld held an exhibition dedicated to “abstract photography”; the volume The Art of Abstract Photography came out two years later. The project was based on the observation that the “originally representational medium invariably also spoke in a nonrepresentational manner; it created abstract images which, up to now, have hardly been properly acknowledged by art historians and art critics.”21 These images are photographs that eschewed recognizable motifs as far as possible in order to draw attention to the formal and structural features of the composition. Considered in this perspective, “abstract photography” appears as the analogue of painting in the narratives of modernism, as a process of artistic purification: It introduces a different form of photography, one that refers neither to the superficially visible world of observed objects (objective photography), nor to the obscure invisible world of observing subjects (subjective photography), but that refers first and foremost to itself: the self-­ production of the medium. A new idea of photography is born, one that pre­sents its own immanent reality and makes itself the object: A photograph of the photograph.22

The teleological aspects of this account are hard to overlook: it is only when the dross of representation has been thoroughly stripped away that the photographic image comes into its own. The argument revives one more time the old idea that a pictorial form achieves its true purpose only when it has cast off all reference to the outside world: that its destiny is “free” design, “absolute photography,” the “pure photo, the photo that renounces any need to recognize familiar objects.”23 The methodological borrowing of art-­theoretical tropes from abstract painting is manifest.24 But what is more interesting for our argument is the strange void at the heart of this teleology of photographic abstraction. The observation that the “originally representational medium invariably also spoke in a nonrepresentational manner” is entirely compatible with the approach the present study takes, and the idea that the history of photography includes not only images that may be decoded as mimetic likenesses but also the record of mere “material traces” is perfectly unexceptionable.25 But indicatively, in the annals of “abstract photography,” the history of these traces commences quite late, in the early twentieth century, with Alvin Langdon Coburn, Christian Schad, Man Ray, and László Moholy-­

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Nagy. In accordance with the teleological model, “nonrepresentational pictures” would be the late accomplishment of an “originally representational medium.” That is hardly a very convincing account. The visibility of the “material of photography itself ” is not a quality that was superadded to photography at some point in time. Historically speaking, the opposite is closer to the truth: the emergence of the material into visibility was primary. The representational function of photography was not always already an unquestionable part of it; it had to be brought into being, with the assistance— and sometimes also: against the resistance—of its technical and material basis. So the samples Niépce or Talbot held in hand (figs. 7 and 11) were anything but the products of a “representational” art. A cloudlike shape loomed where a façade should have appeared, and photochemical hazes hovered quite irresolutely between likeness and figment. And yet these abstract images do not fit the heuristic framework of “abstract photography”: they bear no signature and are neither the result of “free compositional use” of the medium nor evidence of “man’s creative drive” nor an “expression of the human urge toward abstraction in art.” Although they are “nonrepresentational,” and although one would, in the terminology I have cited, classify them as neither “objective” nor “subjective” photography, they do not have what it takes to be masterworks in the “art of abstract photography”: they are not “absolute,” not “autonomous” enough; they are insufficiently “free” and “pure.” But most importantly, their authors are not immediately recognizable, being shrouded in the nebulous plot of their production: the “abstraction” of these images usually appeared unbidden. That is presumably why they were never even candidates for inclusion in the endeavor known as “abstract photography.” This blind spot reiterates the methodological exclusion of the “spontaneously” produced image that chapter 1 described with regard to the invention/discovery of photography: the unintended image falls through the cracks of the descriptive framework because its history cannot be told along the traditional key vectors of “artist,” “work,” “intention,” and “autonomy.” These categories are not altogether irrelevant to the present study, but they are also not exclusive or binding. At the very least the premises they encapsulate are insufficient for an adequate description of a substantial part of the “nonrepresentational” visual inventory of photographic history. In the following analysis, I will accordingly refrain from using the terms “abstract” and “abstraction” in order to avoid confusion with existing approaches. Instead of speaking of “pure” pictures or “autonomous” works, I will examine photographic incidents whose aesthetic status, origins, and function were a matter of ongoing investigation. 2.3 “The photographer’s enemies”: The material becomes obtrusive

We might assign all of these phenomena to the early stages of what was then still an immature pictorial technology. Yet ever since photography estab-

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lished itself, each new photographic technique has produced its own new and specific accidents. The May 1895 issue of Photographische Rundschau, for example, includes a letter from a reader who, although he carefully heeded all technical instructions, found himself incapable of producing the desired color photographs; all he obtained were color defects, altogether colorless pictures, and inexplicable streaks: All through this past winter, I toiled trying to make pictures in natural colors using the Lippmann process. Although I closely hewed to the instructions given by Valenta and in Photographische Rundschau (1894, nos. 10, 11, 12), the outcomes have fallen far short of my expectations. In many instances, no colors appeared at all; other pictures showed color errors or only faint intimations of the natural hues. All plates presented streaks. What might be the reason for this ill success? All tasks were performed with the utmost cleanliness and precision.26

The question concerns a color photography technique the physicist Daniel Lippmann had presented to the members of the Paris Académie only a few years earlier. Lippmann’s process proved extraordinarily difficult to reproduce. The answer the reader ultimately received opened on a distinctly discouraging note, and its conclusion was overtly sobering: Over the past few weeks, we have heard your lament several hundred times. It is a most welcome development that interest in the important field of photography in natural colors is finally growing in Germany as well. Despite the considerable efforts undertaken in the past months, no viable results have been obtained; the explanation is that, in our experience, it is altogether impossible to make good pictures in natural colors during the cold season. Why? We have no satisfactory answer.27

The journal also consulted a Dr. Neuhauss, who added a few speculative remarks on the possible influence of temperature and atmospheric humidity on the gelatin layer, but in the end the only advice he had to offer was to forgo natural color photography altogether during the cold season and try again the following summer. So the Q-­and-­A column of Photographische Rundschau turned out once more to be a black box: this reader’s question was hardly the only one that remained unanswered. Since the days of the earliest photographic processes, photographers had been dealing with substances whose activities were neither predictable nor completely under their control. Looking for photosensitive substances for use in pictures, they not only tried a range of support media (including leather, copper, tin, paper, glass, and celluloid) but constantly varied the composition of emulsions, developers, and fixers. The collodion process illustrates the complexity of these experiments. Be-

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fore the gelatin silver bromide process became prevalent around 1880, photographers worked with “wet” collodion plates. Collodion (from the Greek kollao, to glue), a solution of nitrocellulose, or cotton treated with sulfuric and nitric acid in alcohol and ether, was known for its medical applications—it served as a liquid wound dressing—and adopted by photographers because of its convenient adhesive properties. To produce a photosensitive emulsion, a mixture of collodion and iodide was poured on a glass plate, which was then immersed in a silver nitrate bath and loaded into a wooden cassette. The solvents alcohol and ether, however, evaporated rapidly, the photosensitive layer would dry up, and salt crystals would begin to form that would spoil the picture. So it was crucial to expose the emulsion while it was still wet. As a consequence, the photographer could not bring a supply of prepared plates; a new plate had to be primed for each shot. In 1863 the Illustriertes Handbuch der Photographie lists the implements and chemicals the contemporary photographer had to bring along to make a picture: “lens with stops, camera with visor shield and cassette, cloth for setup, stand, box with cleaned plates, plate holder, dust brush, cuvette, two small glasses, water container, funnel, filter paper, collodion, silver bath, developer, pyrogallol solution, silver solution, fixing bath.”28 The process was cumbersome at best; during longer exposures, moreover, the photosensitive layer sometimes started to dry up before the shot was finished. These difficulties motivated the development of a “dry” plate. Several hundred substances were tested for suitability, including honey, vinegar, caramel, chestnut puree, malt, tobacco, gum arabic, ground quince seeds, raspberry syrup, morphine, and opium. In 1896 Adolf Hertzka, a manufacturer of photographic plates, summed up the situation: the new process had satisfactorily solved old problems, but it had also created new ones; Hertzka noted an entire “register of spurious phenomena.” “The gelatin dry plate is without question the basis of contemporary photography, but there can be no doubt: we do not have in it a medium that would allow us to confidently predict the desired result.”29 A full three decades later, Josef Maria Eder, the author of a technical introduction to dry plate photography, still sees the need to include a dedicated chapter on the distinctive “defects” of the process.30 So the photographic library includes the grand narratives of inexorable technological progress but also titles such as Photographic Failures, First Aid in Photography, Die Mißerfolge in der Photographie (The Failures in Photography), Das große Fotofehler-­Buch (The Great Book of Photographic Defects), Les insuccès en photographie (Failures in Photography), and Le matériel photographique, ses imperfections, comment les reconnaître, comment y remédier (The Photographic Material, Its Imperfections, How to Recognize Them, How to Redress Them). Specialized journals and handbooks know many names for what haunts the photographic image: “defects,” “spurious apparitions,” “fallacious phenomena,” “anomalies,” “vexatious disruptions,” “mysterious phenomena,” “disastrous effects,” “witchcraft,” and “enemies

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of the photographer.” In 1876 the French chemist Cordier notes in his handbook Les insuccès en photographie: “Photography, this alluring and, it would seem, so easily executed art, is in reality a source of inextricable difficulties.” According to Cordier, the amateur navigates a labyrinth of mysterious phenomena “like a pilot without a control stick.”31 Authors listed multiple causes of such disruptions, including improper storage of the sensitive material, plates that had exceeded their shelf life, incorrect loading of plates, manufacturing errors, working with wet hands, incorrect composition of the chemicals, use of exhausted baths, and wrong temperatures of the laboratory, photographic plates, emulsions, or developers. Working with photosensitive materials required the meticulous execution of sequences of prescribed maneuvers. During development, for instance, the developing fluid had to be kept in constant motion to maintain the required mixture of the chemicals. When the photographer stopped moving the tray, the perpetually shifting concentration of the developer produced “peculiar phenomena [. . .] resembling the cells of a honeycomb.” Overly uniform movement of the tray, meanwhile, produced “standing waves in the developing fluid that cause bright streaks, usually across the center of the negative.”32 But neither could the developing tray be moved in a haphazard and irregular fashion. An entire catalogue of precautionary measures concerned the setup of the photo laboratory. Photographic plates were not to be stored in proximity to exterior walls. “During extreme heat or rainy weather, doors and windows of storage rooms must be kept closed.”33 Wooden cabinets, tables, and chairs must be largely resin-­free. Fresh oil paint on the walls would affect the sensitive materials negatively, as would nearby radiators and heating pipes. During development, the slightest intrusion of natural light was to be precluded. “To that end, one enters the darkroom, seals it carefully, and then waits in utter darkness for at least a quarter of an hour.”34 Potential sources of particulate matter that would contaminate emulsions, plates, and developing fluids were everywhere, and it is reported that the English chemist William Crookes made a habit of entering his darkroom naked to avoid bringing in dust. Crookes added that the laboratory worker must not use anything but clear water to wash his body because soap residues might affect the chemicals. If maintaining the laboratory operation under ordinary conditions was tricky enough, the difficulties were compounded by extreme incidents such as the degradation of emulsions caused by passing electrical storms or the formidable challenges that, say, traveling photographers faced: the chemicals would behave differently in tropical heat, microbes could infest the material, and the red light of the darkroom lamp might attract bugs that, disoriented and “struggling to escape death, badly scratch the plate layer with their hard feet.”35 The phenomena such disruptions generated were tabulated, labeled, described, classified, and subjected to comparative study. Some were given distinctive names that alluded to their shapes and were meant to

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facilitate identification: the world of darkrooms teemed with “comets,” “honeycombs,” and “ice flowers,” “snowfalls” and “trails of smoke”; scattered “pinpricks” marred negatives, and “strings of pearls” and “telegraph wires” stretched across pictures. Mishandling of the chemical substances gave rise to a distinctive and highly varied iconography: “moss-­like spots,” “a green haze,” “a red and a brownish-­yellow haze,” “a milky white haze,” “round dull dots,” “an opalescent plaque,” “streaks,” “aureoles,” “ramifications,” “flash glares,” “powdery black traces,” “damask-­like traces,” “small star-­shaped dimples,” “cloudy figures suggesting a map,” “marble veins,” “precipitation of little white stars,” “cell-­like structures,” “scar formation,” “formation of bubbles and ripples,” “formation of islands,” “blue cast,” “red cast,” “yellow cast,” “radial excretions,” “green dendrite-­like figures,” “traces of grease” (“a wicked enemy”), “traces of dust” (“the worst enemy”). The “picture looks hazy,” the “picture looks flat,” the “negative is completely black,” the “negative is gray and monotonous,” “blackening fails to occur,” the “layer melts,” the “layer floats off,” and so on.36 Eder’s handbook Verarbeitung der photographischen Platten, Filme und Papiere, on the handling of photographic plates, films, and papers, contains sixty-­three depictions of such laboratory accidents. Plates 17 and 20 illustrate the “effect of outside extraneous light on the sensitive layer of a wrongly loaded film pack.” In the first instance, the “extraneous light” has generated a bright, S-­shaped figure that stands out from a deep black backdrop (fig. 5). The outlines are blurry and diffuse, producing the impression of a luminous figment from which a mild light emanates into the surrounding darkness. In the top right quadrant, however, the putative dark backdrop encroaches upon the white figure, pushing a bundle of contoured black shafts in front of or into it and thwarting our attempt to tell foreground from background. The second instance of “extraneous light” yields a very different outcome. The lamella-­ like structure pre­sents a symmetrically organized luminous figure that distantly recalls the technoid forms of twentieth-­century Op art. But the producer of this picture is unlikely to have regarded the result as the expression of a photochemical l’art-­pour-­l’art. The photograph shows the structure of the crystal lacquer used to coat the cassette in which the film was stored. The reflection of light on the lacquered surface appears as a “peculiar pattern” on the photosensitive layer.37 Figure 17 illustrates a similar incident that yielded a different result. The reflection produced a vaguely organic honeycomb pattern whose energy seems to emanate from a luminous central core. In addition to such abstract formations, Eder’s handbook includes pictures in which the traces of chemical and physical processes mingle with vestiges of the intended pictorial motifs: “islands” in graduated shades of gray, produced by unevenly distributed developing fluid, float above the rooftops of a town like a school of exotic fish. The portrait of a man looms amid a “chemical dust cloud.” A couple disappears due to “pre-­exposure

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Fig. 17  Anonymous, “Fremdlichteinwirkung” (effect of extraneous light; exposure). From Eder et al., Verarbeitung der photographischen Platten, Filme und Papiere (1930).

and the lettering on the cover sheet of the film pack” (fig. 18); the man’s head and hat are clearly recognizable next to the roof ridge, but his body is lost in photochemical fog. A “melting layer” has exploded the colonnades of St. Peter’s in Rome (fig. 19). The emulsion has melted in the excessive heat of the dry press. A fence of iron rails between masonry posts guarding the colonnades is seized by the suction of the approaching cloud and liquefies into a set of parallel streaks. Within the cloud, we may recognize ghostly remnants of columns and the portico, but the source of light that models the spaces between the columns of the stable structure on the right has become a nonrepresentational luminescence in the top left quadrant of the picture. Looking at photographs like these, the producers would experience what Martin Heidegger calls “the modes of conspicuousness, obtrusiveness, and obstinacy.”38 These modes appear when a thing loses its handiness, when it is missing, becomes inoperable, or disrupts the smooth flow of our actions. “When we discover its unusability, the thing becomes conspicuous.”39 The reports I have quoted are the most immediate expression of this experience of conspicuousness. The discovery of unusability inevitably also raised the question of who or what might be behind a particular phenomenon. “Was

Fig. 18  Anonymous, “Vorbelichtung” (pre-­exposure). From Eder et al., Verarbeitung der photographischen Platten, Filme und Papiere (1930).

Fig. 19  Anonymous, melting of the emulsion (St. Peter in Rome). From Eder et al., Verarbeitung der photographischen Platten, Filme und Papiere (1930).

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the developer to blame, the plate, or the amateur?” the Viennese journal Photo- und Kinosport asked in one installment of its regular column “Was ist da geschehen?” (What happened here?).40 Each issue presented a “defective picture” and asked readers to identify potential causes; the next issue revealed the solution. The editors thus repeated in the playful, domesticated form of the puzzle the crucial question photographers asked, more anxiously, with each new emergence of a “defective picture”: What happened here? And who or what should be held responsible for the disruption that spoiled the picture? Each of the shifting terms used to describe the photographic artifacts—defect, spurious phenomenon, failure, malfunction, accident—accentuates a different aspect of the problem. To speak of a “failure” (Misserfolg, insuccès) is to describe the disruption in the light of a clearly defined intention whose realization has gone awry—an expectation against which the result of the work can be measured. Someone who, like the amateur photographer quoted above, wishes to produce “pictures in natural colors” but obtains only color errors or streaks will not regard the fruit of his labor as magic, however inexplicable it may be to him; he will assess it with a view to his intentions and actions. Labeling a photographic phenomenon a success or a failure presupposes such a framework of correct and incorrect operations and acceptable and unacceptable outcomes. The identification of an artifact as “incorrect” points to a similar framework. The handbooks’ chapters on “incorrect treatment of plates” or “incorrect execution of the gelatin silver bromide process” are mostly about the improper handling of laboratory utensils: “inadequate pre-­cleaning of the plate,” “incomplete cleaning of the plate edges,” “wet hands,” “overly slow drying of the plates,” etc.41 These descriptions, too, presuppose an agent whose inept actions are the cause of a “spurious phenomenon.” The chemical and physical processes as such cannot be described in these terms. What happens in the developing bath is what happens; there are no correct or incorrect outcomes; the chemical behavior of an emulsion knows neither “success” nor “failure.”42 The plate, as Hermann Vogel rightly puts it in 1874, “is utterly indifferent.”43 It acts and reacts, shows hazes or phosphorescence, resists interaction with the developer, and so on—but it does not pursue intentions of its own. Titles such as the abovementioned Photographic Failures, Die Mißerfolge in der Photographie, and Les insuccès en photographie accordingly place the main emphasis on the correct or incorrect actions of human agents and their proper or improper handling of the sensitive materials. Yet reports of photographers’ “unsuccessful attempts” and “failures” also reflect the fact that interference from the intrinsic dynamic qualities of their tools was to be expected. The material would become obtrusive. Many accounts hint at moments of surprise, irritation, and hesitation—the moments of pause in which, according to Heidegger’s remarks on the obtrusiveness of things, we stand helpless before them:44 “the plates repel the developer”; “the emulsion refuses to congeal on the

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plate”; “a sandy yellow powder covers the plate during development.”45 Such effects defied description as the simple consequence of personal ineptitude. Cordier’s metaphor of the technician as a “pilot without a control stick” sketches a scenario in which the photographer was not entirely in charge of the process. Besides his “unsuccessful attempts” and “failures,” the intervention of “accident” was accordingly mentioned time and again as a source of disruptions.46 Accidents, Michael Hampe writes, are “first and foremost events that supersede plans and decisions. In accidents, something of importance to man is decided without someone, a human person, having made a plan or a decision.”47 So the use of the term indicates a blank: accident appears where human authorship is not, or not unambiguously, discernible. The “darkroom” accidents were visible and concrete, articulating themselves in the hazes, streaks, spots, and fogs described above, and their unmistakable traces squarely raised the question, who or what had caused their appearance? When the French physicist René Colson, who will be a major character in these pages, calls the “accidental hazes” (voiles accidentelles) “the photographer’s enemy,”48 the demonization (or even anthropomorphization) of a chemical-­physical process suggests that he envisions the substances with their dynamic properties as an antagonist actively scheming against him and his intentions. Once again, we realize that the work on the photographic image was not a unilateral construction but an “association of actants” as defined by Latour, the work of a “collective of humans and non-­humans”: “the more activity there is from one, the more activity there is from the other.”49 The genesis of a picture proved to be an interplay between control and the loss of control, between intervention and accident. The photographer was the master of the action in the laboratory, where incidents nonetheless also befell him. To understand this dialectic better, it is worth recalling Virilio’s description of the accident. The French as well as English word accident unites two meanings vaguely distinguished in German by two similar words, Zufall and Unfall. Both indicate an occurrence that irritates or disrupts a given order. Unlike a Zufall, or random event, a report of an Unfall, or accident, draws attention to the material dimension of the incident; the word usually marks an interruption or disruption that affects technical objects, processes, or systems, with destructive consequences. The accidental, Virilio writes, “signifies what arises unexpectedly—in a device, or system or product; the unexpected, the surprise of failure or destruction.”50 This emphasis on the unexpected notwithstanding, Virilio speaks of the “invention” of accident, the invention of the substance of a technology, product, or process being inseparable from the invention of its immanent slippage, its disruption and unpredictability. But how can one invent what is unpredictable? The notion seems paradoxical: we ordinarily regard accidents as events that befall us from outside, that occur, undesired and unforeseen, as the epitome of what cannot be invented. One would think that an intended and foreseeable

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accident would no longer be an accident. Virilio, however, conceives “invention” not as a deliberate, predictable, and conscious operation but as an “unconscious oeuvre, an invention in the sense of uncovering what was hidden.”51 Considered in this perspective, accidents may be manifest disruptions, but they do not crash into the scene from an outside realm beyond all explanation; they are latent in the process—unforeseen, but always already possible, unexpected and yet “waiting to happen.”52 2.4 Blow up: From the photograph to the stuff of photography

The accidents of photography were not the only instances in which its material reality came to the surface. It also became apparent when the beholder put his eye close enough to the picture—so close that the object depicted dissolved, letting the medium of depiction itself emerge, as the following example from microphotographic research vividly illustrates. On June 2, 1861, Emil Du Bois-­Reymond submitted to the members of the Royal Prussian Academy a treatise of the Erlangen anatomist and physiologist Joseph Gerlach. The author argued that, the growing perfection of the microscope notwithstanding, its capacity had reached a barrier, and he promised to achieve “enhanced magnification by way of photography.”53 The idea had first struck Gerlach as he looked at tiny glass photographs, a product sold in England for entertainment purposes: the user had to study them under the microscope at a magnification of one hundred. When the microscope was fully focused, he wrote, the pictures were so fine-­grained that the magnification brought “a wealth of detail to light of which the naked eye cannot discover even the slightest trace.”54 Elsewhere he wrote, “The most outstanding such photograph I have had the opportunity to see was the entire Lord’s Prayer in English, compressed to a third of a square millimeter; upon hundredfold magnification, it resolved into quite clear writing whose individual letters measured 4 millimeters in height.”55 This spectacle gave Gerlach the idea of putting not his microscopic specimens but their microphotographic images under the microscope: “The originally negative image can be examined with the microscope as though with a magnifying glass and thus become the object in turn of a new picture produced by means of the microphotographic apparatus. The magnification, needless to say, grows immensely in this process.”56 In these experiments, photography was more and something else than the representation of a set of facts that existed before it: as Olaf Breidbach has shown, it had become an object of research in its own right.57 A first picture in which Gerlach pre­sents an (otherwise unspecified) scale or flake at a magnification of 265 is followed by a photograph of a detail of this first negative, showing the posterior part of the object, which already achieves a magnification of 670. Finally, in yet another magnification of this magnification, the central part of the object appears in 1,460-­fold magnification. Yet what resides in the depths of photographic

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magnification is in this instance not divine guidance but the menace of the photographic artifact. The microphotographic excess eventually crashes into the barrier at which the heightened visibility of the objects gives way to the emergence into view of the instruments of recording themselves. At that point, photography no longer reveals previously unimagined details in the specimens but instead the obtrusiveness of its own material reality. In his textbook Lehrbuch der Mikrophotographie, published in 1880, Richard Neuhauss is perfectly clear on this point. Magnifying the negative more than two to three times, he writes, is impermissible. “Higher magnifications must be rejected because the grain of the plate is magnified as well, yielding an unpleasantly sandy complexion of the picture.”58 Gerlach, too, had seen this sandy complexion appear, but he promptly identified a remedy that let him push out the boundary of photographic white noise yet further: The limitation on the magnification feasible in this manner is merely a consequence of the visibility of the silver precipitate [. . .] on the glass plate. Yet this constraint can be relaxed to an extraordinary extent, partly by diluting the photographic solutions, partly by treating the glass plate in a distinctive manner [. . .] so that even a hundredfold magnification of the original picture can be achieved without the silver precipitate becoming noticeably visible to the naked eye.59

But Gerlach had already entered deeply into the self-­reference of his magnification technique: what had been photographed was ultimately photography itself, and the significant final detail he sought to glean from these interferences eventually required thinning the solutions and had to be extracted under the ever-­present threat of the “visibility of the silver precipitate.” Gerlach’s experiments, that is to say, demonstrate once more that the utopian vision of infinite exactitude painted by the two critics cited earlier— “the acutest magnifying glass, which shatters so many illusions and often lets us discover horrible things and monsters in the most delicate and airy masterworks, examines and inspects the products of this art in vain; they stand up to even the most exacting scrutiny and foil all evil intentions of its most penetrating gazes”60—was ultimately untenable. A monster did appear in the depths of microscopic magnification: the silver grain, that tiny unit, the building block of photography. It may happen, an 1899 report on the use of photography in the sciences notes, that the “details of an object to be depicted are very small, on the same order of magnitude as the silver grains of the layer. It is then often quite impossible to determine whether a structure is real or merely the result of an accidental aggregation of silver grains, and it is entirely up to beholder’s imagination to decide which he will assume.”61 In these instances, that is to say, the optical added value of expanded visibility abruptly turns into photographic noise. That was also Roland Barthes’s experience. The pertinent passage may

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Fig. 20  Detail from Blow-­Up, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966.

be found among his reflections on the photographic “emanation of the referent,” but it is oddly isolated and unconnected to its context. It concerns the most important photograph discussed in the book (but never shown there)—the portrait of the author’s mother in the Winter Garden, in which Barthes seeks to discern the very being of the sitter and simultaneously the “essence of photography,” the famous “that-­has-­been”: “I want to enlarge this face in order to see it better, to understand it better, to know its truth (and sometimes, naïvely, I confide this task to a laboratory).” In the one passage in Camera Lucida that mentions, for the first and only time, the “laboratory”—and with it, implicitly, the darkroom and the ineffaceable dark side of photography—Barthes must acknowledge the insistence and intercession of the “photographic signifier”—of the entity, that is to say, of which he nonetheless writes that it takes a “secondary action of knowledge or of reflection” to see.62 In the enlargement of the Winter Garden photograph, however, signification becomes obtrusive, even impossible to miss: “Alas, however hard I look, I discover nothing: if I enlarge, I see nothing but the grain of the paper: I undo the image for the sake of its substance” (sa matière).63 Like the photographer in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-­Up, whose desire to discern ever more in his pictures drives him to enlarge his prints until they finally show nothing but an abstract silver grain pattern (fig. 20), what Barthes confronts in the end is the “substance” of the pictures. The closer photography is meant to bring what it depicts to our eye, the more it is meant to show and “magnify” it, the more it veils its object,

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letting us see its internal components instead. The fragility of the photographic image is apparent not only in the possible destruction of its material medium, but also and already when we come close enough to the pictures. 2.5 Parasites of representation: Image and “collateral image”

In most of the scenarios I have discussed, the “modes of conspicuousness, obtrusiveness, and obstinacy” were addressed as interventions and disruptions, in the sense of unintentional, unforeseen, and vexatious effects. But an entire dimension of disruption already looms in the treatises and handbooks I have quoted, one that transcends this purely negative interpretation. There is, on the one hand, the aesthetic excess of the disruption and, on the other hand, its epistemic surplus value. Although the authors I have mentioned did not read the spots, streaks, and hazes as pictures in their own right, let alone as autonomous artistic forms, the vivid terms with which they often characterized these traces indicate that they were awake to the formal quality of the photographic incident. When photochemical effects are described as “comets,” “ramifications,” or “ice flowers,” they become legible as forms in ways that surely exceed the apprehension of technical defects and deficiencies. That is the point of departure for the transformation of the accident into an art of the disruption that I will discuss below (sections 2.7 and 2.8). But first I want to consider the epistemic potential of the photographic incident. The accounts I have quoted already suggest that facing “the photographer’s enemies” was not a useless endeavor; it also generated positive knowledge about photography. Disruptions, that is to say, were not an externality, not a peripheral issue, and not an unfortunate exception from the normal process of photography. On the contrary, they marked specific moments when insight into the workings of photography became possible. Dealing with the alleged “defects” of the process was a form of photographic research. More importantly, the neat distinction between intended effects and unintended disruptions was often impossible to draw, especially in the field of scientific photography. The “famous objectivity of the photographic plate,” the authors of a late-­nineteenth-­century atlas of microphotography note, “was discredited when it became impossible to ignore that it could be used to produce severely distorted pictures and yielded artifacts of which the eye saw nothing under the microscope.”64 But was the result of a particular photographic exposure a reflection of natural phenomena or a “distorted picture,” an “artifact” produced by the process itself? The answer was not self-­evident. In this sense, too, the investigation of “flaws,” “failures,” and photographic “accidents” was not a negative labor: an ostensibly spurious phenomenon might prove exemplary when placed in a different context or considered from a different angle. So-­called halation, “this parasite that has spoiled so many good negatives,”65 is a paradigmatic example. Halations are fogs and hazes that appear near bright objects in developed

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photographs. “This diffusive phenomenon,” the French astronomer Marie-­ Alfred Cornu writes, is “exceptionally capricious; it sometimes appears [. . .] in the form of fogs of downright striking intensity, while at other times it vanishes almost entirely [. . .] In short, the photographs often pre­sent aureoles, hazes, or fogs that do not exist in nature and produce this vexatious effect, and so we must ask ourselves three questions: First, what is the cause of halations? Second, why do they not always appear? Third, how can they be prevented?”66 Question one was soon generally seen as having been satisfactorily answered. Most photographers agreed that halations could be explained as the effect of rays of light scattered back into the photosensitive layer by the reflective back surface of the photographic plate. There were two main proposals as to how to eliminate these “reflex hazes”: coating the back of the plate with printer’s ink that would absorb the light, and staining the photosensitive gelatin layer to prevent the light from reaching the back of the plate in the first place. Success, however, proved elusive. “A number of prescriptions and directives on how to avoid them exist,” one photographer writes in 1891, “and they may be valid in theory, but when subjected to strict scrutiny, they prove more or less ineffective.”67 Both remedies produced new, undesired effects. Staining the gelatin layer, for instance, was helpful only “if the coloring agent actually washes out without residue during development.”68 When the measures taken to prevent halations were successful, other authors objected, they reduced the sensitivity of the plates—not to mention the fact that handling printer’s ink reportedly had severely negative effects on at least one photographer’s domestic environment.69 As early as 1890, Cornu had assured readers of the Jahrbuch für Photographie und Reproduktionstechnik that the “somewhat inconvenient” use of a black paste made of clove oil, turpentine oil, and soot “completely prevents the appearance of halations, aureoles, and fogs,”70 but six years later, the same organ reports that “photographers who occupy themselves with capturing landscapes and interiors aside, there is probably no one more vexed by the emergence of halations than the astronomer. This phenomenon makes it virtually impossible to photograph weak stars in the vicinity of bright ones.”71 All precautionary measures notwithstanding, the “disastrous effects” of halation were still at work, and photographers in France likewise reported the persistence of the “parasitic phenomenon.”72 The fact that Cornu, a leading astronomer, took an interest in the issue of halations already intimates that something else, and more, was at stake here than the elimination of a formal flaw. A halation was not simply “not an image” or an optical foreign body; it was an image in its own right, one that interacted with the intended photographic recording. Cornu speaks of the “appearance of a collateral image [. . .] that confounds the image proper.” The confusion was due to the ambivalent cohort of agents the halation brought onstage: “aureoles, hazes, or fogs that do not exist in nature.” In 1899 the German astronomer Scheiner found this formula for their appear-

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ance: “The photographic plate, too, may be possessed of a fanciful imagination, as it were.”73 So it was doubtful whether what a photograph presented to the beholder was actually there outside the darkroom. What is more, the very distinction between natural and artificial phenomena, between those that were part of nature and those that existed only in the darkroom, was called into question by the appearance of “collateral images.” As Michael Lynch correctly notes, “artefacts are not necessarily unnatural in origin.”74 The photographic generation of visibility, in particular, was effected by a set of instruments so thoroughly grounded in physical and chemical processes that the separation of natural from technical phenomena, of fact from artifact, was far from self-­evident. In the debate over halations, for instance, it is in the end virtually impossible to tell whether the primary interest was a negative one, to eliminate a technical defect, or a positive one, to investigate a natural (physical) phenomenon. Terms such as “extraneous light,” “spurious apparitions,” or “defective phenomena” suggested an order that allowed for unequivocal distinction between intrinsic and extraneous, correct and incorrect, natural and artificial, technical image and technical defect. Even apostrophizing the undesired traces as “enemies” invokes the idea of an antagonist who at least pre­sents himself in definite form, a visible external threat to a given order. “Parasite,” another term that occasionally appears in handbooks and research accounts, is more apposite. The parasite is not an outside enemy. It operates as an intruder who has already occupied the interior of the order. Parasites, Michel Serres writes, “parasite each other and live amidst parasites.”75 In that sense, what the term designates is not negative, not a mere flaw or pure deficit. “The parasite has placed itself in the most profitable positions, at the intersection of relations”76— in our case, the relations between image and “collateral image,” between technically generated image and image of technology. At this nodal point, it reveals something that, without its appearance, would presumably have gone unnoticed. In the following, I will explore scenes of the generation of visibility in which the appearance of the disruption was no longer identifiable as an evident “defect” or “spurious image” but instead raised a vastly more fundamental question: what should be considered the “normal case” of photographic recording? 2.6 Blending fact and artifact

In the final years of the nineteenth century, the physicist René Colson launched a series of experiments to gauge the sensitivity of the photographic plate. Colson’s experiments must be seen in the context of a number of scientific uses of photography in which the latter was stripped of virtually its entire set of instruments: all mechanical and optical components—­ camera box, shutter release, and lenses—were removed, leaving nothing but the photosensitivity of the isolated plate. As in the photograms from the

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early period of photography, objects were placed directly on the sensitive layer, held at a minimal distance from it, or projected onto it in the form of radiation. In 1896 Henri Becquerel rendered the nuclear radiation from uranium salts visible by scattering them across a photographic plate. In 1895 Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen similarly did not use a camera to capture what he called X-­rays, instead aiming the unidentified radiation directly at a photosensitive plate. Electrical spark discharges left their traces, as did the shadows cast by flying projectiles the English physicist Vernon Boys captured on photographic plates. So when Hippolyte Baraduc, Louis Darget, and Julien Ochorowicz sought ways to re­cord thoughts by photographic means, their obvious first choice was to hold photographic plates to their own or their test subjects’ foreheads in order to obtain a visible signature of the active mind.77 All of these experiments grew out of the realization that visible light was but one of many agents that affected the sensitive emulsions. Others included chemical agents, mechanical action on the photographic plate, heat, infrared radiation, and the forms of radiation mentioned above (X-­rays, radioactivity, electricity). In 1897 the physicist Adrien Guébhard, who will play a major part in chapter 3, aptly called this form of photographic recording without light “aphotographie.” Gustave Le Bon, who was not only a prominent theorist of mass but also experimented with photographic plates, discerned the effects of a “black light”; Guillaume de Fontenay, meanwhile, preferred to call the phenomena in question “chimicographies,” arguing that the traditional term “photography,” or “light-­writing,” was misleading in this instance.78 It goes without saying that experimentation with these phenomena had to be conducted in the dark, since natural light would quickly have blackened the sensitive plates. The researchers accordingly worked in darkened rooms or used photographic plates wrapped in suitably opaque packaging. And so, around 1900, readers of the specialist literature on photography, natural-­science journals, and academy reports encountered titles such as “Production of Pictures on a Photographic Plate in the Dark,” “On Photographic Effects in the Dark,” and “A New Kind of Invisible Radiation.” Researchers took account of the fact “that many bodies are capable of influencing a photographic plate in the dark and generating their own images.”79 Colson experimented with various substances and radiations (zinc, aluminum, magnesium, cadmium, ink; light, thermal radiation, X-­rays) and studied how they affected a gelatin bromide layer. In March 1899 the English physicist W. J. Russell reported to an audience at the Royal Society about the pictures he had produced “in complete darkness” on commercially available Ilford Special Rapid plates, letting substances affect the sensitive layer of the plates for periods ranging from a few hours to a week. Like Colson, Russell investigated the imaging effects of various metals. He also exposed the photographic plate to the vapors of turpentine, olive oil, bergamot, peppermint, and lemon oil, and tested the optical agency of printed

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matter: a cover of the satirical journal Punch, a page from the Times, and a five-­pound note that was “placed on the photosensitive plate with the letters facing down,” resulting in a clearly visible “image of the writing.”80 “Eau de Cologne gives a good picture; so do many wines and brandy, and coffee, guaiacum, and cinnamon are also active substances; thus the photographic plate becomes a very delicate test for the presence of all these substances, and as the action is cumulative, it may even compete with the sense of smell.”81 As Eder’s Jahrbuch für Photographie und Reproduktionstechnik reports on a lecture that same year, many “pictures produced in this manner [. . .] were presented using a projection apparatus, most impressively illustrating the speaker’s observations.”82 Russell’s own publication, however, contains no comparative documentation of his results. He uniformly describes the visible effects of the various substances as “dark pictures” or a “darkening of the plate”; it is difficult to imagine, based on the information he offers, how such evidently undifferentiated markings on the plate might allow for visual identification of particular substances. A few years later, J. Blaas, a physicist from Innsbruck, published additional findings in the Naturwissenschaftliche Wochenschrift. Seeking to test the sensitivity of the plate to radioactive substances, Blaas “wrote several words in uranium nitrate on white paper, briefly exposed the paper to sunlight, and then left it to act on a silver bromide plate in the dark for a day.”83 To the experimenter’s surprise, development of the plate revealed that the uranium writing had left no trace. Instead, the white paper, intended to serve as a mere substrate, had had a visible effect. Blaas concluded that “white or appropriately tinted paper, after intense exposure to sunlight, emits chemically active rays of light that affect the photographic plate for a considerable period of time even after exposure has ended.”84 Flour, sugar, and porcelain proved impervious to the effects of light; experiments with silver and platinum, linen and cotton similarly produced no visible results. Once Blaas had noticed, however, that “low-­quality newsprint” with a high wood content (“wooden lids, packing paper, etc.”) yielded especially strong effects, he tried samples of wood that had been exposed to sunlight for longer periods of time. “And indeed, the very first experiment involving wood after sun exposure yielded a handsome success. Parts of the wood surface kept dark during sun exposure by covering them with black paper were inactive, whereas images of the wood grain and knotholes of the exposed parts were quite clearly visible on the photographic plate. The soft spring wood of the tree rings is a more powerful agent than the more solid autumn wood.”85 Blaas subsequently conducted experiments to assess the relative potencies of oak, beech, acacia, chestnut, plane tree, and elm wood. The 1905 issue of Eder’s Jahrbuch für Photographie und Reproduktionstechnik includes a photographic image of such a sample, half of which had been covered as the other half was exposed to strong sunlight (fig. 21). The grain of the exposed portion is imprinted distinctly on the sensitive layer.

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Fig. 21  J. Blaas, emanation of a piece of wood, 1903.

Russell, Colson, and Blaas systematically mapped this excess sensitivity of the photographic plate and explicitly described their work as the “production of pictures.” Yet once again, the line between “picture” and “disruption,” “fact” and “artifact,” was far from evident. The reports from which I have quoted contain indications that the pictures from the dark represent phenomena that had hitherto been known primarily as “vexatious instances of blackening during the development of plates.”86 “These effects,” Colson writes, “are the photographer’s enemies and only the more dangerous for occurring invisibly and surreptitiously, so that, once the damage is done, the photographer does not always have the wherewithal to identify their true cause so he can avoid them in the future.”87 Depending on where and in what context they appeared, the phenomena might also switch sides, as it were. Blaas, for instance, recognized that the image-­generating effect of wood was at once also the explanation for “a phenomenon that had previously caused me a great deal of annoyance [. . .] I had [. . .] long noticed that -­thirds of the surface of many a negative was hazy while the rest remained brighter or showed only isolated stripes.” In the course of his experiments, he found that the undesirable haziness was apparently due to radiation emitted by the wood used to make the cassettes of the camera body. Colson reminds his readers on several occasions that the high sensitivity of photographic plates is a profoundly ambivalent property: “Although these effects constitute important resources for the applications of photography, many of them are capable of producing more or less distinct hazes that appear without the operator’s knowledge. It is quite probable that many pictures

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recorded accidentally [impressions accidentelles] for which we used to have no explanation may be traced back to these effects.”88 Early on in his monograph La plaque photographique, he writes, of the photographic plate: Due to its extreme sensitivity, this wonderful instrument [. . .] is surrounded by numerous influences that create a veritable confusion; in ordinary photography, they cause failures, accidental hazes, and stains, and determining their cause is vital if we hope to remedy the problem. In the field of scientific research, such as in the photographic recording of invisible objects or objects hidden behind solid bodies, they may easily deceive the researcher as to the true cause of the phenomenon he observes.89

In short, when pictures appeared, their “true cause” was a complex question, not to be answered offhand or on the basis of visual inspection alone. As in the investigations of halations discussed above, experiments concerning the effects of various substances on photographic plate were ultimately equivocal: was the objective to eliminate hitherto unidentified sources of error or to uncover unknown natural phenomena? Such oscillation was a familiar experience in the nineteenth-­century laboratory. As Christoph Hoffmann and Jutta Schickore remind us, “Control over the steadily growing variability of disturbances and contaminations had become an object of general interest among scientists and researchers from a wide variety of disciplines [. . .] Everything and everyone can interfere with everything and everyone. Undisturbed operation of an institute of physics would require all research and teaching activities to be discontinued.”90 In 1911 Guillaume de Fontenay puts the same observation more succinctly in a report to the members of the Société universelle d’études psychiques in Paris: “There is nothing that does not affect our plates.”91 Like Colson, who sought to divide this excessive output into useful “applications” and “harmful hazes” (voiles nuisibles), Fontenay devotes a first part of his tract to the “usefulness” of the photographic plate before moving on to what the title of the second part calls “its treason: errors, illusions, fraud.” “One can always make something come up on a photographic plate, and be it the haze created during its manufacture,” he writes.92 This inevitable appearance of “something” was at once the condition and—as Colson notes—the “confusion” of the photographic push into visibility. It could not be true that nothing had preceded the visible traces on the plate. So had an as yet unidentified phenomenon been at work—like the X-­rays whose discovery had earned Röntgen a Nobel Prize—or had the plate been contaminated by the photographic materials themselves, as in the negative-­suffusing hazes that Blaas had identified as a sort of self-­portrait of his camera? Colson’s experiments may be described as an attempt to retain control over this distinction. By bringing plates in contact with all sorts of materials, radiations, and va-

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Fig. 22  Arthur Goodspeed, “The Röntgen Phenomena,” 1892.

pors in his laboratory, he built a register of photographic effects that would ideally be capable of identifying the natural cause for any figure that might emerge on the plate. Yet nothing could better illustrate the instability and permeability of this boundary than the case of the American physicist Arthur Goodspeed. In 1890 Goodspeed had directly captured the spark discharge of an induction machine on photographic plates. As part of his experiments, he also used several ordinary coins that received an electric charge. One of the plates presented a peculiar phenomenon: “A few days later Mr. Jennings, who had taken the plates home for development, reported the appearance, on one of them, of too [sic] very mysterious discs quite different in character from those obtained by the sparking process. No explanation was found at the time to account for the phenomenon, and the matter was forgotten till recently.”93 Five years later, Röntgen published his report “On a New Kind of Rays.” The existence of a hitherto unknown species of radiation caused a global sensation. Goodspeed went back to his laboratory and retrieved the old plate (fig. 22), identifying it in retrospect as the first X-­ray photograph ever taken, unintentionally produced by the presence of a Crookes tube— such as Röntgen himself had worked with—on the laboratory table in the vicinity of the plate and the coins. The original, accidental production in Goodspeed’s laboratory of a picture of two “mysterious discs” now became the subject of a purposeful and methodical reenactment: “On repeating the experiment by operating a Crookes tube for ten minutes, in the vicinity of an enclosed photographic plate having two coins on the outside of the box, it is found that the coin shadows are strikingly similar to the mysterious discs upon the old plate. The blurred appearance of one edge is a distinctive feature of a Röntgen picture.”94

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Otto Glasser reports a similar case in his life of Röntgen: “It is well known that Sir William Crookes, as early as 1879, used a cathode ray tube with a concave cathode and a platinum anode, the construction of which became typical for later roentgen ray tubes, and often made the observation that photographic plates which happened to be stored near his cathode tubes were fogged; at one time he even returned a number of these plates to the manufacturer complaining that they were unsatisfactory.”95 Again, it was impossible to tell straightaway whether photographic plates presented discoveries or contaminations, the stuff that Nobel Prizes are made of or a potential warranty case. The “divisions between message and noise” are “capricious”: depending on a tiny displacement, one hears now one, now the other.96 The same difficulty is evident in Goodspeed’s fate. The final sentence of the brief report he published in Science in 1896 marks the remarkable displacement that had occurred: “The writer and his associate wish to claim no credit for the interesting accident, but the fact remains that without doubt the first Röntgen picture was produced on February 22, 1890, in the physical lecture room of the University of Pennsylvania.”97 What in 1890 had been an “interesting accident” had by 1895, when Goodspeed retrieved the plate from the stack of rejects to which it was consigned (“a lot of so-­called failures”), become the “very interesting incident” mentioned in the first sentence of his account. Goodspeed realizes that he is a discoverer without a discovery. He has no claim to being the discoverer of Röntgen rays (if he were, the phenomenon might now be known as “Goodspeed radiation”) since, when he first encountered them, he believed them to be experimental noise. Somewhere between 1890 Pennsylvania and 1895 Würzburg, Goodspeed’s “mysterious discs” had crossed the epistemic threshold between artifact and fact. A notable element of his story is that Goodspeed did not simply discard the mysterious result he had produced in February 1890. Humboldt, in Kehlmann’s novel, could confidently throw Daguerre’s picture out the window: the group portrait that was supposed to emerge on it and the “maze of ghostly outlines” that appeared in its stead were clearly distinguishable. It was not a matter of debate that the shot was a failure when assessed in light of its maker’s intention. In the case of invisible radiation and its baffling effects, the criteria of what constituted a successful or unsuccessful exposure were much murkier: something about his inexplicable plate made Goodspeed keep it for the time being. We have already seen that a disruption in the field of photographic visualization did not necessarily constitute an obstacle; in some instances, it remained an open question what it would turn out to be. In their laboratory in Pennsylvania in 1890, Goodspeed and his assistant Jennings played the parts of two scientists who could not (yet) know what they had just produced. Fact and artifact, incident and accident of generated visibility, did not belong to two different orders: as “procedural excesses,”98 artifacts instead raised questions that concerned the entire procedure of visualization. Techniques designed to render visible unleash a “dialectic of fact and arti-

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fact” that “should not [. . .] simply be regarded as the root of all epistemic evil or a dangerous knowledge trap. For it is also the driving force behind a typical research dynamic.”99 But before I trace this dynamic in two case studies from nineteenth-­century France, I want to sketch another scene where the disruption or accident has shed the aspect of being a defect: the scene of its aesthetic appropriation. 2.7 The art of the disruption I: August Strindberg

If we now recognize the aesthetic potential of many a photographic artifact, that is no doubt because our eye has been trained by the art of the twentieth century.100 Some pictures (fig. 23) distantly resemble the products of what is called “experimental” or “abstract” photography, even though they came into being under very different circumstances.101 The nineteenth- and early-­twentieth-­century handbooks I have mentioned give little indication of such an eye for the formal qualities of the pictures: a technical “defect,” “failure,” or “accident” was usually considered a reject without ulterior aesthetic relevance. Yet as I have already suggested, the rich assortment of metaphors used to describe these artifacts adumbrated an appreciation of their legibility as forms and figures. This perspective comes far more naturally to today’s beholders: the original context in which the pictures were produced has been largely forgotten, and their entanglement in the interplay between fact and artifact has lost its particular urgency. Most importantly, the art of the twentieth century has established a canon of pictures that aesthetically integrate the process of ostensible destruction. The works of August Strindberg without a doubt occupy an exceptional position within the photographic recording system of the nineteenth century. In the late 1890s, Strindberg by and large discontinued his literary production in order to devote himself to painting and to studies in the natural sciences. He wrote treatises on chemistry, optics, and astronomy, took an interest in the growth of plants and the formation of crystals, and revived the tradition of alchemy by attempting to synthesize iodine and gold. In these experiments, Strindberg did not hew to a rigorous system but let spontaneous fancies and intuitions be his guides; for example, he used the zinc bathtub in his room at the Hôtel Orfila, Paris, for experiments with iron oxide. In 1907–1908, he published the Blue Books, a four-­volume collection of short essays that surveyed the entire spectrum of the poet’s savage mind. “The thematic palette ranges from mathematics and cabbala to the cryptography of the planets, from plant psychology and electricity to bacteriology, from spontaneous generation and the impossibility of historiography to eschatology.”102 That Strindberg’s natural-­science experiments did not elicit any appreciable echo from expert circles goes without saying, but that disregard is irrelevant. The scientific value that might have been extracted from his

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Fig. 23  Anonymous, “Fremdlichteinwirkung” (effect of extraneous light; exposure), 896. From Eder et al., Die Photographie mit Bromsilbergelatine und Chlorsilbergelatine (1930).

ventures is far less interesting than his curious excessive experimentalism itself: he dyed flames, examined the ashes of plants, and toyed with prisms, mirrors, and spectroscopes, showing no concern for scientific standards or the boundaries between chemistry and alchemy, experimental science and occultism. This backdrop is what lends Strindberg’s photographic experiments their particular interest. “From having been a scientific experiment,” he writes in 1897, “photography has now become a game, and yet the whole process remains a mystery.”103 Once again, the poet’s purpose was presumably not so much to methodically unlock the secrets of photography; he wanted to savor them and demonstrate their potential as instruments of visual creation. Hence Strindberg’s contribution to cameraless photography. “Today, when people are amazed that X-­rays require neither a camera nor a lens, it is a fitting moment for me to relate the real circumstances concerning my photographs of celestial bodies taken without a camera or a lens in the early spring of 1894.”104 Strindberg called these pictures “celestographs”: several dozen pictures made during an extended stay in Dornach, Austria. “A photosensitive plate, without a darkroom, without a lens, was doused with developer and exposed to the moon’s light for forty-­five min-

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utes.”105 Strindberg immersed the plates with the sensitive side up in a developer bath and exposed them to the light of the open night sky. “If I remove the lens in the darkroom,” he notes elsewhere, “the effect of the rays must be stronger, since they have been spared the effort of having to penetrate a medium such as glass.”106 A similar consideration was presumably what had led to his open-­air experiments: Strindberg had reduced the instrumentarium of photographic recording down to the photosensitive plate, hoping that forgoing all technological intermediaries would allow him to achieve the greatest possible immediacy. The result is an “accidental image of fascinating indeterminacy” (plate 2).107 In the bottom left part of the picture, we see a cloudlike entity, while bright dots and spots litter the rest of the plate, coalescing into more or less dense formations. A strange metallic glow emanating from the cloud looks as though painted on an enamel plate. Its edges are so fuzzy that it is virtually impossible to read as an object of any kind. In the upper part of the picture, ethereal and motionless “stars” dot a dark “sky”; the lower part, by contrast, conveys an impression of dynamism, an ongoing emergence and transmutation of mercurial organic shapes that the photograph merely captured in a transitory stage. Strindberg’s notes are not entirely clear on how he wanted his celestographs to be received. Was he trying to contribute to astronomical research? He did send a selection of pictures to the astronomer Camille Flammarion in Paris. “To find out where I stood, I mailed paper prints accompanied by a report to the Société astronomique de France.”108 Yet even Flammarion, who had published numerous works of popular science and was not above consulting spiritistic studies, apparently thought the Swedish dramatist’s research was shady. He presented it to the members of the Société astronomique de France in May 1894, but in the printed protocol all that remains of Strindberg’s celestographic transmission is a laconic and virtually meaningless entry: “Mr. J. Strindberg, Austria, sends photographic prints made without a lens.”109 A little later, Flammarion had the odd pictures returned to sender. Strindberg’s view of photography as a “game” and a “mystery” suggests that we should regard the celestographs as more than simply a contribution to astronomical research whose value proved to be nil when the scientific experts withheld their acknowledgment. To understand the peculiar position between art and science these pictures occupy, we need to consider them in the context of Strindberg’s interest in “chance in artistic creation” and his “theory of automatic art.”110 “A standing mirror remained on the table, reflecting the moon as a round yellow image, which struck me as strange at that moment”: that is how Strindberg retrospectively describes the instant that inspired his experiments.111 What all at once struck him as “strange” that night were the laws of optics that let a celestial body of the moon’s immense size pro­ject its image as a perfect circle in the smooth surface of the mirror. Was not the round shape perceptible in the mirror in fact

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the work of the beholder’s “visual apparatus”?112 And might it be possible to circumvent this apparatus by directing the moon’s image instead onto a photographic plate? Strindberg’s focus was from the outset on the difference between the perceptions of the eye and what photography recorded. The hypothesis of his experiments was that the two would not show the same image—Strindberg clearly saw his celestographs not as “depictions” that would render the familiar view of the starry sky but as the transformation of the latter into an unlike photographic image. If the night sky over Dornach was not “recognizable” in the pictures, that was part of the program. The motivation behind it was the desire to know “how the world appears irrespective of my treacherous eye”113—or perhaps even, how it appeared when Strindberg himself was absent. This desire is reflected in the act of “exposing” the developing tray, which Strindberg abandoned to the autonomy of its chemical processes for a period of twenty-­four hours, during which he presumably engaged in another of his many studies. We might regard this approach as a direct implementation of the ideal of “noninterventionist objectivity” that, as Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison write, guided many scientists of the second half of the nineteenth century: “wary of human intervention between nature and representation,” they “turned to mechanically produced images to eliminate suspect mediation.”114 Yet while Strindberg was no doubt interested in the possibilities of nonintervention, his approach does not quite conform to the ideal of the disciplined scientist who delegates the entire burden of proof to the autonomous agency of his instruments. His concluding remark on the celestographic experiments hints that he did not think the question of whether the photographic plate transmitted an objective image of the stars had been conclusively answered: “Reflections.—Why do the sun and the moon not appear on the plate as they appear in the mirror, in distinct and delimited forms? So it must be the eye and its construction that determines the forms of these luminous disks. Sun and moon are not round?” This final question, put forward with a mild overtone of incredulousness, hints at the crucial epistemological dilemma of the “photography of the invisible.” “Sun and moon are not round?” The stars the eye sees do not even exist in that form? And only the photographic plate knows their true shape? Are we then to believe that the sight of the celestographic clouds, formations, and spots (plate 2) contains more truth than what the sense of sight transmits? Strindberg leaves these question unanswered. His celestographs showed something other than what the eye saw. Yet he was by no means convinced that they had a superior claim to validity. The majority of the scientists of his day opted (at least when discussing the issue in abstract terms) for the superiority of the photographic plate—something I will discuss in detail below (chapter 5)—but Strindberg left the question mark in place. It was entirely possible that the celestographs showed him a picture of “how the world appears irrespective of my treacherous eye.” But that did not mean that this other

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view of things was not treacherous as well. As the way Strindberg handled the pictures also demonstrates, he did not regard them as documents, evidence, or an objective record of real sets of facts. He did not even fix all of the shots, not only hazarding but deliberately precipitating their progressive transmogrification, which suggests that he was primarily interested in the photographic generation of forms.115 So the autonomous agency of the instruments, far from guaranteeing their objectivity, here serves to escalate the dynamic of the medium to the point where any claim to exact representation collapses. The ideal of a noninterventionist objectivity gave way to the realization that the instruments, when left to their own agency for long enough, gave rise to an undreamt-­of plethora of forms. In one of the pictures, Strindberg discerns a dark cloud with a clear honeycomb grid. Sometime later—it was in the spring—I was taking a walk in a small gorge whose eastern slope was still covered by plenty of snow, illuminated by the rays of the setting sun. The surface of the melting snow presented the same honeycomb-­shaped indentations, like a drawing of cells, that the moon had engendered on my photographic plate. Travelling through Bohemia during the thawing period, I observed that the snow bore the impression of the same honeycomb-­shaped indented circles or inaccurate hexagons.116

Once again it is apparent that Strindberg saw his photographs not as objective and immutable notations but as a medium of free association. Their shapes were at his disposal for a play of similarities. The celestographic figments, supposedly the product of a technology that was the eye’s antagonist, were suddenly plain to see during a spring walk as honeycomb patterns in the melting snow. They could be found in nocturnal Dornach as well as in Bohemia, and the moonlight engendered them in the same form as the setting sun. “We have seen similarities everywhere, for the simple reason that similarity and correspondence exist everywhere.”117 This is not the place for a detailed discussion of the sources that inspired Strindberg’s holistic worldview. Of primary interest in the context of the a-­photographic praxis of the 1890s is his aesthetic perspective on the products of this automatic art. What looks initially like a scientific experimental arrangement—an investigation of the true shape of the moon using photographic plates and involving the expertise of colleagues in Paris—turns out to be part of a larger creative endeavor. Strindberg is ultimately much more interested in the formal qualities of the pictures than in any astronomical information they may contain. The difference between the plate and the “visual apparatus,” too, recedes into the background as the identification of formal similarities between the technically recorded image and what the unarmed eye discovers in the world comes to the fore. To Strindberg’s mind, the question of who was ultimately right—the “treacherous eye” or the incorruptible apparatus—is beside the point. So the celestographs should also

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be considered in relation to the paintings he creates around the same time and the “theory of automatic art” that accompanies them (plate 3).118 Instead of a brush, Strindberg used a knife to paint these pictures, spreading thick layers of oil paint across cardboard sheets and blending the colors by rubbing. “The process,” Dario Gamboni writes, “involved a combination of intention, chance, technique, material, and projection.”119 Strindberg applied and mixed the paints, wielded the spatula, intervened and guided the painting process, but he also watched “what happens when one lets the physical substance itself determine the process of the picture.”120 This approach was consistent with his programmatic proclamation of an “art of the future (which will pass away, like everything else)! Imitate nature closely; above all, imitate nature’s way of creating!”121 One aspect of this natural way of creating was that the pictorial production allowed itself to be guided in part by the intrinsic dynamic of the material. The picture, Strindberg wrote, “is endowed with the gift of life.”122 The art historian Douglas Feuk has argued that Strindberg’s paintings accordingly not just “provide an image of nature,” they also give the “impression of being nature.”123 The tentative and hesitant aspect, the indecision between the imposition of form and the loss of form, would recur in the subsequent contemplation of the pictures: “At first, one sees only a chaos of colours; then it begins to assume a likeness, it resembles, but no: it resembles nothing. All at once a point defines itself, like the nucleus of a cell; it grows, the colours group themselves around it and accumulate; rays develop which sprout branches and twigs as ice crystals do on a windowpane . . . and the image pre­sents itself to the viewer, who has assisted at the birth of the picture.”124 A similar gaze meets the nocturnal pictures from the developer bath. In the celestographs, Strindberg left the material almost entirely to its own agency. The autonomy of physical matter, which had already become an integral factor in the paintings, was even more crucial to these pictures. Strindberg prepared the plates, immersed them in the developing tray, and left the visual creation to the moonlight and the agents of chemistry. In this regard, celestography resembled the approaches of Colson, Russell, Blaas, or Paul Czermak, who exposed their plates to all sorts of radiations, vapors, or substances, expecting to be fruitfully irritated by the images that would emerge. They certainly did not think of the photographic disruption as a pure defect. The astronomer Cornu similarly accorded the status of an image in its own right (“collateral image”) to halations, however vexatious they were. But these researchers did not see the legibility of such traces as a matter of free formal play; they believed they served a function, being recordings of real phenomena. That is where Strindberg’s visual practice clearly departs from that of the scientists. He regarded his photographic plates the same way he looked at his paintings and went about discovering all sorts of figures in the products of chemistry. This engagement with the artifacts of photography recalls the centuries-­old tradition of discerning figurative elements in trees and roots, in passing clouds, in flames or rising smoke. The canonical pas-

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sage is Leonardo’s well-­known recommendation in his Treatise on Painting that apprentice painters look “attentively at old and smeared walls, or stones and veined marble of various colors” to discover in these natural figments entire landscapes with rocks, valleys, and rivers; human figures performing vivid gestures; battles; dresses; and “strange countenances.”125 These techniques of what Gombrich has described as the “projection” and “reading” of figures into an image aimed to discover representations in the products of chance even when—or precisely because—no manifest and unequivocal creative intention underlay them.126 Such “accidental images,” Gamboni writes, first stand out because their “author” is “unidentified.” In this sense, they “can also be seen as natural, miraculous or automatic, depending on the agency to which they are attributed. Or they can be seen in a more neutral way as non-­intentional images.”127 That is why he also proposes the term “potential images.” Reading them as figurations or “depictions of . . .” is not compulsory; such legibility is not manifest in them but lingers in a certain latency. The point of the interpretation of potential images is accordingly not the “correct” identification of a cause or intention but the “imaginative side of perception.”128 In his interpretations of the nocturnal formations of photochemistry, Strindberg similarly put his faith in a beholder’s freedom to recognize something as an image that may not have been intended as such. To his mind, the formations of photochemistry were neither sources of useful insight nor a “dangerous enemy” of the photographer. He was no more interested in a systematic classification of photochemical production than in preventing potential artifacts. Strindberg was perhaps the first to see the artifacts of photography as autonomous pictures and motors of the imagination. 2.8 The art of the disruption II: Araki, Polke

Marjen Schmidt’s handbook on the conservation and archival storage of photographs includes an illustration that shows a striking transformation. Water damage has turned a conventional wedding picture into a surreal scene (fig. 24).129 The man’s gaze fixes the beholder, and the depiction of the polished top hat and white gloves he holds in his left hand is razor-­sharp. But the carefully arranged scene is infested by a conspicuous cloud of destruction that has already swallowed the bride. The action of the water has detached the gelatin layer from the support medium. The man’s smile remains just barely recognizable, but the maelstrom of decomposition has seized the right half of his body. His right shoulder is disintegrating; the shape that begins as a pointed white shirt collar melts away and is lost in the fog of formlessness. The bride’s gleaming shoes sit on the floor, but above them the destructive cloud hovers like a second, artificial gown. By a wild coincidence, the undulating fringe of the white veil transitions seamlessly into the aureole of disintegration.

Fig. 24  Anonymous, wedding couple, around 1920.

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To a present-­day beholder, this image of decomposition will instantly bring photographs by contemporary artists to mind. Striking examples may be found in the Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki’s book Shijyo–­ Tokyo, which combines close-­up shots of exotic blossoms and plants in color with stills from a film damaged by improper storage (plates 4–9). The perforated strip visible at the center of the compositions is manifestly Araki’s addition. “The fashions worn by the characters and the automobile models,” Ulf Erdmann Ziegler argues, “suggest that the film must have been made around 1970. The perforations are supposed to indicate that these pictures are taken from a filmic source—but their presence must in fact be an artifice of the photographer, since the perforations frame the pictures along the top and bottom edges rather than laterally. Araki, in other words, deliberately appropriated his own pictures.”130 Araki’s arrangement separates the realm of lavishly colorful and technically flawless nature photography from the material disintegration that, in the bottom halves of the compositions, has infested the views of Tokyo and its residents. But more importantly, the juxtaposition of the plates engenders an odd affinity between the organic life of plants and the destructive growth that unfolds in the bottom images. In some shots, the degradation has altogether effaced the motif (plate 6). Instead of an illusive space to be explored by an eye accustomed to perspectival depiction, proliferating figments spread across the surface. Other pictures let us see fragments of the urban scene: a piece of wall, a playground, the façade of a building (plate 7). The most disturbing effects occur where the imprints of decay align themselves with vestiges of mimetic depiction: the forms of decomposition coalesce with vegetable and anthropomorphic motifs or envelop the face and body of a human figure as a dense haze (plate 8). They manifest as flames setting a parked truck on fire or as an ominous apparition above the urban highway. “Some pictures are almost black, others merely spotted, but most look like the Last Judgment: acid, fire, and ice race through the streets, breaking holes into bodies and faces.”131 Looking at Araki’s pictures, our eye wavers between the visible motif and the visibility of the pictorial medium—or finds that motif and medium have become assimilated to the point of indistinguishability. Some of them indeed make it difficult not to read the accidental damage the stock suffered after exposure and development as mimetic as well. It pre­sents itself as an organic infestation that affects not only the surface of the paper but the bodies of the persons that appear in the pictures (plate 9). It is not by accident that these images have been compared to photographs taken in Nagasaki—as though they, too, showed not the damage suffered by the surface of a picture but the maimed victims of a disaster.132 The effect of these images resembles that of Walker Evans’s Torn Movie Poster (fig. 3), in which a dynamic dialogue unfolds between the painted melodrama of the movie poster and the traces of its destruction. The actress’s exaggerated expression of horror—the wide-­open eyes, the parted

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lips—is of course a response to a catastrophe happening somewhere outside the pictorial space. But it takes an effort of will not to relate the theatricality of her expression to the much more proximate disaster befalling her from above: the picture is peeling off the wall. Our eye wavers between these two planes of depiction: the torn paper might also be blood trickling down from the woman’s forehead, while a fold in the paper—whoever put it up did a sloppy job—looks like a tear running down the man’s cheek. The heroine’s eyebrow continues as a black gash where the paper is torn. These correspondences are paradoxical because they compress two logically separate planes of depiction into a unified perceptual image. They are logically false yet visually plausible, accidental yet irrefutable. We know that no physical correspondence can link a tattered piece of paper to the face depicted on it, and still we see them as one. The disfigurement inhabits the material, but it infects our reading of what the image depicts. Araki’s Shijyo–­Tokyo follows on a long tradition of artists adapting accidental damage for their own purposes. The deliberate production of unfocused pictures by Julia Margaret Cameron and the pictorialists of the nineteenth century probably constitutes the earliest attempt to transform photographic defects into an aesthetic quality.133 The handbooks of photography never failed to include blurriness in their catalogues of defects, but photographers also began to recognize its aesthetic value and devised techniques to produce and refine it. In the 1930s solarization—the reversal of light and dark values by overdevelopment—was part of Man Ray’s artistic repertoire. Around the same time, the Belgian surrealists Raoul Ubac and Marcel G. Lefrancq created brûlages, pictures in which they experimented with the deliberate ablation of the pictorial layer, resulting in abstract streaks or figures such as Ubac’s La nébuleuse (fig. 25), who owes her ghostly appearance to intentional overheating of the negatives. Another way of rendering the photographic material visible is illustrated by the abstract “gelatin paintings” made by Carl-­Heinz Hargesheimer (Chargesheimer, as he styled himself) in the 1950s, using photochemical ingredients as quasi-­painterly artists’ supplies. His large-­format pictures generated “fields of free association in which one may discern both microcosmic and macrocosmic objects: possible interpretations range from a flow of plankton to an interstellar nebula. Whereas the photographic advice literature considered these same effects the marks of technical failure, Chargesheimer sought to elicit them as genuinely photographic phenomena.”134 A detailed history or critique of such “photographic bad manners” remains to be written.135 For our context, what is interesting once again is the fact that artists attached aesthetic value to phenomena that had long been treated as deficits, spurious apparitions, and accidents of photography. What had been perceived as nothing but the thwarting or effacement of the originally intended picture was now seen as a form in its own right— a “potential image,” in Gamboni’s terminology. Instead of appearing unbidden, the result of accident or inadvertence, the proliferating effects of

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Fig. 25  Raoul Ubac, La nébuleuse, 1939. © VG Bild-­Kunst, Bonn 2009.

the material were manufactured in a balancing act between control and loss of control, design and chance. Johannes Brus framed this program in 1976 when he set himself rules that systematically turned the precepts of the photographic advice literature upside down: Make focused or blurry prints; allow spots to appear by contaminating the material; let dust settle on a picture and fix it; use a sponge in developing; never use stop baths, and use a bad developer instead of a good one; solarize, manipulate, interpret; make double exposures and let the photographic paper slip out of position between exposures [. . .] Add to that the

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subsequent manipulation of the finished print, whose black-­and-­white layer may be dyed any color using chemical agents.136

No one pursued this cultivation of the defect with more systematic energy than Sigmar Polke. Many of his photographic works inhabit scenarios in which the representational image absconds, fails to come into existence in the first place, or wears its photochemical ingredients on its sleeve. Polke made some of these pictures in his bathroom. The developing trays were set up in the bathtub, while the fixing bath sat in the adjacent sink. When the trays were too small for the large paper formats, Polke folded the paper, which yielded an uneven distribution of the developer across the pictures.137 Like the people and things in Paris, New York, or Afghanistan the photographs showed, the air bubbles that rose in the baths demanded their fair share of the pictorial space. Why should the clouds, patterns, and hazes of photochemistry be “less iconic” than the streetlights of the Place de la Concorde that flanked them? A face emerges, but a dark haze veils it, and a yellow chemical cloud is already approaching from the bottom right corner of the picture. In Paris, solarization strikes in the open street, and in the photochemical dripstone cave next door, the deposits have buried everything but two bare feet (fig. 26). Such fragments are burned into the pictures as vestiges of representation. They show people and times and places of the past as the life of the ingredients rages around them; it has spit them up and may swallow them again at any moment, reminding the beholder that “a picture is a picture and not what it depicts.”138 Rampant chemical sprawl has left nothing of four men by a bar in São Paulo but a hand and the checked pattern of a sports jacket (plate 10). In other pictures from the same series, the men have vanished without a trace beneath a dark layer that has spread over them. In addition to the chemical marks, we discern the creases of the paper, folded to fit it into the developing tray. That human figures “would have been visible” behind this photographic curtain can be deduced only from other pictures in the series, in which the sitters have “survived.” The picture camouflages its object. Or, to be more precise: the picture is this camouflage. The fog is the picture—“an arranged noise,” as Martin Seel has put it.139 It lets objects come and go, partially revealing them or dissolving them into their chemical components. In an interview, Polke described his approach, speaking of the series Bowery, New York (fig. 27): “It was the first time that I had incorporated all the mistakes, the spots that crop up when you’re developing and enlarging, but in a way that interprets the picture.”140 The “mistake” no longer befalls the intended picture as an accident. Once it is “deployed,” as Polke puts it, it loses the status of a defect and disruption. We generally perceive the appearance of “photographic spots” the same way we see other blemishes, as obtrusive: “When we interpret a spot on the tablecloth, a motif on a tapestry,” Sartre writes, “we do not posit that the spot, the motif has representative properties. Really, that spot represents nothing; when I perceive it, I perceive it as a spot and that is all.”141 That is

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also how the photographic handbooks re­cord the countless forms in which the spot appears. Like the stain on the immaculate tablecloth, it has no value in itself; its existence is pure deficiency—a figment to be removed, whose reappearance must be prevented. The lists of errors in the photographic handbooks I have already quoted include an arsenal of photographic spots: “dully gleaming spots,” “spots clear as glass,” “mossy,” “loamy-­yellow,” and “crescent-­shaped spots.” These descriptions already bespeak the particular attention to the outward appearance of the spot that the attempts to eliminate it guaranteed. Calling it “mossy” or “crescent-­shaped” presupposes a gaze that looks for resemblances to forms in the familiar world of everyday life. So it would be a mistake to believe that nineteenth-­century amateur photographers were unaware of the formal qualities of photographic accidents. But unlike Brus or Polke, they saw no point in deliberately causing the formation of “photographic spots” in order to involve them in the creation of the pictorial space. By contrast, Polke, like Strindberg before him, harnesses the visually generative potential of the artifact—what Sartre men-

Fig. 26  Sigmar Polke, Paris, 1971, © The Estate of Sigmar Polke, Cologne/VG Bild-­ Kunst, Bonn 2016.

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Fig. 27  Sigmar Polke, from the series Bowery, New York, 1973. © The Estate of Sigmar Polke, Cologne/VG Bild-­Kunst, Bonn 2016.

tions as the possibility of “interpreting” a spot. Looking at a spot, we are, as a matter of principle, at liberty to confer the status of a representation on it. A spot, one that was deliberately put in a picture, “makes itself by itself, and so quickly that elaborative thought has no time to construct anything representational at all in the image.”142 But nothing can prevent someone contemplating this spot to read its outlines as a representation in spite of all—even if its presence was never “meant” to be understood that way. The spot-­turned-­image then appears as a phantom that allows for a “play” of similarities. When spots, as Polke similarly puts it, “interpret” the picture, when they play this game, they are no longer mere photographic supplements. As in Araki’s series Shijyo–­Tokyo, the putative defect is now an integral part of the picture and enters into a relation of mutual interpretation with the other motifs. Conclusion

The history of photography has been haunted from its very beginning—and as chapter 1 demonstrated, even before its proper beginning—by a history

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of disruptions, of accidents and incidents. Parts of what, around 1830, became, according to the classical photohistorical narrative, a photographic image—which is to say, a fixable, representational, intentionally produced visual record—had long existed as unintentional, nonmimetic, ephemeral traces. This recalcitrant potential persisted after the establishment and stabilization of photography in the early nineteenth century. Since then, every new photographic process has engendered novel and specific forms of disruption as well. These effects have manifested themselves as flaws, defects, or “enemies” of the photographer, but two additional dimensions of the disruption have emerged as well: its aesthetic potential, which let beholders discern in the spots, streaks, and hazes of photochemistry a new universe of forms and figments, and its potential as an object of knowledge. In the very dysfunction, interruption, and “disturbance of reference” (Heidegger), photography shows itself. The technical image is then—intentionally or unintentionally—at once also an image of technology, revealing the operation of the medium, which would have remained latent in its smooth functioning. That is why an either-­or (picture/no picture) cannot be the ultimate point of an account of the disturbance. Even the disappearance or disintegration of photographs generates a visible trace: an image of disappearance and disintegration. So we need to recognize the disturbance, the accident or incident, as a constitutive element of photography, though its presence is no more an absolute quality than its absence: neither the transparency and smooth functioning of a medium nor the disruption of this function are tokens of its “authentic” existence. Both are “symmetrically interdependent.”143 Moreover, toward the end of the nineteenth century, the photographic laboratories yielded growing numbers of pictures that made it virtually impossible to decide: did these products of the photographic generation of visibility reveal as yet unidentified natural phenomena, or were they artifacts of the photographic process itself? At this point, the concept of the “disturbance” sheds its negative meaning; what it designates is not a pure deficiency but instead a potential of photography—the spoilage of photochemistry might very well contain the stuff of scientific discovery. In the next two chapters, I will explore this dialectic of fact and artifact in greater depth in two case studies: the controversy over the French neurologist Jules Luys’s “effluviographs” ( photographies des effluves), and the debate over the earliest photographic image of the Shroud of Turin (1898). In each case, the contentious question was whether the images represented scientific discoveries— an as yet unidentified kind of natural radiation, a chemical self-­portrait of Jesus Christ—or were worthless artifacts born from the darkrooms of photographic dilettantes (or worse, occultists).

3 Case Study I: Signs of Life or “False Flames”? Jules Luys and the Controversy over “Effluviography”

3.1 “Recording devices”: From the human medium to the photographic plate

In 1897 the French neurologist Jules-­Bernard Luys and the chemist Émile David appeared before the assembled members of the Société de biologie in Paris to pre­sent the earliest samples of what they called “effluviography” ( photographie des effluves), pictures that were purported to offer the first visual proof of the existence of a “vital fluid” invisible to the naked eye. Luys was not a novice in the scientific use of photographic techniques. As early as 1873 he had published an atlas of seventy microphotographs that showed cross-­sections of the human brain and earned its author an award from the Académie des sciences.1 These photographic experiments, Luys reports, were prompted by the doubts some of his fellow specialists harbored concerning his earlier drawings of the nervous system: did they “in fact render the reality of the things I claimed I had seen,” or were they the works of “the imagination of an author too much taken with his subject”?2 In the preface to his atlas, Luys responds to this suspicion with the rhetoric of “honesty and self-­restraint” Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have highlighted as a hallmark of the era’s characteristic “ideal of noninterventionist objectivity.”3 “By exercising the utmost self-­restraint and replacing my own person with the agency of light,” Luys writes, “I have been able to obtain a reproduction of the salient anatomical details that is as impersonal as it is authentic.”4 In the later case of his photographies des effluves, there could be no such contest between the arts of drawing and photography: these photographic pictures did not replace or complement any drawings for the simple reason that the phenomenon they made visible was altogether invisible to the draftsman’s eye. The photographs of the “vital fluid” came after a long series of experiments with hypnosis. The heightened sensitivity his subjects evinced in the hypnotic state, Luys believed, constituted a sensorium that would enable him to gain access to phenomena that were imperceptible to individuals in

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a normal physiological state. Because his later use of photography turned out to be an immediate extension of, or replacement for, these early experiments with hypnosis, the latter effectively constitute a prologue that I should briefly outline. In the last third of the nineteenth century, an “experimental culture of hypnotism” had emerged around Jean-­Martin Charcot, who practiced at the psychiatric hospital La Salpêtrière in Paris. “The hypnosis experiment offered an opportunity for investigating a number of pathological alterations of the nervous system on the body of the living patient.”5 In countless experiments, doctors artificially induced these alterations, eliciting a rich spectacle of symptoms. “The hypnotic state,” Charcot and Richer write, “is in effect nothing but an artificial or experimental nervous state, whose multiple manifestations can be caused to appear or disappear at the whim of the observer.”6 To the masters of ceremony at the Salpêtrière, their female subjects presented as living seismographs, automata who were in no way actively involved in the sights they produced but instead allowed effects engendered artificially and “at the whim of the observer” to become manifest on their highly sensitive bodies. In the experiments at the Salpêtrière, “the experimental subjects have no knowledge. They are merely recording devices.”7 In the course of his experiments, Luys similarly turned his hypnotized test subjects into human sensors, always thinking of new physical effects, fluxes, and vapors with which to challenge their heightened sensitivity. In addition to mechanical stimuli such as pressure, shocks, or massages applied to selected areas of their bodies, his trials explored the effects of electrical induction and magnetism. Charcot’s experiments with hypnosis at the Salpêtrière had already drawn on the older tradition of animal magnetism, turning the use of metals and magnets, originally conceived as a therapeutic technique, into another form of experimental stimulation.8 Luys tested the “psychological effects of magnets, electromagnetic currents, and the familiar electric currents” by exposing his hypnotized subjects to these influences. They “engender sensations now of joy and gratification, now of sadness and aversion, depending on whether the north or south pole of a bar magnet is held up to the subject.”9 In his treatise Les émotions chez les sujets en état d’hypnotisme, published in 1887, Luys gives a first comprehensive report on his experiments with hysterics, on whose bodies he staged a veritable theater of physiological and psychological effects. “I tested the agency of gaseous, liquid, and solid substances,” Luys relates, emphasizing that these trials were “actual laboratory experiments,” tests “of the utmost sensitivity and subtlety.”10 The scene in which they took place is described as a sort of resonance chamber; great care was taken to eliminate any extraneous stimuli that might have irritated the senses of the highly sensitive female agents—“the peal of a bell,” “a ray of sunlight that suddenly illuminates a part of the room,” “the tick-­tock of a noisy wall clock,” “an unexpected fly that settles on the test subject’s face.”11

Case Study I

In this controlled environment, Luys operated with fifty-­four chemicals, substances, and essences he held at a distance of three to four inches from his subjects’ eyes and noses, including potassium bromide, pepper, water, rose petals, thyme, and turpentine. Depending on the stimulant and its qualities, he elicited a wide range of reactions: sleepiness (opium), scratching (valerian), emesis (ipecac), religious ecstasy (cherry laurel water). In addition to such physiological reactions, he noted physiognomic changes that, by his account, appeared on the subjects’ faces as though on a screen. The twenty-­eight photographs that accompanied his study served to capture the ephemeral effects in vivid images and were meant to document the full panoply of phenomena. Several observations Luys made over the following years would prove crucial to his later effluviographs. In the course of his experiments, the female subjects showed salient variations in irritability: in the hypnotic state, some parts of their nervous systems were effectively anesthetized, while others awoke to an unimagined and “supraphysiological” activity. Luys first reported this enhanced sensitivity to the members of the Société de biologie in 1890: “New functional abilities are ipso facto being engendered; the subject’s eye acquires a supernatural visual capacity that renders her capable of perceiving impressions of light and vibrations of the ether that elude our eyes.”12 The fact that hypnotized subjects apparently saw more and other things than persons in a normal state inspired Luys to employ them as optical instruments, as “veritable living reagents.”13 “My idea, then, was to harness these new forces, experimentally studied in the instructed test subject, from a scientific standpoint: just as we avail ourselves of a microscope to expand our field of vision and discover details we cannot see on our own and of whose existence we are completely unaware.”14 Upon closer inspection, such comparisons are usually imprecise or suggestive. Does the hallucinating somnambulist in the experimental psychologist’s laboratory truly act like a mute microscope on the biologist’s laboratory table? Optical instruments are always suspected of deceiving their users’ senses, but it would seem unreasonable to impute to them an intention to deceive. With the hysterics, by contrast, the question of whether they were truly “reagents” without wills of their own or merely feigned the spectacle of their symptoms was part of the controversy over experiments with hypnosis from the very beginning. Moreover, the “supraphysiological” phenomena that appeared to the hypnotized subjects, unlike images in the microscope, were inaccessible to outside observers: Luys had not seen them with his own eyes; he had merely heard his test subjects’ accounts of them. But the point I want to make is not so much about whether Luys’s comparison between living and mechanical instruments is in fact compelling. What is remarkable is how and why he offers it in the first place. The virtual identification of the test subject with an instrument, after all, is what will soon prompt him to employ an actual photographic plate as his recording medium.

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His hypersensitive subjects had reported seeing red and blue emanations coming from the eyes, lips, and ears of other persons in the room during Luys’s experiments. They had used the same terms, he added, to describe the suddenly visible electric current of a battery—as blue and red radiation near the negative and positive poles, respectively. In his view, these reports corroborated his belief that the same universal forces that powered an electric battery or moved a compass needle were also at work in the human organism. But what drew his particular attention was that the intensity of these effluves apparently varied depending on the observed person’s psychological and physical state. The red and blue rays sometimes faded; hysterics engendered purple emanations; dead bodies, none at all. One subject, who was taken to the laboratory at the Hôpital de la Charité in a state of somnambulistic derangement and exposed to the sight of the uncovered and slowly cooling brains of a dog, said, “It is all black,” and finally, “It is dead.”15 “We may note, then, that the vital fluid can from now on be seen, since its existence in the animated state can be detected and vanishes together with the latter.”16 In this experimentalization of “seeing,” Luys went beyond the experiments with hypnosis at the Salpêtrière. The heightened sensitivity induced by hypnosis no longer served to spur the experimental bodies to generate forever new symptoms of their excitability. Luys sent his subjects forth like probes into the realm of the unobservable, from which he then prodded them to speak to him. But the slightly labored comparison to the microscope with which he tries to portray this process highlights, if anything, what the spaced-­out mediums left to be desired. Unlike the microscope, they could not in fact “expand” the experimenter’s “field of vision.” They were supposed to see in his stead, and their accounts from the realm of somnambulism did not yield any visible result. In the title of his treatise, Luys promised his readers that the “cerebral effluvia” would be immediately visible, but the conditions of their appearance were in fact highly mediated: the patients were instructed on how to see, and what they then saw, no one else did. Luys’s next goal was to eliminate this blind spot. Starting in the late 1890s, he replaced his living sensors with the sensitivity of the photographic plate. The experiments with hypnosis turned into an exploration of the photographic visualization of invisible fluxes. The sensitivity of the photographic plate supplanted the hallucinating somnambulists’ “special ­impressionableness.”17 3.2 Vital fluids: A “new scientific reality”?

Luys saw these two media of sensitivity as capable of translation into one another; how much so is evident in the earliest photographic samples he and his associate, the chemist Émile David, presented to the Société de biologie on May 8, 1897. Instead of relying on hypnotized female patients,

Case Study I

Fig. 28  Jules Luys/Émile David, spark photograph, 1897.

they entrusted the task of rendering electricity visible to the sensitivity of the photographic plate. Luys and David experimented with the induction coil developed a few decades earlier by Heinrich Ruhmkorff. In a first step, they fired the spark generated by the coil at an ordinary glass plate, where it appeared as a bluish-­purple bunch discharge. When the glass was replaced by a photographic plate, the discharge generated “a central trunk” near the positive pole of the coil “that forks and ramifies into small fibrils of the utmost delicacy” (fig. 28); near the negative pole, by contrast, the discharge appears in the form of a pattern of “fanlike rays that suggest a palm leaf.”18 Finally, Luys and David switched from dynamic to static electricity, testing the spark discharge of a Wimshurst machine. A five-­franc coin was placed at the center of a glass plate and connected to the negative pole of the electrostatic machine. The coin was covered with a photographic plate on whose sensitive layer a second coin was placed that was connected to the machine’s positive pole. Once a spark discharged the machine, each of the coins was surrounded by a “luminous aureole” that left “its imprint

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Fig. 29  Jules Luys/Émile David, spark photograph, 1897.

on the gelatin silver bromide.”19 Reversing the poles yielded an image of a negative discharge (fig. 29). Luys and David were not the first researchers to use photographic plates to render electricity visible. As early as 1858 the German physicist Berend Wilhelm Feddersen had directed the electric current flowing between the poles of a Leyden jar onto a photographic plate. A few years later, Charles-­ David Winter, the owner of a photography studio in Strasbourg, recorded the electric sparks emitted by an induction coil. Next came the French astronomer Étienne-­Léopold Trouvelot, who—like Luys and David after him—hoped to use photography to visualize the difference between positive and negative electricity.20 So the demonstration of the photographic agency of electricity was hardly novel. What set Luys and David’s report apart was the context in which they published their findings: a specialist journal of biology. The authors concluded their report by returning to the observations that had initially prompted their experiments, recalling “the particular way in which each of these currents affects the visual sensitivity of hypnotized test subjects [. . .] To their eyes, fluids of different colors and consistency emanate from the human body just as from an actual bar magnet.”21 They

Case Study I

did not claim that the photographic plate rendered the phenomenon in question in the same manner in which it had appeared to their hypnotized subjects. Where the plate showed formations of delicate “fibrils” and “fanlike rays,” the human instruments had seen red and blue effluvia of largely unspecified shape. Their premise was that what could be seen under conditions of hypnotism had to be capable of being captured in photographs as well. If a physical phenomenon like electricity was registered both by photography and by the “supernatural visual capacity” of hypnotized subjects, then those “cerebral effluvia,” “impressions of light, and vibrations of the ether” the test subjects reported seeing might have a demonstrable physical origin as well. Luys and David’s endeavor may seem curious and even absurd today, but the matter is less clear-­cut if we recall the scientific context in which they conducted their photographic experiments. This was a time when physicists who were above all suspicion of occult inclinations spoke of “photographic effects in the dark,” photographs of the “invisible,” and “photography without light”; when the discovery of a “new kind of rays” could garner a Nobel Prize; when researchers tested the photogenic agency of cotton, wood, five-­pound notes, and newsprint, and dribbled lemon oil, eau de cologne, or brandy onto sensitive plates in the dark laboratory; when scientific treatises were published about photographic “aureoles,” “hazes,” and “fogs,” and scientists lamented the “confusion” allegedly brought on by the “extreme sensitivity” of the photographic plate.22 In this context, it arguably appeared less than absurd that a neurologist at the Hôpital de la Charité in Paris would come up with the idea of making his patients touch a photographic plate with their fingertips to see what visible effects this would yield. Luys laid a plate on the floor of a developing tray and then dipped his subjects’ fingers directly into the developer bath for a period of five to ten minutes. Plate 11 shows the five fingertips of a male adult subject’s hand surrounded by bright emanations. A cometlike artifact appears near the upper right corner of the picture, identified by Luys as a small piece of epidermis floating in the developer solution; it, too, is surrounded by the emanations in question. The effluviographs heralded a revival of ideas such as Franz Anton Mesmer’s theory of animal magnetism and the chemist Carl Ludwig von Reichenbach’s doctrine of Od. In 1852 Reichenbach, a belated follower of Mesmer, had published his studies on what he termed “Od,” an invisible “vital force” that, he surmised, was active not only in human and other animal organisms but also in plants, minerals, magnets, and certain chemical compounds. Although Od was invisible under ordinary conditions, certain persons were able to perceive it. Reichenbach himself had already tried to employ a photographic plate instead of his sensitive human mediums.23 The year before Luys and David produced their effluviographs, the German doctor Ludwig Tormin had gone back to Reichenbach’s photographic experi-

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ments. In his view, the gelatin silver bromide plate, which had been introduced in the intervening years and supplanted the so-­called wet collodion process after around 1880,24 provided a completely new basis for investigation of the effects of Od. “The day seems to have finally arrived when the photographic plate, which has in recent years revealed unimagined and immeasurably vast worlds to the weak human eye, will testify to the legitimacy of Mesmer’s and Reichenbach’s work.”25 In France, Albert de Rochas’s book L’extériorisation de la sensibilité (1895) was instrumental to reviving the interest in Mesmer’s and Reichenbach’s experiments. In their report, once again published in the Société de biologie’s Comptes rendus, Luys and David themselves pointed out the affinities between this earlier research and their own findings. But more importantly, they believed that the photographic recording of the body’s own fluids now made possible a new form of classification and visualization of symptoms of disease. For example, the hand of a patient who had just recovered from a hysterical paroxysm showed no emanation whatsoever. The patient herself was “bilaterally anaesthetic and had lost all sensitivity.”26 Another patient’s hand, by contrast, showed extraordinary activity: “With her I was able to obtain the diverse effluvia corresponding to the different states of hypnosis (lethargy, catalepsy, somnambulism) [. . .]; in particular, I detected a higher intensity of radiation in the state of lethargy, which seems to suspend all sensation, than in the normal state, a finding that seems to be consistent with the phenomena of neuromuscular hypersensitivity that Charcot has so aptly described as a characteristic feature of lethargy.”27 In effluviography, the photographic plate seemed once again to have become the scene of a discovery. Luys and David, for their part, certainly regarded the photographic record they had produced as “reliable evidence of new facts,” “objective demonstration,” and “proof of scientific reality.”28 “Perhaps,” they speculated, “this line of research may enable us to find a new indicator of biological death?”29 3.3 Vital fluids: “Familiar accidents”?

Luys’s death in 1897 put an abrupt end to his experiments. The following year, Photographische Rundschau remarked about his effluviographs, “Pressure, heat, and hydroquinone solution are more than sufficient to explain these impressions. We need not waste another word on them.”30 But this attempt to close the book on the issue with an apodictic assertion came after a debate that had involved physicians, biologists, physicists, chemists, and amateur photographers.31 “This Od fluid, it now seems, really exists,” the editor of Internationale photographische Monatsschrift für Medizin notes in 1897, expressing his hope that the future will bring advances in pathology as well as further insight into “the medical significance of these emanations.”32 But favorably disposed observers like this writer faced a growing pha-

Case Study I

lanx of skeptics who insisted that the appearance of effluves had very different causes. One of the first to join the fray was René Colson. A physicist whose experiments concerning the sensitivity of the photographic plate had made him an expert of sorts on invisible emanations, he naturally took an interest in the records produced at the Charité. “I began by replicating the experiment,” Colson reports.33 Different results appeared depending on the test subject’s physical disposition, the temperature of the hands, or the particular condition of the skin. These findings could still somehow have been made compatible with Luys and David’s conclusions. But then Colson continued his investigation by replacing the human hand with an iron weight. Heating it and holding it above the plate in the developer bath yielded the same questionable effluves: “It is not even necessary that this metallic object have a large capacity. An ordinary key of the sort we carry with us every day leaves an imprint on the plate in less than five minutes.”34 So what Luys and David had claimed was a “new fact” was in fact reducible to a commonplace and perfectly familiar phenomenon: “what we call heat.”35 The German chemist Emil Jacobsen shared this view. It was well known, he argued, that the precipitation of silver was accelerated in warmer areas of the developer bath. The developer solution rose to the surface in the warmest spots and then flowed off to the sides; these convection currents subsequently appeared as dark streaks, whereas the cold countercurrents produced bright streaks. “And indeed, we can generate all phenomena of what is called effluviography merely by means of heat and have no need to assume the existence of Od-­light rays, so if it is necessary to introduce a technical term for the pictures obtained in this manner, they may be called heterothermographs.”36 Paul Yvon, who directed the microphotography laboratory at the medical faculty of the University of Paris, undertook another series of experiments. “The sensitivity of the gelatin silver bromide plate,” Yvon begins his account, “has reached a maximum and meets the experimenter’s needs in every regard.”37 Like Colson, Yvon tested whether the visual forms in question might be produced by causes other than Luys and David’s effluves. He was a physician, and so experimenting with the severed hand of a dead person probably struck him as an obvious idea. He tried a variety of arrangements: the dead hand next to his own living one in the developer bath; the dead hand by itself; his own hand by itself. He worked in the ordinary red safelight illumination of the darkroom before repeating his experiments in utter darkness. Finally, he heated the severed hand to see how heat might affect the dead flesh and whether it would elicit the emanation in question. Yvon’s findings agreed with Colson’s: the chemical agency of heat played a part. A warm hand from the morgue produced the same effects as the hands of Luys’s living patients had. But unlike Colson, Yvon noted two further sources of radiation: the ordinary red laboratory light and what he called the voile latente, a pretreatment of the plates during manufacture designed to in-

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crease their sensitivity. Developing an unexposed plate as it came from the factory in utter darkness revealed this special coat as a gray haze. So heat, Yvon believed, was only one factor to be held responsible for Luys’s “new facts.” Manipulation in the filtered light of the laboratory made it possible to alter or even disrupt its chemical action: a dead person’s cold hand, held above the sensitive emulsion in red light, generated emanations as well. The next to join the debate was Yvon’s fellow member of the medical faculty, the physicist Adrien Guébhard. “The photographic act,” he wrote, was determined by three factors: a “passive” one, the silver salt spread evenly across the picture medium, and two “active” ones, the light affecting the plate and the chemical and physical agency of the developer fluid. Any irregular phenomenon that appeared during the development of a photograph and could not be traced back to a manufacturing defect in the plate or uneven exposure was by implication attributable to the third factor, the developer bath—and certainly not to a fourth and “allegedly photogenic” factor: “the producer himself ” or invisible flows emanating from his body.38 Of course, Guébhard was familiar with the many experiments exploring “direct photography without light”; he had personally investigated manifestations of what he termed aphotographie in numerous trials.39 Still, he argued, the ultimate cause of the resulting traces had to be sought in physical processes within the developer fluid itself and not in the presence of an external light that was allegedly natural and yet invisible to the naked eye. It was indeed one of the peculiarities of photographic visualization that a wide range of influences on the sensitive plate could engender bright aureoles in the developed positive without an actual source of light that caused them. Guébhard reminded his readers, such bright and dark areas in the picture did not signify light and darkness and might at most be described as “luminoid” or “obscuroid.”40 For example, the dense black cloud of pulverized graphite with which the physicist Victor Regnault had covered and effaced one of the persons depicted in the negative of a family portrait appeared in the positive image as a glowing aureole (fig. 30)—something “that was light and yet not light,” an “intangible,” “unreal,” “paradoxical light” and a “demon of dissemblance.”41 But, Guébhard emphasized, such manipulation was not required; inaction, too, could result in spurious light phenomena. If, for example, the photographer in the laboratory failed to keep the developer fluid in the tray in gentle motion during development, as was the usual practice, “after allowing the liquid to stand for ten to twenty minutes, the plate is covered by a flocculent mass that appears sometimes in the form of ‘luminoid snow’ (i.e., black in the negative), sometimes in the form of a delicate ‘obscuroid’ polygonal web etched into the picture; at other times, it looks like stringed beads or meandering streaks that, the observer will have no doubt, trace the slight rotating movements of the fluid.”42 So not only could the alleged effluves be produced using a key or a dead person’s hand, as Colson and Yvon had demonstrated; “objects of any kind”

Case Study I

Fig. 30  Victor Regnault, family portrait with effaced figure, around 1850.

would do the trick.43 Still, Guébhard sought to reconstruct Luys and David’s experimental arrangement as closely as possible: he filled a thin gum elastic hose with warm water to create an object whose “shape, consistency, and especially heat distribution approximates a human finger.”44 Comparing the photochemical effects of the artificial and a real finger, Guébhard found, as expected, that the two objects left similar traces on the photographic plate (plate 12). Once again, heat seemed to be at work. Guébhard’s view, however, was that heat was involved in the production of Luys’s “figures of effluvia” “only as a motor force.” The true cause, he argued, was convection in the developer bath—“the direction of the meandering currents relative

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to the gelatin, and nothing else.”45 So where Luys and David wanted to discern “photographs of the human ‘vital fluid’ in the indeed beguiling luminoid emanations that appeared around the imprint of the fingers,” Guébhard saw “representations of the different phases of a process of molecular demixing.”46 Finally, a Dr. Axmann addressed the issue in Photographische Rundschau in 1899, attributing the effects in question to the agency of “a peculiar, individual, temporary, or even pathological condition of the skin and its secretions” and “appealing to medicine” to conduct further experiments into the matter.47 The phenomena Luys and David had first produced, that is, were subject to a number of competing interpretations: emanations from the human body (Luys/David), heat (Colson, Jacobsen, Yvon), red light (Yvon), hazes from the photographic plate manufacturing process (Yvon), convection in the developer bath (Guébhard), and secretions of diseased skin (Axmann). These disparate explanations reflect what Colson called the “confusion” brought about by the excessive sensitivity of the photographic plate. At first glance, they abide by the distinction between fact and artifact, manifestation and “spurious apparition,” which echoes in Colson’s division of the traces produced on the photographic plate into useful “applications” and “accidental hazes” and “enemies.” Luys and David thought they were on to the visualization of a natural fluid, whereas Colson, Jacobsen, Yvon, and Guébhard saw mere artifacts of photography itself—“familiar accidents from photography’s banal kitchen.”48 What Luys and David believed existed outside the photograph as well—and had, moreover, allegedly been sighted there by hypnotized mediums—was located by their antagonists in the internal space of photography: the fluid milieu of the developer bath, the industrial manufacture of photographic plates, the artificial red light illuminating the darkroom. 3.4 The irreducibility of the trace

Looking back at this debate over the right interpretation of pictures from a distance of more than a century, what are we to make of it? Were Luys and David’s photographic effluves a contribution to the history of physiology after all? Or should we follow their critics and attribute their findings to a lack of familiarity with the intricacies of photographic laboratory practice? In the perspective of this book, these questions are irrelevant. I am not interested in whose construal of the pictures was right—whether based on the knowledge of the time or in light of what we know now. Nor is it my goal to stake out a “neutral” stance on the question as a historian of the debate.49 Instead of classifying the conflicting interpretations as right or wrong, as “undetermined” or “undeterminable,” I want to inquire into the premises on the basis of which such a determination could even seem possible and meaningful. The question, then, is not whether the photographic plate

Case Study I

had actually revealed facts or artifacts, natural or artificial phenomena, but which tacit conception of photographic visualization such distinctions presupposed. Looking more closely, we find that no clear line of demarcation separates Luys and David’s research from their antagonists’. The scientists who joined the debate not only took aim at Luys and David’s original experiments, they also contradicted one another. Their only point of agreement was that the two experimenters at the Charité had misinterpreted their own results. Guébhard saw the explanation he proposed not only as a refutation of Luys and David’s findings but as “proof [. . .] that these results cannot be reduced to a direct effect of heat on the gelatin silver bromide [. . .] as Colson has recently argued.”50 Meanwhile, neither Colson nor Guébhard attached any importance to Yvon’s observations concerning the roles of the darkroom safelight and the routine pretreatment of the plate. So we should note, first, that the debate over effluviography is by no means a pitched battle of a group of established scientists against the dubious schemes of two photographic amateurs. What we find instead is a mêlée of competing interpretations that are sometimes complementary, sometimes mutually exclusive, not readily divided into scientific and pseudoscientific activities. That is also why the controversy over the effluves took a different turn than the debates over the authenticity or spuriousness of spirit photographs, with which it is occasionally associated. The numerous attempts to capture the invisible spirits of the dead on photographic plates have been widely discussed.51 Many of these pictures quickly turned out to be deliberate forgeries—simple double exposures that superimposed the usually blurry apparition of a dead person onto an ordinary portrait. These cases could be addressed in legal categories, and so rather than triggering scholarly debate, they yielded outcomes like that in the case of the Parisian photographer Jean Buguet: he was sentenced to a year in prison and a fine of 500 francs.52 In such cases, the alleged surplus value of the photographic images was the product of intentional falsification, and once the latter was debunked, the pictures were virtually without interest. Luys and David’s photographs were a different matter. Occultist circles received them with interest, and journals like the French Revue spirite and the German Die übersinnliche Welt took them to be manifest proof of their own tenets, and yet they defied the straightforward schema of truth versus fraud, authenticity versus forgery. One might believe that Luys and David’s conclusions were wrong and ill-­advised, that their pictures were tainted by imprecise and dilettantish laboratory work—but there was nothing fraudulent about the effluves their procedures produced, no intention to deceive waiting to be unmasked. The phenomena that emerged from the developer bath might be photographic artifacts, but that did not make them forgeries. It is telling that not one of the critical responses to Luys and David accused them of having manipulated their experiments or conducted them

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with fraudulent intent. The existence of a phenomenon, the pure fact of its presence, was never called in question. No one denied that something had been recorded by photographic means, something that really existed. Guébhard’s reconstruction of Luys and David’s experiments was designed to produce “proof of convection in the developer bath.” Like the two researchers before him, he employed the photographic plate as an “instrument for the recording of phenomena” (enregistreur des phénomènes), and like them, he regarded what he produced as a recording of the “true natural causes” of the alleged effluves.53 And although he roundly rejected the interpretation of the photographs as registering traces of a “human vital fluid,” he did see his own pictures as “representations” that rendered “the vestigial animate energies of the motion of the liquid mass.”54 Jacobsen at first wholly assigns the effluves to the world of artifacts, of incorrect handiwork and photographic accident: “A professional photographer has informed me that, working with Bromaryt paper, he often noticed stains surrounded by rays when he was not careful about where he put his warm fingers during development; the pictures in question are presumably a result of the same cause. Older photographers are familiar with the phenomenon that they had to avoid supporting the plate with their warm fingers when pouring the collodion lest they subsequently find spots where they touched the plate.”55 If Jacobsen thus describes the effluviographs as “stained” by careless handling, the title of his treatment of the subject nonetheless introduces them as depictions—“pictures engendered by heat differentials”; he was even tempted to coin the neologism quoted above, heterothermographs, to designate this specific technique of visualization. In this perspective, Luys and David’s procedure is effectively a “method” of “rendering visible the currents caused in a body of liquid by minute differences of temperature.”56 Colson likewise thought that Luys and David had found a new method of measurement without knowing it: “In physics, it is a new resource for the study and detection [. . .] of heat.”57 So Colson, too, in no way denied the scientific significance of the experiments: Luys and David merely misconstrued their findings. Even Guébhard, Luys and David’s most polemical adversary, could not simply accuse them of producing absurdities. After an extensive series of counterexperiments, all he could reproach them for was having given a wrong interpretation of a genuine phenomenon. Closer inspection thus shows that, conflicting explanations notwithstanding, none of these scientists contested the epistemic status Luys and David had attributed to the photographic traces: “reliable evidence of new facts,” “objective demonstration,” “proof of scientific reality.” 3.5 The plate cannot show nothing (I)

In Guébhard’s case, his investigation of the effluves was part of a larger series of counterexperiments and publications in which, beginning in the

Case Study I

Fig. 31  Louis Darget, thought photograph of a bottle, 1896.

early 1890s, he took aim at exponents of occult photography like the Paris neurologist Hippolyte Baraduc and the retired officer Louis Darget. Darget had conducted experiments in which he tied photographic plates to his subjects’ foreheads, developed them, and then sought to discern the content of the individual’s intellection by decoding its photographic traces. To his eyes, the fogs and patterns of the plate presented the immediate likeness of what the subject had thought of or dreamed: planets and satellites, the outlines of a bottle (fig. 31), or the ghostly form of an eagle that had ap-

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peared to Darget himself in a dream. Darget lived on a pension from the French army and undertook his experiments as a private citizen; by contrast, Baraduc, who practiced at the Salpêtrière and had published treatises on the nervous system, hysteria, and diseases of the bone marrow, enjoyed considerable standing in the scientific milieu, even if his experiments attracted no particular attention and never made it into the Comptes rendus of the Paris Academy of Sciences. And whereas Darget made little attempt to develop a consistent theory to explain his photographic creations, Baraduc surrounded his experiments with a distinctive and often confusing terminology. His book L’âme humaine, ses mouvements, ses lumières et l’iconographie de l’invisible fluidique, published in 1896, was written with the ambition to open “the realm of the invisible” for “experimental science.”58 In using the term “iconography,” Baraduc responded to the observation that “photography” was no longer an apposite name when what its sensitive plates revealed was not the varied impact of light but the effects of radiations and fluxes invisible to the naked eye. “Light is not the only thing that can affect it; a pistol shot produces a haze on a plate, and exercising pressure can engender the same result.”59 By his own account, Baraduc, like Colson, processed an immense number of plates in order to learn to distinguish the different causes that affected them: “I can assure the reader that the graphies I pre­sent are not the results of haphazard causes or the accidents of the manufacturing process, and that they emerged under circumstances that the photographers cannot comprehend.”60 When his opponents—the debate resembled the one over Luys and David’s pictures—argued that his iconographies were nothing but effects of photographic laboratory practices, Baraduc simply turned their logic on its head: not only was it not true that the rays emitted by the “Psychod” were mere laboratory artifacts—on the contrary, photographic records that had mistakenly been labeled artifacts had in reality been unrecognized iconographies. Unsuspecting photographers had discarded hundreds of plates in which the psychological states of their fellow humans had taken visible form in all sorts of figures and shapes: I asked them whether they had never inspected the pictures they call hazy negatives more closely. The answer was always the same: “These are rejects, bad negatives that have failed their intended purpose of making a flawless picture.” But, they all added, the cause that produced the phenomenon—which they attributed in the most superficial manner to the effects of chemistry or excessively long exposure in the developer bath—never occupied their minds, and their attention was focused on other matters.61

Investigating the issue further, Baraduc eventually visited factories where photographic plates were manufactured and found that “some of the workers spoiled a plate by touching it near the edge, so they were replaced by machines that transported the plates after application of the solution.”62

Case Study I

Fig. 32  Hippolyte Baraduc, Apparation du force vital, 1896.

So in his own way, Baraduc, too, had contemplated the distinction between fact and artifact in photography. In his experiments investigating the “Psychod,” he sometimes worked with an ordinary, commercially manufactured camera; at other times, he held a photosensitive plate up to his own or his test subject’s forehead or fingertips. Baraduc’s oeuvre accordingly includes not only nonrepresentational eddies, clouds, streaks, and hazes, but also pictures like the portrait of his son by a window (fig. 32)—the sitter is mourning his dead pet pheasant, the barely discernible object in his hands. In some regards, it is a conventional photographic portrait: we recognize the boy’s sailor suit, and the bright backlight limns an ornamented cast-­iron window balustrade, a typical feature of a middle-­class apartment building in nineteenth-­century Paris. The boy’s face is unrecognizable, but his grief, Baraduc believes, may be read in the streaked emanations that surround him like an aureole and constitute a specific expression of his force vital. Other pictures taken by Baraduc are abstract: we see the record of a nightmare, the emanations triggered by praying a Veni sancte spiritus, or the aura of pilgrims appearing on a photographic plate he had placed at the feet of the statue of Saint Mary in the grotto at Lourdes (fig. 33). In all of these pictures, Baraduc notes in a remarkable neologism, the soul has “iconographed itself ” in its various outward forms.63

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Fig. 33  Hippolyte Baraduc, Procession, Lourdes, before 1909.

Before long, Baraduc’s commutation of fact and artifact was set back on its feet (or was it turned on its head?). “These gentlemen,” scoffed a brief report about Luys and David’s and Baraduc’s pictures that came out in 1900, “simply forgot to shake their developer trays, rinse their negatives, or use clean developer baths.”64 Yet no one mocked Baraduc’s and Darget’s experiments more extensively and with greater relish than Guébhard, to whose eyes the iconographies of the soul were nothing but random formations and “familiar accidents from photography’s banal kitchen.”65 The phenomena that emerged from the developer bath, he wrote, were the “cream pie” of the spiritists who, in the manner of the excellent Dr. Hip. Baraduc (Paris), wish to exhibit the evident manifestation of an animist or extraordinary force where there is nothing to see but the consequences of a—no less extraordinary—failure to abide by the simplest basic precepts of the photographic kitchen; or of those others who, like the good Commandant Tegard [an anagram of Darget], interpret the most varied operative accidents as fluids and discern the most extraordinary things in even the most diminutive black stain on their negatives, like a traveler who discovers a living creature in every rock formation:

Case Study I

they see now a “flag” (monochrome, not to say “white”; but they will not let that crimp their enthusiasm: Long live the Army!), then an “eagle” (Long live the Emperor!), a “walking cane” (Long live Esterhazy!), or a “bottle” (Long live . . . the Spirits!), etc., etc., where the practitioner gifted with a less lively imagination and all ordinary mortals see nothing but the haze caused by an improperly closed cassette, spots of some kind left on the plate by the developer, or the residue of a floating fiber, hair, or large air bubble on the gelatin layer of the plate as it lay upside down in the bath.66

Guébhard rightly distinguishes between Baraduc’s experiments, in which the force vital generally articulated itself in nonrepresentational formations, and the work of “those others,” like Darget, who sought to discern identifiable objects. Guébhard’s traveler discovering living creatures in rock formations is an unmistakable allusion to the tradition of accidental images I have mentioned in connection with Strindberg, who would presumably not have taken the reference as a criticism. The systematic distinction of fact from artifact in photography held no interest to him, and the excess of legibility that let him discover a potential representation in any formation was positively part of his program. For Darget, by contrast, it was crucial that the outlines of creatures and things he discerned in the photographic fogs and hazes he had produced be seen not as the creations of a fertile imagination but as exact recordings of actually existing phenomena. So if Guébhard assigned Darget’s iconography to the tradition of the free-­floating imagination, that was merely another way of discrediting it as experimental science. Guébhard devoted ongoing series of experiments to proving all of these interpretations fallacious; he published his findings in more than twenty articles that appeared in various scientific journals over the course of a decade. He also mounted the photographs he created on cardboard, added handwritten annotations, and sent them to experts in the field, to whose kindest consideration he commended them. The Albertina in Vienna has one such collage, mailed by Guébhard to Josef Maria Eder; its peculiar charm resides in its odd blend of scientific demonstration and hobbyist decorative handicraft (plate 13). At its center stands a self-­portrait with Od emanation, around which Guébhard has arranged five additional variations on his aura. The image is staged to advantage: surrounded by dense foliage, the physicist is seated before the wall of a house, perhaps his residence at Saint-­Vallier-­de-­Thiey in southern France. At his feet is a carefully arranged composition of rocks, fossils, and a hammer (presumably an allusion to Guébhard’s studies in geology), as well as the dial of a measuring instrument and the front page of a journal. Guébhard holds two additional publications in his hand, one of them an issue of Photo-­Journal, which he extends toward the beholder as though offering copies for sale. The five surrounding shots look like film stills undermining the central motif: the still

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life at Guébhard’s feet varies slightly from picture to picture, and the sitter now regards the beholder with mild scorn, now turns away, staring into the distance as though lost in thought. In the classical scholar’s portraits of art history, scientific accessories are deployed as emblems of the subject’s erudition; here, by contrast, they seem merely an aggregate of objects that have been brought out to the garden for inclusion in the photograph. The undisguised artificiality, the awkwardness and comic pathos of the mise-­en-­ scène, all seems deliberate. As to the primary target of this extravaganza’s scorn, it is identified by what is surely the creative highlight of the collage— a droopy gold foil banderole inscribed in ungainly letters with the motto of the whole production: Les prétendues auras vitales de Dr. H. Baraduc de Paris (The supposed vital auras of Dr. H. Baraduc, Paris). The joke is infectious: in its light, Baraduc’s experimental system, too, looks like a child’s homemade Christmas decoration bearing a supernatural message. Guébhard’s handwritten annotations specify what he argues are the true causes of the putative aura in each photograph—to make the picture in the bottom right corner, for example, he simply let the developer fluid stand. Another collage further surveys the visual spectrum of Baraduc’s “iconography.” It shows six pictures made without a camera by manipulating a sensitive plate (plate 14). Various objects—a metal band, a ring, the glass wax protector of a candlestick—were brought in contact with the plate in order to reveal their effects on the chemical-­physical processes in the developer bath. The picture at the bottom left, for example, shows the effects caused by a ring: “false flames” emanating from its outline, an example of the “luminoid” phenomena that feign a mysterious blaze where in reality a chemical reaction has occurred in the darkness of the developer bath. In debunking Baraduc’s iconographies, Guébhard proceeds along the same lines as in his rejection of Luys and David’s effluviographs: he disputes not the reality and scientific relevance of the phenomenon they show but its scientific interpretation. Baraduc, too, is not accused of outright fraud and deliberate deception of his readers. If he had worked in the manner of the spirit-­photographer Buguet, in whose studio the police seized false beards, ghost costumes, and prefabricated photographs, there would have been no need to refute him with elaborate counterexperiments. Although what Baraduc produced were “false flames,” Guébhard does not regard him as a counterfeiter. The purpose is not to reveal him as an impostor, but to ridicule him as a naïve amateur, a scientific dilettante whose research is essentially no more than childish bricolage. Guébhard’s ten-­year crusade against Baraduc’s “false flames” raises the question: What motivated such vehemence and perseverance? Would not a fraction of the intellectual and experimental energy he expended have been enough to prove that Luys, David, Baraduc, and Darget had failed to abide by the “simplest basic precepts of the photographic kitchen”? Could he not have let these “supposed vital auras” flow whither they would instead of

Case Study I

securing even greater attention for them with countless experiments and public objections? His reference to the “unfortunate provincials we are” and his no less ironic bow to the “excellent Dr. Hip. Baraduc (Paris)” also hint at a critique of centralism in a country that was apt to attach entirely unmerited significance to whatever was going on in the capital and fail to notice developments of actual importance that happened elsewhere. But such possible motives hardly explain the fundamental antagonism that fueled the contention over these pictures. It is difficult to avoid the impression that this was also about stabilizing the epistemic boundary between fact and artifact, whose contour had long since become as ghostly as the fluids in Baraduc’s iconographies. Colson’s attempts to distinguish photography’s “accidental hazes” from its useful “applications” had to start from the assumption that the phenomena were each other’s spitting images. Guébhard similarly struggled to shore up and draw distinctions that were far from obvious. This is not so say that there may have been some truth, however minute, to Baraduc’s self-­portraits of the soul that Guébhard was ultimately compelled to acknowledge. More pertinently, the difficulty of distinguishing natural from artificial, fact from artifact, incident from accident, had to do with the contemporary fad for experiments that sought to reveal invisible fluxes and radiations by photographic means, a fashion Colson and Guébhard rode no less than Luys, David, Darget, and Baraduc. As I argued earlier, the effluves’ champions and opponents did not face each other across a neatly drawn frontline; their refutations sometimes contradicted each other as well. If what Guébhard called “the ‘cream pie’ of the spiritists” had been incontrovertibly and unambiguously just that, the experimental effort expended on keeping it off the menu of respectability would have been unwarranted. The structural affinity between the scientific “photography of the invisible” and the visual cosmos of occultism and spiritism is evident; consider, for example, the life and work of the English Nobel Prize winner William Crookes, who apparently saw not the slightest conflict between his reflections on the fourth dimension and research into cathode rays, on the one hand, and his participation in spiritistic photographic experimentation, on the other.67 Similarly, Guillaume Fontenay, whom I have already quoted, studied the “usefulness” and “treachery” of the photographic plate primarily with a view to the “investigation of psychic phenomena” such as telepathy, material apparitions, and telekinesis.68 Even researchers who were above suspicion of interest in contact with the world of the supernatural believed the sensitivity of the photographic plate might reveal physical phenomena that had hitherto eluded the eye’s limited capacity. Eder’s Jahrbuch für Photographie und Reproduktionstechnik, for example, opines, “In light of the important research conducted by Dr. Russell, it almost seems that this activity of emitting rays is probably a universal property of physical matter, since his experiments have shown that almost all bodies are capable

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of affecting the photographic plate in the dark; one merely needs to extend the exposure time long enough.”69 As early as 1888 the astronomer Jules Janssen had assured his fellow members of the Société française de photographie: Yes, gentlemen, photography will very soon put us in contact with that mysterious realm of radiations that surround us and manifest the innermost forces of matter and the physical world. And it will do so in a very different manner and with a very different potency and thoroughness than our natural eye possibly could, however admirable it may otherwise be.70

In this “mysterious realm of radiations,” the distinction between fact and artifact, between manifestation and “spurious apparition,” became an acute problem. The sensitivity of the photographic plate fostered the presumption that whatever was discernible on it had to be a trace of “something.” The plate could not show nothing. The question of whether one would eventually assign a phenomenon to the domain of useful applications or to the lackluster province of artifacts was not an obvious one and could be reached only in the course of interpretation—but it was always secondary to that first certainty. That is why Baraduc and Guébhard could reproach each other for having taken what was artificial to be natural and what was natural to be artificial, and yet share the conviction that a recording had taken place. Although Guébhard called his opponent’s pictures “spots of some kind,” he could not but interpret them as the reliable representation of some real phenomenon. In this light, the patience and insistence with which he described phenomena he was at the same time trying to ridicule may also be read as an attempt to trace a boundary between fact and artifact, whose fragility had long been impossible to ignore. This ambivalence was an inevitable consequence of the project of “making the invisible visible.” In chapters 5 and 6, I will explore the aesthetic and epistemological challenges the practice of photographic visualization entailed. But first I want to enrich my discussion of this oscillation between fact and artifact with a second case study on the earliest photograph of the Shroud of Turin, another instance in which the photographic revelation of an unimagined visibility was rejected as no more than an artificial effect of photography itself. Once again it will turn out that, upon closer inspection, the distinction was virtually impossible to draw. René Colson will play a central role in this episode as well, but this time on the side of the “believers” rather than the skeptics: another illustration of the ambivalence of a pictorial practice in which protagonists were able to change partisan affiliations without having to renounce their confidence in the truth of photography.

4 Case Study II: A Self-­Portrait of Christ or the White Noise of Photography? Paul Vignon and the Earliest Photograph of the Shroud of Turin 4.1 “There is nothing there to see”: The shroud in the Cathedral of Turin

After the crucifixion of Christ, the Gospels report, Joseph of Arimathea received permission to bury the body. “So Joseph bought some linen cloth, took down the body, wrapped it in the linen, and placed it in a tomb cut out of rock. Then he rolled a stone against the entrance of the tomb” (Mark 15:​ 46). Famously, two days later, the stone had been rolled away, and the tomb was deserted. But the shroud, it was later surmised, remained in the tomb. A piece of linen sheet, it supposedly bore images of the body of the dead Christ. In the shroud, its devotees believed, posterity possessed a graphical record of the Passion. In contradistinction to the thousands of images of Christ produced over the course of art history, what Christianity seemed to have in this object was a portrait whose author was Christ himself: a last trace of the Savior before his mysterious ascension to the heavens.1 The extant documents on the subsequent history of the shroud reach back to the fourteenth century. In April 1349 the French knight Geoffroy de Charny wrote a letter to Pope Clement VI informing him of his plans to have a church built at his seat in Lirey. At the time, de Charny was already in possession of the shroud, which he had allegedly purchased in Constantinople. The earliest reported exhibition of the shroud in the church at Lirey took place six years later, attracting the first pilgrims, but after the bishop of Troyes, Henri de Poitiers, contested its authenticity, it was locked away. Geoffroy de Charny fell in the Battle of Poitiers in 1356; the shroud remained in his family’s possession. In the mid-­fifteenth century, it passed into the hands of the House of Savoy, which subsequently transferred it among its various residences and exhibited it to the public on several occasions: in 1502 it was on display on the high altar in the Sainte-­Chapelle, Paris, and a year later it was shown in the palace of Philibert the Handsome in Bourg-­ en-­Bresse, Flanders, where, as the courtier Antoine de Lalaing reports, it was dipped in boiling oil, thrust into the fire, and rubbed down several times

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to test its authenticity—“the impressions and images proved impossible to efface or remove.”2 On the night of December 3, 1532, the shroud was rescued from the burning chapel of the abbey church at Chambéry; it survived the fire almost unharmed. In the eyes of the faithful, the traces of the damage it sustained were merely further proof of its authenticity. “The shroud,” François Lecercle writes, “was burned and yet saved [. . .] So the fire must leave its mark in order to show that it certainly affected the object but could not complete its work because it was prevented.”3 These visible marks of its narrow escape from destruction added to the relic’s dramaturgic effect: “The image no longer limits itself to presenting an object (the body of Christ), nor even to telling a story (the Passion); by virtue of the accidental marks of its own history, it bears witness to its status as a thaumaturgic image.”4 Further public exhibitions took place at Turin, Milan, Vercelli, Nice, and Aosta. When the Black Death retreated from Milan in 1578, Cardinal Borromeo decided to make a pilgrimage to Chambéry in France, where the relic was kept at the time, to render his gratitude. To spare Borromeo the arduous crossing of the Alps, the shroud’s keepers took it and met him roughly halfway. On September 15, 1578, the relic arrived in Turin, where it was received amid cannon salutes fired by the local artillery. It has been in the Cathedral of Turin ever since and presented to the public on various religious as well as secular occasions. By May 1606, according to one report, the crowds that came to attend its exhibition had swelled to forty thousand pilgrims. The history of the shroud resembles the appearance of a comet. Its public presentations have been numerous, yet each was no more than a brief interruption of a long history of absence. The shroud is meant to be waited for. It is there, but it is not seen. One can spend a long time regarding the altarpiece in the side chapel in which it lies, rolled up like a scroll of parchment and hidden in a silver chest secured by several locks—but the shroud will not show itself. Its revelation is subject to an economy that is as simple as it is effective: for it to appear again and again, it must disappear each time and return to the place of its concealment. “The only things that appear are those which are first able to dissimulate themselves. Things already grasped in their aspect or peacefully resembling themselves never appear. They are apparent, of course, but only apparent: they will never be given to us as appearing.”5 In the history of the Shroud, each of these moments of appearance has occasioned a special ceremony. When it was shown in 1898, its first exhibition in twenty years, it literally had to be retrieved from behind several screens: the front of the marble altarpiece in the side chapel contained a glass door; behind it sat an iron cage and, mounted inside it, a second iron cage secured by three locks; within this was a doubly sealed wooden chest containing a silver receptacle; and inside the latter lay the shroud, tied up with four purple ribbons.6 On May 25, 1898, a procession approached the

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altar holding the hidden relic. The party consisted of the Duke of Aosta accompanied by his family, Archbishop Agostino Richelmy of Turin, and other archbishops, bishops, chaplains, and secretaries. The locks were opened and the seals broken; the linen sheet was taken out, placed in a golden urn, and carried forth into the overcrowded church, where it was affixed to a frame and displayed above the altar. In a brief oration, a priest threatened anyone who dared to touch the shroud with immediate excommunication. Eyewitnesses to this exhibition later reported that making out the silhouette of the body among the many traces of damage the shroud had sustained in the course of its history was a matter of intuition rather than seeing. “The salient point I gather from an account in no. 257 of the Kreuzzeitung,” the art historian Ernst von Dobschütz notes in his study Christusbilder, “is that the white cloth, stretched on a golden frame and displayed in the incense-­ heavy air of the chapel, was illuminated by means of reflectors, and yet, despite the glaring light, very little more than the bare outlines of a human body was recognizable in the two shadowy images.”7 “Non si vede niente,” another eyewitness was later quoted as saying. “There is nothing there to see.” But, the source continues, the witness then began to scan the fabric for the image in question and “bit by bit discovered it.”8 The ambiguous display was on view for eight days. Those who came beheld it in the certain knowledge that it would soon return to its crypt and not reappear for a long time. In that sense, the relic was never fully there, not even and especially not during the brief periods of its visibility. It appeared only on the condition that it would soon again be hidden from view, perhaps forever. Moreover, those who did see the untouchable shroud at the distance commanded by the high altar did so only briefly, before the other pilgrims thronging behind them pushed them aside. “The relic was held up before—the original sense of the word ostensio—the faithful only to be presented as withdrawn, offered at a distance. That is its fundamental condition of visuality.”9 This regime of receding visibility was also characteristic of other “true” images of Christ, such as the Holy Face of Genoa. The dramaturgy of their exhibition made them vehicles of an “objective irony”: the Veil of Veronica, for example, “is sometimes shown to the faithful, but from such a height that only its frame shines forth, a frame made of crystal, gold, and precious stones, a frame that designates as much as conceals it.” The true image makes only a qualified appearance, it requires “the implementation of its withdrawal.”10 4.2. A photographic revelation: The shroud in the developer bath

In one respect, however, the 1898 exhibition was different from all earlier presentations: on this occasion, the shroud was photographed for the very first time. And so, since 1898, it has never disappeared entirely; it has left the world its photographic double. Secondo Pia, a lawyer and amateur pho-

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tographer who was also mayor of Asti, was commissioned to take the picture.11 When a photographic reproduction was proposed, King Umberto I of Italy, a member of the House of Savoy and the relic’s legal owner, was initially skeptical. It was feared that the distancing scientific reproduction in a photograph was incompatible with the aura of devotion that ought to surround such a sacred object.12 Ultimately, Baron Antonio Manno, the appointed organizer of the presentation, who was in favor of having a picture taken, prevailed. A photograph of the shroud, he argued, would be a singular document should the object ever be destroyed, and given the huge number of pilgrims to be expected, it could not be ruled out that unauthorized pictures of the relic would be made and circulated. Work on the picture could not interfere with the stream of visitors, and so the shooting had to be held at night. Pia had a platform set up in front of the altar and illuminated the relic with two arc lamps. At some point, two glass plates he placed before the electric lamps to disperse the strong and uneven light cracked in the heat, and the work had to be discontinued. Finally, on the night of May 28, 1898, he successfully produced two pictures on glass plates measuring 50 by 60 centimeters, or 20 by 24 inches.13 Later, in the seclusion of the darkroom, Pia discerned the contours of a face. “Ensconced in my chamber, entirely focused on my work, I felt a powerful shock when, during the development process, I saw the Holy Face gradually emerge on the plate.”14 The front and rear views of a human body came into view against the dark ground of the glass negative. The image in the developer bath was subject to a peculiar inversion that would prove pivotal to the subsequent history of the shroud: the development of the negative had produced not a negative but a positive image, in which what were dark markings on the shroud appeared as the bright lineaments of a body (fig. 34). In the upper part of the picture, we can see a human face and hair; the folded hands appear near the center. Pia concluded that the likeness on the shroud was already a negative: the picture in the developer bath was accordingly the negative of a negative—a positive image. “The miracle of photography now took possession of the shroud in its entirety [. . .] the shroud itself became a photograph. Its history begins with this moment.”15 It is not immediately obvious precisely wherein the unforeseeable effect, the surprise and surplus value of this photographic revelation, supposedly lay. It was to be expected that the dark markings on the shroud, which had long been seen and described, would be inverted into light markings. So what exactly was it that was made visible for the first time? In the history of the shroud, a series of illustrations before Pia’s photographs had rendered the cloth as the medium of a depiction of a human form: a print published in 1582 illustrating an earlier presentation of the relic in Turin; a miniature by Giulio Clovio, a student of Raphael; a copy of the shroud—extractum ex originali—painted in 1640; another copy made in 1663. All these reproductions illustrate that making out the imprint of a human being in the faint

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Fig. 34  Secondo Pia, Shroud of Turin, negative, 1898.

markings on the linen sheet had never presented any difficulty. Giulio Clovio’s miniature not only shows the imprint; the bottom part of his picture also instructs the beholder on how to imagine the genesis of the image.16 It shows Joseph of Arimathea, John the Apostle, and Nicodemus wrapping the body in a shroud such that, when unfolded later, it would bear the imprint of the limbs in the familiar position. So even back in the sixteenth century, the sight of the linen sheet led its beholders to imagine the complexion and position of the body that was supposed to have left its image on it. There was evidently something else that surprised Pia and his contemporaries in the photographic reproduction of the shroud. The relic, it seems,

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appeared again in the photographic reproduction, or perhaps appeared for the first time. The moment Pia recounts—“when, during the development process, I saw the Holy Face gradually emerge on the plate”—conforms to the dramaturgy that had always already underlain the staging of the shroud in a sacred ceremony: to appear, it needed to have been concealed for a long time. By bringing the shroud to light, the photographic reproduction also conveyed a sense of its centuries-­long concealment. What had been visible as a mere pattern of “faint markings” on the linen sheet was decoded by the photograph to have been a latent image—a quasi-­photographic portrait of Jesus Christ.17 Inverting the brightness values turned the imprint on the linen into a vivid depiction in “natural” tones, however ghostly, which is to say, into a light image before a dark backdrop. For the first time, a pair of eyes seemed to fix the beholder from the surface of the cloth—a pair of eyes whose gaze pierced the surface of Pia’s developer bath across a gulf of almost two millennia, thanks to a rendition that, unlike all existing copies of the shroud, was supposedly vouched for by the laws of physics and photochemistry. Suddenly, the history of the shroud seemed to have been a single long wait. In retrospect, it became the history of an encrypted message that could not reach its addressee until the advent of photography: its information had been illegible for millennia. The Son of God had left an image to posterity whose true nature—as a negative—only the photographic plate could reveal. As he busied himself with his chemicals, Pia thought he was playing a part in the immediate sequel to the Passion narrative. In June 1898 the Osservatore Romano struck a similar note in its report of the “indescribable impression” made by the sight of the glass negative. The photographic unconcealment proved to be the consummation of a teleology spanning almost two millennia: “We clearly saw what the countenance of the Savior looked like, and we were the first to see it after nineteen centuries during which no one dared to hope for any such thing.”18 The French writer Arthur Loth, the author of a monograph on Pia’s pictures, similarly set the photographic event in a teleological scenario: “An act of Providence has made possible what we could never hope for: a pure and complete manifestation of the divine imprint, a translation of the mysterious image that is visible to the eye, the revelation of the portrait of Jesus Christ himself.”19 Such expressions of enthusiasm help us understand the caesura Pia’s work marks in the long history of the shroud. Photography had not, strictly speaking, made something invisible visible; it had provided a new mode in which to describe markings that had always been seen—a mode that was the language of the photographic itself. “So what the human eye bears witness to—and this is of central importance—confirms the testimony of the photographic eye. For five hundred years, the human eye always saw what the photographic eye has shown so clearly in our days, but it did not understand it.”20 When Loth, in the passage above, writes of a révélation, he means both, and both as indistinguishable from each other, the “revelation” of a

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message that had long been concealed (a message, needless to say, in which Loth, Pia, and others after them would discern a medium of the history of salvation), and the photochemical révélation of the photographic plate Pia immersed in the developer bath in May 1898.21 Newly identified as a “negative,” the shroud was displaced into the perceptual apparatus of photography. A photographic reproduction, it was thought, suddenly made it plain to the eye that the shroud itself had always already been a quasi-­photographic record. This intervention of photography initiated a discussion over the authenticity of the relic that has often been portrayed as the first scientific engagement with the object.22 When the debate flared up, the object at its heart had long been returned to safekeeping in the altar in the side chapel. On June 2, 1898, after eight days of presentation, the linen sheet had again been rolled up and locked up in its chest. But this time, a reproduction remained that showed more, and something else, than its secluded original. In the following discussion, I will focus on the best-­known and most contentious contribution to the controversy over Pia’s photographs: the French biologist Paul Vignon’s Le linceul du Christ: Étude scientifique (1902). What is most immediately interesting about this treatise for our context is that although Vignon identified le linceul de Christ, the burial cloth of Christ, as the ultimate object of his experiments, what he actually had before him was its photographic reproduction. He did not see the shroud until 1931, when it was next unrolled and publicly displayed. In 1900 he had traveled to Turin to see not the cloth, which had returned to its crypt, but Pia’s glass negatives. The point of departure for the research Vignon conducted in Paris were additional glass negatives Pia made for him from his original negatives. In a departure from the iconographic tradition, the print layout of Vig­ non’s Étude scientifique pre­sents the body on the burial cloth as an upright figure (fig. 34). It would have been more in keeping with how corpses are commonly imagined to show the silhouette as a recumbent body. That was how Clovio had depicted it, and the same position had been adopted for the public exhibitions of the relic. Vignon, by contrast, cuts the cloth in half down the center and shows the front and rear views of the figure in an upright position. The recumbent body Clovio painted is much harder to read as the beholder’s direct counterpart than the presentation in the Étude scientifique. In a sense, Vignon’s layout dramatizes a resurrection: the body is set upright so that, instead of a corpse laid out for burial, we encounter a man captured en face who, though dead, looks us straight in the eye. Moreover, Vignon’s plate effectively reenacts the photographic revelation of May 1898 by including both a positive and a negative image of the linen sheet, emphasizing the disfigured nature of the positive (fig. 35) so that its subsequent transformation in the negative is even more compelling: “To be sure, this head is not beautiful; we even have difficulty discerning a representation of facial features in it. This is presumably a nose, but it is completely black. Let us look at the eyes: are they hidden behind glasses? They appear to be surrounded by a white circle [. . .] There is a mouth there, but it seems impos-

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Fig. 35  Secondo Pia, Shroud of Turin, positive, 1898.

sible to make out. Where is the upper lip? [. . .] There is no trace of ears or a neck.”23 “The linen sheet,” Vignon concludes, “is a mysterious document: a magic key is required to read it. The mystery was solved in 1898: all that is needed is the assistance of a photographic apparatus; a sensitive plate must be tasked with inverting the entire gradation of tonal values.”24 Vignon follows up this indecipherable positive with the result of its magical decryption (fig. 34). Yet it emerges very quickly that the negative does not pre­sent an undistorted image of the dead man’s body either. After all, the photographic transformation of the burial cloth was merely an extension of the indirect visibility in which it had always already presented

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itself to its beholders. Even decrypted in the negative, the image of the dead body was not unreservedly there. That is implied, most immediately, by the technical status of the pictures. As reproductions of reproductions, negatives made from negatives, they reached Vignon only after a series of inversions and technical interventions. His negatives, moreover, needed to be converted into heliogravures for inclusion in the Étude scientifique. Above all, the negative still presented only a ghostly image of the dead man’s face (fig. 36). Non si vede niente—Pia’s photographic negative was no less apt to inspire this disappointed exclamation. The eye must scan the picture for some time before the outlines of a body emerge from the confusion of lines. More readily apparent than the spectral likeness is the damage the sheet has sustained throughout its history. Multiple creases—sharply edged white lines in the negative—cross the image like incisions. The dominant motif, however, comprises the eight symmetrical shapes that structure

Fig. 36  Secondo Pia, Shroud of Turin, detail, 1898.

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the picture like the figures of a Rorschach blot. When a fire broke out in the chapel at Chambéry in 1532, those who came to rescue the sheet folded it several times before removing it. Unfortunately, the flames reached one corner of the folded linen cloth, and a portion was destroyed. Once the sheet was unfolded, the damage appeared in eightfold replication, and the nuns of the monastery had to patch up the holes. In Pia’s negative, the eight symmetrical brand marks look like silent guardians, a visual barrier behind which the human figure emerges from the dark ground. Only these traces of damage lend the flat sheet a semblance of visual depth, suggesting a layering of foreground and background. The likeness itself is largely devoid of clear contours. The head and extremities are no more than spectral apparitions, and entire parts of the body such as the neck, shoulders, and thighs must be supplied by the imagination (or hallucinated). A separate plate in Vignon’s book, an enlarged detail of the figure’s face, illustrates this ambivalence between appearance and apparition especially well (fig. 36). Behind the two gouges crossing the picture as sharp and glaringly white lines, the phantom’s countenance shows itself and at once recedes into its dark ground. “Looking for the lateral parts of the face, the ears, neck, and shoulders, we will not find them,” Vignon notes.25 In their own way, Pia’s photographs continue this interplay of showing and concealing. Vignon promises his readers “the most immediate and simplest observation” of the pictures, but then adds at once that this observation is trained on a body “that seems to emerge from the night.”26 “Because of his blurred contours, this man appears to us as though we saw him through a gauze veil; he looms in the twilight.”27 As though to underline the remoteness of the image, Vignon discourages his audience from scrutinizing the reproductions too closely: “The reader will appreciate that the study of the documents presented in these pages is a highly exacting challenge. But he will arrive at an adequate understanding of them if he inspects them from some distance.”28 The same year Vignon’s study came out, Henri Terquem, a lawyer in Paris, also published a monograph on Pia’s photographs, and he similarly appends an instruction to the caption, “Do not regard from up close.”29 This aesthetic of distance recalls the circumstances in which the abovementioned “true” images of Christ were beheld. They were said to possess “a capacity for apparition [. . .], articles that offer an appearance that is literally as effaced as possible.”30 The faded body in Pia’s negatives never ceased to appear, because in the twilight that shrouded it, it was forever only barely visible. The certainty of this withdrawal was the basis on which Vignon set up his experiments. 4.3 Not made by human hands

Vignon was an assistant to the zoologist Yves Delage, who brought Pia’s photographs to his attention in 1900. The experiments for his Étude scien-

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tifique were conducted in Delage’s laboratory at the Sorbonne.31 The purpose of the book was to prove that no human hand had been involved in making the markings on the sheet. As a product of manual creation, the shroud would have been one of thousands of imaginary likenesses disseminated by visual artists. Vignon dedicates a chapter of his treatise to a discussion of several such renderings of Christ “in an aesthetic perspective.”32 He begins with surviving specimens of Greek and Roman sculptural portraiture and concludes with a drawing by Leonardo. Not one of these images, he writes, resembles the face discernible in the Turin Shroud. The shroud, Vignon believes, stands outside art history: “The image in Turin does not bear the hallmarks of any era.”33 The key to its uniqueness lies in this very disconnection from the known techniques of visual art. In a footnote, he sketches the manual production of images as a sequence of discontinuities and translations: “Anyone who has drawn knows that the artist’s hand is at every moment guided by his feelings toward the model to be reproduced, regardless of whether it is in fact present or ideal.”34 When the artist draws, Vignon writes, “He actually sees the object as it inserts itself between his eye and the paper.” In other words, the artist apprehends his model where it is not, or not yet. What hovers between eye and paper is already not the object itself but a phantom of his imagination. “We notice here how cumbersome it is even for a very realistic painter to stay faithful to reality to the very end when the object he sees hardly comes to his help.”35 And so the artist’s hand, “in a series of corrections and tentative movements,”36 departs from what he sees as it draws. Vignon’s remarks recall a view of the artist’s craft that Charles Baudelaire had articulated a few decades earlier under the title of art mnémonique, or art of remembering. The draftsman—Baudelaire is thinking of the artist Constantin Guys—“draws from memory and not from the model [. . .] All good and true draughtsmen draw from the image imprinted on their brains, and not from nature.”37 By contrast, in Vignon’s eyes, the Turin Shroud was the medium of a recording that was inconceivable without the real presence of its model. “The most immediate and simplest observation will show us that these images were not made by a painter’s hand, that they are traces left on the fabric by a body, and that they resulted from a process that occurred in the narrow space between that body and the fabric.”38 Vignon’s experiments were designed to identify this mysterious process of image transfer—to show that the self-­depiction of Christ could be replicated in the laboratory at the Sorbonne. The demonstration began with Pia’s photographs. In the 1898 photographic recording, Vignon wrote, the shroud was first brought into the precinct of science: “The Holy Shroud enters the field of scientific fact, finding a refuge where it is protected from the attacks of the Middle Ages.”39 These “attacks of the Middle Ages” came to an early head in 1389, when Bishop Pierre d’Arcis of Troyes not only made any presentation of

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the shroud a punishable offense but prohibited merely speaking of it—sive in bono sive in malo, whether well or ill.40 The pertinent source mentions a painter who incriminated himself as having single-­handedly counterfeited the shroud. Two years before Vignon’s Étude scientifique came out, the historian and prelate Ulysse Chevalier had edited this document; his historical Étude critique was awarded the gold medal of the Paris Académie des inscriptions.41 The tone is harsh, and the message unmistakable. Chevalier opens his study with a long quote from a treatise by the Belgian Bollandists, a circle of Jesuit scholars who worked in the tradition founded by Jean Bolland. With reference to a relic of the blood of Christ kept in Mantua, they described the relic cult of the “half-­barbaric ancestors” as ultimately pathological: “Their desire to possess relics grew into a passion and finally led to what we should frankly call degeneration and dementia.”42 Chevalier goes on to reconstruct the history of the Turin Shroud as the “life of a legend.” In the cult, he writes, the shroud was presented to the faithful “as a simple painting.”43 Against its photographic reproduction, Chevalier fields the authority of the extant historical sources. “Let us return to the texts.” “I have urged my opponents to dig up unpublished documents that would corroborate their hypothesis: they have not brought a single line to light.”44 Vignon’s insistence on the automatic genesis of the images should thus also be read as a response to Chevalier’s source criticism. Only if the markings on the sheet were the result of a self-­depiction would they escape the devastating suspicion that they were a counterfeiter’s handiwork. So the controversy over the authenticity of the shroud was also a contest between different media and arts. Vignon countered the authority of the sources by invoking the superior authority of the photographic image. “The question seemed to have been decided [. . .] But, it will be asked, in this purely historical discussion, what has become of the astonishing facts photography had revealed in 1898?”45 Where Chevalier challenged his opponents to read more sources and adduce written evidence, Vignon answered: “Our work is based on photographs, and we believe we know how to read them.”46 The scientific “refuge,” as Vignon called it, to which the shroud was brought for safekeeping in 1902 was also meant to save it from the historical profession. The foundations of the scientific facts to be ascertained in this safe haven were “observation, experiment, and the reading of texts.”47 So Vignon could not do entirely without the reading of texts either. But the order in which he enumerated his scholarly strategies was carefully chosen; the authority of writing came last. Texts were to be consulted only after the shroud had been subjected to the scrutiny of observation and experiment.48 Vignon proffered this critique of source criticism so as to convey his confidence that observation and experiment put him in immediate contact with the “thing itself.” But there is a glaring problem with this claim: Vignon was not in fact writing about the shroud that was presented in Turin in 1898, which he had never seen. His object of study was the glass negatives Pia

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had made for him. As far as I can tell, no attempt to establish the authenticity of the shroud on a scientific basis had been undertaken before 1898. In other words, this research commenced at the very moment the one Shroud of Turin was supplanted by a series of photographic doubles. Vignon’s scientific refuge was an ambivalent place, where a piece of linen cloth was represented by glass negatives that were then said to possess all qualities of the cloth. Further copies were made of the negatives, and these copies were likewise presumed to contain the original information without loss. In this manner, the difference between original and copy, between shroud and photograph of the shroud, was replicated in the scholarly safe haven in Paris. In Vignon’s experimental practice, Pia’s photographic reproductions came to be regarded as originals in their own right—he explicitly called them “the original photographs of Monsieur Pia”—to the point that they obscured their secluded archetype in the Cathedral of Turin.49 The same view had been taken in Turin in 1898: the pope and the king of Italy each received one of the original negatives—to be deposited and guarded together with the keys to the reliquary shrine. And like the shroud itself, they were the objects of a remarkable exhibition before being removed from view. A few days after the shroud had been returned to its crypt, Pia’s home became the destination of a pilgrimage of sorts: one of the glass negatives was on display in a darkened room, illuminated from behind.50 Strolling through Turin, the visitor was able to measure the distance between the hidden cloth in the cathedral and its photographic reproduction at Pia’s home by his own steps and thus survey the space of their mutual dependency: the negative was nothing without the invisible relic to which it referred, but conversely, the shroud, once it had been subject to photographic recording, could no longer be read without its reproduction. The same interrelation between the hidden object of contemplation and the artifacts of its technological reconstruction subsequently provided the framework for Vignon’s experiments in far-­off Paris. The Étude scientifique opens with a negation. Before unveiling the “true meaning” of the markings on the sheet for his readers, the author promises to “make it perfectly clear what they are not.”51 The purpose of this “negative definition” is to rule out the possibility that any kind of manual work produced the images. Vignon interprets the markings on the cloth as a relief image: projecting features such as the forehead and nose appear in it, whereas recessed parts such as the orbital cavities have remained blank (fig. 34). The edges and transitions of the relief, he argues, are “blurred contours”; for instance, “a vague frottis that is heavily blurred toward the edges predominates in the stomach region.”52 No fourteenth-­century painter, he writes, had the technical skills to produce such blurring. Finally, Vignon got his hands dirty and painted on several pieces of centuries-­old linen provided by the director of the Musée des étoffes, Lyon. His finding is that a painting made with medieval colorants would inevitably have suffered

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damage along the numerous folds in the sheet, including the two creases across the face. The second negation concerns the claim that the markings were the result of an immediate physical imprint made by a human being or model. Vignon refers to the experiments of the physician Paul Richer, who had his test subjects march across long sheets of white paper after staining the soles of their bare feet in order to obtain an image of their specific walking disorders: “As he walks according to his personal rhythm, man re­cords the formula of his own illness.”53 Vignon, wondering whether the Turin Shroud might be the result of a similar inscription process, develops a typology of the imprint in which his own face plays a curious part. This improvised solution is characteristic of the experimental design that underlay his attempts to reconstruct the historical events. Scientists would experiment with whatever happened to be at hand or could be obtained in Paris—age-­old fabrics from the museum in Lyon, commercially available paints, and if need be, an object that was literally always within reach, the experimenter’s own face: I stretched out on an operating table, my face thoroughly coated with red chalk. The false beard I had stuck to my face to approximate the circumstances revealed by the imprint as nearly as possible had been treated in the same fashion [. . .] Dr. E. Hérouard, maître de conférences at the Sorbonne, and my colleague and friend Mr. Robert, agrégé at the university, were so kind as to take the impression.54

Several linen sheets were impressed with varying intensity on the face prepared with red chalk. Vignon pre­sents the results in a tableau of six images: “Imprints of a living head coated with red chalk” (fig. 37). The caption instructs the reader of the Étude scientifique to see an anonymous face, but it is impossible to forget that we are meeting the author himself—wearing a false beard and keeping his eyes closed to resemble the object of his study, ostensibly Jesus of Nazareth, as closely as possible. In analogy with the plates showing the shroud, a positive and a negative photographic reproduction is included for each of three imprints. Vignon thus reenacts the effect of inversion with which the debate over the photographs of the Turin Shroud began. Little more than the rough imprint of a mask is recognizable in the three positive plates in the top row. The image on the right, in particular, distorts the face into an amorphous black stain; only the negative below restores a semblance of human likeness. But in Vignon’s comparison of these images to Pia’s photographs, dissimilarity is actually the point. The conclusion he draws from his morphological examination is that the traces on the shroud could not possibly have resulted from a mere impression. Fabric pressed down on a face stretches to accommodate the physiognomic relief; when the cloth is subsequently unfolded and flattened, Vignon argues, the natural proportions of the face

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Fig. 37  Paul Vignon, imprints of the experimenter’s face covered in red chalk, around 1900.

are invariably distorted. This distortion, he writes, is evident in the imprints of his face: the eyes are set too far apart and have shifted downward to near the wings of the nose; the distance between mouth and nose is too large; and unlike in the Turin image, the cheeks look puffy. The imprint of the nose has produced a flat wide bridge edged by straight lines, and blanks—white in the positive, black in the negative—appear where the wings of the nose ought to be. The image on the shroud, Vignon concludes, is not an imprint but the result of a projection. Whereas an impression produces specific deformations, a projected image retains the correct proportions. He illustrates this model of image transfer in a series of diagrams. The greater the distance between a point on the body’s surface and the cloth, the fainter the image the former leaves on the latter (fig. 38). The line xy represents the half of the shroud on which the body rests; the dotted area, a rounded portion of the body, such as a leg, rising from the point of direct contact with the shroud at A to a point of maximum distance at A′. The intensity of transmission steadily decreases along this outline. At this point in his argument, Vignon proceeds to describe the markings on the shroud as the residue of a chemical effect, replacing the

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Fig. 38  Paul Vignon, diagram from Étude scientifique, around 1900.

assumption of immediate and extensive physical contact between body and pictorial medium with that of chemical action at a distance. According to this hypothesis, an image may be recorded without the body touching the medium. Vignon asserts that this new mode of imaging entails greater perfection: “The imprint on the shroud will be a more perfect negative because the image develops entirely without contact with the original.”55 One is surprised to read that an image recording technique that dispenses with immediate contact is supposed to guarantee superior precision in transmission. Direct contact between model and medium in printing had long been regarded as the most immediate way for an object to inscribe its own likeness. “A frequent connotation of the imprint [. . .] is that its result persists, that its gesture occasions a ‘durable marking.’”56 In 1854 Alois Auer, describing the technique he called Naturselbstdruck, or “autotypy of nature”—the reproduction of an object by means of its impression on a lead plate—had emphasized that it allows nature to “yield itself to printing” without the need for a “drawing or etching made by human hands in the hitherto customary manner.”57 Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Francis Galton reasserted this pretension in his study of fingerprints, which he characterized as individuals’ unadulterated self-­depictions: “They are self-­signatures, free from any possible error of observation or clerical mistake.”58 As Vignon was working on his treatise, even France, the heartland of Alphonse Bertillon’s anthropometry, gradually adopted the use of fingerprints, which were thought to allow for unequivocal identification of their authors.59 So it is odd that Vignon would attribute greater perfection to a non-­contact-­based recording technique. An immediate and pragmatic reason, no doubt, was the abovementioned inability of printing to transfer reliefs without distortion. Yet by postulating an action at a distance between the body and the pictorial medium, Vignon also introduced a motif to the field of the Turin image’s production that had always defined its reception: the indispensable remoteness of its appearance, the constitutive in-­between that kept the beholder at a distance and, as we have seen, led scientific interpreters of its photographic reproduction to caution readers, “Do not regard from up close.” And this distance in space entailed one in time as well,

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the perspective of “a physical-­chemical study undertaken from a distance of twenty centuries.”60 Finally, the replacement of direct contact with chemical action at a distance also indicates a remarkable shift of the research perspective: the generation of markings was no longer a matter of outside intervention but an autonomous activity of the body. The taking of an impression still required the presence of a force external to the image source that literally pressed the portrait into the medium. In the case of Vignon’s portraits, this agency was even known by name: his assistants Hérouard and Robert had modeled the likeness with their hands. In comparison to the delicate hand of the draftsman Vignon described as working tentatively and without rigorous guidance, this already meant a considerable reduction of the influence exercised by human agents, but in the final analysis, the resulting image still evinced vestiges of manual interference. By contrast, in the action at a distance in question, the body supposedly engendered a chemical self-­portrait, an image recorded without any manual or instrumental intervention. “The imprints on the shroud came into being of themselves.”61 By the end of Vignon’s “negative definition,” the Turin Shroud thus pre­ sents itself as the medium of a likeness not transmitted, disrupted, or adulterated by any hand or instrument. His anxiety to rule out any external influence, any involvement of manual craft or manufacture, had brought him to a point where the emergence of the markings pointed to the agency of an unknown energy. In place of the outside agent presumed by the hypothesis that the shroud was a forgery, Vignon’s hypothesis outlined a peculiar blank: “Something emanated from the body and affected the cloth.”62 In the case of impressions such as Vignon produced in the laboratory at the Sorbonne, there was ultimately always someone responsible for the image. With the mysterious action at a distance, the cause was something—an unknown substance, a pictorial agent—that had emanated from the dead body itself. Only in this chemical self-­depiction were the dead man and his likeness united in perfect self-­sufficiency. The image could come into being of itself; no one had a hand in its making. Vignon’s attempt to read the markings on the shroud as an emanation brings a curious analogy to light. The Étude scientifique combines the hypothesis of an action at a distance, whose nature remains to be determined by experimental means, with the model of the Byzantine iconic tradition of acheiropoietoi. In fact, a few years earlier, Ernst von Dobschütz had called the Turin Shroud an “elaborate variant of the belief in acheiropoietoi” and counted it among “the most peculiar [of these] images ‘not made by human hands.’”63 Such images, it was said, had come into being of themselves or had been engendered by direct contact with their holy models. One instance is the Mandylion, which was first mentioned in the sixth century (plate 15).64 Its fate after the sack of Constantinople in 1204 is shrouded in darkness, but there are several extant images said to be copies, including

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the Holy Face of Genoa, which is kept in that city’s church of Santo Bartolomeo degli Armeni. Legend has it that the Mandylion was created when King Abgar of Edessa sent a messenger to Christ to paint his portrait. When this task proved impossible—the painter was overwhelmed by the sight of his subject—Christ washed his face, took a piece of cloth, and miraculously imprinted his likeness on it. Seeing this image subsequently healed the ailing king. In the West, another “true” image of Christ, the Sudarium, or Veil of Veronica, emerged in the thirteenth century; it is venerated as the vera icon in relics in Saint Peter’s in Rome and elsewhere.65 Like the Turin Shroud as described by Vignon, these images were primarily distinguished by what they were not. The very term a-­cheiro-­poietos is a “negative” definition: the object’s genesis cannot be explained as the work of a human hand. In the eyes of posterity, only the immediate reflection of Christ’s glory compellingly attested to its real presence: So the “prototypical” images of Christianity are nothing but pure symptoms: shown traces of the divine, and shown as such to the end of constructing a mystery, magical efficacy, veneration. That is why the affirmation of such a contact—that of the living face of Christ with the Mandylion, of the suffering face of Christ with Veronica’s Veil, of the body of the dead Christ with the Holy Shroud—wouldn’t work without the operation of procedures requiring something reciprocal, namely the non-­contact of humans.66

The parallels with the Étude scientifique are obvious. Vignon’s characterization of the Turin Shroud is based on the model of these images made without hands: “What place will this portrait occupy among the likenesses of Christ? [. . .] It is the only portrait of Christ we have: the only one that is not a translation of nature effected by the eye of a painter or sculptor; the only one that is not a work of art.”67 Early legends about the acheiropoietoi that, like the reports of Eusebius, predate the first known images are especially emphatic about the distance that “legitimates the power of touch [. . .]: be it the Mandylion or the Veil of Veronica, the imprint of the face of Christ always appears—and heals its recipient—at the end of a translatio, the bridging of a distance.”68 Yet the return of the old myth cannot conceal that the conditions in which it appears have changed. The Byzantine acheiropoietoi required no experiments. Their supernatural agency was proof of their authenticity: it was “desirable for images to declare themselves authentic by performing miracles, the classic proof of authenticity.”69 By 1902 critics demanded different forms of authentication. Arthur Loth, in his text on Pia’s pictures, was ready to at least hint at the possibility of a miracle,70 but Vignon is explicit, at least on the level of rhetoric, about the value of clear boundaries between science and faith, experiment and religion. The author of the Étude scien-

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tifique emphasizes that his work falls silent at the very point at which, in the Gospels, the miracles commence: “As regards the supernatural events, we persist on a purely scientific standpoint. We have no concern with them; we need neither admire them nor discuss them.”71 In other words, the Étude scientifique reiterates the pretension of the image made without hands to be evident on its face, but with the crucial amendment that supernatural occurrences are excluded from the laboratory. Instead, Vignon seeks to reconstruct in experimental fashion the conditions under which the as yet undetermined action at a distance transpired. “We must now attempt to reproduce analogue impressions.”72 But an identical reproduction of the markings was never a real possibility. Vignon ruled out an experimental reconstruction of the Passion for practical as well as ethical reasons—unlike his later critic, the biologist Adrien Donnadieu, whose work I will discuss below. The circumstances of the death of the man shown by the image on the cloth, Vignon argued, were virtually impossible to recreate. So his attempts to reproduce the markings on the shroud were from the outset a series of replacements, fragmentations, and abstractions. Even the physical objects of his studies—glass negatives made from other glass negatives—were substitutes. And his examination of these substitutes triggered a chain of further supplements—models for “something,” that unidentified source of a chemical emanation. Vignon explicitly refers to the studies of Becquerel and Russell (see above, section 2.6), which, like his, investigated “radiations produced without the intervention of an external agency.”73 Yet although he invokes the authorities of these scientists, he cannot simply apply their findings to his own problem—it seems “highly improbable that a human body would be or become radioactive in the true sense of the word.”74 At this juncture, however, Vignon’s inquiry received support from an unlikely source—the experiments of another physicist who has already played a major role in chapters 2 and 3: René Colson. 4.4. Images from vapors: The shroud in the laboratory

Colson’s intervention marks the point at which the history of the Turin Shroud merges with the study of photographic disruptions. The concept of action at a distance appears in the very title of the study, published in the Bulletin de la Société française de photographie in 1896, in which Colson discusses the “photographer’s enemies”: “Revue des actions à distance capables d’influencer les couches photographiques.” “All phenomena,” Colson writes, “in which the source of active influence may be removed from the sensitive layer are collectively designated by the term action at a distance.”75 The text relates Colson’s experiments investigating the sensitivity of the photographic plate. As we have seen, these experiments were prompted by the observation that numerous factors, in addition to the rays

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of ordinary light, were capable of affecting the photographic plate in disruptive ways. Colson had sought to track these “enemies” down so that they could be classified, identified, and averted in the future. He distinguished between two categories of action at a distance: radiations (rayonnements) and gases or vapors (vapeurs). Radiations traveled along linear paths emanating from their source, penetrated solid substances, and, like light, were subject to reflection or refraction. Vapors, by contrast, diffused through the air, which allowed them to travel around obstacles, but they penetrated only permeable substances. His studies of actions at a distance had made Colson an expert of sorts when it came to emanations. The insights he gained from his experiments would become useful at the precise point where Vignon’s “negative definition” left the study of the shroud suspended in uncertainty. At Vignon’s request, Colson participated in the attempt to reconstruct the markings in question. Their experiments made direct reference to Colson’s research paper “Action du zinc sur la plaque photographique.” “In the progress of my photographic studies,” Colson reports, “I found that zinc has an energetic effect on gelatin bromide.” A small plate of zinc roughened with sandpaper and left in contact with a gelatin silver bromide plate for twenty-­four hours, he writes, leaves a dark gray stain that becomes visible only when the plate is developed. The same effect may be observed when the zinc plate is separated from the medium by another body or by empty space. “So an emission of something is present, and it must be either a radiation or an emanation.”76 When Colson’s report was read before the Paris Academy of Sciences by the astronomer Marie-­Alfred Cornu in 1896, no one could have suspected that the experiments it described would help, only a few years later, to shed light on unknown details of the Passion of Christ. As Vignon and Colson saw it, there was a direct link between the emanation of zinc on gelatin bromide and the dead body of Christ and its chemical self-­depiction on the linen cloth now in Turin. Colson cast a four-­inch plaster head of Christ, coated it with fine zinc powder, and placed it inside a closed box together with a photographic plate to let it act upon the gelatin bromide for forty-­eight hours. In this manner, the researchers hoped to reenact in their Paris laboratory the historic moment in May 1898 when the ghostly image of a human face emerged from Pia’s developer bath. The time the zinc-­coated mask lay in the dark was chosen to approximate the time the dead body of Christ lay in the burial cave in Jerusalem. The artifacts Vignon and Colson produced are not just material documents of the history of science; they also form part of the iconography of Christ. When the plate was developed, a shadowy image appeared. In keeping with the dramaturgy of the Turin Shroud, Vignon once again pre­sents both a positive and a negative: “Head of Christ (plaster cast): imprints obtained by means of zinc vapors in the dark” (fig. 39). As in the other pairs, the virtually indecipherable fog of the positive imprint contrasts with a legible negative. Our eyes can make sense of the

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Fig. 39  Paul Vignon, emanation of zinc, around 1900.

shapes in the positive only when they return to it after examining the negative with which it is paired. Of the latter, Vignon writes, “This imprint matches—not in chemical but in physical terms—the traces that can be seen in the shroud.”77 As in the latter, the face seems to be lighted from above. Vignon also notes the characteristic absence of sharp contours and the same relief quality that distinguishes the image in Pia’s photograph. The parts of the face that were in immediate contact with the plate have affected it most strongly. Parts of the crown of thorns as well as the forehead, cheekbones, tip of the nose, and chin stand out, while the rest of the face recedes into the murk of the background. Instead of an abstract chemical-­physical trace, Colson had created a phantom, an image that hovered on the threshold of visibility just like its prototype in Turin: barely discernible, too ghostly to be identifiable as the portrait of a particular person, but distinct enough to be legible as the face of a stranger gazing at us from the dark. A second experiment with zinc coating involved a silver medal—chosen, Vignon explains, not because he believed it had particular archaeological value but for its “simple and yet distinctive relief.”78 He fixed a photographic plate above the medal so that it touched the forehead and left shoulder of the depicted figure. Once again, the intensity of the emanation was found to decrease with growing distance from the photographic plate. Recessed parts such as the neck and right shoulder left no image on the negative. An ordinary photograph of the medal, Vignon notes, captures details that are

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lost in the image produced by emanation. However, the latter is superior when it comes to rendering the relief structure: for example, the figure’s two shoulders seem to be on the same plane in the photograph, while the zinc-­ generated image renders the projecting and recessed parts of the relief in different shades, conveying a sense of the medal’s actual three-­dimensional depth. What Vignon needed now was a chemical model to explain the active vapors that a human body might emit under certain circumstances and the corresponding sensitivity of the linen. He found both by looking into ancient Jewish burial rites. The body, he argued, may have been shrouded in a cloth anointed with a blend of myrrh and aloe, and this, he believed, was the missing link: the chemical effect of the urea contained in sweat on aloe was analogous to that of zinc on gelatin bromide. He envisioned the following sequence of events: A human being died after extended torture, his body covered with an accumulated layer of sweat. The water fraction of the sweat evaporated, but the skin remained moist. The dead body was wrapped in an anointed cloth. Fermentation of urea released ammonia vapors that stained the aloe-­treated shroud, leaving a brown imprint. His research having reached a satisfactory conclusion, Vignon ventured to coin a new term: “We now finally know which name we must give to these imprints; if a rough-­ cast neologism be permitted, they are vaporographic imprints [impressions vaporographiques].”79 So the study of photochemical effects was the primary source of the knowledge Vignon believed could explain how Christ had rendered his own likeness. Even the hypothesis with which his work closes, that the image of Christ was produced by the action of ammonia vapors, owed much to Colson’s 1896 study of photography.80 Having drawn up a hypothesis concerning the chemical origin of the traces, Vignon faced a final and crucial task: “to read in the linen cloth the name of the man whose dead body left these impressions.”81 No laboratory experiment could plausibly tell him anything about the historical identity of the man whose likeness appeared on the shroud. So for this last part of his quest, Vignon moved on to the scientific method he ranked third, after observation and experiment: “the reading of documents.” In this reading, text and image coincide in a peculiar way: Vignon started seeing in the glass negative what he had read in the biblical text. “Reading in the linen cloth the name of the man”—that meant always already having read the “text” of the Holy Shroud in the Gospels. The events of the Passion as related in the written tradition seemed to have indelibly inscribed themselves in the shroud—the “first forensic ‘photograph’”82—in blood and vaporographic markings. Here was once more what, as François Lecercle had emphasized, made the shroud superior to simple portraits of Christ. “Indeed, the shroud is not simply the authentic imprint of the body of Christ; it is also the imprint of his Passion. It is portrait and narrative at once.”83 The meticulous decryption of this visual narrative shows Vignon

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yet again at the peak of his interpretive powers. In the area of the right chest he discerns the lateral wound inflicted on the crucified Christ by Longinus, and a large stain produced by blood that had flowed from it. He also identifies traces of a second wound near the left wrist from which blood supposedly trickled down Jesus’s outstretched arms before congealing. The nose shows a deviation from the straight line, which suggests it has been broken. Traces of the bloody crown of thorns appear on the forehead and back of the head, and the distinctive marks of scourging are evident on the man’s back, pelvis, and calves. In Vignon’s imagination, these markings shed their static quality and spelled out the Passion as a plot: they re­cord the scourging and its duration in time as well as the movements of the man who wielded the whip two thousand years ago. “The injuries to the back ascend, whereas those to the calves descend, as though the scourger placed the lashes to the back along a curved line and from the bottom up; the lashes to the soft parts, in a horizontal direction; and the lashes to the calves, from the top down.”84 This imagination then translates into a final image. In a Dictionnaire des antiquités romaines et grecques, Vignon found a picture of a Roman whip (flagellum) with metal weights fastened to the ends of the thongs: an instrument of this sort, he concludes, might have caused the lesions on the man’s back. In its various stages, Vignon’s interpretation of Pia’s photographs generated an unceasing stream of images—the imprint of a face, photographs of a zinc emanation—and drew yet others, such as illustrations from a dictionary of antiquities, into its orbit. All of these images crowded around the one image, enclosed in its locked box in Turin, disclosing its latent message along an extended chain of additional visualizations. 4.5 Observation and experiment

It need not be demonstrated at length that Vignon was unable to implement his heuristic of the “proper path.”85 Scholarship, he writes, explaining his ideal of the production of knowledge, gradually expands “in all directions: every scientific worker observes; then he verifies his observation with the help of experiments based on hypotheses to which an initial idea has inspired him; then he observes once more in order to ascertain whether the picture he paints accurately renders the reality of objective fact.”86 The very first link in this chain, “the most immediate and simplest observation,” Vignon promises his readers on several occasions, gives reason for skepticism.87 His observing scholar seems impartial and unprejudiced, a great disinterested eye that roams the world, scrutinizing and comparing phenomena—an illusion Bachelard dispelled, noting that observation is always already “governed by a ‘code’ of precautions that must be observed; observers are admonished to think before they look, to scrutinize carefully what they first see, and invariably to doubt the results of the initial observa-

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tion. Scientific observation is always polemical [. . .] It shows as it demonstrates; it establishes a hierarchy of appearances.”88 The Étude scientifique, too, lays out such a hierarchy of phenomena. From the outset, Vignon knows too much for the claim that he will be nothing but an unprejudiced observer to be convincing. In its formal structure, his study sketches a climactic progression from a tabula rasa through observation, experiment, and the examination of written sources to the heart of the matter. But his text simultaneously registers all of the agents that thwart progress toward this climax from the very first step. Vignon “observes” an object he has never seen. When he calls the object of his investigation le linceul du Christ—the phrase appears in the very title of his book—what he actually refers to are glass negatives made in Turin. Their interpretation unfolds a web of presuppositions, readings, pieces of expertise communicated to Vignon by fellow scientists, and the employment of technical media and models. Establishing the truth involves a congeries of highly disparate objects including a zinc strip, the Gospel according to Matthew, and a plaster head. Vignon’s bricolage of these elements may ultimately be read as a cascade of substitutions: the unavailable shroud is replaced by photonegatives; the original negatives, by reproductions; the reproduced negatives, by a gelatin silver bromide plate in proximity to zinc; and finally, the gelatin silver bromide plate, by a canvas impregnated with aloe and exposed to ammonia. Vignon, however, portrays this sequence of leaps and bounds as a simple circular chain in which reference flows freely: from the dead body of Christ through the shroud and its photograph to the plaster model—and back. The argument shuttles effortlessly between physical and chemical phenomena,89 jumps from biblical text to laboratory experiment90 and from photography back to biblical text, and nimbly substitutes the urea in sweat for zinc. Such transfers are supposedly warranted, across a distance of two millennia, by “the truthful seal that nature has impressed on the linen cloth”: “Here we will rediscover nature itself.”91 But as many critics have emphasized, when scientists speak of the traces of “nature itself,” they are usually contemplating something else. “Scientists,” Bruno Latour says bluntly, “start seeing something once they stop looking at nature and look exclusively and obsessively at prints and flat inscriptions.”92 Vignon’s Étude scientifique illustrates this displacement. With the scientist’s characteristic squint, he scrutinizes “flat inscriptions” in his laboratory, manufactures additional inscriptions, and constructs models, and yet what he “sees” when he looks at them is “nature itself,” the original secreted away in far-­off Turin. Pia’s photographs, with which the chain commences, represented the invisible research object kept within the altar and transcended it. They rendered it, but they also showed more than anyone could have seen looking at the cloth. There is nothing extraordinary about the insight that photographs, be-

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yond simply standing in for their object, may pre­sent information in excess of it and supplant it; it was certainly true in photography around 1900 (see chapter 5). But I think the model with which Vignon’s analysis of the shroud operates is substantially photographic in yet another, entirely different sense: by association with the pictures taken in May 1898, the traces on the shroud have become the markings of a distinctive pseudophotography. “It seemed evident that the impressions bore the significance of veritable photographic negatives.”93 Vignon goes so far as to describe the traces on the linen as mechanical, contradicting his own hypothesis of an organic vaporography: “And so we find, finally, that a mechanical image has been imprinted on the shroud.”94 The shroud appears as the equivalent of a photograph down to the level of technical detail. In analogy with the photographic plate, he argues, it was a chemically sensitive layer: “the aromatic compounds constituted the substance that was capable of sensitizing the cloth.”95 That is why Vignon does not think twice about availing himself of photographic techniques in his experimental attempts to reproduce these markings. Looking for a chemical process that might recreate the impressions, he writes, he “instinctively” thought of the sensitivity of the photographic plate.96 But what Vignon places under the rubric of “instinct” is the fact that photography was from the start the ultimate destination of his experiments. Just as his observation of the linen cloth in Turin was hardly “immediate and simple,” its experimental representation cannot be reduced to mere “instinct.” Again, consider Bachelard’s assessment of scientific cognition: “And once the step is taken from observation to experimentation, the polemical character of knowledge stands out even more sharply. Now phenomena must be selected, filtered, purified, shaped by instruments; indeed, it may well be the instruments that produce the phenomenon in the first place.”97 In his laboratory in Paris, Vignon had cast the shroud in the mold of scientific instruments, and the phenomena he manufactured in the first place are produced at the level of these instruments as well. This is not to say that the technology Vignon and his assistants deployed determined the course and outcome of their experiments outright. But photography was more than just a technical apparatus of visualization. From the start, it provided Vignon with the epistemic model for his vision of a vaporography. In his attempt to reconstruct the relic, he relied on photographic techniques only because he had never seen the likeness of Christ on the linen cloth as anything other than a quasi-­photographic portrait. But the most striking motif in this interference between the object the Étude scientifique investigates and the instrument it brings to this investigation concerns the principle of the latent image. It is common knowledge that the photographic image is not discernible on the photographic plate right after exposure. Only the subsequent development reveals the image that has been recorded. “In the history of images,” André Rouillé writes,

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“the photographer is the first to act in a realm of uncertainty, being unable to ascertain the result of the choice he has made [. . .] His images are inscribed and deferred at the same instance, projected back into the future.”98 The same constellation—invisible recording, latency period, photographic visualization—animates the teleology attributed to the photographs of the shroud around 1900. The cloth figures in it as the medium of a latent image that allowed a technologically advanced posterity to recognize itself as the addressee of a vaporographic message. In this instance, the deferral Rouillé describes spanned almost two millennia. Vignon’s recital of a history of numerous failed attempts to copy the shroud is nothing other than an account of the blindness of the prephotographic era, which lacked the right developer. Arthur Loth praised Pia’s glass negative as the “revelation of the portrait of Jesus Christ himself,” and in Vignon’s view, too, photography may be called a révélateur in a twofold sense: it developed the picture on the glass negative Pia took on the night of May 28, 1898—and developed, at the same instant, the vaporographic negative supposedly recorded two thousand years earlier in a darkroom in Jerusalem. The coincidence of medium and message in the Étude scientifique is nowhere more tangible than at this point. Photography is here the model that explains its own creation. It unconceals an image made without hands and is itself regarded as just such an image. It is the more remarkable, then, that photography, the process on which everything in this experimental setting rests, ultimately remains a blind spot in Vignon’s report. True, Étude scientifique is explicit about the useful qualities of photography virtually from the first sentence. But Vignon’s research has no place for anything the photographic equipment and chemical agents might do beyond the safe and lossless transmission of “nature itself ”: from Turin to Paris, from linen to glass, from sweat and blood to silver salt. In Vignon’s eyes, photography is a medium of truth. It has rendered the latent message of the shroud visible for the first time in history but for its own part remains utterly invisible. His text nowhere so much as mentions the material intervention of the photographic apparatus. Instead, it limns an ideal of recording, portraying photography as a pure medium that produces noise-­free transfers of whatever is held up to it and never appears in the pictures as such. With all his borrowings from the photographic process, Vignon fails to take one crucial phenomenon into account: the visible manifestation of the recording technique itself. 4.6 “False” pictures, but not falsifications

The year after Étude scientifique was published, a biologist joined the debate and recalled attention to these forgotten agents of recording. In Le Saint Suaire devant la science, A.-­L. Donnadieu, professor at the Faculté catholique des sciences, Lyon, turned the spotlight on all the apparatuses, chemi-

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cal processes, and optical distortions that had intervened between the rolled-­up linen cloth and its reproduction in Vignon’s treatise. Like Vignon, Donnadieu claimed that his work hewed to the maxim of scientific rigor. The very title of his study announces his intention to summon the Turin cloth before the court of science: “I will limit my argument as strictly as possible to the realm of positive science, which is to say, that science which is entirely based on observation and experience.”99 Like Vignon before him, Donnadieu accordingly considered the evidence of textual sources to be merely “subsidiary.”100 Pia’s photographs, Donnadieu writes, are “false”: If I describe Mr. Pia’s negative as false, the reader must not conclude that I believe Mr. Pia to be a forger and charge him with falsification [. . .] What I mean above all else is the property one ascribes to a thing that is not an expression of truth: a false color, for example, a false hue in painting, a false maneuver in the art of war, a false note in music, etc. Mr. Pia’s negative is false in this sense. It is not an expression of the truth, and it is solely for this reason that I say that “it is not accurate.”101

The untruth Donnadieu believes has slipped in is the product of a series of photographic defects. The reproductions the reader sees—in Vignon’s Étude scientifique as well as the studies by Arthur Loth and Henri Terquem—are photographic artifacts. “What the public knows is not the original copy, the immediate copy of the cloth, but only secondary copies, as it were.”102 Pia’s negatives, he argues, circulated in reproductions made using three very different processes—phototypy, photogravure, and heliogravure—and from different originals. “Each of these processes knows its own forms of manipulation; each generates specific results.”103 Assessing, for example, heliogravures, the type of print published with Vignon’s book, Donnadieu quantifies photography’s responsibility for the result as one-­third and the printmaker’s manual labor, two-­thirds: “The engraver’s hand could not but manipulate the plate.”104 So the very agent Vignon wanted to banish in the spirit of the acheiropoietoi—the human hand—was involved in the making of the pictures of the shroud. The countless details in which, in concluding his interpretation, he discerned clear traces of the scourging had been touched, edited, and perhaps fashioned by a human hand after all. But Donnadieu’s skepticism does not stop with the reproductions of Pia’s pictures—the negatives themselves, he argues, were already highly artificial. “A twenty-­minute exposure seems unusually long for such a small surface, which was illuminated by two powerful arc lights.”105 Moreover, the black fabric with which the shroud had been lined had been replaced on occasion of the presentation in 1868 with a new red taffeta lining, which now showed through the flimsy linen. A photographic record of the translucent cloth under blazing lights inevitably rendered an adulterated image

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of the actual color and brightness values. Donnadieu alludes to a peculiarity of the photographic process that had already occupied John Herschel, Talbot, and other pioneers of the medium. Different segments of the light spectrum—from red across orange, yellow, green, blue, and indigo to violet—affected the sensitive silver salts with varying force and speed: violet light produced the fastest reaction, yielding the most intense darkening of the silver salt and a bright spot in the positive image, whereas the reaction was slower under red light, leading to fainter darkening and a comparatively darker area in the positive. A black-­and-­white photograph thus presented a distribution of brightness and darkness values very different from the one the naked eye would perceive in the depicted objects. Talbot had pointed out this photographic adulteration as early as 1844, in The Pencil of Nature: blue china, he wrote, looked not much darker in a photograph than white china, and light in the green range of the spectrum produced an especially feeble reaction—“an inconvenient circumstance, whenever green trees are to be represented in the same picture with buildings of a light hue, or with any other light coloured objects.”106 In 1873 Hermann Wilhelm Vogel, who directed a photographic laboratory at the Gewerbe-­Institut in Berlin and would later become professor of photochemistry at the city’s Technical University, undertook a thorough investigation of this “anomalous color-­sensitivity of photographic plates.” As he reported in the Berichte der deutschen chemischen Gesellschaft: It is well known that certain colors, like red, yellow, green, are very weak photographic agents or altogether inactive. This circumstance poses obstacles to the production not only of photographs after varicolored objects (oil paintings), but also of portraits, in which colorful clothes and even a yellowish complexion, blond hair, red cheeks yield an abnormal image. Bright parts often appear dark in the photograph when they are tinged with yellow, whereas dark parts tinged with blue may appear bright, and retouching the negative is the only way to mitigate this defect to some degree.107

The “anomalous” rendition of the colors in photographs was a problem in a wide range of scientific disciplines. The American art historian Bernard Berenson describes its fatal consequences for the reproduction of paintings: “Ordinary photography, by changing blue to white, and red and yellow to black, distorted and confused a portrait to such an extent that it was no longer recognizable.”108 Donnadieu knew these difficulties of reproduction from his own discipline. “The president of the Société mycologique de France recently proposed removing the red color of the caps of certain species of mushroom with Javel water in order to obtain a more balanced photograph of the object. Taking photographs of anatomical objects, which I have dissected in great numbers over a lifetime, I often had to resort to

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artificial expedients to restore a bit of balance between the very different shades of red of the viscera, and I did not always arrive at entirely satisfactory solutions.”109 If, then, the Turin Shroud had been lined since 1868 with a second fabric whose red color showed through the linen cloth, this effect cannot but have altered the photographic record. “This transparency utterly confounds the photogenic agency, and with regard to the cloth itself, the photographic plate pre­sents an absolutely false result.”110 No one, Donnadieu argues, knows the actual hue of the markings on the cloth. Vignon, who had never seen the original, specified it as “yellowish” on some occasions, “brownish” or “reddish-­brown” on others. But he never questioned his assumption that he was dealing with a monochrome image. “A monochrome likeness of reddish tint,” Donnadieu writes, “was discerned where there was perhaps nothing to see but the visual effect of a lining.”111 Perhaps the cloth the Étude scientifique discussed at such length was not even the cloth itself but a hybrid figment, a lineament and its robust ground at the same time. Even worse, Vignon’s point of reference was not the “red,” “yellow,” or “brown” the pilgrims before the high altar had seen with their own eyes in 1898 but the spectrum of colors Pia’s photographic plates had “seen.” The peculiarities of the photosensitivity of the plates, Donnadieu goes on to argue, also explain the photographic revelation to which Vignon and his followers had ascribed such great value—the emergence of a positive image in the photographic negative. To demonstrate what he means, he pre­sents a watercolor portrait (which he calls a “drawing”; plate 16)—we can hardly be in doubt concerning the identity of the middle-­aged man with a beard and long hair wearing a crown of thorns. Unlike the ghostly face on the Turin Shroud, the drawing shows a distinctive physiognomy: the crown of thorns and half-­open eyelids suggest a moment during the crucifixion rather than the subsequent burial of the dead man. An abstract pattern in shades of blue would have done just as well for an assay of the color-­sensitivity of photographic emulsions. Instead, Donnadieu uses a drawing that reestablishes the link between the object of study—the image in Turin—and traditional depictions of Christ in the history of art. Like Vignon before him, with his plaster head, he enriches his experiment with an iconographic surplus. The image on the shroud is linked to a drawing made by human hand, the very association Vignon worked so strenuously to avoid. The blue Christ appears to the unarmed eye as a positive image—a dark figure seen against a light yellow background. Then Donnadieu pre­sents a black-­and-­white photographic negative of the same picture (plate 17). Due to the differing intensity of the photochemical action of blue and yellow light, what emerges is again a positive image. Contrary to what we might reasonably expect, the darker blue of the positive drawing has not turned into a light image, and the light yellow of the background does not show as black. So instead of inverting the light-­dark relation, the negative, like the

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positive, pre­sents a dark drawing on a lighter ground. “Why should not the colored images on the cloth in Turin, due to their chemical agency, have produced the same effect? [. . .] Only the study of this chemical agency can resolve the issue.”112 Donnadieu’s introduction to the confusing aspects of the operation of the photographic plate continues with further demonstrations. The photochemical agency of red light is inferior to that of blue. A red object will darken silver salt more faintly and more slowly than a blue one. So replacing the blue drawing with a red one, still on a yellow ground, yields a different result in the negative. This time, the light-­dark contrast of the original is indeed inverted in the negative. Like a luminously white chalk drawing, the head of Christ hovers before the dark ground. In the course of his experimental investigation of the varying chromatic sensitivity of photographic plates, Vogel had discovered in 1873 that an admixture of certain pigments modified the sensitivity of the emulsions considerably. He had worked with a dry plate manufactured by Stuart Wortley in England that had been treated with the yellowish-­red colorant coralline to prevent the formation of annoying halations. Vogel’s spectroscopic examination revealed that the coralline dye had significantly increased the plate’s sensitivity to light in the green range of the spectrum. His observation of this effect was what led Eder to praise Vogel in his Geschichte der Photographie as “the preeminent photochemist of the post-­Daguerrean era and the author of the most significant advances in the technology of reproduction and scientific photography.”113 For the first time, targeted interventions allowed photographers to correct the long-­known distortions of brightness values. In 1882 Vogel started selling a plate treated with quinoline red and quinoline blue that improved sensitivity to green-­yellow and orange. In the late 1880s photographic plates came on the market that promised correct rendering of all brightness and darkness values; following Vogel’s proposal, they were labeled “orthochromatic plates.” During a lecture before the members of the Verein zur Pflege der Photographie und verwandter Künste in Frankfurt in September 1884, he had demonstrated the effect of orthochromatic plates with two reproductions of a colorful piece of embroidery. One picture had been taken on a conventional gelatin silver bromide plate, the other on an orthochromatic plate. The difference was striking. The distribution of bright and dark accents across the two pictures diverged so widely that they were not immediately recognizable as depictions of the same object; the ordinary gelatin silver bromide plate had swallowed up entire parts of the image. So an assessment of the pictures Pia had taken in 1898 seemed impossible without precise information about the composition of the plates he had used. Orthochromatism, “the great factor of order in photographic action,” was a primary guardian of the reliability of reproductions.114 To Donnadieu’s eyes, then, Pia’s photographs, which Vignon thought of as precious documents, were nothing but artifacts. Looking at the glass

Case Study II

negatives in his laboratory in Paris, Vignon had always also seen the cloth in far-­off Turin. Moreover, he presumed that the photographic reproduction of the relic revealed, for the first time, what the object itself actually showed. Without the indirection via their photochemical translation, the traces on the linen were indecipherable markings. And yet Vignon described his heuristic approach as a gapless chain of observations and experiments that “instinctively” led him from photography to vaporography. As Bruno Latour has shown, virtually no scientist would arrive at a finding without such a “cascade of images” that supplant and bolster one another.115 A science that resolved to do without the concatenation of such “mediators” in order to abide impassively in the presence of the “thing itself ” would be tautological. So a representation—such as Pia’s photographs—is never self-­sufficient. “There is no absolute point of reference for what becomes involved in the game of representation,” Hans-­Jörg Rheinberger writes. “The necessity of representation itself implies that any possibility of an immediate evidence is excluded.”116 Latour is right to point out that sciences that operate with images are especially dependent on their multiplication and concatenation. “If you wanted to abandon the image and turn your eyes instead to the prototype that they are supposed to figure out, you would see less, infinitely less. You would be blind for good.”117 Simply put, “the more instruments, the more mediation, the better the grasp of reality.”118 Still, for a series of transformations to garner the assent of fellow scientists, it must make each step seem plausible. “An essential property of this chain is that it must remain reversible. The succession of stages must be traceable, allowing for travel in both directions.”119 In our case, that means from Jerusalem via Turin to Paris—and back; from Christ’s recording of his own image via Pia’s photograph of this record to Vignon’s attempts to reconstruct its genesis with zinc and aloe—and back. “If the chain is interrupted at any point, it ceases to transport truth—ceases, that is, to produce, to construct, to trace, and to conduct it.”120 As Donnadieu saw it, the experimental series had been interrupted at the very start. Its “conductivity” for truth had been vitiated the moment Pia took his photographs on the night of May 28, 1898. The subsequent links in the chain inevitably reproduced and exacerbated the initial misprision. Wherever Donnadieu turned in his study of the photographic images, he encountered nothing but effects of photography itself. He uncovered a panorama of all the media and agents that Vignon, guided by his heuristic of the “proper path,” had failed to consider: the consequences of an exposure lasting nearly twenty minutes in the blazing light of the arc lamps; the functionality of photographic plates, which operated according to their own laws; and finally, the inevitable personal style of the engraver, who necessarily manipulated the artifact yet again to prepare it for reproduction. What was supposedly a self-­depiction of Christ shrank into a self-­referential act of media representation: the image Pia had produced, Donnadieu argued,

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was nothing but the “optical effect of a lining,” an “accident of lighting,” and its interpretation “a mere question of the sensitivity to rays.”121 Still, he did not believe that Pia had deliberately committed forgery. That would have required certain intentions on his part. Rather, the falseness of Pia’s pictures had, as it were, befallen him; it had contaminated his work without his even noticing it. We recognize the constellation that, a few years earlier, had led Adrien Guébhard to refrain from accusing the two effluviographistes of fraud. Pia, and Vignon after him, were ultimately just unsuspecting amateurs, guileless falsifiers who had confused the chemical activities of photographic plates for a distant reflection of the glory of the Passion, a flash of the history of salvation. 4.7 Comparing camera and eye

Astonishingly, Donnadieu’s critique of these “false” images did not lead him to take a skeptical view of the scientific value of photography more generally; on the contrary. In 1897 he wrote, “Since the memorable day when Arago presented the fine and extraordinarily successful research of Daguerre and Niépce to the gathered members of the Académie des sciences, photography has progressed steadily and in great strides along the path of perfection.”122 A little later, he expressed his view that “lack of evidence is a reproach we have occasion to level every day, and it would become unwarranted if photography were given a permanent place among the tools of the research laboratory.”123 In 1884 Donnadieu had presented his physiograph to his fellow experts: microscopic specimens had long been dissected in an aqueous solution, and his invention now made it possible to photograph them in the same medium. By contrast, Donnadieu noted, the examination of “dry” specimens was hampered by the illegibility of the objects. “‘There is nothing to discern’: these words come to the scientist’s mind the moment he examines a specimen prepared in the dry.”124 The physiographic technique let the parts of the specimen, which formed a “confused mass” after drying, float in the water, revealing their layered structure more fully, and allowed the microscopist to instantaneously capture them in a photograph. In this connection, Donnadieu also brings a motif to bear that is as old as photography itself: the superior accuracy of the photographic record in comparison to manual graphic depiction. In a well-­known passage, Talbot had already contrasted the work of The Pencil of Nature with the draftsman’s instrument: “The hand is liable to err from the true outline, and a very small deviation causes a notable diminution in the resemblance.”125 Half a century later, this critique of the losses in transmission with drawing or painting was still a staple of the scientific literature. In France, it surfaces in publications as varied as Albert Londe’s introduction to the practice of modern photography, a treatise by the naturalist Eugène Trutat, and Alphonse Bertillon’s plans for the photographic identification of criminals.126 Like these

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authors, Donnadieu notes that the photographic record constitutes actual proof ( preuve), whereas the pencil draws “according to the author’s imagination.” Neither the graphic notation of the microscopic view nor the researcher’s insistence that he had seen a phenomenon with his own eyes were adequate substitutes for the photographic image. “Most studies presented to the scientific community for assessment are based on so-­called personal observations that are not subject to any review, and the moment an author says: ‘I saw it,’ his findings are accepted.”127 Only the photographic image, Donnadieu writes, reiterating an argument Robert Koch had made two decades earlier, allows other scientists to review what was seen under the microscope.128 So Donnadieu’s critique of Pia’s pictures was not at all aimed against photography; what he took issue with were Pia’s and Vignon’s misreadings of its products. As Donnadieu saw it, on the night of May 28, 1898, the photographic plate had yielded an exact record of what Pia held up before it in the deserted cathedral: the “optical effect of a lining,” an “accident of lighting,” an excessively long exposure. But then it is impossible to ignore that Donnadieu has become caught up in the tangles of his own terminology of “exact” and “false” images. He initially calls Pia’s photographs “false”: “with regard to the cloth itself, the photographic plate produces an absolutely false result”; the photographic image is “not exact”; it does “not express the truth.” But what exactly is the measure of this truth-­content of a picture? Is a picture faithful to the truth if it renders what an imperturbable eyewitness of the moment it was taken would have seen? Or is it truthful if, on the contrary, it reveals what no unarmed eye on the scene could have discovered? Pia’s pictures are false—and yet Donnadieu does not regard Pia as a counterfeiter. They are false—and yet supposedly the exact rendition of the translucent fabric and its lining. Donnadieu manifestly tries to resolve the ambivalence implicit in this line of reasoning by distinguishing between the photographic record and its subsequent inspection, between the technical generation of the images and the domain of intentions, interpretations, and attributions. Untruth, then, comes into being not in the recording process but only in the confusion of the ensuing interpretation: the medium is blameless. The pictures in question pre­sent a flawless record of optical effects for whose presence photography cannot be reproached. They become false only when someone misconstrues them—stripped of such misreadings, they are “true,” one way or another. Donnadieu’s treatise is confusing in this respect because his line of argument repeatedly switches between the two sides of the distinction. Depending on which of the two perspectives he adopts at a given moment, the photographs appear now as exact reproductions, now as “false results.” But we would be mistaken to suspect a pluralistic or relativistic attitude behind these shifts of perspective. Contrasting the photographic record with direct visual inspection, Donnadieu leaves no doubt which of the two

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is to be the standard of truth. Instead of concluding that eye and apparatus had simply registered different things and letting the matter rest there, he posits a clear hierarchy: “The human eye may have been deceived, but the photographic plate was not deceived in this instant.” “The sensitivity of the gelatin silver bromide will be the strictest and most competent judge of this matter. The eye is subject to idiosyncrasies that are alien to the photographic plate.”129 This brings the contention over the photographs of the shroud back to the rhetorical territory on which the nineteenth-­century discourse of photography plays out: objectivity versus subjectivity, consistency of results versus instability of visual impressions, incorruptibility of the equipment versus liability of the senses to be deceived. This difference between recording and visual inspection, Donnadieu believed, was at work not only in the contemplation of the photographs; it infected the very sight of the questionable linen cloth itself. If Vignon— who, it bears repeating, had never actually seen the Turin Shroud—had erred, those who had examined it with their own eyes had been no less deceived as to its true nature. “A monochrome image of reddish tint was seen where there was perhaps nothing to see but the optical effect of a lining.”130 So was what was seen in fact not what was seen? Had it only seemed like there was a monochrome image there to see? And should the “optical effect of a lining” have been there to see if its appearance had not been erroneously overlooked? According to Donnadieu’s logic, only the photochemical recording was able to correct—even denounce—this misperformance of the naked eye. What was seen was erroneously seen; the photographic recording, by contrast, functioned correctly. Yet reading closely, we find that Donnadieu ultimately cannot sustain this dichotomy either. In his discussion of the effect of the red lining, he phrases his arguments in ways that waver between the abovementioned poles, blurring the rigid boundary he had drawn earlier: “Human eyes were subsequently incapable of making out this red amid the other hues [. . .] but the photographic plate would not have been deceived in this instance if the cloth had been presented for its review under better conditions.”131 Whence the sudden switch to the conditional? So the photographic plate was “deceived” in this particular instance after all? And could such deception have been avoided if only a better sample “had been presented” to it? The same irritation recurs in another passage: “The red of the back lining has no doubt confounded the values of the other hues. These hues were not rendered as they would have been if they had been photographed in isolation; they were rendered incorrectly.” More literally translated, the final phrase— elles se sont traduites à faux—means “they have translated themselves into falsehood.”132 Putting it this way, falsehood does not come into play after the fact, by dint of an erroneous interpretation, but already contaminates the recording itself. The defect inhabited the recording process as such: the photographic translation was false.

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A final detail of Donnadieu’s argument likewise indicates that a critique of the photographic record was not as simple a matter as suggested by the initially compelling contrast of visual inspection versus apparatus, susceptibility to deception versus incorruptibility, subjectivity versus objectivity. Donnadieu’s comparison between eye and apparatus ultimately leads him to adopt the popular and ambivalent metaphor of artificial “vision,” which I will examine at length in chapters 5 and 6. The photographic plate, he writes, “sees”—even though it manifestly has neither eyes nor an optic nerve: “I should emphasize again that, in dealing with photography, we must be wary of the shades of red. Where the eye barely perceives them and believes it has no reason for concern, the sensitive plate sees them with admirable acuity, and its photochemical sensorium often responds in ways for which we have no explanation.”133 What may read here like the casual use of a conventional locution encapsulates a problem to which Donnadieu had in fact devoted an entire study, L’œil et l’objectif: Étude comparée de la vision naturelle et de la vision artificielle, in which he strenuously objected to the attempt to construct direct analogies between the natural sense of vision and the artificial vision mediated by the photographic apparatus. Donnadieu is primarily interested in the structure and function of the eye and the camera lens, but he also offers a few observations regarding the relation between the retina and the photographic plate. The retina, he writes, is in the final analysis not an organ of vision but a diaphanous screen that merely allows the image to pass through for further processing in the nervous system. “The sensitized plate, by contrast, is the actual receptor that not only sees the image, but also preserves it in an indefinite fashion.”134 The eye, moreover, focuses its perception on a single point at any given time, leaving the rest of the image indistinct. The plate, by contrast, is just as sensitive along the periphery as it is at the center, yielding a uniform image. So Donnadieu’s “comparative study of natural and artificial vision” effectively unearths nothing but radical dissimilarity. Scrutiny of the physical and physiological laws of the operation of eye and lens, retina and photographic plate, reveals that they had virtually nothing in common. Yet astonishingly, Donnadieu—like others—does not let his findings deter him from keeping the metaphor of “artificial vision” alive. How is it possible that a study whose objective was precisely to characterize the incongruence of the sense of sight and the camera mentions “artificial vision” in its very title? And why does the discussion that follows nonetheless describe the sensitized plate as a “receptor that [. . .] sees the image”? The interpretation of the photographic recording as a form of “vision”—and of the recorded trace as something “seen”—manifestly bridges an epistemic dilemma that plagued any attempt to “make the invisible visible” by technical means: the instruments operated according to their own laws, and there was no point at which eye and apparatus converged, at which the scientist’s meaning and that of his instrument might coincide. The makeshift heuristic of

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the artificial eye appears to offer an answer to this inevitable discrepancy: confronted with the vaguely humiliating realization that their instruments do something “utterly different” from what they themselves do, scientists initially resort to a metaphor that translates this alien operation into the horizon of their own experience. In our case, nothing illustrates the ambivalence of this translation better than Donnadieu’s remark that the plate “sees” the shades of red “with admirable acuity.” Such admiration for the plate’s color sense would seem odd given that—this is around 1900—he can only mean black-­and-­white photography. The photographic plate translates what our senses readily perceive as red, green, or blue into a scale of varying intensities of darkening. Not only does the plate not “see”; what it re­cords is also not “red.”135 Vision and recording drift apart, and Donnadieu’s metaphor of the seeing silver layer occupies this discrepancy. It aims to establish a unified space of representation in which natural and artificial agents see basically the same thing and in the same way—only the photographic plate then captures more of it and with greater exactitude. In this utopian space, natural and artificial vision remain fundamentally compatible. The “wholly other” of natural vision is not so utterly different after all. The arrival of photography does not mark a watershed moment in the field of perception but simply brings about its technical extension and expansion: a vision by other means, the function of a prosthesis that steps in where the eye’s own vision grows dim. But this account covers only one aspect of Donnadieu’s experimental practice. It is the narrative of a scientist who tries to give meaning to the markings his instruments produce, and it shows that in doing so he needs to take the fact into consideration that they operate according to their own rules. Donnadieu’s ambivalent interpretation of the photographic plate, whose function is “utterly different” and more reliable than the eye’s and yet supposedly still a kind of “vision,” circles around this problem. Yet the distinctive function of the photographic equipment is not only—and in the end not even primarily—a circumstance that poses problems for the researcher, defeating his premises or interfering with his actions. Donnadieu also ceaselessly invokes and exploits this same surplus value of photography, the difference it engenders. It is what makes the use of instruments fertile in the first place. “In order to be productive,” Rheinberger argues, “an experimental arrangement must be sufficiently open to shape its signals and to become infiltrated by techniques, instruments, model compounds and so on.”136 If the plate rendered nothing but what the researcher could just as well have seen, its experimental use would be redundant; photography in the laboratory would be a tautological enterprise. The fact that the plate does not see is constitutive of its surplus value. The inevitable divergence of natural and artificial vision, then, is not a deficit but the positive precondition on which experimentation is based. Donnadieu’s own work ultimately proves this point. In contradistinction to his unsteady rhetoric, his experi-

Case Study II

ments are nothing if not a series of attempts to bring the difference between vision and recording, between eye and apparatus, to light. The images he produces (plates 16 and 17) are designed to reveal precisely this divergence: where the reader’s eye recognizes a blue head of Christ on a yellow ground, the photographic plate registers a distribution of light from different parts of the spectrum with varying photochemical agency. It sees neither paper nor drawing and perceives no crown of thorns, no yellow or blue. Donnadieu’s demonstration that the plate “sees” differently actually shows that its chemical-­physical activity is not a kind of vision at all and that this difference is what animates the critique of the photographs of the Turin Shroud. 4.8 The plate cannot show nothing (II)

So the comparative reading of Vignon’s Étude scientifique and Donnadieu’s Le Saint Suaire devant la science finally reveals a surprising scenario. At first blush, the two authors’ standpoints on the question of what to make of Pia’s photographs are diametrically opposed: Vignon believes they are icons of science, whereas Donnadieu sees nothing in them beyond the manifestation of photographic defects. Beyond this dispute over the interpretation of the pictures, however, the two are in remarkable agreement concerning the epistemic status of photography. Vignon regards it as the “unwavering servant of modern positivism”;137 Donnadieu argues that the arrival of photography in the research laboratory marks the advent of the first true means of evidence in biology. And the consensus between the two scholars extends well beyond such commonplaces; in particular, they concur on the special significance of photography for the decryption of the Turin Shroud. Both take for granted that Pia’s photographs of the cloth allow the viewer to see more, and something else, than the cloth itself. Both devote their studies to the description and investigation of this difference. Both assume that the photographic plate has registered what no eye was able to see—a hidden portrait of the Savior or the hitherto unnoticed discernibility of the crimson-­red lining through the translucent fabric, a negative of the body of Christ or an orthochromatic inversion effect. Needless to say, the antagonism between these interpretations is not negligible—when it comes to the authenticity of the relic and the cogency of its photographic reproduction, it matters much more than the points of agreement between Vignon and his adversary Donnadieu. In our perspective, however, it is far more interesting to note that the opposition of fact and artifact, of true and false images, that is obviously at the heart of the controversy proves considerably less stable and unequivocal than it may seem at first glance. Donnadieu had joined the debate with the intention of demonstrating the faultiness of Pia’s pictures. Yet his argument in no way discredits them. On the contrary, Donnadieu discusses them as evidence of the incorruptibility of the photographic plate, which, he writes, was on the scene in Turin to redress the misperfor-

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mance of the eye. Whatever “falsehoods” were in circulation had been put out by Pia’s and Vignon’s erroneous interpretations. In a peculiar inversion, the one study that undertakes a critique of the photographic record ends up underscoring its inerrancy. Donnadieu’s work illustrates how photography weathers even the demonstration that it is liable to error arising from multiple sources—­because this demonstration relies on photographic evidence. There is no neutral position outside this experimental circle from which one might observe the function of the photographic operation. Donnadieu’s experiments exemplify the general tendency noted by Bachelard that I pointed out earlier in regard to Vignon’s work in the laboratory: the phenomena were “shaped by instruments” or produced outright by these instruments in the first place. Even Donnadieu’s insistence that instead of poring over photographic reproductions, scholars should examine the shroud itself—“an immediate spectrum photograph must be obtained of every single part of the cloth”—did not chart a way out of this circle.138 Scrutiny of the original linen cloth using spectrum analysis would yet again have implied the interposition of instruments. The contention over the authenticity of the Turin Shroud was also a controversy over the truth of photography, which had produced the first records of the cloth in 1898. What was an “image” or record, and what was a visual accident? How did one bring about a photographic “revelation,” and what caused “optical effects”? These questions were very much at issue in the debate Pia’s photographs occasioned. The distribution of these labels was neither unequivocal nor invariable. Michel Serres has noted “the capricious ups and downs of the divisions between message and noise”: “to one side or the other I hear a noise or the beginnings of a message.”139 The history of the photographic reproduction of the relic in Turin was also a series of such commutations and transformations. In Vignon’s Étude scientifique, the emanations of zinc had given rise to a vaporographic likeness of Christ. This transmutation started with the physicist Colson and his quest to identify the causes of “harmful hazes” and “accidental impressions.” His findings led him to advise the manufacturers of photographic plates in the Bulletin de la Société française de photographie not to ship their products in zinc containers because the metal’s emissions damaged the photosensitive layer. A few years later, the same emissions were not only not an interference to be prevented, they were deliberately produced in order to yield an image. When Vignon and Colson let undirected vapors paint the outlines of a human face, the mimetic effect served a distinct purpose. The choice of motif added an iconographic surplus to their experiments. Any other sample relief coated with zinc would have served just as well to demonstrate this action at a distance. The use of the plaster model marks the moment at which the diffuse vapors, hitherto considered disruptive, are given form and direction in order to generate a likeness. “The production of clearly modeled images by vapors, then, may from now on be regarded as confirmed fact,” La nature

Case Study II

summarizes Vignon’s research in April 1902.140 The report Yves Delage, Vignon’s teacher at the Sorbonne, presented to his colleagues at the Académie des sciences that same month similarly underscores this innovation: “It is virtually indisputable and evidence of the scientific nature of this study that the case of the linen cloth in question has occasioned the discovery of two new imaging techniques, of which one had been largely untried and the other entirely unknown.”141 By the first, Delage meant the imaging effect of zinc on gelatin silver bromide; by the second, the effect of ammonia on aloe. Regardless of whether Vignon’s conclusions seemed persuasive or not, his experiments seemed to have borne fruit in the form of a previously unknown technique of representation. In his paper in the Revue scientifique, Delage deplored the skepticism with which his report to the Académie des sciences had been met, arguing that it was motivated by nothing but the semblance of religious concern clinging to the debate. “If [Vignon’s hypotheses] have not been received by some with the recognition they merit, that is solely due to the fact that this scientific problem has been falsely wrapped in a religious issue that has inflamed passions and clouded people’s clear judgment. If it had been Sargon, Achilles, or a pharaoh rather than Christ, no one would have found reason to take exception.”142 Periodicals with a natural-­science focus did take a cautious view of the experiments concerning the shroud conducted in Paris. In England, Nature informed its readers about “M. Vignon’s Researches and the ‘Holy Shroud’” in a report whose very title was explicit about the religious aspect of the debate; meanwhile, the Revue générale des sciences pures et appliquées and the abovementioned proceedings of the Académie des sciences contained accounts of the events that were so abridged as to be incomprehensible143—they did not even mention the relic in Turin, the shared ultimate object of all the various experiments. In the businesslike language of the Comptes rendus, Vignon’s work on the chemical reconstruction of a portrait of Christ shrivels down to a piece on the chemical agency of zinc and ammonia vapors, and some readers may have wondered why a biologist would bring linen cloths impregnated with aloe into such research. Yet even this note, which effaces any trace of Christian iconography, refers to Vignon’s experiments as concerning an imaging technique: “Chemistry.—On the formation of negative images by the agency of certain vapors.” So if Vignon and Colson’s work transformed photographic artifacts into truthful representations, Donnadieu’s alternative model undid their accomplishment. The emergence of the image of Christ in the developing bath Pia had admired was now revealed to be an instance of photographic inversion, a perfectly ordinary phenomenon that had prompted many baffled photographers to submit their pictures to experts for review. “In the correspondence sent to specialist journals, we even now fairly often come across letters from subscribers who were quite surprised to obtain a positive where they had expected an ordinary negative and now ask for an explanation.”144

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This put Pia’s photographs and their evaluation by Vignon and Colson back on the scene of the negotiation over the accidents of photographic imaging—a scene where accident and picture resembled each other so closely that they were easily confused and routinely exchanged roles. Conclusion

As we have seen, very similar structures underlay the controversy over the earliest photograph of the Turin Shroud and the contemporaneous debate over Jules Luys’s effluviography. Both case studies reveal protagonists who had reason to accuse one another of having taken banal artifacts to be discoveries and discoveries to be banal artifacts. Everyone involved in the debates believed himself to be on the side of unprejudiced scientific inquiry, but considered from outside, the system of labels they applied do not fit into any clear hierarchy—say, of “scientific” versus “unscientific” applications, of “experimentation” versus “occultism,” or of “true” versus “counterfeit” results. What emerges instead is an order of knowledge in which one and the same phenomenon may be read, depending on the observer’s vantage point, now as photographic accident and artifact, now as revelation and discovery. René Colson, who made appearances in both case studies, though in different roles, embodies the “veritable confusion” he himself identified as the hallmark of photographic visualization—a “confusion” that should be understood as constitutive indecision rather than a defect.145 Without the productive potential of this confusion, the experiments would have been redundant, mere exercises in the production of known and expectable phenomena. The errant sensitivity of the photographic plate, which brought all sorts of things to light but never showed nothing, was not a flaw; it was the positive condition that made the photographic recording system possible. It was not by chance that Colson addressed the equivocal nature of photography in a treatise whose very title, La plaque photographique: Propriétés, le visible, l’invisible, draws a categorical distinction between “visible” and “invisible.” The confusion, Colson argued, primarily sprang from the fact that the plate made inroads into domains that lay outside the spectrum perceptible to the human eye. The question of photographic visualization was thus always intimately bound up with the operation and limitations of the human eye. The question of what exactly had appeared on the photographic plate could not be answered as such, but only in the horizon of different visi­ bilities. This dependency has been evident in both case studies. In each instance, the contention was that photography was instrumental to the visualization or even the discovery of phenomena that were inaccessible, or only very inadequately accessible, to human perception. Donnadieu, in particular, found that his reflections on the difference between camera and eye led him deep into an epistemological labyrinth: on the one hand, the operation

Case Study II

and output of the photographic plate were supposed to be utterly different from and more reliable than the perception of the eye. On the other hand, for photographs to be intelligible, they needed to be capable of being translated back into the modalities of that perception, which is to say, into the realm of the scientist’s ordinary experience. It was welcome, even imperative, that they were dissimilar—but not so dissimilar as to become visually unrecognizable and incomprehensible. The metaphor of the camera as an “artificial eye” captures this dilemma quite accurately: the camera is supposed to be “like an eye,” and yet, as is incessantly noted, it is entirely unlike the eye and operates in accordance with its own incontrovertible laws. The two controversies I have retraced are hardly isolated incidents in this regard. They are part of an extensive late-­nineteenth-­century practice that aspired to render the “invisible” “visible” by means of photography without compromising its integrity, creating a dilemma that I will examine in the next chapter.

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Critique of a Dichotomy

5.1 “Photography of the invisible”

The idea of a “photography of the invisible” obviously makes sense only when it is contrasted with a traditional, conventional, perhaps even outdated “photography of the visible.” This familiar variant of photography renders what its beholder has already seen without the intervention of photographic representation, or could have seen had he been on the scene when the picture was taken: a landscape, an event, the face of a stranger. True, photography shows these objects from a specific perspective, accentuating some parts and omitting others, replacing the colors of objects with an artificial black and white, and so on, such that even a picture of this kind reveals something different and new in things, rather than merely reproducing them. Still, it cannot be argued that photography has transplanted the object or phenomenon in question into the realm of visibility in the first place. “Photograph of the invisible,” by contrast, would ideally allow its motif to become visually manifest for the first time ever, and perhaps even constitute proof of its existence: the physical behavior of a falling droplet of water or a projectile in flight, the structure of a microbe or the shape of a distant galaxy. This was what Ottomar Volkmer, director of the Imperial and Royal Printing Office in Vienna and president of the city’s Photographic Society, had in mind when, in 1894, he spoke of the “photographic record of the ­invisible”: Nature and human life are frequently the scenes of processes that, for a wide variety of reasons related to optics, are not visible, and so man is not clearly aware of them [. . .] The progress of the natural sciences, and more specifically, the progress that has been made in the fields of photographic technology and electricity in the past decade, is so marvelous that even today it allows us to fix a number of invisible facts in nature in photographic images.1

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Volkmer’s brief tract focuses on the applications of photography in physics: its main concern is with ballistic photography, an experimental discipline born around the mid-­nineteenth century in which researchers studied the physical behavior of projectiles in flight. The elusiveness of the phenomena, which were bathed in the glaring light of an electric spark for the purposes of photography, echoes in Volkmer’s assertion that photography had made it possible to “fix” the invisible in the picture: the photograph captured a volatile phenomenon, froze it, and made it permanently available for the physicist’s contemplation. The “invisible fact” had turned into a visible image. A few years later, Colson returned to the distinction between visible and invisible in a treatise I have already mentioned, La plaque photographique: Propriétés, le visible, l’invisible, which programmatically introduces the heuristic dichotomy in its very title. He, too, singles out as distinctive the power of photography to “discover” phenomena, rather than merely depicting what has already been visible to the eye. Colson portrays the science of his time as an expedition into the invisible guided by the photographic plate as a sort of detector or compass: “Many researchers have begun to penetrate into the realm of the invisible, where the sensitive plate is destined to make great discoveries.”2 Like Volkmer, Colson is primarily thinking of applications in physics—spectrography, electrography, radiography—but the chapter on “photographie de l’invisible” also mentions astronomical photography, “which reveals to our eye the existence of celestial bodies that it cannot see even with the most powerful instruments,” hinting at another expansion of the intended purview of photography.3 Volkmer’s examples emphasize the photographic fixing of an evolving event in time. Although astrophotography was based on long exposures, during which the photographic plate accumulated the light of distant stars, it moreover involved the bridging of a spatial distance. In ballistic photography, “invisibility” was a matter of the imperceptibility of rapidly moving objects; in astronomical photography, of objects that were enormously far away. Yet the idea of a photography of the invisible was by no means limited to the visual universe of physics. In the 1880s Étienne-­Jules Marey had pioneered the development of chronophotographic techniques in connection with his studies in physiology. Marey saw this work as an extension of the “graphical method,” which—not unlike photography—was regarded as a process in which nature produced its own recording, a “natural graphics,” “the very own language of the phenomena.”4 In the introduction to his famous study La méthode graphique, published in 1878, Marey outlines the program of this notation system in emphatic terms. Contemporary science, he argues, is about recording phenomena that defy the scientist’s traditional resources. “In this new endeavor, we must do without the guidance of our senses, but the graphical method makes up for their inadequacy, discovering a new world amid this chaos.”5 When Marey traded his physiological auto-­graphs for photographic recording instruments in the early 1880s, his goal remained the same: to compensate for the deficiencies of the senses.6

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Around 1900, the division of the photographic object domain into a visible and an invisible part congealed into a systematic classification meant to draw a fundamental distinction between two orders of representation. For example, in 1893 the zoologist and physician R. Koehler writes in a survey of the applications of photography in the natural sciences: The benefits photography promises to the natural sciences fall into two different categories, depending on whether it is employed as a simple technique of rapid and reliable reproduction or harnessed as an actual practice of scientific research and analysis. This distinction reflects the historical development of the applications of photography, which was long regarded as nothing more than a humble tool for the visual representation of the objects of natural history. Yet it has only been a few years since we have begun to supplant the tremendous sensitivity of the gelatin silver bromide plate for our inadequate senses and to study certain biological phenomena whose particular qualities render them unamenable to any other form of investigation.7

This schema fit neatly into the narrative of the progress of a technology that, having surveyed the visible world, would now proceed to illuminate the wide field of the invisible as well. In his tome La photographie moderne, Albert Londe sums up this utopian vision of total transparency in a succinct formula: “From the infinitely small to the infinitely large, from the object we can touch to the object that is forever outside our reach, from what we see to what we do not see, nothing escapes the lens.”8 A century later, similar ideas informed one of the first exhibitions of scientific photography, presented by Jon Darius, curator at the Science Museum in London. In fact, the functional dichotomy of photography—­ reproduction of the visible versus revelation of the invisible—seems to have become even more inevitable in retrospect: in selecting his exhibits, Darius decided to consider only pictures whose objects originated in realms that lay “beyond vision”: “Beyond Vision is more than a catchy title: it nicely defines what is meant by a ‘scientific’ photograph for our purposes, namely one which provides information inaccessible to the human eye. On all scales from the submicroscopic to the cosmic, photography has the ability to expand our limited vision, revealing invisible radiations, fleeting events, vanishingly faint images, remote realms of space and oceans which the naked eye cannot capture.”9 Even more resolutely than the nineteenth-­century writers I have quoted, Darius is convinced that the visualization of invisible phenomena is what determines the scientific quality of a photograph. “Pictures of butterflies,” shots of geological rock formations, and dermatologists’ “records of skin diseases” do not pass scientific muster: “In such photographs the camera does not afford us an understanding that the eye alone could not attain.”10 Darius accordingly fixes a fairly late date—July 27, 1842—for the inception of the history of scientific photography: on that day,

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John William Draper made the “first foray into the invisible” by taking a daguerreotype of the solar spectrum.11 Darius not only casts the photography of the visible aside as redundant; he also excludes the long series of spiritistic and occultist revelations whose advocates were no less persuaded that their work contributed to the “photography of the invisible world.” The discovery of X-­rays in 1895, in particular, gave rise to an occultist discourse of a new “iconography of the invisible.” So it is hard to see why the products of this revelatory art should be summarily struck from the history of scientific photography. Only a year before Darius presented his history of photographic discoveries, a historical outline of the spiritistic variant of the visualization of the invisible had been published in nearby Cambridge. Its title bears an eerie resemblance to that of the show at the Science Museum: Beyond the Spectrum.12 The coincidence reflects the rhetorical proximity between the various scenes of a photography of the invisible a century earlier. If Ottomar Volkmer, René Colson, and Gaston-­Henri Niewenglowski used some version of this formula in the titles of their publications, so did Hippolyte Baraduc and his fellow champions of a phototechnical iconography of the soul (figs. 32 and 33). The realm of the invisible is vast, and the demarcation line between science and nonscience, fact and artifact, was often blurry at best. The most recent scholarship on the period has largely drawn the correct conclusion: the occultist and spiritistic efforts to capture the invisible must be considered in the context of the physical research of its time.13 “Spiritism and the modern natural sciences shared the epistemological objective of materializing what was invisible.”14 So much for the historical setting; but my sketch has so far barely touched on the aesthetic and epistemic import of the “photography of the invisible” in a history of images. Is there such a thing as a purely reproductive photography that may be regarded as its mere precursor or counterpart? What makes this dichotomy necessary in the first place? Is it still meaningful, or should we file it away as a traditional trope in the self-­description of a scientific discipline? And most importantly, what exactly does it mean to say that something “invisible” has become “visible” in the photographic image? What happens in the several stages between initial invisibility and eventual visibility? Where did what became visible reside before its successful visualization? When more recent studies examine the “visualization of the invisible,” they generally adopt, perpetuate, and consolidate a nineteenth-­century terminology that even the historic protagonists themselves used to outline a set of open questions rather than to explicate their visual ­practice.15 5.2 Generating visibility, abstractness, “adumbration”

Let us return for a moment to the pictures in Darius’s exhibition Beyond Vision (1984) and the captions that accompany them, which exemplify the ways in which the formula “visualization of the invisible” requires expla-

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nation. Exhibit no. 15 is an X-­ray photograph; the legend calls this perfectly visible picture a “photograph of the invisible.” Other pictures show “the unseen sun,” an “unrecognized neutron,” and a clearly visible “invisible rainbow.” What these pictures depict is manifestly not invisible. So what has happened to the phenomena “beyond the spectrum”? Can we still see their invisibility? Or was it completely effaced at the moment the photograph recorded them? And if so, what might it mean to say that the pictures let us see the invisible? Merely perusing the pictures and accompanying notes, we can have no doubt that the division of the universe of photographic depiction into visible and invisible parts is questionable or at least requires explanation. Darius rightly underscores that “a ‘scientific’ photograph [. . .] provides information inaccessible to the human eye.” The photographic plate is photochemically sensitive to parts of the light spectrum the unarmed eye cannot detect, not to mention, for instance, the emissions of radioactive substances. So we may say, with Volkmer, that photographic techniques have made it possible to “fix” invisible phenomena “in photographic images.” And Colson has good reason to speak of the possibility of photographic “discoveries.” The photograph no doubt yields an optical surplus, information that was unattainable without it. But how exactly are we to envision the genesis of this surplus? Is it an act of transformation in which an invisible thing gradually— or suddenly—metamorphoses into its visible counterpart? In other words, was its visibility in some way implicit and inherent in its invisibility—in an optical latency from which the photographic exposure was then apt to release it? To think so is to assume that what appears in the finished picture is the same object that was invisible only a moment ago. Peter Fuchs has argued that “words like unobservability and unobservable”—and, I would add, invisibility—“are the redoubt of the ontological relation to the world. Contrary to what widely held belief may suggest, they camouflage the idea of being that resides in them. After all, their point is manifestly not that nothingness cannot be observed, but that something (whatever it may be) eludes observation, and so thoroughly that it is unamenable to any kind of observation”16—except, that is, photographic “observation.” The something that was invisible before has supposedly become visible by virtue of its photographic recording. “Visible” and “invisible,” in this model, are two states of the same object. The phenomena in question are visible at some moments and invisible at others, but regardless of which state they are in when we encounter them, they are always the same phenomena. The realm of the “invisible” is subject to the same laws that govern the familiar visible world, the only difference being that the phenomena it comprises are not—not yet—visible.17 Long before the radiographic picture of Röntgen’s hand was taken, this view has it, it existed as a shadowy image—it was merely invisible: a phenomenon “beyond vision,” a thing sheathed in invisibility. But the process of visualization is not a translation into visibility, not a transfer that leaves the integrity of the object being

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transferred unaffected. Visualization means making something visible that was previously not present at all in this form. The “photography of the invisible” is not the awakening of an image that was already present in some way, latent and waiting do be discovered. On the contrary, its objective is to generate visibility, to generate an image where there was no image or another image. I deliberately avoid the term “construction,” which is rather worn from inflationary use. A critic who writes that a phenomenon that is passed off as “natural” or “real” is in fact “merely a (social or technological) construction” often means to uncover errors or false premises or to expose ideological interests. But the “constructed” nature of an artifact is not prima facie a flaw or deficit. In the case before us, it is the positive condition that enables us to see anything at all. That is why there is no contradiction between the “artificiality” of an image, the fact that it is “made,” and its positive function as an agent of knowledge. I will return to this point. The final product of this process of visualization is highly unstable, an image that is not recognizably the likeness of anything. There was, in any case, never an unequivocally identifiable “original” to which one might compare the depiction to assess its truthfulness. How is one to determine its accuracy with any certainty when the phenomenon it is thought to represent was not manifest outside the photographic plate? The surplus value of the recording, after all, is supposed to consist in its presenting something to the eye that did not manifest itself beyond the confines of photography. “Sometimes a photograph [was] the only enduring trace of a phenomenon, and all subsequent analysis of the data collected [would] have to be done on the basis of that photograph alone.”18 So the “photography of the invisible” unexpectedly transports its practitioner into the world of technical artifacts. “The possibility of artifacts is an almost inevitable accompaniment of research which relies upon specialized techniques and machinery for making initially ‘invisible’ theoretic entities visible in documentary formats.”19 Whether the pictures reveal “invisible facts in nature,” as Volkmer wrote, cannot be determined until the question has been resolved: what is to be considered as a natural fact and what as an artifact of the transfer? Colson’s writing expresses this oscillation between fact and artifact quite clearly. A few lines after acknowledging the “discoveries” photography had made in the vast “realm of the invisible,” he notes the confusion into which the sensitivity of the photographic plate routinely throws its users: “ Due to its extreme sensitivity, this wonderful instrument [. . .] is surrounded by numerous influences that create a veritable confusion; in ordinary photography, they cause failures, accidental hazes, and stains, and determining their cause is vital if we hope to remedy the problem. In the field of scientific research, such as in the photographic recording of invisible objects or objects hidden behind solid bodies, they may easily deceive the researcher as to the true cause of the phenomenon he ­observes.20

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As we observed in chapter 2, once pictures are made, their “true cause” still remains to be identified. Researchers generate effects without knowing exactly what has manifested itself in them. In this respect, the products of visualization are initially highly abstract creations. Their information content, far from being self-­evident, must be tethered to points of reference. For example, as Volkmer recounts, when Ernst Mach held the first samples of his spark-­photographic process in his hands, he and his associate Peter Salcher could not even tell which side of the pictures was up and which was down. “In addition to a world out there, which the experiment was designed to bring to light,” the experimental arrangement had imprinted its own likeness on the image.21 Similarly, astronomical photography, which Colson praised as a translator of the invisible, reveals a world in which it has been “sometimes virtually impossible to say where the real ended and the unreal began.”22 The formula “photography of the invisible” circumscribed a unique space of knowledge. It was regarded as the infallible inscription of real phenomena, but it did not indicate which phenomena were in play in each instance. It is debatable, then, whether the mere fact of its technical feasibility should be regarded as “scientific evidence,” as Michel Frizot believes.23 The pictures may figure as evidentiary material or indispensable illustration in a demonstration, but their existence as such is not already proof “that something invisible may really exist.” Their function more closely resembles that of a model. “An experimental model system has always something of the character of a supplement in the sense Derrida confers on the notion. It stands for something only the absence of which allows it to become effective.”24 When a phenomenon became visible, that did not simply negate this absence. “Models [. . .] are relevant to research only as long as they leave something do be desired.”25 The model never fully coincides with what it represents, and this systematic misprision is the source of its productivity. Applied to the case of photography, this means that the visualization of an “invisible fact” did not straightforwardly undo its “invisibility.” What the photographic image presented to the eye was not the spoils of a foray into the darkness of the invisible world, hauled back unscathed into the world of visibility. With Niklas Luhmann, we might say that photography rendered something visible, but on the condition that its invisibility remain intact.26 The paradoxical structure of this process was not a flaw, impediment, or deficit of visualization; it was the mainspring that kept the work on the pictures going. In my discussion of the photographic visualization of the invisible, I have mainly focused on one side of the enterprise: the technical realization, production, and interpretation of the pictures. But what can we say about that “invisible something” itself that supposedly existed, powerful and intangible at once, before the process of technical visualization? The accounts I have quoted create the impression that there was an epistemic void in

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which not even the keenest intuition apprehended what would later become visible, even though it had supposedly always already resided there. The pictures unexpectedly brought something into the field of view that existed and was nonetheless inaccessible, unfathomable, perhaps even inconceivable. To dramatize the exploratory function of photography, it seems, writers have portrayed both sides of the dichotomy in absolute terms: the conspicuous manifestness of what had become visible and the utter darkness from which it had to be wrested. This account fits neatly with the teleology of an inexorable expansion of the field of vision. Its guiding metaphor is an eye that is either completely blind or, thanks to its photographic prostheses, capable of vision even in the realm of the invisible. In his important contributions on this subject, Georges Didi-­Huberman has insistently pointed out how questionable the rigid opposition between visibility and invisibility is. The “entire history of images,” he writes, is “an effort to visually transcend the trivial contrasts between the visible and the invisible.”27 The “invisible” of photographic experimentation was not in fact a tabula rasa on which an image appeared out of thin air at the moment of visualization. When researchers ventured out into what Colson called the “realm of the invisible,” they did not haphazardly stumble in the dark, hoping that the occasional invisible phenomenon would strike their photographic plate. On the contrary, their exploration was escorted by a kind of knowledge and experience, by premonitions and intuitions, by a vision, however blurry it may have been. Experimentation presupposes a “blind tactics.”28 Its outcome is undetermined, and yet the instruments are trained on an as yet unknown result. It also makes a difference whether the research is in an early stage, the first and still erratic apprehension of a phenomenon, or a later stage, after the phenomenon has been largely stabilized. The more routine researchers have in handling the techniques of visualization, the more familiar they are with the sights their plates pre­sent, the less “invisible” or unforeseeable the provenance of the images becomes. There is a kind of habituation to the improbable. In Le mouvement, Marey describes this progression as a continuous “education of the eye.” Discussing an exemplary series of chronophotographic portraits, he explains that such shots, taken at extremely brief intervals, render the phenomenon in images that are utterly at odds with what an eyewitness would have expected. “Instantaneous photography should fix the unknown and unforeseeable.”29 In this sense, chronophotographic visualization was defamiliarization first and foremost. The watchman at the Station physiologique where Marey had worked since 1882 was surely a familiar sight. Then Marey posted him in front of the chronophotographic camera and recorded him as he enunciated a few words in colloquial French. The photographic recording dissected the familiar physiognomy into a sequence of disconcerting frames: “The series of photographs thus obtained showed the periodical repetition of the facial expression, but so curiously contracted

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were the muscles of expression that the appearance was rather that of an ugly grimace.”30 The guard’s metamorphosis resulted from the extreme distension of the process in time. Those present during the recording saw an ordinary speaker, but the pictures showed his physiognomy in the split second when he pronounced each individual syllable. Marey’s assistant Georges Demeny appears in a comparable series as he enunciates the sentence “Je vous aime” (fig. 40). The sheet shows him in twenty iterations of the same half-­length portrait shot. The sitter’s dark vest, shirt, and tie dependably recur twenty times as the physiognomy above the collar undergoes continual deformation: his eyes at times shut tightly; his mouth sometimes appearing as a black orifice, at other times revealing a row of white teeth suggesting a mocking grin. The guard of the Station physiologique presumably presented a similar sight. “And yet simply to watch him there was nothing extraordinary in the man’s expression.”31 His “curious contraction” and disfiguration was the product of the intervention of photography, which made the ordinary extraordinary and turned the familiar face into an “ugly grimace.” Marey could hardly have chosen a better motif to demonstrate this defamiliarization effect than the unremarkable and seemingly immutable visage of a close associate. But what is interesting to Marey (and to us) about this chronophotographic defamiliarization is something else: it fades as the viewer becomes accustomed to the new pictures. Marey reminds his readers that Muybridge’s famous shots of galloping horses initially struck the public as an “unnatural” spectacle. “But by degrees, as they became more familiar, the world became reconciled to them.” Something similar, one may conclude, will sooner or later happen to the guard’s ugly grimace. “What does this fact imply? Is it not that the ugly is only the unknown, and that truth seen for the first time offends the eye? [. . .] How will this education of the eye end [. . .]? The future alone can show.”32 Marey’s idea of an “education of the eye” is predicated on growing familiarity with the improbable; it assumes that the pictures will ultimately become somewhat expectable. In this way, it qualifies the formula of the “photography of the invisible” in yet another regard: once the freezing of time in the chronophotographic image has become a familiar parameter, its recurrence will no longer be entirely surprising. Rendered visible by chronophotography, the “unnatural” shape of a drop of milk at the instant it hits a surface can seep into the general imaginary and eventually return as the logo a dairy company puts on its tank trucks.33 The late stages and periods of habituation to images that Marey mentions pre­sent less interesting constellations in an epistemological perspective than the scenarios of their first emergence. That is not because things appear first in especially pure form before undergoing adulteration, but because their status is still uncertain. Once what Marey describes as familiarization with the improbable has begun, the images and the circumstances in which they occur cease to generate productive disquiet or disorientation.

Fig. 40  Étienne-­Jules Marey, chronophotograph (“Je vous aime”), 1891.

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Yet even in the delicate early stages of experimentation, the visible/invisible dichotomy proves overly rigid. When Ernst Mach set about photographing a bullet in flight in 1884, he did not confront a uniform wall of invisibility, although that did not stop Volkmer from including Mach’s experiments in his recital of “photographic recordings of the invisible.” As Christoph Hoffmann has emphasized, the camera’s position could in principle have been occupied by a human observer, whose eye would have perceived the phenomenon in question during the fraction of a second when the spark illuminated the scene. That had in fact been Mach’s approach in his earlier experiments: the setup was designed to “provide ‘favorable’ conditions” for observation, rather than photographic recording, “during the brief period of exposure.”34 When Mach eventually launched his experiments with photography, he already had “a fairly clear idea in mind of what the photographs were meant to show.”35 Before the photograph “of the invisible,” there was a vision distinct enough for Mach to be able to capture it in sketches he sent to his associate Peter Salcher in Prague. My point is not to dispute the significance of photography for Mach’s experiments. But classifying it as a “photographic recording of the invisible” is simplistic. The photographs of projectiles did not abruptly make something visible that had previously been unimaginable. The composition of the pictures was in some ways foreseeable, and even when the researcher’s expectations proved wrong, their involvement was not altogether irrelevant. The “invisible” realm Mach’s experiments illuminated was shot through from the outset with visual models. A similar argument can be made about the emergence of X-­rays, which were among the most frequently mentioned agents of a “photography of the invisible” in the late nineteenth century. Röntgen had discovered this radiation—which he labeled X-­Strahlung, though it is now generally known as Röntgenstrahlung in his native German—in the course of experiments concerning the electric conductivity of gases in 1895. In December of that year, he submitted his report Über eine neue Art von Strahlung to the Physical-­ Medical Society of Würzburg. In it, he relates that he first observed the fluorescent effect of the rays on a screen made of “paper covered on one side with barium platino-­cyanide.”36 Only in a second step did he replace the fluorescent screen with a photographic plate, which made it “possible to exhibit the phenomena so as to exclude the danger of error. I have thus confirmed many observations originally made by eye observation with the fluorescent screen.”37 The photographic plate enabled him to produce a permanent record of the “new kind of rays,” but it was not what had first made them appear. In November 1895 Röntgen had espied the shadowy image of his hand glowing on the wall of his darkened laboratory. The “earliest manifestation of the radiographic image is mobile and ephemeral and requires the immediate presence of the objects and direct observation.”38 So visualization was often preceded by another visibility, and where it was not, prior knowledge, experience, and ideas nonetheless attended the first emergence of the new sight.

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So far, I have mainly dwelled on three observations concerning the paradigm of a photography of the invisible. First, photographic visualization was not the transfer into the image of a phenomenon that had always already existed, though it had been latent; it was, first and foremost, the fabrication of an image. Second, as a general rule, it was not evident what this image showed; it needed to be decoded, stabilized, and isolated from an amalgam of facts and artifacts. And third, the “invisibility” that preceded it was not nothing but a sort of structured darkness that, despite its persistent obscurity, was interspersed with experiences, expectations, or imaginations. But there is another way in which photographic reality can “visually transcend” (Didi-­Huberman) the opposition of “visibility” and “invisibility,” one that is at work outside the domain of scientific observation as well. In the second volume of his Logical Investigations, Edmund Husserl shows how the visible is itself embedded in a field of the invisibility (Husserl’s term is Unsichtigkeit, or “unseenness”). Even in the ordinary contemplation of an object, large parts of it remain unseen: “elements of the invisible rear side, the interior etc.” Although these “invisible” parts are “subsidiarily intended” and “symbolically suggested” by the perception of the object, they “are not themselves part of the intuitive, i.e., of the perceptual or imaginative content, of the percept.” The object appears “by way of an adumbration.”39 “Radical incompleteness [. . .] pertains to the essence” of our perception.40 The quality Husserl calls unsichtig is by no means identical to the “invisibility” the scientists discussed in these pages hoped to eliminate, but it reminds us that the opposition between visibility and invisibility appears questionable in yet another regard: the so-­called visible object itself is already not a homogeneous entity that is unequivocally present to our eyes. Visible reality represents “an optical potential. Everything that is seen is accompanied by the shadow of the unseen; the visible appears surrounded by the halo of the invisible.”41 Other theorists have used the term “blind spot” to point out that all observation inevitably implies that something else is not being observed.42 But the reference to the “radical incompleteness” of the visible also brings us back once more to the point with which this chapter began. The writers I have mentioned sought to define the scientific nature of the “photography of the invisible” primarily by distinguishing it from conventional and purely reproductive or documentary photography. The recording of phenomena located outside the visible spectrum no doubt created a new situation. In retrospect, it may well have seemed to the pioneers of the “photography of the invisible” that all photography before them had been merely reproduction of the visible. Still, the distinction between visibility and invisibility is suitable neither as a categorical definition of two different types of photography nor for the identification of a historical discontinuity that reorganized the field of the visible around 1900.43 Visibility and invisibility were not mutually exclusive static conditions, nor did one historically supersede the other. The invisible was not entirely invisible, and the visible

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was not entirely visible. My reflections have largely dealt in abstractions, which must prove their worth in the examination of actual pictures. In the next section, I will test them by applying them to the example of a radiographic revelation. 5.3 A parcel vanishes

Charles-­Édouard Guillaume’s treatise Les rayons X et la photographie à travers les corps opaques, published in 1896, includes two photographs chosen to illustrate, by comparison, the explorative function of photography (fig. 41). Identical in size, set one above the other, the two pictures, which Guillaume credits to Messrs. Benoist and Hurmuzescu, float before a monochrome white background. The first, “an ordinary photograph,” shows the outside of a parcel. The piece of mail is “corded and sealed and ready to be put into the mail.”44 The picture underneath shows the same parcel, but now as it pre­sents itself in radiographic screening. The impenetrable exterior has vanished to disclose the contents of the parcel. A dark frame surrounds an equally dark tangle—a central circular object to which a sort of cord with eyelets seems to be attached. A second agglomeration is discernible further to the left, consisting of two oval rings that likewise appear to be intertwined with the rest of the ensemble. The accompanying note identifies the object as a “pocket watch with chain.” Guillaume’s contemporaries were certainly better prepared to recognize the dark tangle as such than today’s beholders, few of whom handle pocket watches on a daily basis. Still, not even a nineteenth-­century viewer could presumably have made sense of the shadowy image in all its details and at first glance. Compared to the “ordinary photograph” above, the X-­ray picture seems flat. The photograph conveys a distinct impression of the three-­dimensional shape of the object it depicts. We are looking down at a rectangular box in a view that is almost, but not quite, frontal, as the foreshortened and shaded side of the box along the bottom edge of the picture indicates. We even get a rough sense of the parcel’s dimensions. The radiographic image, by contrast, offers virtually no clues concerning the arrangement of the objects in space. The distribution of light and shadow within it is governed by different laws. The dark fringe surrounding it on all sides reinforces the impression that we are looking at a two-­dimensional representation; instead of recognizing it to be a view of the inside of a box as seen from above, we might think the photograph shows a flat framed picture on a wall. Somewhat experienced viewers know that the varying intensities of blackness correspond to different permeabilities of the materials present to X-­rays. But how exactly the chain is coiled up, which parts are closer, which further away, where the gray area along the bottom edge of the picture is located relative to the object at the center—these are questions even viewers familiar with radiographic images cannot answer with any certainty. Guillaume points out the silhouettes of iron clasps clearly discernible near the

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Fig. 41  Messrs. Benoist and Hurmuzescu, radiograph, around 1896.

top edge of the picture, but once again, their actual position is virtually impossible to determine. The radiograph annuls perspective, a peculiarity that quickly proved to create problems in the medical uses of radiography. What most fascinated early viewers about X-­ray images of skulls and extremities was the revelation of hidden foreign objects (such as bullets) that had lodged inside the body. The radiograph made the shapes of these objects visible but did little to indicate their precise location, as a handbook published in 1897 notes: “It is, after all, only a shadow projection that does not render depth, representing things only side by side in a single plane and not one behind the other.”45 Upon closer inspection, we find that the shadow-­image of the watch

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evinces several irregular features that are hard to read. Its evenly rounded circular shape is marred by a lumpy excrescence in its top left quadrant. A look at the photograph above tells us that the silhouettes of the watch and of the seal on the outside of the parcel have fused into a single amorphous blot. But where does the “watch” end and the “seal” begin? Which of the two objects is superimposed on the other? A gray oval near the bottom edge of the radiograph represents a second seal, but again we could not tell without the conventional photograph, where its sharply delineated contours appear in the corresponding position. According to the inscription on the parcel, Benoist and Hurmuzescu did not send it to just anyone. The parcel is addressed to “Monsieur Röntgen, Würtzbourg”—an instance of return to sender, as it were, to the very place where the history of X-­rays had originated a year earlier. We do not know whether the watch from Brussels ever arrived in Würzburg, nor can we tell whether it was even actually mailed. The package may well have been put together solely for the purpose of taking its radiographic image and then unpacked. That would make its double likeness a work of radiographic l’art pour l’art, a pure demonstration of its own feasibility that brought the name of the discoverer into play as a surplus. Or maybe Röntgen refused delivery of the strange parcel from Brussels: as far as we can tell, it contained nothing that would have explained to him why a watch worth 200 Belgian francs (see the declaration of value) was sent to him. What arrived in Würzburg, if indeed it arrived there, was nothing but a pocket watch and chain, with nothing about it to suggest that it had served as the object of a scientific demonstration. And so it remains questionable whether the piece of mail and its photographic documentation reached their destinations. The pictures sit, one above the other, in mute confrontation. The layout is didactic. The picture above, we might say, visualizes the initial state of invisibility: looking at the neatly tied parcel, we are meant to see, by implication, the latency of its content, which the picture below then discloses, in a formidable act of revelation. Yet it is part of this dramaturgy of unconcealment that the pictures are not presented as “before and after” but as simultaneous states: the parcel that shows only its impregnable outside at the same time hides a pocket watch from our eyes. Radiographic screening promises to uncover this duplicity. Visualization, in this instance, is a means of exposure, and as the context suggests, radiography is imagined as an instrument not only of scientific visualization but also of inspection or surveillance.46 This reading of the pictures is not wrong, but it is imprecise and captures only one side of the phenomenon. For one thing, it is not simply a matter of something invisible having “become visible.” The radiographic image is not an unquestionable revelation. What it shows is not evident, and the viewer needs to know how to read it. Numerous details of what it depicts remain latent or unsichtig, to use Husserl’s term. The picture exposes something,

Plate 1  William Henry Fox Talbot, The Breakfast Table, 1841.

Plate 2  August Strindberg, “celestograph,” 1894.

Plate 3  August Strindberg, Alpine landscape, painting, 1892.

Plate 4  Nobuyoshi Araki, from the series Shijyo–­Tokyo. © Nobuyoshi Araki.

Plate 5  Nobuyoshi Araki, from the series Shijyo–­Tokyo. © Nobuyoshi Araki.

Plate 6  Nobuyoshi Araki, from the series Shijyo–­Tokyo. © Nobuyoshi Araki.

Plate 7  Nobuyoshi Araki, from the series Shijyo–­Tokyo. © Nobuyoshi Araki.

Plate 8  Nobuyoshi Araki, from the series Shijyo–­Tokyo. © Nobuyoshi Araki.

Plate 9  Nobuyoshi Araki, from the series Shijyo–­Tokyo. © Nobuyoshi Araki.

Plate 10  Sigmar Polke, Untitled (São Paulo), 1975. © The Estate of Sigmar Polke, Cologne/VG Bild-­Kunst, Bonn 2016.

Plate 11  Jules Luys/Émile David, “effluviograph,” 1897.

Plate 12  Adrien Guébhard, experiment comparing photochemical effects of real and artificial fingers, 1897–1898.

Plate 13  Adrien Guébhard, Les prétendues auras vitales de Dr. H. Baraduc de Paris, 1897–1898.

Plate 14  Adrien Guébhard, False Flames, 1897–1898.

Plate 15  Mandylion, Constantinople.

Plate 16  Adrien Donnadieu, Head of Christ, watercolor, 1903.

Plate 17  Adrien Donnadieu, Head of Christ, photographic negative, 1903.

Plate 18  Victor Chabaud, radiograph, 1898.

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yet what is seen in it is not, as one might think, the unveiled and undisguised heart of things but rather a new side of the veil. We should also note, too, that the radiographic screening has made some “visible” things “invisible”: we can make out the hidden contents, but the parcel itself has vanished. The rays have disintegrated the box, the stamp, the handwritten address. Only “conventional photography” brings these details back to light. At this point, the dramaturgy of visualization may be turned on its head for a moment: the radiographic image shows nothing but a shadowy image of the interior, depending on “conventional photography” to shed light on the outward appearance of the object. The “photograph of the invisible” is illegible without the information provided by the “photograph of the visible” that accompanies it. Each picture illuminates the other, and neither is intelligible without its counterpart. Both visualize, and both conceal. As though to prove that such radiographic demonstration will work a second time, Guillaume then pre­sents another instance of the same procedure. For this iteration, Albert Londe, whom I quoted earlier, put together a parcel and “kindly supplied” the author with the product of his radiographic experiment. “The precision of the radiographic image is immediately evident; note the small nails holding the box together, which are clearly visible in the print.”47 Yet Guillaume does not say what this shipment contained, and so we cannot be certain what we are looking at (a bracelet? a necklace?). Once again, the demonstration shows that radiography does not simply uncover familiar objects but simultaneously renders them unfamiliar. The well-­known object appears as something else and is often not instantly identifiable. Röntgen himself tested this “recognition effect” with a number of mundane objects “whose likeness in the X-­ray image pre­sents a novel and initially strange sight when compared to normal perception, though without becoming altogether unrecognizable.”48 Over the next few years, researchers played this “game of discovery” with great tenacity.49 For example, in 1898 Victor Chabaud presented a radiograph of two crayfish in an arrangement manifestly informed by gastronomic rather than zoological considerations (plate 18). We might take the circular form at whose center the animals’ bodies appear for a lens opening—often visible in photographs taken through a microscope—until the juxtaposition with a knife and fork helps identify the black circle as the edge of a plate. The objects are perfectly ordinary, yet we need to reorient our gaze. Things are not where we would expect to find them: the silverware is to the left of the plate, and the knife and fork have traded places. Looking more closely, we notice that the tines of the fork are curved, suggesting that we are looking at the entire ensemble from below, as though through an invisible pane of glass. We can imagine the plate and cutlery resting on the same flat surface; the translucent crayfish, meanwhile, seem to float in a sphere of their own, disconnected from the other objects in the picture and impossible to locate either in front of or behind them. In contradistinction to the solid black ring that encloses them,

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they look otherworldly and fragile, and one wonders whether the comparatively coarse silverware is really the right equipment with which to handle such ethereal creatures. Denis Canguilhem has argued that this picture was probably taken to test the efficiency of a new vacuum tube.50 Such sample or test pictures constitute a peculiar genre. The motifs they depict were not chosen entirely at random—in this instance, the crayfish were no doubt included for their striking translucency—but there was usually no prescribed object they needed to capture. This indeterminacy gave the scientists some creative leeway, and so bits and pieces of their everyday world sometimes filtered into the experimental setting. Then again, we might say, the purpose of demonstration positively compelled such creativity. After all, they needed to depict something if they wanted to bring the visual effect of the phenomena in question home to their audiences.51 Experiments designed to demonstrate the “photography of the invisible” thus also engendered a new iconography of mundane objects that balances visual defamiliarization of the familiar with the eventual recognition of the original object. Josef Maria Eder and Eduard Valenta’s pictorial atlas Versuche über Photographie mittels der Röntgen’schen Strahlen contains a picture that marks the far end of this scale. Thirteen of the fifteen plates show living organisms such as “frogs in prone and supine positions,” “two salt-­water fish,” and the “hand of a twenty-­one-­year-­old woman.” Plate no. v, however, is a “table representing the permeability of different substances to X-­rays” (fig. 42). The designation “table” alone signals the shift to another visual register. The plate illustrates the different permeabilities of various metals, rock crystal, pear wood, wax, meat, leather, a woolen cloth, a four-­layer wound dressing, and other materials. There are no objects to be recognized; each material is simply a sample, one cut in the form of a circle, the others more or less rectangular. The more X-­radiation a substance allows to pass through, the brighter it appears in the picture. The nuanced variations bespeak the level of training required to be able to tell the different materials apart. Identifying the objects would likely have been impossible without the accompanying legend. Eder and Valenta’s plate illustrates once more that when the “photography of the invisible” made something visible, it did not cease to be an abstraction merely by virtue of its visualization—and in some cases, became an abstraction in its photographic representation. 5.4 “The mysterious in the everyday”: Schad, Man Ray, Moholy-­Nagy

Eder and Valenta’s plate no. v resurfaced in 1990, when it was included in the monograph Das Fotogramm in der Kunst des 20. Jahrhundert.52 The editors used the Viennese experiment concerning materials’ permeability to X-­rays for the frontispiece of their volume, omitting the key identifying the

Fig. 42  Josef Maria Eder and Eduard Valenta, “table representing the permeability of different substances to X-­rays,” 1896.

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samples shown in the picture and making no reference to the setup of the experiment or the context in which it was conducted. In this new setting, a history of “the photogram in twentieth-­century art,” the plate looks like an early transmission from the world of nonrepresentational forms. The material samples stand at attention, in pedantic formation; the numbers remain as vestiges of an explanation that is presumably to be found somewhere outside the picture. In its new context the plate invites contemplation as an autonomous composition—a formal study in black and gray on a white ground anchored by the mysterious composure of the black circle slightly above center. The remaining five hundred pages of the book do not mention the radiographic composition created in 1895. Eder and Valenta’s plate seems suspended between discourses: incorporated into the history of twentieth-­century art and presented as a visual prelude to the art of the photogram, but then left behind on the threshold. In the heuristic perspective of the book, it seems, the picture came into being too early and in the wrong context: the history of the photogram it traces does not commence until 1918, when Christian Schad first experimented with photosensitive paper and everyday objects in his studio in Geneva.53 The indecision implicit in presenting the radiographic image, then excluding it from the corpus of photogrammatic art may in fact be a fairly accurate reflection of its historical and aesthetic status. Eder and Valenta speak of the “pictorial effect” of their radiographs.54 When they first worked on radiographic visualization, the technology was still too new to have given rise to a firmly established system of applications and functions. Eder kept up to date on technical developments in the field of photography, replicating experiments whenever possible and publishing his own observations, so it probably went without saying that he would play around with the “invisible rays.” His and Valenta’s atlas was meant as a “reference to all materials amenable to radiographic screening,”55 but beyond the technical demonstration of the procedure, Eder was no doubt also interested in the aesthetic potential of the new rays—the “pictorial effect of this discovery [. . .] given that X-­ray photography implied first and foremost an almost infinite enlargement of the bounds of visibility.”56 Two decades later, László Moholy-­Nagy, a pioneer of the photogram as an art form, conversely described the radiograph as an “interesting preliminary stage” of his own creative use of light.57 “Penetration of the body with light is one of the greatest visual experiences,” he notes with regard to a radiograph of a frog, and an X-­ray photograph of a seashell strikes him as “matter translated into light.” In his book Painting, Photography, Film, reproductions of these pictures are followed by four of his own photograms and two “camera-­less photographs” by Man Ray.58 The transformation of the familiar in the radiographic image, its oscillation between reproduction and defamiliarization, visualization and invisibilization, not only motivated the research of the scientists I have mentioned

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Fig. 43  Christian Schad, Schadograph Nr. 8. © Christian Schad Stiftung Aschaffenburg/VG Bild-­Kunst, Bonn 2016.

but energized creative work on the photogram, another genre that developed an iconography of everyday objects: paper clips (Kurt Schwitters), keys (Man Ray), cigarettes (Man Ray), silverware (Man Ray, Moholy-­Nagy, Franz Roh), tumblers (Man Ray, Moholy-­Nagy, El Lissitzky), feathers (Schwitters, Moholy-­Nagy), needles (Anton Stankowski), screws (Man Ray, Georgiy Zimin), tongs (Zimin), a comb (Man Ray), the artist’s glasses (Moholy-­ Nagy). Here, too, the familiar objects of everyday life retreated until they were nothing but outlines, underwent metamorphoses, and finally vanished without a trace behind the light effects their presence left behind on the paper. This extreme form of withdrawal, the defamiliarization and mystification of things, appears at the very moment when artists begin to explore the possibilities of the photogram. Schad brings objects into contact with the photographic paper “only to then make them disappear from the picture.”59 Some “Schadographs” retain fragments of representationality— tangled odds and ends of lace, the letters of a printed page—but a composition like Schadograph Nr. 8 effaces even such vestiges of reference (fig. 43). The picture, we might say, pre­sents two forms of the photogrammatic manifestation of objects in juxtaposition. On the right-­hand side, Schad has used a stencil to produce a shape that may be read as a white figure on a black

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ground but also, in an abrupt inversion, as a black form held by the white figure as though clutched by a protective arm (or the claws of a crab). Nothing about the formation suggests depth; black and white sit flatly side by side. The visual resonance of the stenciled outline in the angular shape to which Schad has cropped the picture reinforces this sense of paper-­bound flatness. Next to the stencil, however, “something” has produced a very different shape. It looks like the writhing body of an animal, uneasily hovering between the white shape and the no less hard-­edged margin of the picture. The object that has left this imprint apparently did not rest flat on the photographic paper, whence the blurred silhouette. Instead of distinct contours, we notice zones of diffuseness in which the white body blends into the dark ground. In one place, the two disparate forms almost touch: the white stencil and the floating something are mere millimeters apart, a proximity that only highlights their provenance from different spheres. Our gaze uneasily shifts back and forth between the two registers without finding a way to envision both formations in the same pictorial plane. Whereas the stencil looks flat and level with its black surroundings—the two interlock to form a compact figure—the unequally more delicate entity on the left seems unfathomably recessed beneath this surface, half retreating into the darkness of the ground. The making of photograms, Ulrich Raulff has remarked, “is not a practice purely of shading; without departing from flatness, it touches upon the realm of the sculptural arts.”60 Schad made the objects he used disappear almost entirely behind their photogenic apparitions; the question of what they were is both unanswerable and without interest. In the works of Man Ray, the world of things is far more present. Some of his early photograms capture objects that were literally at hand, such as the utensils of the photo laboratory itself. Instead of things laid flat on the flat paper, these pictures suggest the conventional optical projection of three-­dimensional objects. The chemical bottle (fig. 44) stands upright, and the reflexes in the glass lend it a semblance of depth. The funnel seems to stick up somewhere behind the bottle, its volume taking up the top left third of the picture to the edges, and it would presumably tip over were it not for the prop that appears to barely prevent the whole precarious composition from collapsing. Closer inspection, however, once again shows the objects to be located on very different planes. The putative strut appears in vigorously drawn outlines, whereas the handle of the funnel disintegrates into an ethereal haze that would probably elude an attempt to grasp it. More photographic fog spreads in the bottom part of the picture, where we would expect to see a stable surface on which the objects stand. A luminous body whose shape resembles the lower end of a golf club protrudes into the picture from the bottom edge, its radiance dissipating in the black of the bottle. Our gaze wavers between the semblance of physical heft and depth of the objects and the manifest flatness of the paper on which they appear.

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Fig. 44  Man Ray, photogram. © Man Ray Trust, Paris/VG Bild-­Kunst, Bonn 2016.

Plate 5 from Man Ray’s portfolio Champs délicieux (fig. 45), published in 1922, illustrates a different take on the aesthetic of the photogram. The sharp outlines of a gun and a key rise from a monochrome background, arrayed side by side in an additive fashion that recalls arrangements from the early years of the photogram. The key stands in the pictorial space at an angle, and the ring and fob appear to have been carefully arrayed. The pistol, by contrast, cuts a static figure, held in place, for good measure, by the two arms of a horseshoe magnet, if that is what they are. The laconic exposition of the objects prompt us to imagine what might have motivated their neat juxtaposition—perhaps a crime has been committed in room 37? (Then

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Fig. 45  Man Ray, photogram, 1922. © Man Ray Trust, Paris/VG Bild-­Kunst, Bonn 2016.

again, the photogrammatic pistol lacks a discernible trigger, and its flatness brings to mind a harmless child’s toy). In another picture, a handgun appears as a peaceful luminescent object (fig. 46). The weapon’s hammer is cocked, but where the cylinder should be, we can see through to the black backdrop. The “shot” that has left the barrel snakes through the picture as a winding ribbon or a strip of paste squeezed from a tube and finally ends in front of a softly luminous circular structure, perhaps a distant celestial body. The composition contrasts the image of the gun with three shapes no projectile will ever strike because they do not belong to the world of identifiable objects. In other photograms, Man Ray similarly combines the shadows of rec-

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ognizable objects with the semblance of immateriality: a comb turns into an ethereal figment; a tumbler melts away; the bit of a hand drill is stuck in fog.61 Moholy-­Nagy has described Man Ray’s aesthetic approach in these pictures as a strategy of the mystification of the ordinary: as he writes in Painting, Photography, Film, “new use of the material transforms the everyday object into something mysterious.”62 Elsewhere, he notes that Man Ray “generally used artifacts with clear-­cut outlines rather than natural objects: glassware, nails, keys, sieves, crystals, etc. He combined, emphasized, or suppressed the shadows and the effects of the permeability of these objects. His interest was manifestly in exploring the mysterious, uncanny, extraordinary in the everyday, to create an aura for the ordinary, to draw atten-

Fig. 46  Man Ray, photogram, © Man Ray Trust, Paris/VG Bild-­Kunst, Bonn 2016.

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tion to the hitherto unnoticeable and hence to the invisible (metaphysical, occult).”63 With this account of Man Ray’s art, Moholy-­Nagy no doubt also hopes to highlight, by way of contrast, the distinctive qualities of his own approach. Herbert Molderings has noted the difference between the two artists’ work: “The appeal of Man Ray’s photograms lies in their turning the relationship between the universe of objects and the world of shadows on its head and mystifying the everyday, whereas Moholy-­Nagy’s photograms fascinate us with the breathtaking distance that separates them from all known forms. They evoke a world without objects or shadows, a reality of absolute light and absolute darkness.”64 In that sense, Moholy-­Nagy’s art marks an extreme of photogrammatic creation: the use and simultaneous effacement of objects. His programmatic 1922 essay envisions a photographic art of light that, instead of using the apparatus to fix (reproduce) “individual objects in their special character as reflectors or absorbers of light,” would “exploit the light-­sensitivity of the photographic (silver bromide) plate: fixing upon it light phenomena (moments from light-­displays) which we have ourselves composed (with contrivances of mirrors or lenses, transparent crystals, liquids, etc.).”65 In his early photograms, Moholy-­Nagy mostly relied on stencils and flat objects; later on he used movable sources of light to illuminate the objects resting on the paper from several angles, breaking down their solid shapes in a shower of radiation.66 Yet even in his visual universe, vestiges of objective representation remain, having withstood the withering heat of his process; see, for instance, the metal tea utensils, designed by Wolfgang Tümpel and Wilhelm Wagenfeld, which at least his colleagues in the metalworking class at the Bauhaus in Dessau would have recognized as more than phenomena of pure light (fig. 47).67 Conversely, there are works by Man Ray in which, contrary to Moholy-­ Nagy’s account, we cannot discern any “ordinary” or “everyday” objects. Plate 11 of Champs délicieux (fig. 48), for example, does not pre­sent any “artifacts with clear-­cut outlines”; there is an angular and composite something, a containerlike something, and—attached to it by a sort of umbilical cord— something volatile and diaphanous. Comparing the oeuvres of Schad, Man Ray, and Moholy-­Nagy, then, we find not radical contrasts but rather a continuous scale of compositional possibilities, different aspects of which were explored by different protagonists (and at different points in their careers). It is probably impossible to completely efface the physical characteristics of the objects from the photogram, and it seems the artists never really sought to do so. “The photogram,” Raulff rightly notes, “mounts a play with the disappearance of things and with immateriality, but the recalcitrance of matter is among the conditions on which the possibility of the photogram rests.”68 Looking back from this point at the experiments concerning the permeability to Röntgen rays undertaken two decades earlier (fig. 42), the screenings of opaque mail pieces (fig. 41), or Chabaud’s radiographic place setting (plate 18), we find an amalgam of similarities and differences. “An X-­ray

Fig. 47  László Moholy-­Nagy, photogram. Photo: © Museum Folkwang Essen–­ artothek. © Man Ray Trust, Paris/VG Bild-­Kunst, Bonn 2016

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Fig. 48  Man Ray, photogram, 1922. © Man Ray Trust, Paris/VG Bild-­Kunst, Bonn 2016.

photograph,” Moholy-­Nagy noted in 1926, “is also a photogram, a picture of an object taken without a camera. It allows us to peer into the inside of an object and to reveal its outward shape as well as its construction in a simultaneous penetration.”69 Four years earlier, he had characterized the radiograph as an “interesting preliminary stage” of his own creative efforts. Does this mean that technicians and researchers working around 1900 like Eder, Londe, and Chabaud were precursors of an art they could not yet know anything about? Or was it the other way around: were the artists broadening the idea of a science that preexisted their works or realizing its aesthetic potential?70 The establishment of photography as an art in the late nineteenth century made it difficult, or more difficult than it already had been, to draw clear boundaries between the various functions and manifestations of photographic images. So to preface the study of the corpus of historic photography with a strict distinction between “artistic” and “scientific” formats would be to misapprehend it. Then again, the opposite tendency, to level existing differences between science and art—whether in the name of generalizing notions of “beauty” or “creativity” or with a view to pervasive visual patterns or “archetypes” that supposedly precede any such functional differentiation—is hardly more helpful.71 Such attempts to deny the existence of fundamental distinctions usually pay for their universalism by blinding themselves to the purposes and peculiarities of the images. A more fruitful approach, it seems, is “to investigate the interplay between ‘picturing science’ and ‘producing art’ in the individual instance. Confounding the

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two kinds of pictorial function does a disservice to all sides. The maxim of a mere ‘expansion’—of art, or of the sciences, for that matter—yields nothing but vague generalizations.”72 The pioneers of radiography were not “precursors” of the avant-­garde. Londe’s experimentation with X-­ray screening was propelled by the utopian idea of a “visualization of the invisible,” a radiographic penetration that prospected for identifiable objects beneath the surfaces of the visible world, in the inner life of a mummy or the “contents of packages consigned to the postal service with a specification of their value.” Similarly, Eder and Valenta’s experiments concerning the permeability of different materials to Röntgen rays (fig. 42) aimed to visualize physical properties of these objects, not their outward form. The awkward position on the threshold of art history assigned to the plate by the editors of the abovementioned monograph on the art of the photogram is presumably an effect of this ambivalence as well: the picture bears a distant formal resemblance to the subsequent art of the photogram, but one surmises that that was not the intention behind its creation. Chabaud’s still life (plate 18) already betrays a nascent interest in the compositional possibilities of the new technique that exceeded its useful application; at the very least, the theoretical or practical relevance of this radiographic table setting is not readily apparent. What might be point of screening two crayfish with X-­rays before eating them? And how does including the knife and fork in the radiograph advance science? Unlike Eder and Valenta’s comparative tableau of X-­ray images, this picture does not just array samples in rows and columns: it suggests a real-­life situation. Assuming Denis Canguilhem is right and the image was taken to test the efficiency of a new tube, such a test picture did not require that Chabaud hew to any particular iconography, and so he used the opportunity to extract an additional legibility from his shot: What do everyday objects look like when subjected to a new visualization technique? Or conversely, what effects does this technique engender when applied to ordinary things? Like Schad’s, Man Ray’s, and Moholy-­Nagy’s photograms, Londe’s, Chabaud’s, and Eder and Valenta’s radiographs would seem to illustrate variations on a sliding scale of possibilities. Both forms of visualization—the radiograph and the photogram—generate a photography-­based “alternate vision,” but they do so with different means and different objectives. 5.5 “Another nature”

Needless to say, the applications, functions, and technical apparatuses of photographic visualization I have mentioned did not conform to the same conditions everywhere and at all times. The experiments in chronophotography aimed to suspend time by arresting animated objects in pictures. Radiographic visualization, by contrast, was designed not to disrupt the continuity of time but to break through the barrier in space between the hidden interior of an object and its impenetrable outside. Furthermore, one

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must distinguish between the first products of a technique whose future was as yet undetermined and later samples of a comparatively established and purposeful procedure. And finally, it made a difference whether a photograph was taken as a test picture not intended for publication (plate 18) or as an illustration for a handbook meant to survey the routine functions of a technical medium and demonstrate its inexorable progress. Yet despite these differences and the peculiarities of each individual instance, we can and should inquire into the general motivations driving the endeavor of a “photography of the invisible.” One motive that loomed large in the cases discussed here was the photographic defamiliarization of things. None of the pictures was taken to prove the existence of utterly new objects. Rather, the point was to reveal unfamiliar or improbable aspects of the familiar. The watchman’s grimace at the Station physiologique (fig. 40) was so disconcerting only because it showed the systematic deformation of a perfectly familiar sight. Similarly, what made the new visual experience offered by radiographic recordings of the human body and other objects so fascinating was not the sudden emergence of previously unimagined sights: neither Röntgen nor his successors could have been very surprised to find a skeleton inside the body. What pictures like Eder and Valenta’s radiographic survey of sample substances (fig. 42) mapped with methodical rigor was the threshold at which things remained barely recognizable, distantly recalled their familiar appearances, or became identifiable only with the assistance of legends, while also presenting aspects no eye had ever seen. And so photography and its visualization techniques sharpened awareness of the fact that things might be very different from how the senses perceived them—it certainly “saw” them very differently. Walter Benjamin, in a well-­known discussion of this defamiliarization effect, called it the “optical unconscious” of photography and spoke of “another nature” that inhabited it: For it is another nature which speaks to the camera rather than to the eye: “other” above all in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious. Whereas it is a commonplace that, for example, we have some idea what is involved in the act of walking (if only in general terms), we have no idea at all what happens during the fraction of a second when a person actually takes a step. Photography, with its devices of slow motion and enlargement, reveals the secret. It is through photography that we first discover the existence of this optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.73

We will not pursue the question of how far Benjamin’s comparison of photography and psychoanalysis holds. But the observation that technology allows “another nature” to come into the picture is astute. In the “camera”

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and the “eye,” Benjamin singled out the two entities that photographers pitted against each other on the scenes of the “optical unconscious,” relentlessly comparing one to the other, drawing out the distinctions between them or envisioning their anthropomorphic union in the metaphor of the camera as “artificial eye.” Marey’s portrayal of the chronophotographic endeavor as an “education of the eye” spelled out his premise: photography was right, and the eye had yet to learn what the apparatus already knew. In this view, the technically generated image—however improbable and disconcerting the information it conveyed might seem—came closer to the nature of the phenomena than the wonted visual perception. For example, chronophotography revealed the “actual attitudes” of a running man,74 where the unarmed eyes of artists had been taken in for centuries by what appeared to be a false vision. So why should painters continue to show a galloping horse with four outstretched legs in the air (see, for example, Géricault’s Course de chevaux à Epsom, 1821), when photography had taught the eye that no such sight existed “in reality”? Conversely, the painters might reasonably counter, why should they accept the visualizations of technology as authoritative and take them more seriously than the impressions presented to them by their own eyes (or their imagination)?75 All of the protagonists embroiled in this clash of cultures manifestly struggled to come to terms with the challenging and, to some, insulting realization that the photographic image revealed another side of the familiar world. This difference and its aporias and irreducibility will be the subject of the following and final chapter.

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6 The “Optical Unconscious” of Photography

6.1 Artificial eyes?

The interpretation of technical apparatuses as “artificial eyes” is as old as the history of visual media. Early accounts of the camera obscura already compared its function to the operation of the human eye: in the Codex Atlanticus, Leonardo da Vinci described the camera as an oculus artificialis; Descartes proposed implanting the eye of a deceased person into its aperture to create a half-­artificial, half-­natural construction with which to investigate the laws of perception; Robert Hooke demonstrated the expansion and contraction of the pupil to the members of the Royal Society by placing diaphragms of different sizes in front of the lens of a camera obscura. The microscope and the telescope and, later, the stereoscope and photography were similarly assessed by comparison to the model of the eye or, on the other hand, advertised as new, technological equivalents of perception.1 The case of photography, however, brought a crucial new aspect into play: its pictures were not just seen and projected; they could also be stored on a permanent basis. This innovation suggested that the comparison between camera and eye, between recording and seeing, had its limitations, but that did not dent its abiding popularity. The trope—it is hard to say whether it is a metaphor or expresses specific ideas about physical analogies—appears early on in writings about photography. In 1816 Nicéphore Niépce, in a letter to his brother Claude to which he attached several samples of his work, called the photographs “retinas.”2 A few years later, the physicist Dominique François Arago, in his famous speech on the introduction of daguerreotypy, noted that “there can be no better characterization of this invention than the comparison to an artificial retina Mr. Daguerre places at the disposal of physicists.”3 Talbot himself did not fail to match parts of the photographer’s instruments to the anatomy of the eye: “The Camera [. . .] may be said to make a picture of whatever it sees. The object glass is the eye of the instrument—the sensitive paper may be compared to the retina.”4

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As these few examples demonstrate, the same comparison of camera and eye could be used to make different points. Niépce’s letter is not concerned with the construction or function of the camera; it is the products of its operation that he describes as retinas. The photographic image, that is to say, is a sort of materialized visual impression that may be preserved, compared to others, and dispatched by mail. On another occasion, however, he calls the camera box furnished with a lens taken from a solar microscope an “artificial eye.”5 Arago refers, rather unspecifically, to the entire apparatus (“this invention”); Talbot distinguishes between optics and photochemistry and associates each element with a specific part of the visual apparatus. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the prevailing trope is that the photosensitive plate is capable of seeing. But behind the question of which component of the photographic apparatus is described as an eye or retina in a particular instance looms a more interesting one: what was the author’s purpose in matching the operation of the human sense of vision to the new technology? “The comparison between camera and eye, which has been a defining feature of the discourse of photography from the very first writings about daguerreotypy to this day, may be characterized, for example, as an irreducible difference or as a physiological-­technological analogy; as demanding careful distinction between the two media of perception and recording or as their virtual identification.”6 For the present study of how the “optical unconscious” of photography is modeled, the question is thus whether the purpose was to portray photography as an equivalent surrogate for physiological vision or, on the contrary, as its superior technological competitor or replacement. Did writers focus on what camera and eye had in common, or did they highlight the manifest differences between them? The latter tendency is evident in two passages from Talbot’s Pencil of Nature. With reference to his plate ii, the View of the Boulevards at Paris, Talbot notes: “The instrument chronicles whatever it sees, and certainly would delineate a chimney-­pot or a chimney-­sweeper with the same impartiality as it would the Apollo of Belvedere.”7 So the instrument is capable of “seeing.” But unlike its human archetype, it draws no distinction as it sees: its vision, Talbot claims, encompasses all details at once and indiscriminately. His identification of recording with vision ultimately reveals more differences than shared features. Elsewhere in The Pencil of Nature, he reflects on possible uses of the chemical agency of ultraviolet rays that are invisible to our eyes. Talbot was acquainted with the work of Johann Wilhelm Ritter, who had discovered in 1801 that parts of the light spectrum beyond violet that the human eye could not detect nonetheless blackened paper treated with silver salt.8 The existence of these rays, Talbot concludes, is known to us not from our own immediate sense perception but only because of their photochemical action. Their invisibility inspires him to a thought experiment:

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Now, I would propose to separate these invisible rays from the rest, by suffering them to pass into an adjoining apartment through an aperture in a wall or screen of partition. This apartment would thus become filled (we must not call it illuminated) with invisible rays, which might be scattered in all directions by a convex lens placed behind the aperture. If there were a number of persons in the room, no one would see the other: and yet nevertheless if a camera were so placed as to point in the direction in which any one were standing, it would take his portrait, and reveal his actions. For, to use a metaphor we have already employed, the eye of the camera would see plainly where the human eye would find nothing but darkness.9

Talbot’s term “metaphor” is quite accurate: the virtual identification of camera and eye is in this instance the scene not so much of an analogy as of a displacement. The protagonists are set in close semantic proximity only to bring out their underlying antagonism. Talbot’s metaphor describes an experimental setup in which “seeing” is no longer seeing—that is, not the operation of a sense, but rather the optical and chemical action of an apparatus. The point is that this apparatus sets to work in a room in which the eyes of the human participants are engulfed in utter darkness: people are being “seen” by invisible rays even as they themselves see nothing. In the final analysis, the “eye of the camera” is not an eye. In Niépce, the comparison may still have been one between equals; now the balance has shifted in favor of the instrument. Over the following decades, most writers share Talbot’s view: in comparing eye and apparatus, they usually mean to highlight their incomparability. Interestingly enough, the rhetorical liaison between the unequal partners gains new popularity at the very moment when the ability of photography to re­cord the invisible appears on the horizon. The locus classicus is a much-­ quoted remark made by the French astronomer Jules Janssen, who raises his glass during the annual banquet of the Société française de photographie in May 1888 to offer a toast “in honor of photography”: Gentlemen, let us drink to the great helpmeet of science, to the younger sister of writing and the printing press, to the great invention of French origin [. . .] Scientists have finally come to understand that photography is their most dependable auxiliary, and that [. . .] the light-­sensitive photographic film is the scientist’s true retina. Indeed, gentlemen, it is the true scientific retina, for it has all properties that science might wish for.10

Yet the properties of photographic film Janssen proceeds to enumerate have little to do with the function of a retina: It faithfully re­cords the images that emerge on it, and reproduces and duplicates them ad infinitum, as needed; out of the totality of all rays,

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it captures a range that is more than twice as broad as that which the eye is capable of perceiving, and soon it may well capture all radiation; and finally, it possesses the astonishing ability to preserve the impact upon it.11

In elaborating the old comparison, Janssen once more brings out its paradoxical quality: the photographic film is the “true retina,” but it is not a retina, as it sees vastly more and is, moreover, capable of retaining this surplus vision and reproducing it as desired. Before Janssen drinks to photography, he explicitly contrasts the “photographic retina” with “our retina.”12 Christoph Hoffmann has examined the “commonplace” of the “scientist’s true retina” with regard to “what it presupposes and what it obscures,” and demonstrated that the comparison, however simple it may seem, does constitute an “incontrovertible hierarchy”: from the outset, the eye is gauged against the functionality of photography, a contest in which its deficiencies are so obvious that it becomes a candidate for legacy protection. “The advantage of photography over the eye is an advantage only with a view to the task assigned to photography.”13 In the following, however, I want to discuss a question of more immediate interest to the photography of the invisible and the corresponding idea of a “seeing” photographic plate: How does “photography attain a distinctive profile and competence,” how does it “stand out against the operation of the retina”?14 And how does the retina nonetheless remain in play as the perennial point of reference in this confrontation? The efforts undertaken in the late nineteenth century to delineate the contours of the photographic by contrasting it with the sense of vision are not limited to the rhetorical register of banquet speeches, prefaces, and introductory lectures. Researchers stage various experiments that make the eye the object of investigation and systematically play it off against the capacity of photographic apparatuses. I will discuss two examples of this encounter between eye and apparatus: magnesium flash photography, which comes into use in the late 1880s, and the English physicist Vernon Boys’s experiments on the photographic recording of flying projectiles. 6.2 The blind spot of visualization

In 1887 the Potsdamer Nachrichten reported that strong lightning flashes, highly unusual for the season, had been visible on the southeastern horizon on a recent night. The scientists at the local astrophysical observatory had noticed the extraordinary phenomenon as well and kept precise records of its several occurrences. It soon turned out that the flashes in the evening sky were not a rare natural spectacle: they were the work of Adolf Miethe, a professor of chemistry in Berlin, who had ignited a mixture containing 2.5 grams of magnesium powder in a forested area near Potsdam to test its luminosity across large distances. Miethe was no doubt pleased that observers confused his magnesium flashes for a natural light phenomenon: his

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goal was to create an artificial source of illumination that would stand in for natural light and perhaps even prove superior to it. “Since the earliest days of photography,” Londe writes, “photographers have sought to replace the light of the sun with artificial light. Sunlight is no doubt the most effective and economical form of illumination, but it unites these undeniable virtues with no less considerable flaws that flow from its discontinuity and mutability.”15 Until the mid-­nineteenth century, the onset of dusk or a bank of clouds unexpectedly rolling in and obscuring the sun put an end to the photographer’s work. As late as 1914, Londe reports that fog—routinely in London and occasionally in Paris—forced photographers to put their equipment away. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, magnesium light became the prevailing source of artificial lighting for photography. Magnesium ribbon was uncoiled by hand or by a clockwork mechanism and ignited, whereupon it burned with a brilliant white flame. Pictures taken with this method were exposed for several seconds. In the domain of microphotography, this burning time posed no problems. In the portraiture of living models, however, the extended exposure to glaring light had an unintended effect, as Miethe and his colleague Gaedicke noted in 1878: The primary difficulty associated with magnesium light photography, however, which seems entirely insurmountable in portrait photography, lies in the effect the blinding rays have on the model’s facial muscles. As the sudden intense light strikes the eye, it takes rather robust nerves and considerable willpower to prevent convulsion of the face and keep the eyes open without betraying the strenuous effort required to stop them from protecting themselves against the menacing flare. Accustomed to the yellowish and milky light of the kerosene or gas lamp, the sitter suddenly finds himself amid a crossfire of cones of blinding radiation he is expected to brave for tens of seconds while keeping a straight face. A challenging feat for men, this proves impossible for women and children, the great majority of whom will be incapable of persevering in this distressing situation for mere seconds, and the result, even in the absence of pronounced blurring, will be a tortured face, stricken with fear and without resemblance to the original, its expression spiritless, the eyes bulging out like a crab’s.16

A major problem in ordinary portraiture, the physiological effect of glaring light was prohibitive in the domain of medical photography. By startling the subjects, the magnesium light broke the rule the Berlin psychiatrist Robert Sommer had promulgated in his Lehrbuch der psychopathologischen Untersuchungs-­Methoden, a textbook on diagnostic methods in psychopathology: “The patient must not be perturbed by the photographer’s activities.”17 Photography using artificial illumination altered the object it was tasked with reproducing in its normal state; it rendered visible but at the

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price of distorting what it had wrested into the realm of visibility. Ways were found to reduce the exposure to artificial light to a half- or quarter-­second, shortening the “distressing situation” into which models were forced, but now an additional reflex exacerbated the already familiar “expression of fear and dread”: “In the prints, the models’ eyes are closed.”18 The flash of light was brief enough to avert the reaction of “eyes bulging out like a crab’s,” but still too long to preempt the last possible reflex, the closing of the eyes. Miethe’s experiments outside Potsdam were part of his efforts to reduce the exposure to blinding light even further by replacing the magnesium ribbon burning off over time with a sudden flash of light. He worked with magnesium powder he had mixed with other chemicals to heighten the photochemical efficacy of the light. The result seemed satisfactory: “At all events, the flash of light is [. . .] so brief as to rule out the risk of any reaction on the part of the model during the exposure.”19 At the moment the photograph was taken, the subjects literally had no time to react to the flash. The symptoms of their alarm were expelled from the picture. No other experimenter devoted greater efforts to the effects of magnesium light than Albert Londe. The director of the Service photographique at La Salpêtrière, Londe was in charge of taking pictures of its female patients. The psychiatric hospital’s ill-­lit rooms prompted him to resort to artificial sources of illumination. Londe experimented with a chronophotographic apparatus equipped with twelve lenses that could be triggered, one after the other, at intervals as short as one-­thousandth of a second.20 A timing mechanism ignited a magnesium flash, flooding the dark laboratory with a shockwave of glaring light. Londe used the apparatus not only to capture the patients at the Salpêtrière but to photograph the flash that illuminated them. The purpose of these pictures was to determine, on the one hand, which mixture would produce the most intense light most rapidly and, on the other, to re­cord the effects of the blinding incandescence on the eyes and faces of his test subjects. Analogous arrays of twelve snapshots show the ignition of a magnesium blend as it flares up and burns out in the dark laboratory (fig. 49) and the face of a man exposed to its flash (fig. 50). In both sequences, the image gradually rises out of the surrounding darkness, reaches its maximum brightness in the fifth and sixth pictures, and returns to darkness in the final frame. But it is the subject’s eyes in the latter series that are the crucial detail. “Experiment on the closing of the eyes under the influence of the magnesium flash” is the caption Londe chose for the series. The reflexively closed eyes of earlier magnesium light photographs have given way to a different and much subtler deformation. After the flash first strikes the eyes, they keep gazing into the bright light for another seven one-­ thousandths of a second until, in the eighth picture, the blink reflex finally sets in. Once again, the freezing of the living subject in the photograph gen-

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Fig. 49  Albert Londe, chronophotograph of magnesium flash. From La photographie à la lumière artificielle (1914).

erates the kind of disconcerting sight Marey had described—the transformation of a face into an ugly grimace. Removed from the series, some of the pictures might easily be seen as ordinary portraits: in the third photo in figure 50, for example, the man looks at the photographer with a genial smile. But the chronophotographic sequence dismantles the integrity of his seemingly controlled expression. As we read the pictures in sequence, his mouth tells one story, his eyes another: he appears in the first picture,

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beaming at nothing in particular in the darkness of the laboratory, and he is still laughing in the twelfth picture. The frozen smile refuses to go away; meanwhile, though, his eyes have clenched shut. We are aware of the extraordinary brevity of the instant the series re­cords, altogether no longer than twelve milliseconds, yet the serial repetition stretches the man’s smile into a bafflingly drawn-­out grin. Our searching gaze shifts uneasily between these two poles. What, we may ask, could the man possibly have felt and expressed in little more than a hundredth of a second? “With exposure times of half an hour, or even half a minute, we might speak of the sitter’s

Fig. 50  Albert Londe, “Experiment on the closing of the eyes under the influence of the magnesium flash,” chronophotograph. From La photographie à la lumière artificielle (1914).

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authentic expression, of someone presenting himself or herself and communicating something,” Ute Holl writes, “but flash photography, operating on a scale of milliseconds, snatches evidence from movements in instants that are so brief that the patients cannot become aware of them, let alone respond.”21 Given the imperceptibly brief time such pictures capture, the question is to what extent the resulting tableau can be seen as a “portrait” at all. What it shows, in any case, is not the expression of a person but the reflexes of a mask that acts as though independent of its wearer and keeps laughing in the dark, altogether twelve times, at no one and nothing. This odd isolation of the photographic gaze prompted Roland Barthes to ask, “How can we look without seeing?” A sitter gazes at the beholder from a picture, but “in fact, he is looking at nothing” because, at the moment the picture was taken, he faced merely the dark aperture of a lens.22 Instead of an immediate counterpart his gaze might address, the sitter has only the vague apprehension of a pair of eyes that, at a future moment in time and in another place, will become engrossed in the insubstantial surface of his own face. “One might say that the Photograph separates attention from perception, and yields up only the former, even if it is impossible without the latter; this is that aberrant thing, noesis without noeme, an action of thought without thought, an aim without a target.”23 The “aberrant” phenomenon Barthes already discerns in ordinary photography returns even more disruptively in the chronophotographic ceremony. The subject’s gaze is more tenuous still than an “aim without a target,” and just as we wonder whether laughter adrift in the imperceptible fraction of a second may still be addressed as “expression,” we might also question whether two open eyes seeing nothing still possess a “gaze.” For another tableau, Londe sets three pictures side by side. The varying degrees to which the blink reflex is manifest—in the first frame, it has not even set in—are meant to illustrate the different speeds with which several commercially available magnesium blends burn off. The blend used for the first shot gets the highest score; the powder used for the third has flared up too sluggishly, producing an unusable picture. The middle picture shows an intermediate stage: “The pupil has lost its luster. If the expression be permitted, we might speak of a vacant stare [des yeux blancs].”24 Londe summarizes his findings as follows: “Rapid powder. Normal eyes. Slow powder. Blurred and blank eyes. The different positions of the pupil appear in superimposition, obscuring the image of the normal eye. Very slow powder. Closed eyes.”25 Read from left to right, Londe argues, the series pre­sents a progressive disfiguration of the sitter, a sequence of views that “utterly distort the model’s physiognomy.”26 The word in the French original is dénaturer: “to denature,” “to render unnatural.” If we knew nothing of the technical genesis of the three pictures, we, like Londe, would regard the first one as the most normal and natural, the best likeness of the sitter: an ordinary picture of a man who has walked into the photographer’s studio dressed in

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white shirt and tie. The other two render the disconcerting countenance of a somnambulist gradually sinking into unconsciousness. Nothing, however, could be a better illustration of “another nature which speaks to the camera” (Benjamin) than the sight of this technologically generated ordinariness of a human face. “Normal eyes,” in this scenario, are eyes that still look straight ahead after a flash of glaring light has blinded them. What Londe describes as an “unnatural sight” is the natural reflex action of a human being exposed to such light. The ordinary physiognomy of the man in shirt and tie is the product of a technological setup. The chronophotographic normal is uncanny: the subject looks forward with wide-­open eyes to an event that has already taken place. We can clearly see that he has been blinded; only his body does not yet know it. Londe measures the rapidity of photography against human response velocities. As Charcot gave his famous leçons du midi, during which he had his hysterics stage their symptoms, Londe was busy in the Salpêtrière’s photography laboratory perfecting his equipment. “Londe [. . .] envisioned an epistemological function in the experimental arrangement for the new technology”;27 photography, to his mind, was much more than a means to an end. One gets the impression that Londe, who was a chemist and photographer by training and not a physician, was much more interested in the technical feasibility of his pictures than in the diagnostic value of the results. Two pictures of a cataleptic patient at the Salpêtrière published in Henri Fourtier’s handbook Les lumières artificielles en photographie (1895) are captioned “Experiment concerning the rapidity of the photographic powder.”28 The true object of Londe’s photographic experiments was photography itself, and the particular interest of his magnesium flash trials lies in the fact that they made the eye the indicator of progress in chronophotography. Their objective was to undercut the timeframe of perception; their emblem, “our impotent and blinded eye.”29 The same year Londe took up his work at the Salpêtrière, the English physicist Vernon Boys delivered a lecture in Edinburgh on the recording of flying projectiles. Like Mach before him, Boys labored to produce an electric discharge spark that would yield the greatest possible brightness in the briefest possible time. The object to be captured was a bullet fired from a repeating rifle that left the barrel with a speed of 700 meters per second. In its basic elements, Boys’s apparatus was a recreation of Mach’s setup. By replacing some materials with alternatives and using so-­called Franklin plates as conductors, however, Boys managed to reduce the duration of the spark to less than one ten-­millionth of a second. To bring home to his listeners how mind-­bogglingly short this period of time was, he compared it to the slowness of the eye. The illustration (fig. 51) consists of two pictures of the eye of Mr. Colebrook, a mechanic at Boys’s laboratory at the Royal College of Science, London. The first shows Colebrook’s eye in daylight; the second, the same eye blinded by a magnesium flash after waiting in a dark room.

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Fig. 51  Vernon Boys, “The eyes of Mr. Colebrook” (after a photograph), 1893.

The point is to demonstrate the same belated response Londe had produced in his models: “The pupil is seen fully dilated and the eyelid has not had time to come down, and so we might reasonably say that the flash was instantaneous.”30 Still, this instantaneous magnesium flash, which blinds the eye before it can react, is nothing—that is Boys’s message on this evening— against the extraordinary brevity of the electric spark that makes his own pictures possible. Once again, the time of chronophotography is measured— incidentally, as it were, and as an epistemic surplus—against the response velocity of the eye. Indeed, Boys introduced the apparatus to his audience that night as an “electrophotographic eye.”31 A demonstration designed to highlight the inertia of the eye is summed up in a metaphor that borrows attributes of this same—allegedly deficient—organ. The comparison between seeing and the apparatus once again serves to bring out their incomparability. Despite, or perhaps precisely because of, the manifest differences between them, the scientist does not simply abandon the trope that links technology to vision but instead keeps it in place as the metaphorical substratum of his discourse. As the century comes to a close, representatives of various disciplines still quote or paraphrase Janssen’s adage of the “scientist’s true retina.” “The photographic eye,” the physician and zoologist R. Koehler writes in 1893, “sees everything, indefatigably and impartially. The sensitive plate, Mr. Janssen has said, is the scientist’s retina; it adds up the impressions it receives where our eye sees nothing.”32 Three years later, the photochemist Gaston-­Henri Niewenglowski, lecturing to his students at the École polytechnique in Paris, extols the virtues of the silver bromide gelatin plate, “which has rightly been called the scientist’s retina.” He too quotes the comparison only to qualify it with negation upon negation: “As Nicéphore Niépce has said, the photographic apparatus is a new sense organ, a true eye; but it is an eye more perfect than ours, an eye that possesses neither soul nor emotions, and an eye, moreover, that remembers.”33 Time and again, the comparison survives only as a paradox: the apparatus is a sense organ without sense, not an eye and yet the “true” eye of science.

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6.3 The apparatus does not “see”

When writers today resort to the metaphor first circulated by Janssen, they generally use it affirmatively or as a narrative or descriptive device without analytical purchase.34 The notion that photographic recording is a mode of seeing obviously still seems plausible. The formulas under which Michel Frizot subsumes the “all-­powerful eye” of photography and the “forms of the invisible” it reveals—its ability to “see better,” “see further,” and “see through obstacles”—are telling even as the basis for their semblance of self-­ evidence remains unclear. In the catalogue accompanying his exhibition project Beyond Vision, Jon Darius similarly writes that photography “has the ability to expand our limited vision.” In their various ways, each of these descriptions suggests a mindset that conceives technical media, and especially the ways in which they surpass the senses, along the lines of those senses and accordingly understands technologies as artificial amplifications or extensions of, or surrogates for, natural functions. One of the most prominent advocates of this view was Marshall McLuhan. His theory is not exclusively concerned with visual media—McLuhan is primarily interested in television—but his explicit aspiration to install the relation between technology and the body as the leitmotif of a general theory of media is of considerable interest in our context: “It is a persistent theme of this book [Understanding Media] that all technologies are extensions of our physical and nervous systems to increase power and speed.”35 When McLuhan wrote this in the 1960s, his was merely the most recent in a series of similar explanatory models. As Friedrich Kittler notes, McLuhan was “part of a long tradition that can be traced back to Ernst Kapp and Sigmund Freud, who conceived of an apparatus as a prosthesis for bodily organs.”36 In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud had drawn an analogy between organs and tools and memorably called the human being a “prosthetic god” (Prothesengott). The optical instruments Freud mentioned were glasses, the telescope, the microscope, and the camera. “With every tool man is perfecting his own organs, whether motor or sensory, or is removing the limits to their functioning [. . .] Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God.”37 But Freud’s metaphorical language is not entirely consistent. The reference to “limits” removed by means of tools suggests transcending the body or overcoming its defects by means of technology. The concept of the prosthesis, by contrast, invokes the image of a technology that is merely a surrogate for natural functions and at best supplies what the unimpaired body was already capable of.38 Of Freud’s examples, glasses may be said to fit the latter definition: wearing them creates or recreates a normal physical state. But can a telescope, a microscope, or a camera be called a prosthesis of vision in this sense? Their use does not restore a natural state but creates a new capacity. Freud’s argument concludes with a remarkable turn: “Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs

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have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times.”39 Unfortunately, Freud does not elaborate on this vague allusion, leaving us to wonder which difficulties he has in mind.40 But where McLuhan, decades later, speaks of “extensions,” suggesting a seamless continuity between the organic and technological realms, Freud’s observation that man’s artificial organs “have not grown on to him” introduces a breaking point. The interface between the body and technology is unstable, and the tool, far from having been fully assimilated by its human operator, leads a life of its own. In the lectures on “optical media” he delivered at the Humboldt-­ Universität zu Berlin in 1999, Friedrich Kittler, defending the notoriously inhuman quality of his thinking, rejected the study of media as “interfaces between technologies, on the one hand, and bodies, on the other.”41 Semantic borrowing from the operation of organs, he argues, suffers from a methodological defect, the “unquestioned assumption that the subject of all media is naturally the human.”42 Kittler turns the formula on its head: “We knew nothing about our senses until media provided models and metaphors.”43 In which direction these models and metaphors flow—from the body to the media or vice versa—is presumably a question to which there can be no definitive answer, and so the reader may wonder what this symmetrical inversion of the structure of causation accomplishes.44 But the “harsh hypothesis” of the primordiality of media is less important to our context than Kittler’s “suspicion [. . .] that technical innovations—following the model of military escalations—only refer and answer to each other, and the end result of this proprietary development, which pro­gresses completely independent of individual or even collective bodies of people, is an overwhelming impact on our senses and organs in general.”45 The assertion of “completely independent” development of technical apparatuses is probably another exaggeration for argument’s sake. What matters here is that technologies are not mere extensions of natural functions: they develop a dynamic of their own that is a major—perhaps the primary—source of their “impact on our senses and organs.” Instead of understanding technical implements as mere surrogates for natural organs or means for their enhancement, Kittler reminds us—to quote Benjamin again—of “another nature” they provide access to. Rather than amplifying or extending our senses, he writes, technical media “strategically [. . .] override” them.46 “Media have become privileged models according to which our so-­called self-­understanding is shaped precisely because their declared aim is to deceive and circumvent this very self-­understanding.”47 In the final analysis—and in an accurate inversion of McLuhan’s perspective—this implies that media, far from acting in comforting continuity with our selves, should be seen as “enemies”;48 to put it in McLuhan’s terms, they are not “extensions of ourselves” but confront us as alien.49 Without adopting the bellicose tone of his claims, we may apply Kittler’s critique of the theory of media as prostheses to the field of photographic visualization. The notion of an artificial eye that continues to see where its

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natural prototype defers to its authority does not adequately address the fault lines that traverse this juncture. If we go back to Boys’s comparison between eye and apparatus or to Londe’s twelve stages of a blinding (fig. 50), it does seem that the camera and flash “override” rather than “extend” the senses: nothing could illustrate the interrelation between visualization and blinding more strikingly than these pictures bathed in the artificial light of a medium that not only dazed its characters in order to make them visible, but captured the dead time that elapsed before they mounted a response to being blinded. Even when the encounter between apparatus and model takes a less confrontational course, what come into view are differences and discontinuities rather than seamless transitions. Technical implements, Bernd Stiegler writers, “are not simple ‘extensions’ of the organs of perception; they sometimes play a vital part in the genesis of those phenomena that in turn afford us access to a world hidden to the eye.”50 In praising this surplus value and in insisting on the structural difference between camera and eye, even the historic protagonists effectively admit as much. If they nonetheless continue to rely on the tropes of the “artificial eye,” the “scientist’s retina,” the “electrophotographic eye,” this rhetorical inertia must probably be seen as an attempt to facilitate an understanding of the artifacts of photography, with all the disconcerting and equivocal qualities we have noted, by translating them back into a set of familiar ideas. The image of an apparatus that “sees” certainly brings its functions and products back into a sphere of sensory perceptibility with which we are intuitively conversant. The metaphor of the artificial eye suggests a continuity of visibility, an effortless transition from sensory to technical “vision,” but in building that bridge, it marks the very chasm that motivates the rhetorical effort. Donnadieu’s conception of a photographic plate that was the first to “see” the Turin Shroud correctly (see sections 4.6 and 4.7) is the perfect example of this nexus. Faced with the fact that the photographic plate belied what the naked eye saw, Donnadieu countered with the utopian idea of an artificial vision that set recording and seeing on a shared basis, even though the entire experimental arrangement was energized by the differences between them. If the plate really “saw,” its visual added value would be quite limited. Once again, the trope of the “artificial eye” demonstrates the ambivalent structure of the photographic recording: the photographic plate generates a contingency that motivates its employment in the first place but which is also seen as a source of upsetting destabilization. My remarks so far have mostly focused on the generation of photographic images. I have sought to point out that this process ultimately cannot be understood by comparison to the model of the eye and visual perception. Needless to say, I do not mean to deny that, for the pictures produced in this manner to show anything, they need to be seen. My critique solely concerns the notion that recording and seeing are fundamentally and effortlessly translatable into each other. “The apparatus sees differently than the eye,” Karlheinz Lüdeking writes.51 But, and this is more, the apparatus sees

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neither more nor differently—it does not “see” at all; it generates a photographic artifact. And so most of the pictures that illustrate this chapter do not, or only to a very limited extent, evince a quality that Hans Belting’s Anthropology of Images presupposes as the defining property of photography: that it must be understood to be at its core the “medium of a gaze”: Photography reproduces the gaze that we cast upon the world, although we know that an unseeing camera; i.e., without gaze, has captured the image that we are seeing. To be sure, we know that the camera was operated by a photographer, who was guiding it with his gaze. But we would not hesitate to recognize a gaze in a photograph even if the camera’s view of the world had been undirected, entirely random. We cannot but take a photograph for the medium of a gaze—not, in the first instance, our gaze, but the gaze of the photographer, which transfers itself onto our own gaze when we stand before the finished picture.52

Belting too emphasizes that the camera that “captured the image” is “unseeing.” A technology that has no gaze of its own mediates between the photographer’s eye and the eye that later beholds the image. But he goes on to argue that the pictures the camera renders are the products of “another gaze.” A kind of vision has somehow returned to the image captured “unseeingly.” It is expressly called the gaze of another. Belting’s argument is not restricted to normal photography but covers the extreme position of an “undirected, entirely random” shot. But why should we be obliged (“we cannot but”) to conceive such an undirected shot as the expression or precipitation of a human “gaze” at all? Belting’s allusion might bring to mind a landscape shot from the early years of aerial photography (fig. 52). It shows Schloss Friedrichshof, a castle near Kronberg im Taunus in central Germany. The horizon line is skewed, falling away toward the left and leaving the beholder disoriented and a bit dizzy. The only object the eye can fix on is the bright façade of the castle standing out from the surrounding dark woodland, and even this motif, which oddly appears near the bottom right corner of the picture, is slightly cropped and shown in what would seem to be an arbitrarily tilted view: the building lists like a ship about to sink. But we have no human photographer to reproach for these flaws. The picture is a specimen of “carrier pigeon photography,” a technique the apothecary Julius Neubronner patented in 1908 (fig. 53).53 As it flew above the mountains of the Taunus, a pigeon wore a camera, strapped to its body, whose shutter was automatically released at a predetermined point in time. Whom should we regard as the author of this photograph? The pigeon itself conspicuously appears in the picture: at the left and right edges, the tips of its wings frame the shot. Contrasting with the wide expanse of the landscape, this unexpected close-­up puts the viewer right where the picture was taken. Yet even here we do not sense the implicit presence of a gaze. The photograph shows the castle as it fell away into the distance; the pigeon in

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Fig. 52  Unknown pigeon/Julius Neubronner, Schloss Friedrichshof [Schlosshotel Kronberg], around 1908

its flight had already passed it. So who would have seen it at the moment it was taken? The pigeon merely hauled the camera and otherwise followed its own instinct. Neubronner arranged for its production, but he was absent from the scene of its making. And the airborne camera itself saw nothing. No gaze, human or otherwise, underlies the image that surveyed this landscape around 1908. “The pictures,” Neubronner himself wrote, “are often so vastly different from what we are accustomed to seeing that it takes great effort to find one’s bearings.—This is the source of a peculiar charm, though few are sensitive to it.”54 The charm of these pictures, it seems, lay in their nonrecognizability. If Neubronner initially labeled them based on the “classical picture postcard motifs” visible in them, “they became popular precisely because they were anything but classical picture postcards. The photographs witnessed to a perspective the viewer was unable to adopt for himself.”55 We may call what a photograph such as this shows a “view,” but it is a view that no one has ever seen, one that comes into being as a view only ex post facto, when someone looks at the picture. The scene of this shot is no doubt imaginable. But if we do not want to abandon the distinction between seen and imagined views, we will have to say that no act of seeing attended its origin that a later viewer might return to. This is not a case of communication between two gazes meeting each other in the surface of a picture: it is the action of a solitary viewer who transforms an unseeing record into a view.

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Fig. 53  Pigeon as photographer. From Wolfgang Baier, Quellendarstellungen zur Geschichte der Fotografie (München: Schirmer/Mosel Verlag, 1977), p. 638, fig. 219.

Yet we need not invoke the extraordinary case of pictures taken at lonely heights to outline the “space informed by the unconscious” (Benjamin) that no amount of anthropological assimilation will entirely bring under control. There are no doubt numerous instances—probably even the majority—in which photography may indeed be described as a “medium between two gazes.”56 Still, the notion of a simple “transmission” from gaze to gaze remains questionable even with regard to pictures made under less extreme conditions than the photographs discussed in this chapter (photographs taken in the dark, in a tiny fraction of a second, etc.). Joel Snyder has shown as much in the example of Walker Evans’s picture Hotel Porch—and any other picture would serve the argument equally well: Now, the first and most obvious thing about the picture is that we could never see what is shown here in this way, if by “see” we mean how all the depicted objects would have appeared to a viewer standing at the side of

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the camera [. . .] The Evans photograph neither shows nor suggests the way we might have seen what is represented in it. The suggestion that this or any other photograph can stand in for vision is simply wrong if by “stand in” we mean somehow “replicate” vision.57

If that is true for motifs that are part of the world of our senses, it is doubly true of the photographic record of phenomena that were not visibly manifest at the moment they were captured. The majority of the pictures discussed in this book precisely do not reproduce “the gaze that we cast upon the world,” nor are “we” even present at their genesis, regardless of whom exactly that plural is meant to designate. The radiographic screening of a parcel (fig. 40) is not the scene of an “exchange of gazes” in which another, earlier gaze “transfers itself onto our own.”58 No such transfer takes place. The encounter between the X-­ray tube and the beholder’s eye is not a dialogue. The intricate object at the center did not become visible until the picture was taken—no one saw it at the moment of photography (needless to say, this is not to exclude the possibility that, as described, its sight had been anticipated and imagined and that steps had been taken to bring it into existence). . Similarly, the darkness from which Londe drew his experimental subjects in a flash (fig. 50) is basically a space without gaze or vision. Marey’s chronophotographs (fig. 40) further undercut the gaze with their imperceptibly brief exposure time. “At the zero point of perceptibility,” Iris Därmann writes, “the law of time according to which the time of perception coincides with the time of that which is perceived is suspended.”59 Still, this “zero point” was not a blank slate. The photographic “space informed by the unconscious” did not remain unoccupied. Although it eluded immediate observation, people had an idea of what went on in it. The “invisible” of photography was prestructured by expectations, experiences, and imaginations. So if the utopian vision of limitless visualization by virtue of an artificial eye extending our sight is questionable, the opposite extreme—the idea of an absolute darkness from whose heart a clear image of the invisible suddenly emerged—is no more convincing. The scenarios of photographic visualization sketched in these pages all presupposed a “blind tactics.”60 It proceeded tentatively and yet with a sense of direction; its result defied anticipation but was nonetheless structured and imaginable. This constitutive entanglement of visibility and invisibility, of control and elusiveness, is at the heart of my final case study. 6.4 Worthington’s splash pictures I: Black box

Arthur Worthington’s A Study of Splashes came out in 1908.61 The book details the English physicist’s efforts to capture falling drops of water, milk, and mercury by means of spark photography. Figure 54 re­cords a drop of milk striking the surface of water in nine chronophotographic frames. The

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Fig. 54  Arthur Worthington, falling milk drops, photographs, 1908.

first picture shows the drop of milk, an intact ovoid shape, hovering above the water, on whose surface it casts an elongated shadow. In the second picture, it plunges into the water, and the next seven frames show the development and subsidence of a crater-­shaped deformation of the water surface at the site of impact. The photographs are numbered, and as the captions indicate, the entire sequence lasted no more than 0.056 seconds. Worthington’s “Natural History of Splashes”62 includes more than a hundred such photographic records. These latent phenomena from the world of familiar

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liquids may seem utterly peaceful, but Worthington’s studies of milk and water were ultimately motivated by questions in ballistics. Understanding the mechanics of splashes, he hoped, would allow him to draw inferences concerning the physical behavior of solid bodies, resulting in a model for the impact of projectiles that might contribute to the development of improved armoring for warships.63 Once again, the action was set “in absolute darkness.”64 And as in Mach’s, Londe’s, and Boys’s research, vastly disparate scales of time were in play. The illumination produced by the spark, Worthington reports, was so brief that it was to a second as a day is to a thousand years. In 1895 Worthington began a lecture by emphasizing this discrepancy between different regimes of time: “The splash of a drop is a transaction which is accomplished in the twinkling of an eye, and it may seem to some that a man who proposes to discourse on the matter for an hour must have lost all sense of proportion.”65 Once again, the time of perception is incommensurate to an imperceptibly brief time of recording. The disproportion between the brevity of the phenomenon and the great lengths to which Worthington went in encircling it with his apparatuses, as well as in speaking about it, also defined the experimental arrangement, as seen in a diagram from his book (fig. 55). A partition divides the scientist’s workplace into light and darkness. On the right-­hand side, in the “dark

Fig. 55  Arthur Worthington, diagram of laboratory apparatus. From A Study of Splashes (1908).

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room,” a drop of liquid (D) rests on a watch-­glass (W) held in place by an electromagnet (M). The wire that powers the magnet crosses from the darkroom into the laboratory, where the current can be interrupted using a key. As the magnet is switched off, the lever supporting the watch-­glass shoots down and the drop falls, passing the camera (C) and the illuminating spark in the spark-­gap (S) before disappearing in the bowl. To make sure the spark flashes at exactly the desired moment, Worthington used a “timing sphere” (T), a metal ball. Like the drop in the darkroom on the other side of the partition, it rests on a lever held by an electromagnet. The same circuit powers both magnets, so when the current is interrupted, the metal sphere and the drop of milk fall at the same time. The sphere then passes between the terminals S and S, triggering the illuminating spark. The drop height of the timing sphere can be adjusted in minute increments. As the drops fall from an unchanging height and at identical speeds while the drop height of the sphere is varied from shot to shot, the moment of illumination and exposure shifts accordingly. This allows Worthington to capture the impact of the drops on the water surface at various stages. Worthington’s sketch of his workplace once again clearly illustrates the conditions underlying the photographic visualization in the scientific setting: there is a room (the laboratory) in which the experimenter goes about his business, adjusting drop heights, charging batteries, triggering electric illuminating sparks by operating a switch, pacing to and fro, and imagining what is happening at the same time on the other side of the partition, in the “dark room,” a black box in which the carefully orchestrated synchronicity of illuminating spark, electromagnet, falling drop, and photographic plate engenders a picture. “It must [. . .] be observed,” Worthington notes drily, “that the absolute darkness and other conditions necessary for photography are not very favourable for direct vision.”66 Indeed, the scientist (on the left) initially cannot see what he is bringing into view (on the right). The recording of the drop is the final product of a sequence of precisely calculated and synchronized steps Worthington sets in motion with a single initial action of the hand. Where ordinary camera photography presupposed a spatial separation between the recording apparatus and the motif, Worthington connected the two, making the instrument of recording and its object components of the same electrical ensemble. Only this wiring makes it possible to program the process of photographing the drop as an exactly defined sequence in time. Worthington takes photographs by breaking an electrical circuit. His action triggers the picture, but he does not see what it triggers. The author of the resulting pictures is the authority behind their production because he constructs the electrophotographic installation, brings it into position, and supervises and corrects its operation. When the picture is taken, he is not involved as an observer. A Study of Splashes is the sequel to a remarkable earlier book, The Splash of

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Fig. 56  Arthur Worthington, falling milk drops, drawings. From The Splash of a Drop (1895).

a Drop, published in 1895, in which Worthington pre­sents not photographs but reproductions of freehand drawings he made with the assistance of illuminating sparks but without using photography (fig. 56).67 “The observer,” he writes about the genesis of these pictures, “sitting in comparative but by no means complete darkness, faces the apparatus.”68 Worthington’s initial experimental arrangement, that is to say, is entirely focused on the one instant of perception in which the light of the spark allows the experimenter to see the falling drop in its current state. Sitting in a dimly lit room, the observer commits this sight to memory and then draws what he has seen. Between the brief appearance of the image and the experimenter’s recording it on paper from memory, a period intervenes during which the drop exists solely in his mind. A remarkable displacement has occurred between Worthington’s first and second publication, between the graphic and the photographic recording, between the attentive observer in a half-­dark room and the lens trained on the darkness, between the observer inside the room and the one outside it: a shift from the vision of an event that takes place instantaneously to the retrospective contemplation and evaluation of its photo-

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graphic recording, a shift from a setup in which everything culminated in a short-­lived climax of visibility to one that buried this climax in a black box that yielded, from its irrecoverable depth, a retrospective picture. And there is yet another scene on which the example of this spark-­ photography apparatus illuminates the blind spot of the recording process. Worthington openly addressed the difficulties he encountered as he sought to establish and maintain the conditions necessary for photography and pinpointed the “source[s] of uncertainty.”69 His experiments concerning the physical properties of moving liquids soon led him to consider the properties of the recording device he intended to bring the phenomena in question to light. The constellation underlying his trials was characteristic of the practice of photographic visualization: before turning their attention to the resulting pictures, scientists had to concern themselves with the instruments that generated them.70 So the apparatus was part of the picture—not as a motif, but as a regulative framework that profoundly influenced the appearance of the pictures. In the case of electric actuation, there were several technical factors that might affect the recording process in undesirable ways: slight variations in the battery charge caused corresponding changes in the spark discharge, producing more or less intense sparks and over- or underexposed pictures. Moreover, the deactivation of the electromagnets that triggered both the spark and the drop took time—how much time depended on the strength of the electric current and the temperature of the iron cores, which in turn depended on how long the magnets had been switched on. Given that the mercurial nature of the phenomena in question was a central object of investigation, the time the installation itself needed to set itself in motion, accelerating or retarding the sequence of events, could not but be a decisive factor. Not unlike the experiments with flash photography conducted by Albert Londe, who was employed as a portraitist of catalepsy but devoted considerable energy to the scrutiny of the photographic equipment itself, Worthington’s photographic experiments accordingly evince a high degree of self-­reference. It is sometimes virtually impossible to tell whether his goal was to capture something or to determine the conditions under which such shots were feasible or unfeasible. In his study Experiment and Metaphysics (1934), Edgar Wind noted this circular structure and concluded that “the instruments which serve to investigate the world are themselves integral parts of the world that is the subject of investigation, and are therefore affected in turn by the cognition which they themselves have transmitted.”71 In other words, there is no neutral standpoint outside the experiment from which we can gain direct insight into its inner workings. In Worthington’s case, the best imaginable demonstration of how a technology came to be retroflexively trained on itself appears in a series of photographs in which the spark-­photography equipment produced what are effectively self-­portraits. The operation of the setup was crucially dependent on the reliability of

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the timing sphere. Its drop height regulated when the illuminating spark was triggered and exposed the photographic plate. Worthington pre­sents a comparative series of “photographs taken to test the accuracy of the ‘timing.’” The subject, in this instance, is not a falling drop but the timing sphere itself (fig. 57). In the darkness of the laboratory, it plunges down in front of a measuring tape that lets the experimenter determine its exact position at the moment of exposure. The five pictures were taken under identical conditions, and if the behavior of the sphere were perfectly consistent, it would have to appear in the same place in all five shots. Pictures 1, 2, and 4 show the sphere in almost the same position, but pictures 3 and 5 reveal deviations of several tenths of an inch. In the same two photographs, the illuminating spark, which is clearly visible, is considerably brighter, leading Worthington to an explanation of the irregular behavior of the falling sphere. Because the battery charge was much higher when the third and fifth photographs were taken, the discharge spark—and hence the exposure—was triggered a little earlier.72 More remarkable than the resulting quantitative time lag between the pictures (which Worthington estimates at 1/2,700 of a second) is the inevitably circular reasoning that underlies them: the picture of the timing sphere was made using a second timing sphere—the “accuracy of the ‘timing’” could be assessed only by relying on the very authority that was supposed to guarantee such accuracy from the outset. The object under trial was at once also the instrument by which it was tried. There is no position outside Worthington’s experimental arrangement from which one could have observed the recording process. The only source of insight into the inside of the spark-­photographic black box was the black box itself. The behavior of the timing sphere could be depicted only by means of an arrangement that required the use of just such a timing sphere. The blind spot of the recording was not exposed but merely displaced to another location within the experimental structure. For our context, we may once again note that the scene of visualization was not visible as such. The same point is illustrated by an amusing photograph that pulls the curtain on the laboratory in which Vernon Boys manufactured his photographs of flying projectiles. An assistant is operating the capacitive generator used to charge the conductors. Near the left edge of the picture, we can discern the figure of the shooter, who is about to aim the repeating rifle and fire. A box sits at the end of the line of fire; hidden inside it are the two wires the projectile short-­circuits in passing. The inside of the box is pitch black. All of its walls are studded with tubes and cardboard covers to prevent the light entering with the projectile from scattering. For the purpose of this photograph, the top cover of the imaging box has been flipped open like the car of a hood. Light floods inside and we see the uncovered photographic plate—in other words: the two technicians in the picture only pretend to be experimenting. No picture could possibly be taken with an open black box. The message of this photograph, then, is that there cannot be a photograph

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Fig. 57  Arthur Worthington, testing the timing sphere, photographs, 1908.

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of the moment the recording mechanism is triggered. Once it is set in motion, the apparatus revolves around a central void. 6.5 Worthington’s splash pictures II: The necessary fiction

Going back to his old drawings after successfully engineering a way to produce photographic sequences, Worthington thought the differences between the two remarkable. “The mind of the observer,” he noted about the drawings, “is filled with an ideal splash—an ‘Auto-­Splash’—whose perfection may never be actually realized.”73 The draftsman, he argued, was accordingly tempted to recreate the parts of the image he had been unable to perceive in the brief moment of visibility based on those parts he did perceive. In the resulting image, the graphical notation of what he had seen a little earlier blended into that other, ideal image that had taken shape, as it were, along the edges of the visual impressions he had received. By contrast, the photographs were “the first really detailed objective views that have been obtained with anything approaching so short an exposure.”74 The two sets of pictures unquestionably belong to very different technical registers of depiction. The drawings render what Worthington saw and remembered in the act of drawing; the photographs fix an event that no one saw at the moment of its occurrence. The drawings were made by hand and so inevitably presuppose the presence of a draftsman; the photographs were the final outcome of an automated imaging process. Still, it would be too simple to call the drawings “subjective” and the photographs “objective”; to argue that the drawings are the products of a fallacious sensory impression and the photographs, by contrast, the faithful likenesses of the thing itself. In both series of experiments, the “thing itself ” remains elusive. In the second series, that is apparent not only in the blind spot that no amount of engineering was able to efface from the pictures. And I have not even mentioned the true nub of this arrangement. The briefness of the spark and the rapidity with which a falling drop changed shape compelled Worthington to adopt an approach that is not readily apparent from his photographic series. A fair-­minded viewer is likely to assume that fig. 54 represents the record of a single sequence in time. In analogy with Muybridge’s, Marey’s, or Londe’s serial pictures (figs. 40 and 50), she will think that what she is looking at are different phases in the metamorphosis of one object. What the photographs actually show, however, is not a single drop in nine stages of its impact on a water surface, but nine different drops photographed at staggered points in time to capture different stages of their plunge. The abrupt discontinuities between some frames hint at the intervals that separate the pictures. The first two photographs in the series show the drop hovering before an even white surface. In the third picture the scene darkens, and in the fourth it is shrouded in an almost uniform gray. Another noticeable oddity is that different periods seem to have intervened between the pictures. For example,

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the imagination can easily bridge the gaps between the first and second or between the third and fourth photographs. Between the fourth and fifth pictures, by contrast, the object, a fragile structure with tentaclelike offshoots, transmogrifies into a comparatively compact crater that suggests a gelatinous mass rather than a liquid. Worthington, we might say, had issued multiple identities to his experimental objects. The spark-­photographic apparatus was built to execute a particular sequence of steps: actuation triggered the simultaneous falling of the milk drop and the timing sphere, the latter of which triggered production of the spark and the exposure of a picture. To take another photograph, Worthington had to reset the apparatus and insert a new photographic plate. So the frames of the spark-­photographic series were separated not, as the captions indicate, by hundredths of seconds, but by the minutes it took to ready the device for another run—or perhaps Worthington waited a whole day between two pictures in a series. The arrangement of the frames is based on an illusion: where nine different drops appeared, there was to be only one. So the photographic series, in its own way, does what the drawings had done: it produces the image of an “ideal splash” that exists in the viewer’s imagination first and foremost. In the perspective of the program of a scientific photography as outlined by Londe and others, Worthington’s experiments would presumably have been perfect examples of visualization: the phenomenon in question, the shape of a drop in the split second during which it fell, was “invisible,” but the eye of the camera, vigilantly peering into the dark, had reliably made it visible. In this utopian vision—in which photography would re­cord even what is hidden from view—the nineteenth century had furnished the medium with a sense of destiny that, couched in terms that have shifted over time, is alive to this day and informs the discourse on more recent technologies as well:75 “However complex an object may be,” Londe noted, “nothing is now easier than obtaining its absolutely faithful photographic reproduction [. . .] Whether the object is small or large, whether it is close or, on the contrary, distant, it cannot escape us.”76 Our study of Worthington’s experiments has suggested a different conclusion. The camera teased a series of pictures out of the darkness of the laboratory with the assistance of an electric spark, but it did not simply translate invisible objects into visibility. On the one hand, Worthington, during his earlier experiments, had seen the phenomenon with his own eyes, if only for split seconds, and drawn its likeness as an “ideal splash.” So the darkness in the “dark room” of his laboratory was far from impenetrable, its contours known from the outset. On the other hand, the imagination continued to be at work, in a previously unimagined manner, in the contemplation of his photographs. The circular closure of his apparatus gave rise to a necessary fiction. What could not be seen had to be imagined. One of the masters of chronophotographic visualization is in fact a key witness to this point. In the final chapter of Movement, Marey clearly identifies one condition of visualiza-

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tion: “Although chronophotography represents the successive attitudes of a moving object, it affords a very different picture from that which is actually seen by the eye when looking at the object itself. In each attitude the object appears to be motionless, and movements, which are successively executed, are associated in a series of images, as if they were all being executed at the same moment. The images, therefore, appeal rather to the imagination [esprit] than to the senses [sens].”77 Marey reminds us that the pictures, in the final analysis, did not “reproduce” anything, instead engendering a form of visibility that involved the beholder’s imagination as well. They showed things in ways that were “very different [. . .] from that which is actually seen by the eye” and created a space of the “optical unconscious” that viewers could not but imagine as well. Conclusion Every photographic image is a sign, above all, of someone’s investment in the sending of a message. (Allan Sekula) For there to be a “message,” several conditions must be met:—first, there must be a noise. (Michel Foucault)

This book opened with a photographic ruin (fig. 1) and a quote from Roland Barthes about the transparency of photography, its immediacy and its attesting to the “thing itself.” One might have expected that this confrontation of a theory of photographic lucidity with the maimed body of an image would be the preface to a critical demonstration of the falsehood, perhaps even the frivolousness, of that theory. This critique would have rejected Barthes’s insistence on the mimetic nature of photography by pointing out the conspicuous materiality of the medium without which such mimesis would be impossible. It would have exposed his claim that a photograph is an “emanation of past reality” as a naïve realism,78 and it would have articulated yet another variant of the critique Barthes himself anticipated in Camera Lucida: “It is the fashion, nowadays, among Photography’s commentators (sociologists and semiologists), to seize upon a semantic relativity: no ‘reality’ (great scorn for the ‘realists’ who do not see that the photograph is always coded), nothing but an artifice: Thesis, not Physis; the Photograph, they say, is not an analogon of the world; what it represents is fabricated.”79 This critique of a putative realism—the critical labor of highlighting the codes, artificiality, and constructed quality of photographic images—­ defines the academic engagement with photography even today. In its perspective, the interpretation of the photograph as an inscription of the real on the photosensitive surface has no basis in specific properties of the medium and instead turns out to be the effect of mere attributions, a social construction, convention, discourse, or ideology. The same critique has long also been applied to the visual worlds of the natural sciences. In this domain,

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too, the assumption that a photograph shows the “thing itself ” has lost its innocence. The constructed, conventional, and artificial qualities of a picture, the deliberate interventions and compositional intentions of its manufacturers have increasingly been the focus of attention. In many ways, the argument presented in this book has shared this perspective: against the notion of photography’s immediacy, I have highlighted the realities of the recording processes; in my critique of the formula of the “visualization of the invisible,” I have sought to show that the picture is manufactured—not latent, already present, in the realm of invisibility. The outcome of such visualization, I have demonstrated, has been neither unequivocal nor self-­evident, instead generating a reservoir of abstractness that first needed to be ordered, interpreted, and imagined. Yet it has not been my intention in this book to add another variation to the rejection of photographic realism or to offer another “critique of credulity.”80 Instead, it is my basic methodological proposal that we should undercut the dichotomies this critique generally presupposes—subjective versus objective, constructed versus realist, artificial versus natural—from the very start. Most of the pictures and techniques I have discussed cannot be adequately understood in the framework prescribed by these dichotomies; they do not fit into the paradigm of “invention,” “artificiality,” and “construction.” An irreducible surplus remains—that dimension of photography which cannot be, properly speaking, “invented” or “constructed,” which must occur, which comes to pass as an event. A photograph, it is important to note, is also an incident: something in the picture falls into place in it or befalls the photographer. Needless to say, this event does not come to pass without having been carefully brought about, planned, and staged. Yet much of photography eludes the total control of its producers, as Talbot already noted when he informed his readers that the camera always also “unconsciously recorded” things the photographer had failed to notice.81 And so the discussion in these pages has been devoted in many ways to the unforeseeable, incidental qualities of photography, to the “obtrusiveness” of the material, photochemical demons, and the photographer’s “enemies.” We have examined the unintended imprints of light that were marginalized by the genealogies of photographic history as its improper “prehistory”; we have studied the blind spots and intervals of recording during which the apparatuses were left to their own devices. The photographer’s share in the picture, I have shown, is not a static category; it varies depending on the function of a picture, the intention behind it, and the process employed to make it. In the earlier chapters, such unforeseeable incidents came into view primarily as unintended disruptions of representation; then the focus shifted to arrangements in which the sensory apparatus of photography was deliberately used to generate unforeseeable records. In these experimental scenarios, the partial autonomy of the photographic recording equipment proved to be not an obstacle but, on the contrary, an indis-

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pensable condition of visualization. It was harnessed to allow phenomena to emerge whose outlines had yet to be traced. The authors of such techniques arrange for sequences of procedures and set them in motion, but they also turn parts of their experimental installations adrift: Strindberg leaves his plates exposed for hours to the light of a full moon; Worthington, ensconced in his laboratory, initiates processes in the adjacent darkroom that elude his direct control. The operator supervises and intervenes, but there are parts of the process from which he is excluded by design. In most instances, he sees what the apparatus has produced under his guidance only after the fact—and he often does not know in advance what the “mysterious” phenomena might be (fig. 22). In this context, a completely predictable, malleable, and controllable photographic record would be redundant. An experimental technique must “create a space for the emergence of new signals,” of “things and concatenations not sought for.”82 The majority of the pictures I have discussed arose from such concurrences of control and disorientation, design and accident, intervention and unpredictability. The two modes, far from being mutually exclusive, complemented or depended on each other. That is why I have not sought to expose yet again the fallacy of photographic images, to strip away their semblance of naturalness. Instead, I have drawn attention to the ways artificiality and naturalness, construction and incident, the photographer’s contribution and that of the apparatus are inextricably interwoven. “There was a time, no doubt, when the indexicality criterion and the Barthesian ça-­a-­été [it-­has-­been/it-­was] were abused. Every time we looked at a photograph, we spoke of ontology, consequently neglecting the formal procedures specific to this medium. But to opt for the diametrically opposed point of view is to trade the all for the nothing, which means losing sight of photographic power itself, as well as the (problematic) point where the images touches the real.”83 This peculiar point has been at the heart of my argument in these pages. It is, as Didi-­Huberman concedes, “problematic” because the insistence on the power of the “real” easily creates the impression that the purpose is to unlearn what we have learned about the historical, aesthetic, and social dimensions of all products of human making in the name of an ontology. But installing “construction,” “invention,” “subjectivity,” or “artificiality” as absolutes makes for no less barren theory. We must seek to keep both in sight: the technical making and the necessary unpredictability of what is made, the intentional and the accidental aspects, representation and its potential disruption. These modes are not antagonists; we cannot choose to side with one or the other. To which agent should the “emanation of the referent” Barthes described owe its existence if not to the interposition of photography’s mediating powers, which at once implies their potential emergence into visibility? The latter, then, marks not a failure of representation but one of its prerequisites—“the more instruments, the more mediation, the better the grasp of reality.”84 Mediation

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underlies photographic representation and at once jeopardizes it—it is both what makes representation possible and the source of its potential opacity or equivocation. That is why the cracked glass plate of a photograph can stand next to Barthes’s apology of photographic transparency without flatly disavowing it.

Notes

Introduction 1.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 45. 2. Ibid., 5. 3. Ibid., 6. 4. Georges Didi-­Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, trans. Shane B. Lillis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 79–80. 5. Georges Didi-­Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, trans. John Goodman (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 194 (translation modified). 6. Erwin Panofsky, “Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History (New York: Doubleday, 1955), 30–31. 7. Didi-­Huberman, Confronting Images, 280n50. 8. Karlheinz Lüdeking, “Vierzehn Beispiele fotografischer Selbstreflexion,” in Grenzen des Sichtbaren (Munich: Fink, 2006), 32. 9. Martin Seel, Ästhetik des Erscheinens (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), 261. 10. Michael Lynch, “Science in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Moral and Epistemic Relations between Diagrams and Photographs,” Biology and Philosophy 6, no. 2 (April 1991): 208. Chapter 1 1. 2.

3.

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-­Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Continuum, 2005), 3. Thomas Elsaesser, “Eine Erfindung ohne Zukunft: Thomas A. Edison und die Gebrüder Lumière,” in Filmgeschichte und frühes Kino: Archäologie eines Medienwandels (Munich: Text + Kritik, 2002), 49. Michel Frizot, “L’invention de l’invention,” in Pierre Bonhomme, ed., Les multiples inventions de la photographie: Actes des colloques de la Direction du Patrimoine (Paris: Ministère de la Culture, de la Communication, des Grands Travaux et du Bicentenaire, Mission du Patrimoine Photographique, 1989), 103.

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Georges Canguilhem, “The Object of the History of Sciences,” trans. Mary Tiles, in Gary Gutting, ed., Continental Philosophy of Science (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 198. 5. Pierre Lamy, quoted in E. N. Santini, La photographie à travers les corps opaques par les rayons électriques, cathodiques et de Röntgen avec une étude sur les photofulgurales (Paris: C. Mendel, 1896), 69–70. 6. Camille Flammarion, Les caprices de la foudre (Paris: Flammarion, 1905), 266, 250. On Flammarion, see also Georges Didi-­Huberman, “L’empreint du ciel,” Antigone: Revue littéraire de photographie 20 (December 1994): 13–64; Philippe Dubois, “La tempête et la matière-­temps, ou le sublime et le figural dans l’œuvre de Jean Epstein,” in Jacques Aumont, ed., Jean Epstein: Cinéaste, poète, philosophe (Paris: Cinémathèque française, 1998), 267–323. 7. Flammarion, Les caprices de la foudre, 277. Flammarion’s neologism “rayons cérauniques” derives from the Greek keraunós (thunderbolt). 8. Santini, La photographie à travers les corps opaques, 78; Flammarion, Les caprices de la foudre, 250, 268. 9. Santini, La photographie à travers les corps opaques, 80. 10. Ibid., 78. 11. Alphonse Davanne and Maurice Bucquet, Le musée rétrospectif de la photographie à l’Exposition universelle de 1900 (Paris: Gauthier-­Villars, 1903), 9. 12. Ibid. 13. Alphonse Davanne, La photographie, ses origines et ses applications: Conférence faite à la Sorbonne, le 20 mars 1879 (Paris: Gauthier-­Villars, 1879), 9. 14. Erich Stenger, Die Photographie in Kultur und Technik: Ihre Geschichte während hundert Jahren (Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 1938), 19. 15. See Michel Frizot, “Light Machines: On the Threshold of Invention,” in Frizot, ed., A New History of Photography (Cologne: Könemann, 1998), 18; Helmut Gernsheim, Geschichte der Photographie: Die ersten hundert Jahre (Frankfurt am Main: Propyläen, 1983), 11; Bernard Marbot, “Sur le chemin de la découverte,” in Jean Claude Lemagny and André Rouillé, eds., Histoire de la photographie (Paris: Bordas, 1986), 12; Heinz Haberkorn, Anfänge der Fotografie: Entstehungsbedingungen eines neuen Mediums (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1981), 12; Wolfgang Baier, ed., Quellendarstellungen zur Geschichte der Fotografie (Munich: Schirmer-­Mosel, 1977), 7; Josef Maria Eder, Geschichte der Photographie (Halle an der Saale: Knapp, 1932), 52; Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography: From 1839 to the Present, rev. ed. (New York: Random House, 1982), 9. 16. See, e.g., the contributions to “Die Geschichte der Geschichte,” special issue of Fotogeschichte 17, no. 63 (1997), and Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). 17. Mathias Bickenbach, “Die Unsichtbarkeit des Medienwandels: Soziokulturelle Evolution der Medien am Beispiel der Fotografie,” in Wilhelm Voßkamp and Brigitte Weingart, eds., Sichtbares und Sagbares: Text-­Bild-­Verhältnisse (Cologne: DuMont, 2005), 105–39. 18. Stenger, Die Photographie in Kultur und Technik, 19. 19. Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, pt. 2, 1931–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 507; cf. Benjamin, “Kleine Geschichte der Photographie,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. ii/1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 368.

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20. Georges Potonniée, Histoire de la découverte de la photographie (Paris: Montel, 1925), 7; Baier, Quellendarstellungen zur Geschichte der Fotografie, 50; Gernsheim, Geschichte der Photographie, 48, 30. See also Helmut Gernsheim, “La première photographie du monde,” Études photographiques, no. 3 (1997), 6–25. 21. Dufay, quoted in Eder, Geschichte der Photographie, 116. 22. “A piece of thin paper with a purple tint, a truly unprepossessing view, a glance at the window and, just barely, at the world beyond it [. . .] But it is primarily the view of the outside that exerts such a fascination on the beholder. Talbot took photographs of other views later on, and as in this photograph, the window frame or the slightly open casement was always part of the pictures’ iconography.” Hubertus von Amelunxen, Die aufgehobene Zeit: Die Erfindung der Photographie durch William Henry Fox Talbot, exh. cat. (Berlin: Nishen, 1989), 27. 23. Eder, Geschichte der Photographie, 116. 24. A reproduction appears in Frizot, “L’invention de l’invention,” 104. 25. Ibid. 26. Eder, Geschichte der Photographie, 1. 27. Ibid., 215. 28. Ibid., 3, 11, 7, 138. 29. Ibid., 31–44. 30. Ibid., 101. This view is shared by C. Schiendl, Geschichte der Photographie (Leipzig: Hartleben, 1891), 10; and see Baier, ed., Quellendarstellungen zur Geschichte der Fotografie, 21. 31. On this point—as in the early historiography of photography more generally—how an author allocates the merits of contributions to the invention and further development of photography may depend on his own nationality. In the present case, however, Eder’s definition of photography as the purposeful creation of a light-­image was probably the decisive reason for his choice of an early date and his emphasis on Schulze. 32. Josef Maria Eder, “Einleitung,” in Eder, ed., Quellenschriften zu den frühesten Anfängen der Photographie bis zum XVIII. Jahrhundert (Halle an der Saale: Knapp, 1913), 14. See also Eder, Johann Heinrich Schulze: Der Lebenslauf des Erfinders des ersten photographischen Verfahrens und des Mitbegründers der Geschichte der Medizin (Vienna: K. k. graph. Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt, 1917), 49. 33. Gernsheim, Geschichte der Photographie, 29–30. 34. Schiendl, Geschichte der Photographie, 10, 21. 35. Batchen, Burning with Desire, 112. 36. Thomas Wedgwood and Humphry Davy, “An Account of a Method of Copying Paintings upon Glass, and of Making Profiles by the Agency of Light upon the Nitrate of Silver” [1802], in The Collected Works of Sir Humphry Davy, ed. John Davy, vol. 2, Early Miscellaneous Papers (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1893), 243. 37. Ibid., 242–43. 38. Ibid., 243. 39. Hermann Vogel, Die chemischen Wirkungen des Lichts und die Photographie in ihrer Anwendung in Kunst, Wissenschaft und Industrie (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1874), 6. 40. Wedgwood and Davy, “Account of a Method of Copying Paintings,” 242. 41. Frizot, “Light Machines,” 19. 42. François Brunet gives presumably unintentional proof of this contingency of beginnings by adding further conditions to the familiar catalogue of criteria. He stands out among the historians of photography discussed in these pages in listing “at least

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four modalities” that need to be present before one can speak of the invention of photography: the technological requirements; institutional recognition; the possibility of a “subjectivist” interpretation (which, he argues, was undertaken by Talbot); and sufficiently wide circulation of the medium (which, he writes, is demonstrable for the United States). And so the scholarship knows another origin of photography courtesy of Brunet, the “single point of departure” and “actual nodal point” in which the “various threads” of its history intersect. Brunet, La naissance de l’idée de photographie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000), 29. 43. Jacques Derrida, “Une certaine possibilité impossible de dire l’événement,” in Derrida, Gad Soussana, and Alexis Nouss, Dire l’événement, est-­ce possible? Séminaire de Montréal, pour Jacques Derrida (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), 95. 44. Ibid., 95–96 45. Gernsheim, Geschichte der Photographie, 11. Batchen attempts to subject the discussion of the inception of photography to a “deconstructive dynamic” but even so does not abandon this logic. He replaces the quest to identify the “first photograph” with the quest “for the first idea of photography.” Instead of asking “who invented photography,” he writes, we ought to ask, “At what moment in history did the desire to photograph emerge and begin insistently to manifest itself? [. . .] Who showed evidence, written or otherwise, of wanting to photograph, even before Daguerre and Talbot had in fact made such a thing possible?” The history of successful inventors is thus transformed into the history of those who first felt the desire to photograph. This shifts responsibility for the invention of photography from the long list of inventors to a “social imperative” and a “discursive desire.” The traditional distinction between photography properly speaking and proto-­photography remains untouched: Batchen, too, knows photographers and “proto-­photographers,” knows a prehistory of “photo-­prophetic aspirations” and a stage of “quasi-­photographic experiments” that predate actual photography; Batchen, Burning with Desire, 181, 29, 36, 52, 38, 50, 52, 39. For a critical assessment of this view, see also Wolfgang Hagen, “Die Entropie der Fotografie: Skizzen zu einer Genealogie der digital-­elektronischen Bildaufzeichnung,” in Herta Wolf, ed., Fotokritik am Ende des Fotografischen Zeitalters, vol. 1, Paradigma Fotografie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002), 198. 46. Frizot, “Light Machines,” 15. 47. Eder, “Einleitung,” 20. 48. See, e.g., Vogel, Die chemischen Wirkungen des Lichts, 4–5: “It was a single step from the discovery of the darkening of paper impregnated with silver nitrate to the invention of photography, and yet a long time passed before anyone thought of producing images solely by means of light, and even more time before these attempts were crowned with success.” 49. Batchen, Burning with Desire, 21. 50. Ibid. It seems, moreover, that to Batchen’s mind, the question of the “natural” or “cultural” provenance of photography is completely unrelated to the material qualities of the phenomena: it is a mere tussle over “metaphors,” which accordingly needs to be addressed “at the level of language”; see ibid., 68–69, 177. 51. See, e.g., Wolfgang Baier’s “history of photography,” whose second chapter, entitled “The Discovery of Photography,” is subdivided into sections on “Joseph Nicéphore Nièpce’s invention,” “The invention of the daguerreotype by Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre,” and “The invention of photography by William Henry Fox Talbot”; Baier, ed., Quellendarstellungen zur Geschichte der Fotografie, v. The very first paragraph of Larry Schaaf ’s introduction to his edition of Talbot’s notebooks mentions the latter’s

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“invention” of photography, but a few pages later Schaaf calls it a “discovery”; Larry J. Schaaf, ed., Records of the Dawn of Photography: Talbot’s Notebooks P & Q (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), xiii, xv. See also Marbot, “Sur le chemin de la découverte,” 12; Haberkorn, Anfänge der Fotografie, 38, 46; and Schaaf, “Invention and Discovery: First Images,” in Beauty of Another Order: Photography in Science, ed. Ann Thomas, exh. cat. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 26–59—the last of which names the abovementioned distinction in the title but never gets around to addressing it. 52. Talbot, in a letter dated January 30, 1839, Literary Gazette, February 2, 1839. 53. William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1844), n.p. 54. Hans-­Jörg Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 133. 55. Bruno Latour, “Do Scientific Objects Have a History? Pasteur and Whitehead in a Bath of Lactic Acid,” trans. Lydia Davis, Common Knowledge 5, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 88, 82. 56. See ibid., 89. 57. Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 182. “This entails that we should be able to say that not only the microbes-­for-­us-­humans changed in the 1850s, but also the microbes-­ for-­themselves. Their encounter with Pasteur changed them as well. Pasteur, so to speak, ‘happened’ to them.” Ibid., 146. 58. Ibid., 182, 174. 59. Ibid., 147. 60. Ibid., 190, 303. 61. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-­Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. and ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 142. 62. Didi-­Huberman, Confronting Images, 141. 63. Gaston-­Henri Niewenglowski, Chimie des manipulations photographiques: phototype négatif (Paris: Gauthier-­Villars, 1899), 5. 64. “And so when it is used in the finishing of enclosed apartments, it remains of its own colour without defects; but in open places like peristyles and exedrae and so forth, where the sun and moon can send their brightness and their rays, the part so affected is damaged and becomes black, when the colour loses its strength.” Vitruvius, On Architecture, book 7, trans. Frank Granger, Loeb Classical Library, vol. 280 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934), 117–19. 65. Eder, Geschichte der Photographie, 3. 66. Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media, trans. Anthony Enns (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2010), 119. Chapter 2 1. 2.

3.

Marian Schwabik, “Zum ersten Mal—ein Mensch auf einem Foto,” Foto Magazin 26, no. 7 (1974): 70. On the history of the Munich daguerreotypes and the attempts to restore them, see Ullrich Pohlmann and Marjen Schmidt, “Das Münchner Daguerre-­Triptychon,” Fotogeschichte 14, no. 52 (1994): 3–13. See, e.g., Newhall, History of Photography, 16.

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Carol Armstrong, Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843–1875 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 441. 5. Victor Regnault, “Rapport et programme présentés à la Société française de photographie,” in Prix fondé par M. le Duc de Luynes (Paris: Mallet-­Bachelier, 1856), 3. 6. Hermann Vogel, quoted in Baier, ed., Quellendarstellungen zur Geschichte der Fotografie, 194. 7. L. Mathet, Les insuccès dans les divers procédés photographiques (Paris: Mendel, 1893), 1–2. 8. Paul Valéry, Cahiers, ed. Judith Robinson, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 229. 9. Paul Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer, Pure War, trans. Mark Polizotti, rev. ed. (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997), 37–38. 10. Paul Virilio, “The Primal Accident,” in Brian Massumi, ed., The Politics of Everyday Fear (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 212. Virilio accordingly proposes that museums of technology ought to exhibit not only the history of technological achievements—inventions, machines, apparatuses—but the corresponding history of malfunctions and collapses. “Every technology, every science should choose its specific accident, and reveal it as a product—not in a moralistic, protectionist way (safety first), but rather as a product to be ‘epistemo-­technically’ questioned.” Virilio and Lotringer, Pure War, 39. 11. Paul Virilio, The Original Accident, trans. Julie Rose (London: Polity, 2007), 70. 12. Johann Heinrich Schulze, “Scotophorus (Dunkelheitsträger), anstatt Phosphorus (Lichtträger) entdeckt; oder merkwürdiger Versuch über die Wirkung der Sonnenstrahlen” [1727], in Eder, ed., Quellenschriften zu den frühesten Anfängen der Photographie, 99. 13. Daniel Kehlmann, Measuring the World, trans. Carol Brown Janeway (London: Quercus, 2007), 11–12. 14. Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 507. 15. Ludwig Schorn and Eduard Kolloff, “Der Daguerreotyp,” in Wolfgang Kemp, ed., Theorie der Fotografie, vol. 1, 1839–1912 (Munich: Schirmer und Mosel, 1980), 56–57. 16. Vogel, Die chemischen Wirkungen des Lichts, 31. 17. William Henry Fox Talbot, “Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing,” London and Edinburgh Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science 14, no. 87 (January–­ June 1839): 206. 18. Larry J. Schaaf, The Photographic Art of William Henry Fox Talbot (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 34. 19. Talbot, Pencil of Nature, n.p. (plate iii). 20. “The era’s historians of photography choose to study the apparatus rather than what it generates, the material rather than what the chemical reactions render visible.” Timm Starl, “Bilderatlas und Handbuch: Zu einigen Aspekten der fotogeschichtlichen Darstellungen bei Josef Maria Eder und Hermann Krone,” in Wolfgang Hesse and Starl, eds., Photographie und Apparatur: Der Photopionier Hermann Krone. Bildkultur und Phototechnik im 19. Jahrhundert (Marburg: Jonas, 1998), 217. 21. Gottfried Jäger, preface, in Jäger, ed., Die Kunst der abstrakten Fotografie/The Art of Abstract Photography (Stuttgart: Arnoldsche Verlagsanstalt, 2002), 7 (translation modified). See also Thomas Kellein and Angela Lampe, eds., Abstrakte Fotografie (Ostfildern-­Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2000). 22. Jäger, preface, 12. 23. Ibid., 12–13. 24. At least the art-­theoretical premises of abstract painting, down to the vocabulary,

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are brought back: note the terms “abstract,” “absolute,” “nonrepresentational,” and “concrete,” and compare the role of the same terms in the history of ideas about abstract painting; see, e.g., Max Bill, “Einführung,” in Wassily Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Berne: Benteli, 1952), 13–14. 25. Jäger, ed., Art of Abstract Photography, 33–34.] 26. “Fragekasten,” Photographische Rundschau 9, no. 5 (1895): 159. 27. Ibid. 28. Paul E. Liesegang, Illustriertes Handbuch der Photographie (Berlin: Grieben, 1864), quoted in Baier, ed., Quellendarstellungen zur Geschichte der Fotografie, 162. 29. Adolf Hertzka, “Fehlerscheinungen beim Verarbeiten von Gelatinetrockenplatten,” Jahrbuch für Photographie und Reproduktionstechnik 10 (1896): 36. 30. Josef Maria Eder, H. Lüppo-­Cramer, F. Wentzel, M. Andresen, and A. Tanzen, Die Photographie mit Bromsilbergelatine und Chlorsilbergelatine (Halle an der Saale: Knapp, 1930), 433–54; see also the chapter “Les insuccès” in Albert Londe, La photographie moderne: Pratique et applications (Paris: G. Masson, 1888), 148–54, and the chapters “Insuccès éprouvés pendant la préparation du phototype négatif ” and “Insuccès éprouvés pendant la préparation de l’épreuve positive” in Georges Brunel, La photographie pour tous: Traité complet, théorique et pratique de la photographie et ses applications aux arts, aux sciences et à l’industrie (Paris: H. Geffroy, 1894), 108–21, 201–7. 31. V. Cordier, Les insuccès en photographie (Paris: Gauthier-­Villars, 1876), 5. 32. A. Tanzen, “Fehler bei der Verarbeitung von Platten und Films,” in Josef Maria Eder, Lüppo-­Cramer, M. Andresen, and A. Tanzen, Verarbeitung der photographischen Platten, Filme und Papiere (Halle an der Saale: Knapp, 1930), 349–350. 33. Ibid., 333 34. Ibid., 335. 35. Paul Sieg, Fotografie in den Tropen (Berlin: Union, 1934), 8. 36. See Kurt Fritsche, Das große Fotofehler-­Buch (Leipzig: Fotokinoverlag, 1959); Tanzen, “Fehler bei der Verarbeitung,” 332–66; Eder et al., Die Photographie mit Bromsilbergelatine und Chlorsilbergelatine, 433–54; “Scrutator” of The Photogram [pseud.], Photographic Failures: Prevention and Cure (London: Dawbarn and Ward, 1905); Georges Maurion, Le matériel photographique, ses imperfections, comment les reconnaître, comment y remédier (Paris: Gauthier-­Villars, 1902); G. Naudet, Insuccès photographiques: Comment les éviter, comment y remédier (Paris: Desforges, 1900); Mathet, Les insuccès dans les divers procédés photographiques; Cordier, Les insuccès en photographie. 37. Tanzen, “Fehler bei der Verarbeitung,” 339. 38. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 69. 39. Ibid., 68. 40. “Was ist da geschehen?,” Photo- und Kinosport, no. 13 (undated), n.p. 41. Eder et al., Photographie mit Bromsilbergelatine und Chlorsilbergelatine, 434, 436, 439; Tanzen, “Fehler bei der Verarbeitung,” 338. 42. For a description of the agency of photochemistry as a “lapsus” (with a nod to Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life), see Clément Chéroux, Fautographie: Petite histoire de l’erreur photographique (Crisnée: Yellow Now, 2003), 133, 156. 43. Vogel, Die chemischen Wirkungen des Lichts, 125. 44. Heidegger, Being and Time, 69. 45. Eder et al., Die Photographie mit Bromsilbergelatine und Chlorsilbergelatine, 435, 436, 442.

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46. See, e.g., René Colson, La plaque photographique: Propriétés, le visible, l’invisible (Paris: Carré et Naud, 1897), ii. 47. Michael Hampe, Die Macht des Zufalls: Vom Umgang mit dem Risiko (Berlin: WJS, 2006), 14. 48. René Colson, “Revue des actions à distance capables d’influencer les couches photographiques,” Bulletin de la Société française de photographie, series 2, vol. 16, no. 20 (1900): 481. 49. Latour, Pandora’s Hope, 147. 50. Virilio, Original Accident, 70. 51. Ibid., 9. 52. Ibid. 53. Joseph Gerlach, “Über die Steigerung der Vergrößerung auf photographischem Wege,” Monatsberichte der Königlich Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, June 1861, 596–97. 54. Ibid., 597. 55. Joseph Gerlach, Die Photographie als Hülfsmittel mikroskopischer Forschung (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1863), 12. 56. Ibid., 11. 57. See Olaf Breidbach, “Representation of the Microcosm: The Claim for Objectivity in 19th Century Scientific Microphotography,” Journal of the History of Biology 35, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 232–34; Breidbach, “Der sichtbare Mikrokosmos: Zur Geschichte der Mikrofotografie im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Hesse and Starl, eds., Photographie und Apparatur, 138. 58. Richard Neuhauss, Lehrbuch der Mikrophotographie (Braunschweig: Bruhn, 1880), 68. On the problems posed by such non-­“representational” photochemical “figments,” see also Jutta Schickore, “Fixierung mikroskopischer Beobachtungen: Zeichnung, Dauerpräparat, Mikrofotografie,” in Peter Geimer, ed., Ordnungen der Sichtbarkeit: Fotografie in Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002), 302–5. 59. Gerlach, Die Photographie als Hülfsmittel. 60. Schorn and Kolloff, “Der Daguerreotyp,” 56. 61. J. Scheiner, “Die Verwendung der photographischen Methoden in den exakten Wissenschaften, insbesondere in der Astronomie,” Archiv für wissenschaftliche Photographie 1, no. 1 (1899): 5. On the visibility of the grain, see also Christine Karallus, “Die Zeit der Chemie: Zu den fotochemischen Voraussetzungen der ballistischen Versuche Ernst Machs,” in Christoph Hoffmann and Peter Berz, eds., Über Schall: Ernst Machs und Peter Salchers Geschoßfotografien (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2001), 326– 33. 62. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 99, 5. 63. Ibid., 100; and see also Roland Barthes, La chambre claire: Note sur la photographie (Paris: Gallimard and Seuil, 1980), 155–56. 64. C. Karg and G. Schmorl, Atlas der pathologischen Gewebelehre in mikrographischer Darstellung (Leipzig: Vogel, 1893), ix. See also Breidbach, “Representation of the Microcosm,” 244. 65. Abel Buguet, “Le halo photographique,” Photo-­Journal (1891), 107. 66. Marie-­Alfred Cornu, “Lichthöfe in der Photographie,” Jahrbuch für Photographie und Reproduktionstechnik 4 (1890): 59, 52–53. 67. K. Günther, “Ueber Lichthöfe und deren Vermeidung,” Jahrbuch für Photographie und Reproduktionstechnik 5 (1891): 142.

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68. G. Riehm, “Ein Mittel gegen Reflexschleier,” Jahrbuch für Photographie und Reproduktionstechnik 10 (1896): 30. 69. “Because first you have to become proficient at getting the greasy stuff off. Take just a little too much benzine or turpentine, and the oil, saturated with pigment, will creep around the edge of the plate to the photosensitive side, plus you’ll stain your hands all over [. . .] You’ve painstakingly cleaned your fingers and sat down for dinner when the maid comes rushing in, her face and hands embellished by black dapples; she’s noticed only just now that the faucet in the bathroom was soiled with printer’s ink; her fingers picked up the villainous black stuff as she made up the bedroom, but she didn’t notice: she used the same fingers to turn down the beds, occasionally touched her own face, and only a passing glance in the mirror revealed the black fiend! It took until every deposit of the gooey substance had been spotted and removed.” Ibid., 33. 70. Cornu, “Lichthöfe in der Photographie,” 62. 71. G. Eberhard, “Lichthöfe und lichthoffreie Trockenplatten,” Jahrbuch für Photographie und Reproduktionstechnik 10 (1896): 263. 72. Riehm, “Ein Mittel gegen Reflexschleier,” 30; M. Goddé, “Enduit antihalo,” Bulletin de la Société française de photographie, series 2, vol. 14, no. 13 (1898): 326; see also, in the same issue, Auguste Lumière and Louis Lumière, “Plaques antihalo,” 320. 73. J. Scheiner, “Die Verwendung der photographischen Methoden,” 6. 74. Michael Lynch, “The Production of Scientific Images: Vision and Re-­Vision in the History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Science,” in Luc Pauwels, ed., Visual Cultures of Science: Rethinking Representational Practices in Knowledge Building and Science Communication (Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2006), 38n5. 75. Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 10. 76. Ibid., 43. 77. See Henri Becquerel, “La radioactivité de la matière,” Revue générale des sciences pures et appliquées 13, no. 13 (July 15, 1902): 603–10; Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, Über eine neue Art von Strahlen (Würzburg: Stürtz, 1895), translated as “On a New Kind of Rays,” trans. Arthur Stanton, Nature 53, no. 1369 (January 23, 1896): 274–76; Vernon C. Boys, “On Electric Spark Photographs, or Photography of Flying Bullets &c. by the Light of the Electric Spark,” pt. 1, Nature 47, no. 1218 (March 2, 1893): 415–21; Hippolyte Baraduc, L’âme humaine: Ses mouvements, ses lumières et l’iconographie de l’invisible fluidique (Paris: Carré, 1896); Louis Darget, “Photographie des radiations psychiques,” Le spiritualisme moderne 3, no. 2 (January 20, 1899); Julien Ochorowicz, “Les mains fluidiques et la photographie de la pensée,” Annales des sciences psychiques 22, no. 4 (April 1912). 78. Adrien Guébhard, “De l’emploi de la plaque voilée comme enregistreur,” Bulletin de la Société française de photographie, series 2, vol. 14, no. 18 (1898): 441; Guillaume de Fontenay, “La chimicographie et la prétendue photographie du rayonnement vital,” Annales des sciences psychiques 23, no. 3 (March 1913): 76. 79. “Photechie—Russell-­Effekt—Wirkung von Dämpfen, Ozon usw. auf photographische Platten,” Jahrbuch für Photographie und Reproduktionstechnik 19 (1905): 368. 80. “Die Wirkungen von gewissen Metallen und organischen Substanzen auf photographische Platten,” Jahrbuch für Photographie und Reproduktionstechnik 13 (1899): 10. 81. W. J. Russell, “On Hydrogen Peroxide as the Active Agent in Producing Pictures on a Photographic Plate in the Dark,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 64 (1898): 412–13. 82. “Die Wirkungen von gewissen Metallen,” 9.

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83. J. Blaas, “Über photographische Wirkungen im Dunkeln,” Naturwissenschaftliche Wochenschrift, n.s., 3, no. 13 (December 27, 1903): 200. On these experiments, see also Rolf H. Krauss, Jenseits von Licht und Schatten: Die Rolle der Photographie bei bestimmten paranormalen Phänomenen. Ein historischer Abriß (Marburg: Jonas, 1992), 66–70. 84. Blaas, “Über photographische Wirkungen.” 85. J. Blaas, “Über photographische Wirkungen im Dunkeln” [continued], Naturwissenschaftliche Wochenschrift, new series, vol. 3, no. 20 (February 14, 1904): 316. 86. Paul Czermak, “Wirkung verschiedener Substanzen auf photographische Platten,” Jahrbuch für Photographie und Reproduktionstechnik 19 (1905): 44. 87. Colson, “Revue des actions à distance.” 88. Colson, La plaque photographique, 157. 89. Ibid., ii. 90. Christoph Hoffmann and Jutta Schickore, “Secondary Matters: On Disturbances, Contamination, and Waste as Objects of Research,” Perspectives on Science 9, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 123–25. 91. Guillaume de Fontenay, “Le rôle de la plaque sensible dans l’étude des phénomènes psychiques,” pt. 3, “Les trahisons de la plaque photographique,” Annales des sciences psychiques 21, no. 6 (November–­December 1911): 350. 92. Ibid., 351. Fontenay is alluding to the so-­called voile latente, a pretreatment of the photographic plate manufacturers applied to increase its sensitivity. 93. Arthur W. Goodspeed, “The Röntgen Phenomena,” Science 3, no. 63 (March 13, 1896): 395. 94. Ibid. 95. Otto Glasser, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen and the Early History of the Roentgen Rays (San Francisco: Norman, 1993), 223–24. 96. Serres, Parasite, 70. 97. Goodspeed, “Röntgen Phenomena,” 395–96. 98. Michael Lynch, Art and Artifact in Laboratory Science: A Study of Shop Work and Shop Talk in a Research Laboratory (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), 108. 99. Rheinberger makes this point with regard to nineteenth-­century microscopy; see Hans-­Jörg Rheinberger, An Epistemology of the Concrete: Twentieth-­Century Histories of Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 222. 100. On artistic production and chance, see Robin Kelsey, Photography and the Art of Chance (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2015). 101. For the complications of the concept of “abstract photography,” see section 2.2. 102. Thomas Fechner-­Smarsly, “Die Alchemie des Zufalls: August Strindbergs Versuche zwischen Literatur, Kunst und Naturwissenschaft,” in Henning Schmidgen, Peter Geimer, and Sven Dierig, eds., Kultur im Experiment (Berlin: Kadmos, 2004), 152. 103. August Strindberg, “On the Action of Light in Photography: Reflections Occasioned by the X-­rays,” in Selected Essays, trans. Michael Robinson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 161. 104. Ibid., 163. On Strindberg’s photographic works, see Clément Chéroux, L’expérience photographique d’August Strindberg (Arles: Actes Sud, 1994); Bernd Stiegler, “August Strindberg: Photographie zwischen Naturalismus und Super-­Naturalismus,” in Philologie des Auges: Die photographische Entdeckung der Welt im 19. Jahrhundert (Munich: Fink, 2001), 268–89; Dario Gamboni, “‘Dieses Schillern der Eindrücke freute mich . . .’: August Strindberg und unabsichtliche Bilder im Paris der 1890er Jahre,” in

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Gerhart von Graevenitz, Stefan Rieger, and Felix Thürlemann, eds., Die Unvermeidlichkeit der Bilder (Tübingen: Narr, 2001), 173–86; Fechner-­Smarsly, “Die Alchemie des Zufalls”; David Campany, “Art, Science and Speculation: August Strindberg’s Photographics,” in Ollé Granath, ed., August Strindberg: Painter, Photographer, Writer (London: Tate Publications, 2005), 113–19. 105. August Strindberg, “Der Himmel und das Auge,” in Thomas Fechner-­Smarsly, ed., Verwirrte Sinneseindrücke: Schriften zu Malerei, Fotografie und Naturwissenschaften (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1998), 118. 106. August Strindberg, “Über die directe Farbfotografie,” in Fechner-­Smarsly, ed., Verwirrte Sinneseindrücke, 119–20. 107. Dario Gamboni, Potential Images: Ambiguity and Indeterminacy in Modern Art (London: Reaktion, 2001), 177. 108. Strindberg, “Der Himmel und das Auge,” 119. 109. Procès-­verbaux des séances de la Société astronomique de France (1895), 29, quoted in Chéroux, L’expérience photographique d’August Strindberg, 53. 110. August Strindberg, “The New Arts! or The Role of Chance in Artistic Creation,” in Selected Essays, 103–5. 111. Strindberg, “Der Himmel und das Auge,” 117. 112. Ibid. 113. Ibid. 114. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” in “Seeing Science,” special issue, Representations, no. 40 (Autumn 1992), 81–82. 115. Chéroux, L’expérience photographique d’August Strindberg, 67. 116. Strindberg, “Der Himmel und das Auge,” 118. 117. August Strindberg, “The Sunflower,” in Selected Essays, 180. 118. See Gamboni, Potential Images, 76. 119. Dario Gamboni, “Acheiropoiesis, Autopoiesis und potentielle Bilder im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Friedrich Weltzien, ed., Von selbst: Autopoietische Verfahren in der Ästhetik des 19. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Reimer, 2006), 70. See also Gamboni, Potential Images, 176–77; Gamboni, “‘Dieses Schillern der Eindrücke freute mich . . .’” 120. Fechner-­Smarsly, “Die Alchemie des Zufalls,” 164. 121. Strindberg, “New Arts,” 107. 122. Ibid., 106. 123. Douglas Feuk, “The Celestographs of August Strindberg,” Cabinet, no. 3 (Summer 2001), http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/3/celesographs.php. 124. Strindberg, “New Arts,” 105–6. 125. Leonardo da Vinci, A Treatise on Painting, trans. John Francis Rigaud (London: J. Taylor, 1802), 84. On this “tendency to read natural phenomena as images,” see also Lorraine Daston, “Nature Paints,” in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 136–38; Jurgis Baltrušaitis, “Pierres imagées,” in Aberrations: Essai sur la légende des formes (Paris: Flammarion, 1995), 87–149; Jean-­Paul Sartre, The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination, trans. Jonathan Webber (London: Routledge, 2004). 126. Ernst H. Gombrich, “The Image in the Clouds,” in Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 181–203. 127. Gamboni, Potential Images, 16.

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128. Ibid. 129. See Marjen Schmidt, Fotografien in Museen, Archiven und Sammlungen: Konservieren, Archivieren, Präsentieren (Munich: Weltkunst-­Verlag, 1994). 130. Ulf Erdmann Ziegler, “Ein komplexer Charakter: Über Nobuyoshi Arakis fotografisches Werk,” in Nobuyoshi Araki: Shijyo–­Tokyo. Markt der Gefühle, ed. Zdenek Felix (Zurich: Edition Stemmle, 1998), 21. 131. Ibid. 132. Ibid. 133. On Cameron, see Kelsey, Photography and the Art of Chance: 66–101; Dario Gamboni, “‘Fabrication of Accidents’: Factura and Chance in Nineteenth-­Century Art,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 36 (Autumn 1999), 219. 134. Friedrich Weltzien, “Defekt-­Effekt: Realitätseffekte des Fotografischen,” in Alexandra Kleihues, ed., Realitätseffekte: Ästhetische Repräsentation des Alltäglichen im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: Fink, 2008), 63–93. 135. Peter Winter, “Manipulieren, ironisieren, malträtieren: Das Foto unter der Hand des Künstlers,” Das Kunstwerk 42 (1989): 5–62. 136. Johannes Brus, “Dem Profi stehen die Haare zu Berge,” in Ars viva 76: Künstler arbeiten in Industriebetrieben, exh. cat., Wilhelm-­Lehmbruck-­Museum der Stadt Duisburg, Kunsthalle Nürnberg (1976), 10–11. 137. Maria Morris Hambourg, “Polke’s Recipes for Arousing the Soul,” in Sigmar Polke: Photoworks. When Pictures Vanish, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1995), 41; see also Viktoria Schmidt-­Linsenhoff, “Sigmar Polkes Fotoreisen,” in Petra Lange-­Berndt and Dietmar Rübel, eds., Sigmar Polke: Wir Kleinbürger! Zeitgenossen und Zeitgenossinnen. Die 1970er Jahre (Cologne: Walther König, 2009), 340– 59; Charles W. Haxthausen, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its (Al)Chemical Transmutability: Rethinking Painting and Photography after Polke,” in Sigmar Polke: The Three Lies of Painting, exh. cat. (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 1997), 185–202. 138. Schmidt-­Linsenhoff, “Sigmar Polkes Fotoreisen,” 353. 139. Seel, Ästhetik des Erscheinens, 237. 140. “Poison Is Effective; Painting Is Not: Bice Curiger in Conversation with Sigmar Polke,” Parkett, no. 26 (1990), 26. 141. Sartre, Imaginary, 35. 142. Didi-­Huberman, Confronting Images, 207–8. 143. See Emmanuel Alloa, “Transparenz und Störung: Vom zweifelhaften Nutzen eines kommunikationswissenschaftlichen Paradigmas für Theorien des Bildes,” in Markus Rautzenberg and Andreas Wolfsteiner, eds., Hide and Seek: Das Spiel von Transparenz und Opazität (Munich: Fink, 2010), 25–36. Chapter 3 1.

See Jules-­Bernard Luys, Iconographie photographique des centres nerveux: Ouvrage accompagné d’un atlas . . . , 2 vols. (Paris: Baillière, 1873). 2. Ibid., 1:iii. 3. Daston and Galison, “Image of Objectivity,” 82–83. 4. Luys, Iconographie photographique, 1:iii. Luys also stresses that his photographs are “utterly devoid of artistic qualities” (1:iv.) 5. Andreas Mayer, Sites of the Unconscious: Hypnosis and the Emergence of the Psychoanalytic Setting, trans. Christopher Barber (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 28.

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6.

Jean-­Martin Charcot and Paul Richer, “Contribution à l’étude de l’hypnotisme chez les hystériques: Du phénomène de l’hyperexcitabilité neuromusculaire,” Archives des neurologie 2 (1881): 33, quoted in Mayer, Sites of the Unconscious, 28–29. 7. Mayer, Sites of the Unconscious, 82. The hypnotized “hysterical subjects become so sensitive, such delicate reagents, that no word or gesture escapes their notice; they see, hear and retain everything, like registering instruments.” Alfred Binet and Charles Féré, Le magnétisme animal, 4th ed. (Paris: Alcan, 1890), 142, quoted in Mayer, Sites of the Unconscious, 82. But the hypnotized patients were regarded as “recording devices” also in a very literal sense: they were urged to write down their impressions in the manner of an écriture automatique. Mayer, Sites of the Unconscious, 84. 8. Mayer, Sites of the Unconscious, 27. 9. Jules-­ Bernard Luys, “Action psychique des aimants, des courants électro-­ magnétiques et des courants électriques continus,” Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de la Société de biologie, series 9, vol. 2 (March 15, 1890): 143. 10. Jules-­Bernard Luys, Les émotions chez les sujets en état d’hypnotisme: Études de psychologie expérimentale . . . (Paris: Baillière, 1887), 8–9, 11. 11. Ibid. 12. Jules-­Bernard Luys, “De la visibilité directe des effluves cérébraux,” Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de la Société de biologie, series 9, vol. 5 (June 17, 1893): 638. 13. Ibid., 639. 14. Ibid., 638. 15. Ibid., 640. 16. Ibid., 641. 17. Luys, Les émotions chez les sujets, 11. 18. Jules-­Bernard Luys and Émile David, “Photographies des étincelles électriques dérivant soit de l’électricité dynamique (bobine de Ruhmkorff), soit de l’électricité statique (machine de Wimshurst),” Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de la Société de biologie, series 10, vol. 4 (May 8, 1897): 449. 19. Ibid., 450. 20. See Wolfgang Hagen, “Feddersens Fotofunken,” in Das Radio: Zur Geschichte und Theorie des Hörfunks. Deutschland/USA (Munich: Fink, 2005), 22–26; Denis Canguilhem, Le merveilleux scientifique: Photographie du monde savant en France 1844–1918 (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 102–11. See also O. Lehmann, Die elektrischen Lichterscheinungen oder Entladungen, bezeichnet als Glimmen, Büschel, Funken und Lichtbogen . . . (Halle an der Saale: Knapp, 1898), especially chap. 10, “Elektrische Abbildung (Elektrographie),” 87–90. 21. Luys and David, “Photographies des étincelles électriques,” 453. 22. See section 2.6. 23. See Carl-­Ludwig Freiherr von Reichenbach, Odisch-­magnetische Briefe (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1852); Reichenbach, Odische Begebenheiten zu Berlin in den Jahren 1861 und 1862 (Berlin: Schroeder, 1862). For a good overview of these theories and the attempts to verify them by means of photography in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Krauss, Jenseits von Licht und Schatten. And see Andreas Fischer and Veit Loers, eds., Im Reich der Phantome: Fotografie des Unsichtbaren, exh. cat. (Ostfildern-­Ruit: Cantz, 1997), as well as Clément Chéroux and Andreas Fischer, eds., Le troisième œil: La photographie et l’occulte (Paris: Gallimard, 2004). 24. The collodion process was called “wet” because the plates had to be prepared fresh for each shot and developed immediately after exposure. With the “dry” gelatin pro-

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cess, plates could be coated with the light-­sensitive layer at the factory and stored between exposure and development. 25. Ludwig Tormin, Magische Strahlen: Die Gewinnung photographischer Lichtbilder lediglich durch odisch-­magnetische Ausstrahlung des menschlichen Körpers (Düsseldorf: Schmitz & Olbertz, 1896), 18. “The objection Prof. Vogel in Berlin has recently raised against the photographic experiments Reichenbach undertook at the time—that the pictures he obtained resulted from the uneven evaporation of the wet collodion plates that were then in use—will have little traction when today’s silver bromide gelatin plates are used.” Ibid., 17–18. 26. Jules-­Bernard Luys and Émile David, “Note sur l’enregistrement photographique des effluves qui se dégagent des extremités des doigts et du fond de l’œil de l’être vivant, à l’état physiologique et à l’état pathologique,” Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de la Société de biologie, series 10, vol. 4 (May 29, 1897): 518. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 517. 29. Ibid., 518. 30. “Neues über das Reichenbachsche ‘Od,’” Photographische Rundschau 9, no. 10 (October 1, 1897): 314. 31. For an account of the debate, see also Clément Chéroux, “La photographie des fluides: Un alphabet de rayons invisibles,” in Chéroux and Fischer, eds., Le troisième œil, 114–25. 32. Ludwig Jankau, “Neues über das Reichenbach’sche ‘Od,’” Internationale photographische Monatsschrift für Medizin 4 (1897): 98. 33. René Colson, “Action de la main sur la plaque photographique,” Bulletin de la Société française de photographie, series 2, vol. 14, no. 1 (1898): 27. 34. Ibid., 23. 35. Ibid., 29. 36. Emil Jacobsen, “Bilder, erzeugt durch Wärmeunterschiede,” Photographische Rundschau 12 (1898): 47. 37. Paul Yvon, “Sur les causes d’erreur inhérentes à la production du voile en photographie,” Bulletin de la Société française de photographie, series 2, vol. 14, no. 4 (1898): 111. 38. Guébhard, “De l’emploi de la plaque voilée,” 440. 39. Adrien Guébhard, “Die Verwendung der verschleierten Platte zum Nachweis von Bewegungen im Entwicklerbad,” Jahrbuch für Photographie und Reproduktionstechnik 13 (1899): 384. 40. Guébhard, “De l’emploi de la plaque voilée,” 440. 41. Georges Didi-­Huberman, “‘Superstition,’” in Phasmes: Essais sur l’apparition (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1998), 57–63. 42. Guébhard, “Die Verwendung der verschleierten Platte,” 383. 43. Ibid., 384. 44. Ibid., 383. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid., 384. 47. Axmann, “Über Handstrahlen,” Photographische Rundschau 13 (1899): 43. 48. Guébhard, “De l’emploi de la plaque voilée,” 440. 49. But see Krauss, Jenseits von Licht und Schatten, 11, 28–31, who discusses the controversy over the effluves in his study on the “role of photography in certain paranormal

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phenomena” and seeks to stake out a “strictly neutral” position by “detailing both the circumstances that appear to confirm the authenticity of a phenomenon and those that appear to prove its inauthenticity.” 50. Guébhard, “Die Verwendung der verschleierten Platte,” 385. 51. On spiritistic photography, see Chéroux and Fischer, eds., Le troisième œil; Fischer and Loers, eds., Im Reich der Phantome; Krauss, Jenseits von Licht und Schatten; Jennifer Tucker, Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 65–125; Tom Gunning, “Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theater, Trick Films, and Photography’s Uncanny,” in Patrice Petro, ed., Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 42–71. 52. See Krauss, Jenseits von Licht und Schatten, 127–29. 53. Guébhard, “Die Verwendung der verschleierten Platte,” 384; Guébhard, “De l’emploi de la plaque voilée,” 440. 54. Guébhard, “Die Verwendung der verschleierten Platte,” 383–84. 55. Jacobsen, “Bilder, erzeugt durch Wärmeunterschiede,” 48. 56. Ibid. 57. Colson, “Action de la main sur la plaque photographique,” 34. 58. Baraduc, L’âme humaine, 4. On Baraduc, see Krauss, Jenseits von Licht und Schatten, 51–56; Fischer and Loers, eds., Im Reich der Phantome, 15; Philippe Dubois, “Le corps et ses fantômes,” in L’acte photographique et autres essais (Paris: Nathan, 1990), 205– 24; Georges Didi-­Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, trans. Alisa Hartz (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 91–99. 59. Baraduc, L’âme humaine, 39. 60. Ibid., 38–39. 61. Ibid., 38. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid., 34. An exploration of the religious and intellectual traditions that contributed to this notation system would be beyond the scope of the present discussion, which is primarily concerned with the function Baraduc ascribed to the photographic plate. 64. J. Bossavy, Les photographies de prétendus effluves humains (Le Mans: Imprimerie de l’Institut de bibliographie, 1900), 440–42. 65. Guébhard, “De l’emploi de la plaque voilée,” 440. 66. Adrien Guébhard, Les Brandtiques (polémique effluviste) (Paris: Camproger, 1898), 1. 67. Krauss, Jenseits von Licht und Schatten, 116–19. 68. Fontenay, “Le rôle de la plaque sensible.” 69. “Die Wirkungen von gewissen Metallen,” 11. 70. Jules Janssen, “Discours de M. Janssen,” Bulletin de la Société française de photographie, series 2, vol. 14, no. 4 (1888): 168. Chapter 4 1.

2.

The question of whether the Turin Shroud is, according to the best current science, genuine or not—whether it is an actual impression of the body of Christ, a painted copy, or a forgery made with the intention to deceive—is irrelevant to my argument. Antoine de Lalaing, quoted in Paul de Gail, Le visage de Jésus-­Christ et son linceul, 2nd ed. (Paris: Éditions France-­Empire, 1977), 292–93.

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3.

François Lecercle, “De la relique à l’image: La promotion du Suaire de Turin,” in Symboles de la renaissance, vol. 3 (Paris: Presses de l’École normale supérieure, 1990), 105. Lecercle also offers an overview of the theological debates over the shroud. 4. Ibid. 5. Georges Didi-­Huberman, “The Paradox of the Phasmid” [1998], trans. Alisa Hartz, http://www.usc.edu/dept/comp-­lit/tympanum/3/phasmid.html. (For the original, see the chapter “Le paradoxe du phasmes,” in Didi-­Huberman, Phasmes, 15–21.) 6. The year 1898 was the fiftieth anniversary of the Statuto Albertino, the constitution of the Kingdom of Sardinia, which became the basis for the laws of the Kingdom of Italy. In Turin, the occasion was celebrated with a number of exhibitions presenting the region’s industries and arts. A special “committee on the exhibition of religious art” was in charge of the presentation of the shroud. On the historic context of the 1898 presentation, see John Walsh, The Shroud (New York: Random House, 1963). 7. Ernst von Dobschütz, Christusbilder: Untersuchungen zur christlichen Legende (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1899), 76. 8. Paul Vignon, “Réponse à M. Donnadieu,” L’université catholique 40, no. 7 (1902): 368. See Georges Didi-­Huberman, “L’indice de la plaie absente,” Traverses, no. 30–31 (March 1984), 151: “One saw virtually nothing, that means: in this ‘virtually’ one already saw something other than nothing. So one did in fact see something, quite simply by foreseeing it or desiring to see it.” 9. Georges Didi-­Huberman, “La ressemblance par contact: Archéologie, anachronisme et modernité de l’empreinte,” in Didi-­Huberman, ed., L’empreinte, exh. cat. (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1997), 53. 10. Didi-­Huberman, Confronting Images, 191. 11. Pia’s interest in photography dated back to the 1870s. Most of his pictures document the art and architecture of his native Piedmont. He contributed to several exhibitions, and in 1890 his architecture photographs received an award. 12. Walsh, Shroud, 14. See also “La photographie du saint suaire de Turin,” Cosmos: Revue des sciences et de leurs applications, no. 701 (July 2, 1898), 10. 13. These two photographs were at the heart of the ensuing debate. On the seven additional pictures Pia took on May 25 and 28, 1898, see Gian Maria Zaccone, “La fotografia della sindone del 1898: Recenti scoperte e conferme nell’archivio Pia,” Sindon, n.s., no. 3 (December 1991), 69–94. On the history of the reception of Pia’s photographs, see Didi-­Huberman, “L’indice de la plaie absente”; Peter Geimer, “L’autorité de la photographie: Révélations d’un suaire,” Études photographiques, no. 6 (May 1999), 67–99; Stefanie Diekmann, Mythologien der Fotografie: Abriß zur Diskursgeschichte eines Mediums (Munich: Fink, 2003); Hans Belting, Das echte Bild: Bildfragen als Glaubensfragen (Munich: Beck, 2005), 63–67. 14. Secondo Pia, “Mémoire,” in Arthur Loth, La photographie du Saint Suaire de Turin: Authenticité du Suaire, documents nouveaux et concluants, avec reproductions photographiques (Paris: Oudin, 1910), 19. The text of the Italian manuscript is published in Giuseppe Pia, “La prima fotografia della SS. Sindone,” in Sindon 3, no. 5 (April 1961): 33–50. 15. Dubois, “Le corps et ses fantômes,” 211. 16. The painting is now attributed to Francesco Maria della Rovere. 17. Pia, “Mémoire,” 17. 18. “Un fatto meraviglioso,” Osservatore Romano, June 14–15, 1898, quoted in Pia, “La prima fotografia della SS. Sindone,” 44. 19. Loth, La photographie du Saint Suaire, 23.

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20. Ibid., 28–29. 21. Marie-­José Mondzain has pointed out the peculiar analogies between the Christian doctrine of revelation and the technology of photography. In a discussion of the photographs of the shroud, she shows how theological notions effortlessly filtered into the vocabulary of photography: “The foundations of the faith are manifest in the translation of a technological into a spiritual vocabulary. Light, revelation, darkness, objectif [i.e., both lens and objective] . . . these are what dreams are made of.” Mondzain, Image, icône, économie: Les sources byzantines de l’imaginaire contemporain (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 244. Concerning the photographic decryption of the Turin Shroud as a negative, Mondzain notes that “negative theology has met its photochemical double” (246). On the double meaning of the résurrection of Christ, see also Didi-­Huberman, “L’indice de la plaie absente,” 153; Philippe Dubois, “Le corps et ses fantomes”, in L’acte photographique (Paris: Nathan, 1990), 209–11. 22. See, e.g., Werner Bulst and Heinrich Pfeiffer, Das Turiner Grabtuch und das Christusbild, vol. 1, Das Grabtuch: Forschungsberichte und Untersuchungen (Frankfurt am Main: Knecht, 1987), 22. 23. Paul Vignon, Le linceul du Christ: Étude scientifique (Paris: Masson, 1902), 3. 24. Ibid., 11. 25. Ibid., 53. 26. Ibid., 160. 27. Ibid., 11–12. 28. Ibid., 5. 29. Henri Terquem, L’authenticité du linceul du Christ: État actuel de la question (Paris: Paclot, 1902), frontispiece. 30. Didi-­Huberman, Confronting Images, 189. 31. In 1897 Vignon started working for the journal L’année biologique, which Delage edited. Delage soon made Vignon his assistant at the Sorbonne and at the Musée de l’histoire naturelle, where Vignon conducted his own experiments, publishing his findings in various scientific journals, including the Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des sciences. 32. Vignon, Le linceul du Christ, 157–86. 33. Ibid., 159. 34. Ibid., 25. 35. Ibid., 110. 36. Ibid., 25. 37. Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (New York: Phaidon, 1995), 16. 38. Vignon, Le linceul du Christ, 2. 39. Ibid., v. 40. See Ulysse Chevalier, Étude critique sur l’origine du St. Suaire de Lirey–­Chambéry–­ Turin (Paris: Picard, 1900), 25. 41. Chevalier subsequently expanded on it in two further publications: Le St. Suaire de Lirey–­Chambéry–­Turin et les défenseurs de son authenticité (Paris: Picard, 1902) and Autour des origines du Suaire de Lirey (Paris: Picard, 1903). For another contribution to the debate from source criticism, see Joseph du Teil, “Autour du Saint-­Suaire de Lirey: Documents inédits, remarques juridiques et esquisse généalogique,” Mémoires de la Société nationale des antiquaires de France, series 7, vol. 1 (May 28, 1902): 191–218. 42. Analecta Bollandiana 19 (1900), quoted in Chevalier, Étude critique, 5. 43. Chevalier, Étude critique, 5.

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44. Ibid., 55, 8. 45. Vignon, Le linceul du Christ, iv. 46. Ibid., 129. 47. Ibid., 127. 48. Vignon’s use of these two concepts probably derives from Claude Bernard’s widely-­ read Introduction à l’étude de la médecine experimentale (Paris: Baillière, 1865). 49. Vignon, Le linceul du Christ, 17. 50. Walsh, Shroud, 23. 51. Vignon, Le linceul du Christ, 38. 52. Ibid., 3. 53. Ibid., 42. 54. Ibid., 3. 55. Ibid., 54. 56. Didi-­Huberman, “La ressemblance par contact,” 23. 57. Alois Auer, Die Entdeckung des Naturselbstdruckes oder die Erfindung von ganzen Herbarien, Stoffen, Spitzen, Stickereien und überhaupt allen Originalien und Copien . . . (Vienna: Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, 1854), 5. See also ibid., 22: “I have no doubt that the ‘self ’ in the term I have chosen [Naturselbstdruck, i.e., ‘self-­printing of nature’] will over time be dropped for the sake of brevity, and I would indeed have left it out from the outset, but I wanted to highlight the unsurpassable resemblance that only nature itself can impart to its own depiction.” 58. Francis Galton, Finger Prints (London: Macmillan, 1892), 168. 59. See Simon A. Cole, Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 169–70. 60. Vignon, Le linceul du Christ, 126. 61. Ibid., 50. 62. Ibid., 54. 63. Dobschütz, Christusbilder, 76. In 1902, the same year that Vignon’s Étude scientifique was published, the French archaeologist Fernand de Mély placed the shroud in the acheiropoietic tradition as well: “The Turin Shroud now presumably also numbers among the pictures some wish to describe as mysterious.” Mély, Le Saint Suaire de Turin est-­il authentique?, 2 vols. (Paris: Poussielgue, 1902), 1:11. 64. “Christ’s portrait was referred to as mandylion (from the Latin mantele, ‘towel, napkin,’ and Arabic mandil, ‘veil, handkerchief ’).” Ewa Kuryluk, Veronica and Her Cloth: History, Symbolism, and Structure of a “True” Image (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991), 4. For the history of the Mandylion and the underlying legendary tradition, see Dobschütz, Christusbilder, 102–96; Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994), 208–15; Kuryluk, Veronica and Her Cloth, 38–47. 65. See Kuryluk, Veronica and Her Cloth, 114–42; Belting, Likeness and Presence, 215–24; Dobschütz, Christusbilder, 197–262. 66. Didi-­Huberman, Confronting Images, 190. See also Dobschütz, Christusbilder, 132, 268. 67. Vignon, Le linceul du Christ, 157. 68. Didi-­Huberman, “La ressemblance par contact,” 53. 69. Belting, Likeness and Presence, 47. 70. “The impressions on the linen cloth were produced by some physical (or miraculous) agency.” Loth, La photographie du Saint Suaire, 116. 71. Vignon, Le linceul du Christ, 120.

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72. Ibid., 75. 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid., 76. 75. Colson, “Revue des actions à distance,” 481. 76. René Colson, “Action du zinc sur la plaque photographique,” Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l’Académie des sciences 123, no. 1 (1896): 49. See also Colson, “Action du zinc et d’autres métaux sur la plaque photographique,” Bulletin de la Société française de photographie, series 2, vol. 13 (1897): 316–20. 77. Vignon, Le linceul du Christ, 80. 78. Ibid., 82. 79. Ibid., 94. 80. “Ammonium vapors have also long been known as a reducing agent [acting on the silver salt] and used in appropriate doses to heighten the sensitivity of the paper and plates.” Colson, “Revue des actions à distance,” 486. 81. Vignon, Le linceul du Christ, 95. 82. Dubois, “Le corps et ses fantômes,” 209. 83. Lecercle, “De la relique à l’image,” 101. 84. Vignon, Le linceul du Christ, 109. 85. Ibid., 95. 86. Ibid., 95–96. 87. Ibid., 2, 60. 88. Gaston Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 12. 89. “After initially remaining entirely within the domain of physics, where we conducted the experiments with zinc, we have now crossed the line separating theory from practice; we have attributed the impressions on the shroud to a precise chemical effect that appears spontaneously.” Vignon, Le linceul du Christ, 92. 90. “No more perfect agreement could be expected across a gulf of twenty centuries between the results of a physical-­chemical study and the reports of the eyewitnesses.” Ibid., 126. 91. Ibid., 102, 171. 92. Bruno Latour, “Drawing Things Together,” in Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar, eds., Representation in Scientific Practice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 39. 93. Vignon, Le linceul du Christ, iii. 94. Ibid., 54. 95. Ibid., 87. 96. “When the goal is to produce chemical effects that are capable of bringing out delicately nuanced pictures, we instinctively think of the photographic plate and its high sensitivity. So we will first use a photographic plate to verify the physical law of action at a distance.” Ibid., 75. 97. Bachelard, New Scientific Spirit, 13. 98. Jean-­Charles Langlois, La photographie, la peinture, la guerre: Correspondance inédite de Crimée, 1855–1856, ed. François Robichon and André Rouillé (Nîmes: Chambon, 1992), 57–58. 99. A.-­L. Donnadieu, Le Saint Suaire de Turin devant la science (Paris: Mendel, 1903), 2. 100. “Texts, regardless of the category to which they belong, are peripheral to [scientific explanation]; the putative shroud remains the crucial object of study.” Ibid., 23. 101. Ibid., 27. 102. Ibid., 62.

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103. Ibid., 63. 104. Ibid., 76. 105. Ibid., 58. 106. Talbot, Pencil of Nature, n.p. 107. Hermann Vogel, “Ueber die Lichtempfindlichkeit des Bromsilbers für die sogenannten chemisch unwirksamen Farben,” Berichte der deutschen chemischen Gesellschaft 6 (July–­December 1873): 1302. 108. Bernard Berenson, “Isochromatic Photography and Venetian Pictures,” in Helene Roberts, ed., Art History through the Camera’s Lens (Amsterdam: Gordon & Breach, 1995), 130. 109. Donnadieu, Le Saint Suaire de Turin devant la science, 30. 110. Ibid., 29. 111. Ibid., 28. 112. Ibid., 56. 113. Eder, Geschichte der Photographie, 364. 114. Donnadieu, Le Saint Suaire de Turin devant la science, 45. 115. See Bruno Latour, “What Is Iconoclash? or, Is There a World beyond the Image Wars?,” in Latour and Weibel, eds., Iconoclash, 28. 116. Hans-­Jörg Rheinberger, “Experiment, Difference, and Writing,” pt. 2, “The Laboratory Production of Transfer RNA,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 23, no. 3 (1992): 391. 117. Latour, “What Is Iconoclash?,” 35. 118. Ibid., 21. 119. Latour, Pandora’s Hope, 69. 120. Ibid. 121. Donnadieu, Le Saint Suaire de Turin devant la science, 49. 122. A.-­L. Donnadieu, La photographie animée, ses origines, son exploitation, ses dangers (Paris: Mendel, 1897), 5. 123. A.-­L. Donnadieu, La photographie des objets immergés (Paris: Mendel, 1901), 23. 124. Ibid., 30. See also A.-­L. Donnadieu, La photographie appliquée aux sciences biologiques et le physiographe universel . . . , compiled by J.-­B. Carpentier (Lyon: Mougin-­Rusand, 1884). 125. Talbot, “Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing,” 202. The locus classicus is Talbot’s recollection of his failed attempts to take sketches with a camera lucida on the shores of Lake Como: “For when the eye was removed from the prism—in which all looked beautiful—I found that the faithless pencil had only left traces on the paper melancholy to behold.” Talbot, Pencil of Nature, n.p. 126. See Londe, La photographie moderne, 163; Eugène Trutat, La photographie appliquée à l’histoire naturelle (Paris: Gauthier-­Villars, 1884), vii; Alphonse Bertillon, La photographie judiciaire, avec un appendice sur la classification et l’identification anthropométriques (Paris: Gauthier-­Villars, 1890), 8–9. On the polemical contrast between drawing/painting and photography, see also Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007). 127. Donnadieu, Le Saint Suaire de Turin devant la science, 23. 128. As Robert Koch puts it, a microscopic photograph is “primarily a piece of evidence.” Koch, “Zur Untersuchung von pathogenen Organismen,” Mittheilungen aus dem Kaiserlichen Gesundheitsamte 1 (1881): 1–79. 129. Donnadieu, Le Saint Suaire de Turin devant la science, 28, 49. See also ibid., 29: “Even the eye is sensitive to the changes in the background of the picture, but the sensitivity

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of the photographic plate, with its very different relation to the chemical agency of color and illumination, is far greater still.” 130. Ibid., 28. 131. Ibid., 32. 132. Ibid., 30. 133. Ibid., 30 (italics P.G.). 134. A.-­L. Donnadieu, L’œil et l’objectif: Étude comparée de la vision naturelle et de la vision artificielle (Paris: Mendel, 1902), 33. 135. With Vilém Flusser, we might add that this autonomy of the photographic recording of color is not canceled by the subsequent development of color photography starting in the final years of the nineteenth century. Even in color photography, the plate does not register colors according to the same laws by which the eye sees them. In an interesting inversion of the conventional understanding, Flusser argues that color photography is even more artificial than black-­and-­white photography: “It is true that there is a very indirect, distant connection between the green of the photograph and the green of the field, since the chemical concept ‘green’ is based on ideas that have been drawn from the world; but between the green of the photograph and the green of the field a whole series of complex encodings have crept in, a series that is more complex than that which connects the grey of the field photographed in black and white with the green of the field. In this sense the field photographed in green is more abstract than the one in grey.” Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, trans. Anthony Mathews (London: Reaktion, 2000), 43–44. 136. Hans-­Jörg Rheinberger, “Experiment, Difference, and Writing,” pt. 1, “Tracing Protein Synthesis,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 23, no. 2 (1992): 323. 137. Vignon, Le linceul du Christ, 159. 138. Donnadieu, Le Saint Suaire de Turin devant la science, 49. 139. Serres, Parasite, 70. 140. “À propos du Saint-­Suaire de Turin: Images produites par des vapeurs,” La nature: Revue des sciences et de leurs applications aux arts et à l’industrie, no. 1509 (April 26, 1902), 323; in the same issue, see alsoCh. de Villedeuil, “Possibilité de la production d’une image de cadavre sur son suaire,” 335–66. 141. Yves Delage, “Le linceul de Turin,” Revue scientifique, series 4, vol. 17 (May 31, 1902): 685. The secretary of the academy declined Delage’s request to run the unabridged lecture in the Comptes rendus de l’Académie des sciences, and so Delage restated his report in this open letter to the editors of the Revue scientifique. 142. Ibid., 686. 143. See “M. Vignon’s Researches and the ‘Holy Shroud,’” Nature 66, no. 1696 (May 1, 1902): 13–14; “Académies et sociétés savantes,” Revue générale des sciences pures et appliquées 13, no. 9 (May 15, 1902): 442; “Sur la formation d’images négatives par l’action de certaines vapeurs: Note de M. P. Vignon, présentée par M. Yves Delage,” Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l’Académie des sciences 134, no. 16 (April 21, 1902): 902–4. 144. Donnadieu, Le Saint Suaire de Turin devant la science, 58. 145. See section 2.6. Chapter 5 1.

Ottomar Volkmer, Die photographische Aufnahme von Unsichtbarem (Halle an der Saale: Knapp, 1894), iii.

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2. Colson, La plaque photographique, i. 3. Ibid., 143. On the growing currency of the trope of a “photography of the invisible” at the time, see also the chapter “Photographie de l’invisible” in A. Bergeret and F. Drouin, Les récréations photographiques (Paris: Mendel, 1891), 28–29; Ch. V. Zenger, “La phosphorographie appliquée à la photographie de l’invisible,” Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l’Académie des sciences 103 (1886): 454–56; Gaston-­Henri Niewenglowski, La photographie de l’invisible au moyen des rayons X ultra-­violets, de la phosphorescence et de l’effluve électrique . . . (Paris: Desforges, 1896); Camille Flammarion, “La photographie de l’invisible,” Bulletin de la Société astronomique de France 10, no. 1 (January 1896): 41–44; Georges Vitoux, Les rayons X et la photographie de l’invisible (Paris: Chamuel, 1896); L. Aubert, La photographie de l’invisible: Les rayons X (Paris: Schleicher, 1898). 4. Étienne-­Jules Marey, La méthode graphique dans les sciences expérimentales et principalement en physiologie et en médecine (Paris: Masson, 1878), 26. At the heart of the recording devices Marey used was a transmission mechanism that translated fluctuations of the phenomenon in question (blood pressure, respiration, muscle contractions, etc.) into movements of a pen that produced a plotted curve. The advantage of the graphical method, Marey argued, was that it did not influence or distort the phenomenon and instead guaranteed its immediate self-­recording. On the difficulties encountered in the implementation of this idea, see Soraya de Chadarevian, “Die Methode der Kurven in der Physiologie zwischen 1850 und 1900,” in Hans-­ Jörg Rheinberger and Michael Hagner, eds., Die Experimentalisierung des Lebens: Experimentalsysteme in den biologischen Wissenschaften 1850/1950 (Berlin: Akademie, 1993), 28–49 (republished in Michael Hagner, ed., Ansichten der Wissenschaftsgeschichte [Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2001], 161–88). On Marey’s work in photography as a continuation of the same project, see François Dagognet, Étienne-­Jules Marey: La passion de la trace (Paris: Hazan, 1987); Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Étienne-­Jules Marey (1830–1904) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Michel Frizot, Étienne-­Jules Marey: Chronophotographe (Paris: Nathan and Delpire, 2001); Georges Didi-­Huberman and Laurent Mannoni, Mouvements de l’air: Étienne-­Jules Marey, photographe des fluides, exh. cat. (Paris: Gallimard, 2004). 5. Marey, La méthode graphique, iii. 6. See Étienne-­Jules Marey, Développement de la méthode graphique par l’emploi de la photographie (Paris: Masson, 1885). 7. R. Koehler, Les applications de la photographie aux sciences naturelles (Paris: Gauthier-­ Villars, 1893), 5. A few years earlier, Albert Londe had made the same distinction in his treatise La photographie moderne. Fontenay contrasts a merely “verificatory” photography that ascertains “that what we see is real” with a “photography of research or discovery” that—like radiography or spectroscopy—furnishes “information” that “our eyes deny us”; Fontenay, “Le rôle de la plaque sensible,” 99. 8. Londe, La photographie moderne, 157. 9. Jon Darius, Beyond Vision (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1984), 5. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 20. 12. Cyril Permutt, Beyond the Spectrum: A Survey of Supernormal Photography (Cambridge, UK: Stephens, 1983). 13. Tucker, Nature Exposed; Chéroux and Fischer, eds., Le troisième œil; Giordana Charuty, “La ‘boîte aux ancêtres’: Photographie et science de l’invisible,” Terrain, no. 33 (September 1999), 57–80; Francesco Panese, “Rationalisation scientifique et images

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du merveilleux,” Traverses, no. 3 (1999), 100–113; Michel Frizot, “The All-­Powerful Eye: The Forms of the Invisible,” in Frizot, ed., New History of Photography, 273–84; Dubois, “Le corps et ses fantômes.” 14. Hubertus von Amelunxen, “Die Erfindung der Photographie aus dem Geist des Äthers: Zu Louis Lambert von Balzac,” Mana: Literatur, Kultur, Gesellschaft, no. 8 (1988), 46. 15. Examples of the recent resurgence of the trope include the chapter “Photography of the Invisible” in Tucker, Nature Exposed, 159–93; Marie-­Sophie Corcy, “La photographie de l’invisible,” La revue–­Musée des arts et métiers, no. 25 (December 1998), 54–59; “Visible invisible: Aspects de la photographie scientifique,” special issue, Revue du Palais de la découverte, no. 17 (December 1979). 16. Peter Fuchs, “Vom Unbeobachtbaren,” in Oliver Jahraus and Nina Ort, eds., Beobachtungen des Unbeobachtbaren: Konzepte radikaler Theoriebildung in den Geisteswissenschaften (Weilerswist: Velbrück, 2000), 39. 17. Maurice Merleau-­Ponty discusses the complications of a similar interpretation in modern particle physics: “When the physicists speak of particles that exist for but a billionth of a second, their first movement is always to suppose that they exist in the same sense as directly observable particles, except for much shorter a time. The microphysical field is considered as a macroscopic field of very small dimensions [. . .] Yet it is to postulate that the considerations of scale are not ultimate; it is again to think them in the perspective of the in itself, at the very moment when there is a suggestion to renounce that perspective.” Merleau-­Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 16–17 (translation modified). 18. Frizot, “All-­Powerful Eye,” 275. 19. Lynch, Art and Artifact, 82. 20. Colson, La plaque photographique, ii. 21. Christoph Hoffmann, “Die Dauer eines Moments: Zu Ernst Machs und Peter Salchers ballistisch-­fotografischen Versuchen 1886/87,” in Geimer, ed., Ordnungen der Sichtbarkeit, 352. 22. Alex Soojung-­Kim Pang, “Technologie und Ästhetik der Astrofotografie,” in Geimer, ed., Ordnungen der Sichtbarkeit, 104. 23. “In 1900, the basic issue [in photography] seemed to have reversed itself: from being an authentic imprint of what is real (and a priori visible), photography had become, in the most scientific way possible, the proof of the reality of the invisible.” Frizot, “All-­ Powerful Eye,” 282. 24. Hans-­Jörg Rheinberger, “Graphematic Spaces,” in Timothy Lenoir, ed., Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 302. 25. Rheinberger, Epistemology of the Concrete, 8. 26. See Niklas Luhmann, “Weltkunst,” in Luhmann, Frederick D. Bunsen, and Dirk Baecker, Unbeobachtbare Welt: Über Kunst und Architektur (Bielefeld: Haux, 1990), 14. 27. Didi-­Huberman, Images in Spite of All, 133. 28. Rheinberger, “Experiment, Difference, and Writing,” pt. 1, 324n59; Rheinberger quotes Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 7. 29. Ute Holl, Kino, Trance & Kybernetik (Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose, 2002), 160. 30. Étienne-­Jules Marey, Movement, trans. Eric Pritchard (New York: Appleton, 1895), 182.

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31. Ibid. 32. Ibid, 183. On this habituation effect, see also Denis Bernard and André Gunthert, L’instant rêvé: Albert Londe (Nîmes: Chambon, 1993), 30. 33. See Martin Kemp, “Stilled Splashes,” in Visualizations: The Nature Book of Art and Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 78–79. 34. Christoph Hoffmann, “Mach-­Werke. Ernst Mach und Peter Salcher: Photographische Fixierung der durch Projectile in der Luft eingeleiteten Vorgänge (1887),” Fotogeschichte 16, no. 60 (1996): 9–10. 35. Hoffmann, “Die Dauer eines Moments,” 353. 36. Röntgen, “On a New Kind of Rays,” 274. 37. Ibid. 38. Vera Dünkel, “Ikonologie der frühen Röntgenbilder,” MA thesis, Humboldt-­ Universität zu Berlin, Institute of Art and Visual History, 2004. See Dünkel, Röntgenblick und Schattenbild: Genese und Ästhetik einer neuen Art von Bildern (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann, 2016). 39. Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay, vol. 2 (New York: Routledge, 2001), 221. 40. Husserl, Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907, trans. Richard Rojcewicz, in Collected Works, vol. 7 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), 44. 41. Gottfried Boehm, “Sehen: Hermeneutische Reflexionen,” in Ralf Konsermann, ed., Kritik des Sehens (Leipzig: Reclam, 1997), 286. 42. See, e.g., with reference to George Spencer Brown’s logic, Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System, trans. Eva M. Knodt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); Luhmann, “Weltkunst,” 14–15. 43. See again Frizot, “All-­Powerful Eye,” 282. 44. Ch. Guillaume, Les radiations nouvelles: Les rayons X et la photographie à travers les corps opaques (Paris: Gauthier-­Villars, 1896), 114. 45. Oskar Büttner and Kurt Müller, Technik und Verwerthung der Röntgen’schen Strahlen im Dienste der ärztlichen Praxis und Wissenschaft (Halle an der Saale: Knapp, 1897), 94. And see Dünkel, “Ikonologie der frühen Röntgenbilder,” 58–59. 46. A few years later, Albert Londe made this aspect explicit: “Since the dawn of radiography, we have pointed out that Röntgen’s rays might be used to screen the content of boxes consigned to the mail with a specification of their value. The transparency of the paper and the box makes it easy to see the objects contained in them without tampering with the seals.” Londe, La radiographie et ses diverses applications (Paris: Gauthier-­Villars, 1899), 37. 47. Guillaume, Les radiations nouvelles, 114. 48. Dünkel, “Ikonologie der frühen Röntgenbilder,” 20. 49. Ibid., 21. 50. Canguilhem, Le merveilleux scientifique, 95. 51. In the instance of Georges Demeny’s “Je vous aime”: Demeny had to say something so Marey could test the chronophotographic appearance of a speaking mouth. 52. Floris M. Neusüss, ed., Das Fotogramm in der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts: Die andere Seite der Bilder—Fotografie ohne Kamera (Cologne: DuMont, 1990). 53. A few references to pioneers like Schulze, Nièpce, Bayard, Talbot, and Atkins aside, Neusüss’s account ignores the full century of photographic history that has already passed at this point: “In the early 1920s, a handful of artists tested the limits of photography, looking for pictures to be produced in acts of automatic photography.” Floris M. Neusüss, “Vorwort,” in Neusüss, ed., Das Fotogramm in der Kunst, 10. The

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54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

71.

early photograms, whose creation was no less driven by an interest in the possibility of “automatic photography,” are excluded from the history of the photogram because “they came into being, one, outside the art context, and two, not in our time but in the nineteenth century.” In our perspective, that is not a plausible argument. Josef Maria Eder and Eduard Valenta, Versuche über Photographie mittelst der Röntgen’schen Strahlen (Vienna: Lechner; Halle an der Saale: Knapp, 1896). Monika Faber, “Josef Maria Eder und die wissenschaftliche Fotografie 1855–1918,” in Faber and Klaus Albrecht Schröder, eds., Das Auge und der Apparat: Die Fotosammlung der Albertina, exh. cat. (Paris: Seuil, 2003), 150. Herbert Molderings, “Die Geburt der modernen Fotografie,” in Die Moderne der Fotografie (Hamburg: Philo Fine Arts, 2008), 19. László Moholy-­Nagy, “Production–­Reproduction” [1922], in Krisztina Passuth, Moholy-­Nagy (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 290. László Moholy-­Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film [1927], trans. Janet Seligman (London: Lund Humphries, 1969), 74–78 (and see 148). Floris M. Neusüss, “Christian Schad—Schadographien,” in Neusüss, ed., Das Fotogramm in der Kunst, 28. Ulrich Raulff, “Ein Etwas oder ein Nichts,” in Neusüss, ed., Das Fotogramm in der Kunst, 406. See the illustrations ibid. Also Emmanuelle de l’Écotais and Alain Sayag, eds., Man Ray: La photographie à l’envers, exh. cat. (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1998), 204; Johann-­Karl Schmidt, Christoph Brockhaus, and Veit Loers, eds., Man Ray, exh. cat. (Milan: Mazzotta, 1998), 79. Moholy-­Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film, 77. László Moholy-­Nagy, “Fotoplastische Reklame,” in Neusüss, ed., Das Fotogramm in der Kunst, 122. Herbert Molderings, “Lichtjahre eines Lebens,” in Ute Eskildsen, ed., László Moholy-­ Nagy: Fotogramme 1922–1943, exh. cat. (Munich: Schirmer & Mosel, 1996), 15. Moholy-­Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film, 28, 31. See the catalogue raisonné of Moholy-­Nagy’s photograms in Eskildsen, ed., László Moholy-­Nagy: Fotogramme, 152–99. Ibid., 172. Raulff, “Ein Etwas oder ein Nichts,” 410. Moholy-­Nagy, “Fotoplastische Reklame,” 123–24. On the diverse variants of this shell game—as a “scientization of art” or, conversely, an “aestheticization of science”—see Michel Poivert, “Der unsichtbare Strahl: Die Strahlungsfotografie zwischen Wissenschaft und Okkultismus,” in Fischer and Loers, eds., Im Reich der Phantome, 120–28; Clément Chéroux, “‘À la recherche d’images susceptibles de nous extasier’: Le goût des avant-­gardes pour la photographie scientifique,” in Canguilhem, Le merveilleux scientifique, 153; Oliver A. I. Botar, “László Moholy-­Nagy’s New Vision and the Aestheticization of Scientific Photography in Weimar Germany,” Science in Context 17, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 525, 527. See, e.g., Felice Frankel, Envisioning Science: The Design and Craft of the Science Image (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). Martin Kemp unfortunately tends to invoke such supposed universals as well, writing, for example, of “deep structures operating at a pre- or subverbal level” that, he believes, are “genetically established”; Kemp, Visualizations, 1. Consider also the exhibition Beauty of Another Order: Photography in Science at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, in 1997, in which photographs taken from very different contexts were placed side by side under the dubious ho-

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mogenizing label “beauty,” and the exhibition L’invention d’un regard: 1839–1918 at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, in 1989, whose organizers took for granted that “art [. . .] was often already present” in nineteenth-­century scientific photography; L’invention d’un regard: 1839–1918, exh. cat. (Paris: Édition de la réunion des musées nationaux, 1989), 212. 72. Gottfried Boehm, “Zwischen Auge und Hand: Bilder als Instrumente der Erkenntnis,” in Bettina Heintz and Jörg Zuber, eds., Mit dem Auge denken: Strategien der Sichtbarmachung in wissenschaftlichen und virtuellen Welten (Zurich: Voldemeer, 2001), 52. Boehm is alluding to the title of Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison, eds., Picturing Science, Producing Art (New York: Routledge, 1998). 73. Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 510–12. See also Stiegler, Philologie des Auges, on photography’s construction of “specific sign systems that parallel nature’s.” 74. Marey, Movement, 170, 171. 75. See Aaron Scharf, Art and Photography (London: Allen Lane, 1968), 205–31; Dagognet, Étienne-­Jules Marey, 109–11; Bernard and Gunthert, L’instant rêvé, 169–74; Frizot, Étienne-­Jules Marey, 282–85; Didi-­Huberman and Mannoni, Mouvements de l’air, 215–17. Chapter 6 1.

See David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from al-­Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). On photography in particular, see the entries under “Auge,” “Retina, künstliche,” and “Verlängerung des Auges” in Bernd Stiegler, Bilder der Photographie: Ein Album photographischer Metaphern (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006), 33–37, 181–83, 241–43. On the significance of theories of vision not only for the description but also for the construction of optical apparatuses, see Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), which examines in detail “how optical devices that became forms of mass entertainment, such as the stereoscope and the phenakistiscope, originally derived from new empirical knowledge of the physiological status of the observer and of vision” (14). 2. “If you want to preserve these two retinas, even though they are hardly worth the trouble, you merely need to leave them wrapped in the gray paper and place them between the pages of a book.” Nicéphore Nièpce, Lettres 1816–1817 (Rouen: Pavillon de la photographie du Parc naturel régional de Brotonne, 1973), 27. 3. François Arago, “Fixation des images qui se forment au foyer d’une chamber obscure,” Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l’Académie des sciences 116, no. 1 (1893): 7. 4. Talbot, Pencil of Nature, n.p. 5. Nièpce, Lettres 1816–1817, 23. 6. Stiegler, Philologie des Auges, 20 (see also 39–40). 7. Talbot, Pencil of Nature, n.p. 8. See Johann Wilhelm Ritter, “Bemerkungen zu Herschels neuen Untersuchungen über das Licht,” in Entdeckungen zur Elektrochemie, Bioelektrochemie und Photochemie, ed. Hermann Berg and Klaus Richter (Leipzig: Geest & Portig, 1986), 119. 9. Talbot, Pencil of Nature, n.p. 10. Jules Janssen, “En l’honneur de la photographie,” in Œuvres scientifiques, ed. Henri Dehérain, vol. 2 (Paris: Société d’édition géographique, maritime et coloniale, 1930), 90, 88.

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11. Ibid., 2:89. 12. “Our retina erases every impression that lasts more than one tenth of a second; the photographic retina, by contrast, stores these impressions and preserves them for a virtually unlimited period of time.” Ibid. 13. Christoph Hoffmann, “Zwei Schichten: Netzhaut und Fotografie, 1860/1890,” Fotogeschichte. Beiträge zur Geschichte und Ästhetik der Fotografie, no. 81 (2001): 24–35. In other words, Janssen could easily have used the same comparison to support the opposite point. Just as the eye cannot be a photographic medium, the photograph is incapable of supplanting the specific function of the retina. As Hoffmann shows, the comparison of eye and apparatus in the nineteenth century worked both ways: photography also served as a model to explain the operation of the retina; see ibid., 24–35. 14. Ibid., 24. 15. Albert Londe, La photographie à la lumière artificielle (Paris: Doin, 1914), xi. 16. J. Gädicke and A. Miethe, Praktische Anleitung zum Photographieren bei Magnesiumlicht (Berlin: Oppenheim, 1887), 8–9. 17. Robert Sommer, Lehrbuch der psychopathologischen Untersuchungs-­Methoden (Berlin and Vienna: Urban & Schwarzenberg, 1899), 6. See also Albert Londe, “La photographie médicale,” in Conférences publiques sur la photographie théorique et technique, organisées sous l’égide de la Société française de photographie et du Conservatoire national des arts et métiers, repr. (Paris: Place, 1987), 28: “This effect is even graver in the case of hysteric patients, who are known to be prone to fall into a cataleptic state when suddenly confronted with a source of light.” 18. Londe, La photographie à la lumière artificielle, 30. 19. Gädicke and Miethe, Praktische Anleitung, 12. 20. See Albert Londe, “Contribution à l’étude de l’éclair magnésique,” Bulletin de la Société française de photographie, series 2, vol. 18 (1902): 425–31. For an account of Londe’s experiments, see Denis Bernard, “La lumière pesée: Albert Londe et la photographie de l’éclair magnésique,” Études photographiques, no. 6 (May 1999): 59–66. On Londe’s work at the Salpêtrière, see Holl, Kino, Trance & Kybernetik, 148–77; André Gunthert, Albert Londe (Paris: Nathan, 1999); Bernard and Gunthert, L’instant rêvé. 21. Holl, Kino, Trance & Kybernetik, 163. 22. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 111–13. 23. Ibid., 111. 24. Londe, La photographie à la lumière artificielle, 32. 25. Ibid., 33. 26. Ibid., 32. 27. Holl, Kino, Trance & Kybernetik, 157. 28. See Henri Fourtier, Les lumières artificielles en photographie (Paris: Gauthier-­Villars, 1895), plate iv. 29. Londe, “Contribution à l’étude de l’éclair magnésique,” 428. 30. Boys, “On Electric Spark Photographs,” pt. 1, 415. 31. Vernon C. Boys, “On Electric Spark Photographs, or Photography of Flying Bullets, &c. by the Light of the Electric Spark,” pt. 2, Nature 47, no. 1219 (March 9, 1893): 446. 32. Koehler, Les applications de la photographie aux sciences naturelles, 7–8. 33. Gaston-­Henri Niewenglowski, Histoire et applications de la photographie: Leçons d’ouverture du cours de photographie professé au Polytechnicum (Paris: Desforges, 1896), 18, 5–6.

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34. See, e.g., André Gunthert, “La rétine du savant: La fonction heuristique de la photographie,” Études photographiques, no. 7 (April 2000): 38. 35. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Routledge, 2001), 98. 36. Kittler, Optical Media, 30. 37. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1962), 37–39. 38. McLuhan suggests as much with his concept of “self-­amputation”: “any invention or technology is an extension or self-­amputation of our physical bodies.” McLuhan, Understanding Media, 49. This makes “any invention or technology” a mere surrogate for an earlier natural capability. 39. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 38–39. 40. It may be that his own jaw prosthesis prompted these reflections; see Friedrich A. Kittler, Eine Kulturgeschichte der Kulturwissenschaft (Munich: Fink, 2000), 213. 41. Kittler, Optical Media, 29. 42. Ibid., 30. 43. Ibid., 34. Kittler’s examples are the ancient wax slate and film. 44. For a critique of this inversion, see also Christoph Hoffmann, “Die Unterwerfung der Sinne: Joseph Plateau, das Phénakisticope [sic], Jonathan Crary, Friedrich Kittler,” in Daniel Gethmann and Christoph B. Schulz, Apparaturen bewegter Bilder (Münster: LIT, 2006), 82. 45. Kittler, Optical Media, 30. 46. Ibid., 36. 47. Ibid., 35 (translation modified). 48. Ibid., 36. 49. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 54. 50. Stiegler, Philologie des Auges, 138. 51. Lüdeking, “Vierzehn Beispiele,” 37. 52. Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 154. 53. See Franziska Brons, “Bilder im Fluge: Julius Neubronners Brieftaubenfotografie,” Fotogeschichte 26, no. 100 (2006): 17–36. 54. Julius Neubronner, Die Brieftaubenfotografie und ihre Bedeutung für die Kriegskunst, als Doppelsport, für die Wissenschaft und im Dienste der Presse (Dresden: Baensch, 1909), 27. 55. Brons, “Bilder im Fluge,” 23. 56. Belting, Anthropology of Images, 154. 57. Joel Snyder, “Picturing Vision,” Critical Inquiry 6, no. 3 (Spring 1980): 508–9. 58. Belting, Anthropology of Images, 154. 59. Iris Därmann, “Noch einmal: 3/4 Sekunde, aber schnell,” in Georg Christoph Tholen, Michael Scholl, and Martin Heller, eds., Zeitreise: Bilder/Maschinen/Strategien/Rätsel, exh. cat. (Zurich: Museum für Gestaltung, 1993), 203. 60. Rheinberger, “Experiment, Difference, and Writing,” pt. 1, 324n59. 61. On Worthington’s photographic experiments, see also my essay “Picturing the Black Box: On Blanks in Nineteenth Century Paintings and Photographs,” Science in Context 17, no. 4 (December 2004): 467–501; Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 11–16, 154– 60. 62. Arthur Mason Worthington, The Splash of a Drop (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1895), 55.

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63. Arthur Mason Worthington, A Study of Splashes (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908), 119. 64. Ibid., 2. 65. Worthington, Splash of a Drop, 7. 66. Ibid., 76. 67. Daston and Galison describe the shift from the first to the second set of experiments as Worthington’s “conversion” to the ideal of mechanical objectivity. See Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 16, 154–60. 68. Worthington, Splash of a Drop, 16–17. 69. Worthington, Study of Splashes, 9. 70. See Christoph Hoffmann’s similar reflections with regard to Mach’s photographic experiments: “Mach/Salcher’s trials will show that it is initially not what is being depicted but its genesis that captures the attention.” Hoffmann, “Die Dauer eines Moments,” 347. 71. Edgar Wind, Experiment and Metaphysics: Towards a Resolution of the Cosmological Antinomies, trans. Cyril Edwards (Oxford, UK: European Humanities Research Centre, 2001), 5. 72. Worthington, Study of Splashes, 10–11. 73. Worthington, Splash of a Drop, 74. 74. Ibid., 73. 75. See, e.g., Wolfgang M. Heckl, “Das Unsichtbare sichtbar machen: Nanowissenschaften als Schlüsseltechnologie des 21. Jahrhunderts,” in Iconic Turn: Die neue Macht der Bilder, ed. Christa Maar and Hubert Burda (Cologne: DuMont 2004), 128– 41. 76. Londe, La photographie moderne, 2. 77. Marey, Movement, 304. 78. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 88. 79. Ibid. 80. Yves Michaud, “Critique of Credulity: The Relationship between Images and Reality,” in Hartwig Fischer, ed., Covering the Real: Kunst und Pressebild von Warhol bis Tillmans, exh. cat. (Basel: Kunstmuseum, 2005), 306–13. 81. Talbot, Pencil of Nature, n.p. 82. Rheinberger, “Experiment, Difference, and Writing,” pt. 1, 322; Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things, 134. 83. Didi-­Huberman, Images in Spite of All, 70. 84. Latour, “What Is Iconoclash?,” 21.

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Index

Alloa, Emmanuel, 212n143 Amelunxen, Hubertus von, 203n22, 223n14 Arago, Dominique-­François, 27, 130, 170– 71, 226n3 Araki, Nobuyoshi, 68, 70–71, 75, 212n130, plates 4–9 Armstrong, Carol, 31, 206n4 Auer, Alois, 114, 218n57 Bachelard, Gaston, 121, 123, 136, 219n88, 219n97 Baier, Wolfgang, 12, 17, 186, 202n15, 203n20, 203n30, 204n51, 206n6, 207n28 Baraduc, Hippolyte, 56, 91–99, 93, 94, 143, 209n77, 215nn58–63, plate 13 Barthes, Roland, 1–2, 4, 7, 51–52, 178, 197, 199, 200, 201nn1–3, 208nn62–63, 227nn22–23, 229nn78–79 Batchen, Geoffrey, 12, 27, 202n16, 203n35, 204n45, 204nn49–50 Baudelaire, Charles, 109, 217n37 Belting, Hans, 184, 216n13, 218nn64–65, 218n69, 228n52, 228n56, 228n58 Benjamin, Walter, 17, 36, 168–69, 179, 182, 186, 202n19, 206n14, 226n73 Bertillon, Alphonse, 114, 130, 220n126 Bickenbach, Mathias, 16, 202n17 Biot, Jean-­Baptiste, 27 Boehm, Gottfried, 224n41, 226n72 Boys, Vernon C., 56, 173, 179–80, 180, 183, 189, 193, 209n77, 227nn30–31

Breidbach, Olaf, 50, 208n57, 208n64 Brons, Franziska, 228n53, 228n55 Brus, Johannes, 72, 74, 212n136 Bucquet, Maurice, 14–15, 21, 202nn11–12 Buguet, Abel, 89, 96, 208n65 Büttner, Oskar, 224n45 Cameron, Julia Margaret, 71, 212n133 Canguilhem, Denis, 156, 167, 213n20, 224n50, 225n70 Canguilhem, Georges, 12, 202n4 Chabaud, Victor, 155, 164, 166–67, plate 18 Charcot, Jean-­Martin, 78, 84, 179, 213n6, 215n58 Chevalier, Ulysse, 110, 217–18nn40–44 Clovio, Giulio, 102–3, 105 Colson, Réné, 49, 55–56, 58–59, 67, 85–86, 88–90, 92, 97–98, 117–20, 136–38, 141, 143–47, 208n46, 208n48, 210nn87– 89, 214nn33–35, 215n57, 219nn75–76, 219n80, 222nn2–3, 223n20 Cordier, V., 44, 49, 207n31, 207n36 Daguerre, Jacques Louis Mandé, 12, 16–17, 21, 25, 27–28, 31, 32, 33, 35–37, 37, 61, 128, 130, 170, 204n45, 204n51, 205n2 Darius, Jon, 142–44, 181, 222nn9–11 Därmann, Iris, 187, 228n59 Daston, Lorraine, 65, 77, 211n114, 211n125, 212n3, 220n126, 228n61, 229n67 Davanne, Alphonse, 14–15, 21, 33, 202nn11–13

232

Index

David, Émile, 77, 80–85, 81, 82, 87–90, 92, 94, 96–97, 213n18, 213n21, 214n26, plate 11 Davy, Humphry, 16, 24–25, 29, 203nn36– 38, 203n40 Delage, Yves, 108–9, 137, 217n31, 221nn141–43 Deleuze, Gilles, 11, 201n1 Demeny, Georges, 148, 224n51 Derrida, Jacques, 25, 146, 204nn43–44, 223n28 Didi-­Huberman, Georges, 4, 147, 151, 199, 201nn4–5, 201n7, 202n6, 205n62, 212n142, 214n41, 215n58, 216n5, 216nn8–10, 216n13, 217n21, 217n30, 218n56, 218n66, 218n68, 222n4, 223n27, 226n75, 229n83 Dobschütz, Ernst von, 101, 115, 216n7, 218nn63–66 Donnadieu, A. D., 124–38, 183, 216n8, 219nn99–105, 220nn109–12, 220n114, 220nn121–24, 220n127, 220–21nn129– 34, 221n138, 221n144, plates 16–17 Dubois, Philippe, 202n6, 215n58, 216n15, 217n21, 219n82, 223n13 Dünkle, Vera Dünkel, 224n38, 224n45, 224nn48–49 Eberhard, G., 209n71 Eder, Josef Maria, 8, 11, 16, 21–24, 26, 29, 35, 43, 45, 46, 47, 57, 63, 95, 97, 128, 156–58, 157, 166–68, 202n15, 203n21, 203n23, 203nn26–32, 204n47, 205n65, 206n12, 206n20, 207n30, 207n32, 207n36, 207n41, 207n45, 220n113, 225nn54–55 Elsaesser, Thomas, 201n2 Evans, Walker, 4, 5, 7, 70, 186–87 Faber, Monika, 225n55 Fitz, Henry, 36–37, 37 Flammarion, Camille, 13–15, 21–22, 64, 202nn6–8, 222n3 Flusser, Vilém, 221n135 Fontenay, Guillaume de, 56, 59, 97, 209n78, 210nn91–92, 215n68, 222n7 Foucault, Michel, 197, 205n61 Fourtier, Henri, 179, 227n28 Freud, Sigmund, 181–82, 207n42, 228n37, 228n39 Fritsche, Kurt, 9, 207n36 Frizot, Michel, 11, 25, 146, 181, 201n3,

202n15, 203nn24–25, 203n41, 204n46, 222n4, 223n13, 223n18, 223n23, 224n43, 226n75 Fuchs, Peter, 144, 223n16 Gädicke, J., 227n16, 227n19 Galison, Peter, 65, 77, 211n114, 212n3, 220n126, 226n72, 228n61, 229n67 Galton, Francis, 114, 218n58 Gamboni, Dario, 67, 68, 71, 210n104, 211n107, 211nn118–19, 211nn127–28, 212n133 Gerlach, Joseph, 50–51, 208nn53–56, 208n59 Gernsheim, Helmut, 12, 17, 23–24, 202n15, 203n20, 203n33, 204n45 Guébhard, Adrien, 56, 86–90, 94–98, 130, 209n78, 214nn38–40, 214nn42–46, 214n48, 215n50, 215nn53–54, 215nn65– 66, plates 12–14 Guillaume, Charles-­Édouard, 152, 155, 224n44, 224n47 Günther, K., 208n67 Hampe, Michael, 49, 208n47 Heidegger, Martin, 46, 48, 76, 207nn38– 39, 207n44 Hertzka, Adolf, 43, 207n29 Hoffmann, Christoph, 59, 150, 173, 208n61, 210n90, 223n21, 224nn34–35, 227nn13–14, 228n44, 229n70 Holl, Ute, 178, 223n29, 227nn20–21, 227n27 Humboldt, Alexander von, 27, 35–36, 61 Husserl, Edmund, 151, 154, 224nn39–40 Jacobsen, Emil, 85, 88, 90, 214n36, 215nn55–56 Jäger, Gottfried, 206nn21–23, 207n25 Jankau, Ludwig, 214n32 Janssen, Jules, 98, 172–73, 180–81, 215n70, 226–27nn10–13 Kapp, Ernst, 181 Kehlmann, Daniel, 35–36, 61, 206n13 Kertész, André, 1–4, 2, 3, 6–7, 34, 36 Kittler, Friedrich, 30, 181–82, 205n66, 228n36, 228nn40–48 Koch, Robert, 131, 220n128 Koehler, Rodolphe, 142, 180, 222n7, 227n32 Kolloff, Eduard, 206n15, 208n60

Index

Lamy, Pierre, 12, 202n5 Latour, Bruno, 27–28, 30, 49, 122, 129, 205nn55–60, 208n49, 211n125, 219n92, 220n115, 220nn117–20, 229n84 Lecercle, François, 100, 120, 216nn3–4, 219n83 Lefrancq, Marcel G., 71 Liesegang, Paul E., 207n28 Londe, Albert, 130, 142, 155, 166–67, 174– 80, 176, 177, 183, 187, 189, 192, 195–96, 207n30, 220n126, 222nn7–8, 224n32, 224n46, 227n15, 227nn17–18, 227n20, 227nn24–26, 227n29, 229n76 Loth, Arthur, 104–5, 116, 124–25, 216n14, 216–17nn19–20, 218n70 Lüdeking, Karlheinz, 6, 183, 201n8, 228n51 Luhmann, Niklas, 146, 223n26, 224n42 Luys, Jules-­Bernard, 76–90, 81, 82, 92, 94, 96–97, 138, 212nn1–2, 212n4, 213nn9–19, 213n21, 214nn26–29, plate 11 Lynch, Michael, 55, 201n10, 209n74, 210n98, 219n92, 223n19 Man Ray, 40, 71, 156, 158–64, 161, 162, 163, 166, 167, 225n61 Marey, Étienne-­Jules, 141, 147–48, 149, 169, 176, 187, 195–97, 222nn4–6, 223– 24nn30–32, 224n51, 226nn74–75, 229n77 Mathet, L., 206n7, 207n36 Mayer, Andreas, 212n5, 213nn6–8 McLuhan, Marshall, 181–82, 228n35, 228n38, 228n49 Mesmer, Franz Anton, 83–84 Miethe, Adolf, 173–75, 227n16, 227n19 Molderings, Herbert, 164, 225n56, 225n64 Moholy-­Nagy, László, 40, 156, 158–59, 163–67, 165, 225nn57–58, 225nn62–66, 225nn69–70 Müller, Kurt, 224n45 Neubronner, Julius, 184–85, 185, 228nn53– 54 Neuhauss, Richard, 51, 208n58 Neusüss, Floris M., 224nn52–53, 225nn59– 60, 225n63 Newhall, Beaumont, 202n15, 205n3 Niépce, Nicéphore, 12–13, 16–18, 17, 21, 25, 28, 41, 130, 170–72, 180, 204n51, 224n53, 226n2, 226n5

Niewenglowski, Gaston-­Henri, 30, 143, 180, 205n63, 222n3, 227n33 Pang, Alex Soojung-­Kim, 223n22 Permutt, Cyril, 222n12 Pia, Secondo, 101–12, 103, 106, 107, 116, 118–19, 121–22, 124–25, 127–31, 135–38, 216n11, 216nn13–14, 216n17 Polke, Sigmar, 36, 68, 73–75, 74, 75, 212nn137–38, 212n140, plate 10 Potonniée, Georges, 12, 17, 23, 203n20 Raulff, Ulrich, 160, 164, 225nn60–61, 225n68 Regnault, Victor, 32, 86, 87, 206n5 Reichenbach, Carl Ludwig von, 83–84, 213n23, 214n25, 214n30, 214n32 Rheinberger, Hans-­Jörg, 129, 134, 205n54, 210n99, 220n116, 221n136, 222n4, 223n24, 223n25, 223n28, 228n60, 229n82 Richer, Paul, 78, 112, 213n6 Riehm, G., 209nn68–69, 209n72 Robichon, François, 219n98 Röntgen, Wilhelm Conrad, 13, 56, 59–61, 60, 144, 150, 154–55, 168, 202n5, 209n77, 210n93, 210n95, 210n97, 224nn36–38, 224nn45–46, 224n48, 225n54 Rouillé, André, 123–24, 202n15, 219n98 Russell, W. J., 56–58, 67, 97, 117, 209n79, 209n81 Santini, Emmanuel N., 13–15, 21–22, 202n5, 202nn8–10 Sartre, Jean-­Paul, 73–74, 211n125, 212n141 Schaaf, Larry, 38, 204n51, 206n18 Schad, Christian, 40, 156, 158–60, 159, 164, 167, 225n59 Scheiner, J., 54, 208n61, 209n73 Schorn, Ludwig, 206n15, 208n60 Schulze, Johann Heinrich, 11, 16, 23–25, 28, 34–35, 203nn31–32, 206n12, 224n53 Schwabik, Marian, 205n1 Seel, Martin, 73, 201n9, 212n139 Serres, Michel, 55, 136, 209nn75–76, 210n96, 221n139 Sieg, Paul, 207n35 Snyder, Joel, 186, 228n57 Sommer, Robert, 174, 227n17 Starl, Timm, 206n20, 208n57

233

234

Index

Stenger, Erich, 15–17, 202n14, 202n18 Stiegler, Bernd, 183, 210n104, 226n73, 226n1, 226n6, 228n50 Strindberg, August, 9, 62–68, 74, 95, 199, 210–11nn102–6, 211nn108–13, 211nn115–17, 211nn121–24, plates 2–3 Talbot, William Henry Fox, 16, 18–19, 19, 20, 24–25, 27–29, 29, 31–32, 35, 37–38, 39, 41, 126, 130, 170–72, 198, 203n22, 204n42, 204n45, 204–5nn51– 53, 206nn17–19, 220n106, 220n125, 224n53, 226n4, 226n7, 226n9, 229n81, plate 1 Tanzen, A., 207n30, 207nn32–34, 207nn36–37, 207n41 Terquem, Henri, 108, 125, 217n29 Tormin, Ludwig, 83, 214n25 Trutat, Eugène, 130, 220n126 Ubac, Raoul, 71, 72 Valenta, Eduard, 42, 156–58, 157, 167–68, 225n54 Valéry, Paul, 34, 206n8 Vignon, Paul, 99, 105–25, 113, 114, 119, 127–32, 135–38, 216n8, 217nn23–28,

217nn31–36, 217nn38–39, 218nn45–49, 218nn51–55, 218nn60–63, 218n67, 218–19nn71–74, 219nn77–79, 219n81, 219nn84–87, 219nn89–91, 219nn93–96, 221n137, 221n143 Virilio, Paul, 34, 49–50, 206nn9–11, 208nn50–52 Vitruvius, 30, 205n64 Vogel, Herrmann, 25, 33, 38, 48, 126, 128, 203n39, 204n48, 206n6, 206n16, 207n43, 214n25, 220n107 Volkmer, Ottomar, 140–41, 143–46, 150, 221n1 Walsh, John, 216n6, 216n12, 218n50 Wedgwood, Thomas, 16, 24–25, 28–29, 203nn36–38, 203n40 Weltzien, Friedrich, 211n119, 212n134 Weston, Brett, 4, 6–7, 6 Wind, Edgar, 192, 229n71 Winter, Peter, 212n135 Worthington, Arthur Mason, 187–96, 188, 189, 191, 194, 199, 228–29n61–69, 229nn72–74 Yvon, Paul, 85, 86, 88, 89, 214n37