The Instant and Its Shadow: A Story of Photography 9780823287475

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TH E I NSTANT AN D ITS SHADOW

The Instant and Its Shadow A STO RY O F PHOTOGRAPHY

Jean-Christophe Bailly Translated by Samuel E. Martin

Fordham University Press

New York

2020

Copyright © 2020 Fordham University Press This book was first published in French as L’instant et son ombre, by Jean-Christophe Bailly © Éditions du Seuil, 2008. Cet ouvrage a bénéficié du soutien des Programmes d’aide à la publication de l’Institut français. This work, published as part of a program of aid for publication, received support from the Institut français. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or thirdparty Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available online at https://catalog.loc.gov. Printed in the United States of America 22 21 20 First edition

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Contents

Preface

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Part I: A Haystack in the Sun

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Part II: The Shadow of a Ladder Notes

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A photo came, rose or detached itself, loomed up. From the mass, from the immense and unending foliation, one photo and one alone had that power—the power, for a time, of looming up that way, capturing meaning, fixing the question, as if all the power and strangeness of images were inscribed in a single one among them, that particular one. With, it must be said, that photo’s instant power to call out toward a second one, unidentified yet forming a kind of dark estuary behind the first. And once I had grasped the direction in which the latter photo—the one that had loomed up—was pointing, the other image toward which it was pointing, I saw a space open: the space of a book, the whole story of the path leading from one to the other—a story of burned shadows and time suspended, with the possibility of seeing the return of the old schemas (though now shaken up) of presence and absence, mass and detail, time flown or flying by, and time stopped dead. All the dramaturgy underpinning the essence of images. The story of a slippage of (or

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in) thought—and I wish this were, or could become, a kind of narrative genre. That photo, then, since everything starts there. Figure 1. For those who have glanced through the history of photography’s origins, it is familiar, and it was in such a context, essentially as a document, that I had probably come across it in books, but without having marked it, without its having inscribed itself, unless in a vague way, in my memory. It is the tenth plate of William Henry Fox Talbot’s Pencil of Nature, entitled The Haystack. In other words, a calotype, a positive print on paper (16 × 25 cm) of which Talbot was the inventor and promoter, published by him in 1844 in the world’s first book of photographs. And hence an incunabulum as well. No doubt that explains its appearance in the form of a postcard at the sales counter of the Musée Nicéphore Niépce in Chalon-sur-Saône, where I bought it in August 2005. And it was in that form, in other words as an isolated reproduction, that it intrigued me right away: it had an air of familiarity, not with my own hazy recollections as a nonspecialist, but with another image, one permanently engraved deep in the mind of anybody who has seen it even once. Behind that peaceful image of an English haystack against which leans a ladder, what was outlined, dimly emerging like a silent menace, was the image of a ladder in Hiroshima, the image of a sentry obliterated and imprinted on a wall by the extraordinary flash of the atomic bomb. But this image—which, coming up from obscure depths, thus superimposed itself in a way on that of Talbot’s haystack—is doubled in turn. Sure enough, there is the one I had remembered, where you actually see a ladder, white and ghostly but real, placed against the wall where the blurry but recognizable silhouette of a human being has been imprinted (Figure 2), and which is usually labeled

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Hiroshima—but there is also the one where the real ladder has disappeared and, just like the human silhouette, is no more than a shadow imprinted on the paneled wall. This image (Figure 3) is the one, it seems, most often circulated today. You can find it in a photo agency, labeled Nagasaki. Yet it was the first one alone, with its white ladder mysteriously intact, that was present in my mind when, impelled by the gaping space opened up by its appearance, I set out to write this book—but I realize now that when I spoke of it, most of my interlocutors had the other one in mind. There lies an enigma, all the more unclear and unsettling given that both images are in circulation, feeding the same vast exegetic workshop. The first one, for example, is inserted in the montage of Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire du cinéma,1 but the second one returns in the first Delocazione of Claudio Parmiggiani, an artist for whom it must have triggered something, since he works above all with traces of vanished presences.2 Often a purely formal bridge—a position, an accent, a detail—effects the passage from one place or image to another. Some links are more obvious, and have to do directly with the work of sorting: for instance, two images that have the same theme, or author, or style—everything that goes into the simple associative logic of classification. But in wandering thought (the reverie of pensive thought or the unrestricted work of montage), things are different. The associations seem whimsical, open; they occur based on a detail, a junction, an isolated feature. And yet, despite this random quality, they are the most solid, the most haunting. Slipped below consciousness, there is something about them, already, that suggests the links between images in a dream. This is true of the spontaneous montage that led me to associate the photo I will be calling the Hiroshima photo with the one of the haystack; not only was each of the

Figure 1. William Henry Fox Talbot, The Haystack, calotype, late April 1844, plate 10 of The Pencil of Nature. © The British Library Board.

Figure 2. Anonymous (U.S. Air Force), Ladder and Shadow Said to Be in Hiroshima, 1945.

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two images thereby revived, but they began to function in tandem, and to emit a unique, low wave of meaning, which is what I would now like to identify and transmit. The reason for the association between these two images—as different as they are, however one looks at it— is not hard to find. It is by way of an object they have in common—a ladder—and this object’s position in the frame that the two images meet, and that one looks like the other’s ghost. Barely a century separates these two ladders, but what I am setting out to narrate or probe is not a slow journey from 1844 to 1945, but on the contrary a telescoping, an abrupt contraction around an origin: consequently a collection of features, or, to speak like Walter Benjamin, a constellation, which has to do with the essence of photographic capture. There was a great temptation—and I yielded to it—to produce the connection right away, to show it, to show (here the play on words takes care of itself) the scaling of ladders, the passage from a light-colored ladder and its dark shadow to a white and ghostly ladder (Figure 2), and then from the latter to an absolute shadow, a kind of sourceless echo (Figure 3). Yet however one makes meaning circulate among these proofs, all of them positive, a pure and terrible negative appears behind the shadow. Originally, even innocently, photographic capture, which is born of light, contains a black spot, and this black spot seals the unexpected montage of sequences from the English countryside to Japan in ruins. I (we) will come back to all of this. There is time, very precisely the time of a development, to weave into writing the metaphor of photography’s ever-discreet operation. What I am ultimately looking to do is to summon the latent image that is deposited between these two (or three) images and goes from one to the other, as if to say that in every real developed image, a latent image still survives, and spreads.

Figure 3. Ladder and Shadow Imprinted during the Explosion of the Atomic Bomb, Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum. © Hélène RogerViollet / Roger-Viollet.

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Hence the vision, like offcuts from a film—and it is up to me to prove that they belong to the same film and share a single impetus: Figure 1, the haystack of The Pencil of Nature. Figure 2, the shadow “photographed” by the atomic bomb, version with ladder. Figure 3, the same view, in the version where only the shadows subsist. No more so than the photos of the camps, the photos of Hiroshima or Nagasaki, whether the ones here or taken shortly after the catastrophe, are not mere documents about which one is free to ramble. Yet nothing dictates that they may or should be removed from the general regime of images, and it is even insofar as they are deeply embedded in this regime that we must consider them—specifically in the sense of this usage legitimated by Georges Didi-Huberman in his Images in Spite of All, which has nevertheless been so violently and so vainly attacked.3 And not just for what these images say about the referent to which they point—extermination, pure and simple disappearance, terror—but also for what they say about the status of images, and our relationship to this status. The entire indexical texture of the photographic sign is refreshed and shaken up by such images—beyond all semiotic guarantee, beyond any contract of readability, in a suddenness that is at once mysterious and plain to see, and against a wholly tragic backdrop. Again: I didn’t look for the Hiroshima image; it arrived by itself, to my very great amazement, with the purchase of that postcard from the Chalon museum bearing an apparently unrelated image. It is thus its irruption, and its question, to which a response must be sought. But since everything here has been triggered by the other

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image, the one of the haystack, that is where I have to start, which also means that for a while, throughout the entire first part of this narrative, there will be no further discussion, or even any thought, of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. I could just as well have avoided mentioning them at the outset, reserving for the end, as it were, like a terrible addendum or a diabolical deus ex machina, the impossible image of the vanished man. But it seems to me that would have involved fakery, since it was without delay (not immediately, but very quickly) that the image came. And above all, I think it right that in this book, concealed behind the English spring and behind the dawn of photography, its specter be ever present.

PART I A Haystack in the Sun

It was thus in the form of a postcard, and not in a book, that Fox Talbot’s haystack loomed back up at me. Perhaps there is nothing peculiar in this, but I cannot help thinking, on the contrary, that the fact that it had become a physical object cut out in space must have counted for a great deal in this liberation of the image. In the vast world of reproducibility, postcards have a special status. The same work, reproduced in a book or seen on a computer screen, does not have the same mode of existence, the same image life, that it has when it is that stiff paper rectangle of more or less consistent dimensions, normally intended to furnish the medium for a written message, which in turn is intended to be sent through the mail. Even if, as we are well aware, for postcards representing paintings—or photographs—and sold in museums, this function is often replaced by a simple acquisitional reflex (one buys them for oneself), we would be unhappy if they became anything other than postcards— for instance, if on the back they were to lose the traditional layout of the caption and the credit line, the space reserved 3

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for the stamp, and the fine horizontal lines awaiting the address. One way or another, we are dealing with a type of image that has a strong talismanic value. No matter what the quality of the reproduction (and it can be quite poor for paintings), there is a compensation, namely the sense of an object, the sense of a sliver blown away, and the very great flexibility of use it authorizes. A bookmark in a book that has nothing to do with what it shows, the postcard can also find itself pinned to the wall, placed on a library shelf or in the corner of a mirror, and each time it is as though the image’s power were being deferred, saved up. In any case, it took that singularity of the object, the effect of a cut-out where the image drifts alone in the three-dimensional space around it, for me to see the haystack properly, and for it to end up fascinating me, such as it is, stiller than anything and seemingly settled in a kind of intermediary state between weightiness and levitation. All of which also amounts to saying that reproducibility, far from being solely capable of weakening the image (which it can do as well, of course), can, on the contrary, dilate it, remove it from its fixed role and invent another role for it, another network, a minor mode that is the space of a new unfurling. It is reproducibility, in any case—the very possibility of reproduction—to which Fox Talbot’s image of the haystack owes its existence. The advantage of the calotype, the method perfected by Talbot of printing onto paper from a negative, was precisely to allow the multiplication of proofs, whereas the daguerreotype, meanwhile, remained stuck to its solitary plate, unreproducible. One could say that the becoming-postcard of the haystack was inscribed in its genome. There is no divergence, nor does this image (short of considering the referent itself as an image, but that is another question) come from any primary, original image,

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any Urbild. Inscribed in the shot from the start is an imprint that is always already a matrix. The Pencil of Nature. The book from which the image is taken, where it is the tenth plate (there are twenty-four in all), was devised by Talbot in order to present his method, and through it the brand-new art of photography. He gave it that splendid title (to which I’ll return) and delivered it in fascicles between June 1844 and April 1846. It is thought that 130 complete series were published in total (not very many, but the purchase price was quite high). Roughly thirty have survived.1 The twenty-four plates were in fact actual prints obtained from a master negative. Given the technical means available at the time, the period of production was naturally increased, as was the cost of a venture that, on the commercial level, in fact ended in partial failure. Yet the affair that had begun was on an altogether different scale, and such as it is, The Pencil of Nature is well and truly the first photoillustrated publication to have seen the light of day, as Talbot was obliged to point out in a foreword, both because what he was offering had no parallel and because it was necessary to distinguish his work from the daguerreotype-based engravings already in circulation. This context of rivalry with the daguerreotype (which, let us recall, was revealed to the world in 1839) is of course present in the historical summary preceding the plates and their commentaries. There are even grounds for thinking that to the thundering revelation of Daguerre’s invention we owe the story of the other side of photography’s birth that is The Pencil of Nature. But here we will leave aside that aspect, which belongs to the history of photography, where it has been described and analyzed with considerable sensitivity. For in reestablishing (and perhaps slightly rearranging) the long genesis of his research, Talbot does

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indulge in a boldly assertive recapitulation in which he is concerned with proving his invention’s primacy, but he also does something far more consequential. He invents another foundation narrative; he tells another story: his book is the presentation, not of a particular procedure, but of an art—photography—considered in its full scope and seen throughout as something marvelous. The theoretical quality of The Pencil of Nature does not lie in the explanation of a series of technical differences, or in the programmatic demonstration of photography’s powers, even if the latter are exposed as fully as was possible in those days of pure beginning. It comes from a kind of exclamatory joy linked to a climate of absolute opening. We are at the source of a new art, and what The Pencil of Nature allows us to hear or grasp is indeed the sound of that source, at the place where it is wholly originated, if not regulated by some scheme of nature at work, functioning directly in the darkroom and in the fixing of the image on the paper. In a way, even if Talbot’s empirical Romanticism does not exactly find us in the thought climate of the speculative Romanticism of Jena, it is Novalis’s “everything speaks” that speaks through the photographic as understood and transmitted by Talbot. This natural or solar conception of the photographic—a conception, as it were, of a self-portrait of nature—is also found in the remarks accompanying the birth of the daguerreotype2 and throughout the discourse on the actual phenomenon of the optical-chemical formation of those new and yet long-imagined images, but with Talbot it takes an even clearer and more assertive turn. The plates that constitute the volume, he says, have all been “impressed by Nature’s hand” and “obtained by the mere action of Light upon sensitive paper.”3 He also refers to them as sun pictures, a term that would last a long time. Here I can at least mention David O. Hill, who, shortly after Talbot

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and following directly in his wake, signed his own calotypes with the phrase Sol fecit, which was at once to assign them to nature’s regime of self-production and to inscribe them, in somewhat arrogant and dandyesque fashion, within the pictorial tradition of the author’s trademark. Yet the theoretical insistence on photography’s atechnical, nonhuman, natural quality is deposited (typo-graphed, we should say) in the very title of Talbot’s book. The pencil of nature means nature doing the drawing (of) itself. In a sense (and very specifically in the resonance of its own sense), the title merely draws, quite cleverly for that matter, on the semantic resources that photography was in the process of establishing, beginning with the choice of its name, which had only just been fixed in French as well as in English. Photography: as we know, drawing with light, or words of light, as Talbot wrote on one of the copies of The Pencil of Nature. For the graphein of photo-graphy, for its fully active dimension, it was necessary to look beyond the agent to find an implement; such would be the allegory of the pencil. But the possibility of that allegory depends on a history, a genesis, and that genesis is the subject of the main development in The Pencil of Nature’s opening text. The implement is placed by man in the hands of nature, restored to it—which also amounts to saying that man did away with it, was forced to do away with it. The story of just such an undoing plays a founding role in the genesis of photography as set out by Talbot. And here the narrative comes into step with autobiography: oddly enough, at the very moment when, in a sense, the subject is evacuated or put away, a subject speaks of his experience, and reveals what it was in that experience that led him to cease being an artist (a painter, a drawer) in order to become the one through whom the photographic sign could make its mark.

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The “Brief Historical Sketch of the Invention of the Art,” which constitutes most of the introductory text, is the unfolding story of the interplay of scientific knowledge, more or less improvised experiments, intuitions, and reveries via which Talbot eventually perfected his procedure. The two paths at the foundation of photography—the optical path, with the camera obscura or its derivatives, and the chemical path, with the sensitivity of silver salts to light—are both present, but it is in the realm of travel (we are very much in the intellectual climate of the “grand tour,” in a world of enlightened amateurs) that curiosity is stirred. Talbot begins by evoking a stay “on the lovely shores of the Lake of Como” in October 1833, during which he tells of attempting to make landscape sketches with the help of a camera lucida (in reality a kind of prism mounted on a stand), only to find “that the faithless pencil [my emphasis] had only left traces on the paper melancholy to behold.” Deciding at that point to return to a simpler method that he had tried many years before, also in Italy, using a camera obscura “to throw the image of the objects on a piece of transparent tracing paper laid on a pane of glass,” Talbot merely reencountered the old difficulties and delays. Once again, the pencil struggled to bridge the gap between what it could trace and the kind of liquid film that appeared on the transparent screen sheet. Yet immediately following the tale of that disappointing recourse to his former method, Talbot writes the passage that I find extraordinary. We join him in witnessing the birth, not of photography as such, but of the idea of photography, inspired by what is before his eyes, namely “the pictures of nature’s painting which the glass lens of the Camera throws upon the paper in its focus,” images of “inimitable beauty” or, as he goes on to say, “fairy-pictures, creations of a moment, and destined as rapidly to fade away.” The idea was precisely to capture those images, no longer with the “faith-

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less pencil” but by another means—and here begins the truly chemical or photochemical path, which is thus (via numerous detours) at the very origin of photography on paper. There is admittedly something striking about Talbot’s utter lack of solemnity in announcing his idea. Although he is aware of the momentousness of his intuition—just before describing the researches that led him to perfect the procedure whose results he is presenting, he reiterates that they “cannot . . . admit of a comparison with the value of the first and original idea”—nevertheless, right after the mention of “fairy-pictures,” he presents that “original idea” in an almost impulsive way: “It was during these thoughts [the meditation on the nature and inimitable beauty of the projected image] that the idea occurred to me . . . how charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably, and remain fixed upon the paper!” But this elegant and amazing lightness, in which there no doubt survives something of the not-so-distant Enlightenment’s climate of curiosity, should not mask the density of the narrative. What makes it valuable is the way Talbot attempts to characterize what he saw over the course of those landscape-sketching sessions, namely the projected images which are also a material made from different stuff than what can be drawn by hand with pencil or pen. It must be noted that he does not so much refer to them as a copy or a (faithful, exact) reproduction, not so much a double of the real as a production. Of those natural images whose beauty overwhelms him, he says they are inimitable. And so they are, in the strictest sense, inasmuch as no pencil, even held by an abler hand than his, could reproduce them. But they are also inimitable because they are not imitations. The prephotographic or quasi-photographic image obtained on this sort of paper screen is a world unto itself. As such,

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insofar as it belongs to the realm of fairies, it demands to be fixed, and fixes a goal for his research: the photographic image (already, in other words, what we have come to know commonly and colloquially as the “photo”) must be like the drawing made by nature, and not like nature directly. This amounts to saying that from the start, the quality of the image’s definition and the accuracy with which it points to the referent are not to be understood in terms of realism. A spectral signature accompanies the photographic image and inscribes itself in what that image ultimately is: a being without depth, a spectral surface. For if the pencil of nature draws, and if the images obtained and then fixed by photographic research can be compared to drawings (a comparison made easier by the black and white, and not actually unique to Talbot—it is likewise found with the daguerreotype and throughout the various speeches celebrating the new invention),4 it is in a wholly different sense than the tradition of disegno. The latter was still quite lively at the time, and was even revived in multiple ways, if one thinks of the logic of lines the European neoclassical circles were then developing. When he signals the gap that opens up between the pencil’s means and the projected image, Talbot evidently runs into the problem of outline; he was endeavoring, he says, “to trace with [his] pencil the outlines of the scenery depicted on the paper.” But what he sees, with the fluctuating landscape of inimitable beauty, is a presence, a halo-like power that is not resolved in an outline’s grasp. The schematizing force and the very rapidity of the stroke go against the settled slowness of the specter-image, the protophotographic image. There is in drawing, from the beginning, something of incision, of engraving—and also, concomitantly, a problem of sharpness and blurriness. In drawing’s manner of capture, there is a whole range of possibilities, from the firmest and

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crispest line to a desire for near-fading and erasure. Though it evidently depends on the artist’s temperament and decision, the type of rendering (firm or loose, crisp or “watery”) stems above all from the choice of tracing implement. Now, while the tradition of disegno, with its elements going back to antiquity, alternates among several types of implement (and rendering), it remains oriented primarily and in principle by a logic of the pure, clear stroke, which is also an ethics of the autonomous line. Moreover, this dynamic of a pure and rational linearity was transformed into a system of guarantees (the “probity” of which Ingres would later speak), which its proponents regularly set against the evanescences and dissolutions supposedly brought about by color. Drawing, in a Winckelmannian profile very present throughout Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century, including in England (I am thinking of the contours of Josiah Wedgwood’s ceramic workmanship,5 or, of course, the closely related and strangely spare drawing of John Flaxman’s engravings), was held to be the guarantor of form. Not getting carried away, staying within the purity of its concept, it was what condensed the essence of the pictorial gesture and structured its productions. And according to this profile, the pencil was evidently the implement par excellence, the energetic servant of the ideal tendency; yet it is this very pencil that Talbot finds “faithless,” not only because the person holding it has not learned the art of drawing, but primarily because the image to be traced onto the screen exceeds the implement’s means. The separation is complete between the stroke that touches a page to inscribe an outline and the pure impregnation of the photographic image announced by the projection. To what is perhaps an overly clear-cut opposition, one should add the corrective of a divergence within the drawing world itself, one that, remarkably, concerns the implement,

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the pencil. Indeed, a history of line-drawing implements remains to be written,6 in which one would see an evolution from the hard, thin groove to a smoother, thicker stroke, better able to grasp the aspects of appearance that go beyond seemingly pure and simple outlines. In the history of art, which must include the determining role of architectural drawing, this can be seen from the liberating logic of sfumato and the efforts of maniera or baroque drawing to discover another line, a line that one would almost have to call nonlinear, winding, rubbed out, fleeting—but it also occurs with a change of implement, with the appearance of different pencils, infinitely more ductile. These pencils are all of mineral origin, whether one goes back to the appearance of black stone at the end of the quattrocento or looks instead to pencils resembling graphite (almost contemporary with Talbot) and those produced by Conté (who added to graphite a mixture of ferruginous clay and soot). All involve the mineral abandoning percussion and hardness in order to slide toward the ductile and the unctuous, toward the possibility of a blurred or mellow rendering. One can legitimately consider this transition, if not prephotographic, then at least as stemming from a will toward the full yet shaky image (minus outlines) of the darkroom.7 The drawings of Seurat toward the end of the century seem to have inherited all this history, and to achieve the union of a penciled glissando and a fuzziness of photographic origin; they make it look as though shadow powder has been fixed. Hence, to return to them, the landscapes Talbot saw in his projections; hence the quality that only a short while later he would succeed in capturing and fixing; hence what we can and should call the photographic. In other words, that ghostly, almost immaterial matter, that absence of thickness that makes the glimpsed or captured image a kind of

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hyperimage; this is what gives it that glow or watery, melted character, that faraway effect that seems to contain the resonance of a lost echo. An image, or kind of image, without precedent in the representational arts, yet which functioned for them via reflection and shadow, persistently and from the beginning, as an incentive, not to say a model. As we know, reflection (by way of the story of Narcissus) and shadow (through the story of the young woman of Corinth as collected and recounted by Pliny) have both played a fundamental role in the fictitious history of an origin of painting or the imitative arts. And the photographic, while neither reflection nor shadow strictly speaking, nevertheless stems entirely from their regime of appearance, in which the image, as well as being projected or sent, is also produced naturally, while man looks on in fascination. “How charming it would be!” Talbot’s wish is already that of Butades’s daughter who wants to imprint her lover’s shadow that stands out on a wall, and thinks to trace around it before it disappears with the man who casts it. Here, the outline serves as a capture, but what is retained and fixed is a shadow. I would contend that this gesture, which stands for all time as the origin of figurative representation, also prefigures the photographic. The “pencil of nature” draws the shadow; light is divided into patches of varying darkness and produces the shade where the memory of a body or a face is sparked. What the young woman of Corinth produces by tracing around her lover’s shadow, which is his simultaneous trace, contemporary with his real and present body, is, at least in its intention, a quasi-photograph. And it is because all figurative images can, like this first image, be considered a posteriori to be quasi-photographs that the photographic, when it arrived with its strange and paradoxical mix of technical and atechnical qualities, represented

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a scandal to artists’ eyes. Talbot’s greatest strength was in immediately identifying the difference of the photographic from all the other, far older branches of the representational arts, and in understanding that its “fairylike” or marvelous aspect was its signature: not an epiphenomenon, but that which produces its very visibility. Talbot, in fact, had come even closer to the regime of shadow, or shadows, when he performed the experiments (starting in 1834–1835) in which one can recognize, in its original clarity, the early history of the photogram. In other words, those images obtained through the direct contact of an object with silver chloride paper and subsequently fixed in a saline solution; hence, purely photochemical images, but which in a way are like flattened shadows (uncast shadows, as it were) and which he called “photogenic drawings” (in the sense of being engendered by light) or, at the time of the very first attempts, adopting the old Greek word that haunts Plato’s work, “skiagraphic.” There is evidently a joy, for anyone interested in Pliny’s distant origin stories, in seeing the ancient skiagraphia of the painters of Greek pottery and décors thus reemerging from the depths, from another birth. Two plates of The Pencil of Nature are photogenic drawings—a finely cut-out leaf resembling flat-leaved parsley, and a fragment of lace. The positive image of the leaf is presented, whereas the lace is given as an example of a negative image. Besides the fact that the negative/positive transfer is an integral part of Talbot’s contribution to the technique of elaborating the photographic image, it allows him to show precisely, and in reverse, the work of light, the way light produces shadow. If light is always the source of shadow, then shadow, rather than being uncritically contrasted with light, can and should be understood first of all as its echo.

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This solidarity between light and shadow is the direction proposed, it seems to me, by Talbot’s vision, and thus by the art of photography as a whole. “The picture,” as in fact Talbot writes (still in the introductory text of The Pencil), “divested of the ideas which accompany it, and considered only in its ultimate nature, is but a succession or variety of stronger lights thrown upon one part of the paper, and of deeper shadows on another.” Behind this formulation’s apparent (and doubtless real) gentility, there is a kind of violence, but it originates in the fact of photography itself. In effect, to speak of an image “divested of the ideas which accompany it” is rather abrupt, but it is only possible in the face of another image, the new image, crude, full of future possibilities (“At present the art can hardly be said to have advanced beyond its infancy,” says Talbot), fixed on the paper and restoring to the question of images—perhaps somewhat exhausted by centuries of academic discussions of propriety, harmony, and pretense— something of its initial tremor, as we are now able to see. Via the photographic, it is as though Plato’s fundamental questioning of the ontic status of images had returned to its threshold. Photography, the being of a photograph, revives and deepens the highly unusual link that, as Plato noted, “interweaves being and nonbeing” in and through the image—the link that so irritated and stimulated him, and that has been at the heart of our relation to images ever since.8 If I have spoken of a hyperimage, it is first and foremost in the sense of this deepening. Thin or infrathin, stripped of all thickness and profile, appearing and yet fixed, almost fanatically framed by its edges (I will return later to some of these aspects), the photograph can be considered an absolute (in the chemical sense as well, of course!), a precipitate of the image. The apparition of that absolute unfurls—here, too, a

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latent image—in the experiments of the very first photographers, beginning with Niépce, even when they are only partially or even hardly successful (I’m thinking of certain ghostly prints by Bayard). That apparition can be read historically (in connection with the industrial age), sociologically, technically, or aesthetically, but the essential thing is perhaps not so much that photography signals a new world age, for which one could identify other equally important markers. Rather, it is that for the image and the conception of the image, self-timing or otherwise, photography enabled a complete reassessment and a vastly greater density (from which, for that matter, painting would be the first to profit). And it is because the fundamental aspects of photography are laid out from the very start—which incidentally is true of any art form—that it is so important to keep coming back to its beginnings, trying to understand not just how it came about, but what it was that came. (in the blunders, the faltering first steps, the regrets, the bricolages, with traces, memory-traces that seem to vanish and appear at the same time, with what is not yet there, not quite, yet via that very hesitation, producing the slowed, gradual, muted effect of an announcement, without prophesy: discrete objects in which the concept takes hold, imagine that, descending the far side of the Hegelian mountain: the negative becoming visible! An improbable fine skin on which the world writes itself, settling in luminous hieroglyphs.) What came, and what was on its way: in this order, Talbot’s “photogenic” drawings are truly nodes in which the problem of the new image is concentrated. The “magical value . . . such as a painted picture can never again possess for us” (which Benjamin, reflecting above all on portraits, recognized in photography)9 is already fully there, precisely

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insofar as these drawings, or rather these transcriptions, are wholly experimental and seemingly without a true aesthetic aim, unlike most of Talbot’s later works. Of the negatives of plants, he says only that they are “very pleasing pictures.” For him they may have merely represented evidence, marks along the path leading him toward his goal, whereas we recognize in them, in all its force, a birth, or to be more precise, a gestation: these images find us still awaiting the great release, still, as it were, in the belly of light. (: thus, Figure 4, this spray of apple blossoms, the negative of a photogenic drawing from 1838–1839. The spring blossom and the experiment both at Lacock Abbey, Wiltshire, where we will be returning often.) The objects selected for the contact method are botanical specimens characterized by their fine chiseling (fennel, fern, mimosa) or complex surfaces (a fly’s wing, a piece of lace). The skiagraphic transfer no doubt has an immediate translation value, but even if the legibility of the vegetal structure is extreme, and gives the resulting “drawing” a kind of scientific validity, the spectral look of the image—particularly when the latter is negative—prevails over all its other aspects, from which, moreover, it cannot be separated. This is not a case of a descriptive value fringed by a spectral one, or by the relief of a revelation. Everything is stamped into a single configuration, and upon seeing images like that of the apple twig, one thinks of the crystallizations that fascinated Stendhal. Yet while the crystallization of the branches thrown into the Salzburg salt mines takes place over two or three months,10 what is accomplished by a photograph occurs in an instant: it is an immediate transfiguration. Deriving from this is also the fact that despite being studies, the negative prints produce a sensation of fulfillment, of

Figure 4. W. H. Fox Talbot, Two Sprays of Leaves or Flowers, paper negative-contact, 1838–1839. © The British Library Board.

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completeness. (We will come back to this, but for me this is where everything holds together, in the positive of the haystack.) What appears on the paper is not reality as such, not the object itself, nor its double; it is its shadow, its specter, its luminous imprint—an image that could evidently not exist without the initial object, but that escapes from it while representing it, revealing it. What photograms bring out, with this revelation of the real, is the regime of autonomous resemblance that will be that of the photographic in general. The latent image, manifesting itself, preserves the mystery of its coming. Present and fixed, no doubt more fixed than any other image, the photographic image is at the same time (in its own time, in the time it has captured and suspends before our eyes in time) always seemingly bound toward its source: it integrates a vanished echo. The contact method is a transitional phase to which the notion of imprint directly applies—the object touches the sheet, the sheet remembers the object—whereas what the pencil of nature performs is an action at a distance, in which contact between surfaces no longer plays a role. Even if Talbot, by analogy with the human hand, uses the expression “the hand of nature,” no hand is holding the pencil, and there is evidently no pencil either—nothing but the flow of photons. The mystery of an impression or an impregnation without contact: this is the photographic miracle. Light is settled within time like a pure immanence, it is an infinite action without object, a continuous expenditure, a perpetual variability; the photographic is what places a witness within that immanence, collecting the trace of that infinite action. In a letter to Herschel, Talbot speaks of the action in terms that recall Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, in particular its underlying notion of potency: “Whenever there comes a

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very bright day, it is as if nature supplied an infinite designing power, of which it is only possible to use an infinitesimal part. It is really wonderful to consider that the whole solar flood of light, should be endowed with so many complicated properties, which in a vast majority of instances must remain latent, since most of the rays pass away into space, without meeting any object.”11 With regard to this infinite loss, one could say that photography in a way becomes the art of creating interpositions, presenting obstacles to light so that it can write or sign its action, making it visible. The entire physical universe is perceived as an inexhaustible and mindboggling stock of latent images. From Schelling’s remarks about the “still drowsy mind” of nature, a mind that must be aroused, to a contemporary photographer like Arnaud Claass, who writes in his Journal de travail that “the photographer, in short, merely helps the image produce itself,”12 we have a continuity of thought in which The Pencil of Nature is like the fundamental pulse. Action at a distance, then. I am deliberately using this term that comes primarily from physics, where it refers to an issue contemporaneous with the beginnings of photography. At the time, there was a shift from a mechanical conception, with tensions and forces engendered by material points and regular movements acting in a kind of void or ether, to a conception granting a universe governed by forces acting in a continuous fashion, no longer in an “empty” space, but in a field that was at once bearer and actor, place and agent, milieu and cause. And it seems to me that photography (which comes along, like all things, when the time is right) should also potentially be thought of, insofar as it hinges on reading the action of light, as a kind of “artist’s proof” intervening in the scientific realization of the unified field. It is the visibility—in the form of a trace—of an invisible action;

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it makes manifest the “infinite designing power” of nature invoked by Talbot. Yet photography, again, is primarily action at a distance in another sense, simpler and more direct: hence its disconformity within the general regime of indices to which it is typically and aptly linked today. Rosalind Krauss, who refers to it as “an imprint or transfer off the real,” evokes a whole series of traces that can be related to it: “On the family tree of images it is closer to palm prints, death masks, the Shroud of Turin, or the tracks of gulls on beaches.”13 She had spoken earlier, perhaps even more appropriately, of “the rings of water that cold glasses leave on tables.” Yes, that is what photography is like: that is its regime, its indexical being. But between it and all the indices that one can associate with it there is nevertheless a major difference, a disconformity that is also a yawning gap. The object or face that has imprinted itself has done so at a distance from which it has not been diverted; the image, through photography, is obtained without any direct contact with the represented object. In truth, the list of traces given by Rosalind Krauss can only be totally assimilated to the photogram, in other words to proofs obtained through direct contact between the object and the sheet—images that have no field, and that consequently refer to nothing beyond a field. Photograms are drawings of light (and, as such, come fully within the realm of photography),14 but they are produced in the absence of the optical mechanism of photography in its regular mode—a mechanism that for its part is always simultaneously using and creating a field. In this sense, one can say that photograms are the opposite of the projected images Talbot saw in the course of his Italian experiments, in which, on the contrary, no chemistry was involved, and which came about solely as pure optical events. As we know, photography in its stabilized form

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would result from the union of the two sides, optical and photochemical, a union that, with constant technical adjustments, would ensure the photographic’s way of being, right up until the appearance of the digital image. But what stands out is precisely this union that allows a referent to give rise to its own trace, and to draw it while remaining untouched. On the optical level there is something of a sending, whereas on the chemical level there is something of a deposit. This simultaneous sending and deposition creates the image by letting it come. The image breaks off from the real (from the open sum of all possible referents) like a sliver belonging to it, but the block from which the sliver blows away remains intact. While the photographic image can be described as a withdrawal from the real or a supplement added to the real, it is not well and truly either; it comes about like a drop that doesn’t fall (which, strictly speaking, is suspense). The open—and this would be another approach to the Rilkean schema—is, in a way, the latent immensity of all that can be imaged or photographed; it is everything that can come about in a depth of field. Yet the photo comes about in the open (which is also the infinite potentiality that Talbot described) by doing something finite. The latent image, by coming, effaces all other images for an instant, embedding itself within its own coming, unique and definitive. Given the infinite possibility of imaging, every image that comes is an eclosion foreclosed, a cut-out strictly and precisely finished, a completion. The great question that haunted protophotographic research for a long time was that of the fixer: it was necessary not only to collect but to preserve, not only to seize but to fix. To fix, as we will recall, is first and foremost to look from a unique angle, to gaze fixedly, to be in a state of fixedness, but it is also to come within the realm of fixation, to pass from the

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ephemeral and the transient into the realm of what remains and holds together. This holding or sustaining, so cruelly denied to Narcissus, in the end was easily achieved by photography. And a world where anything can be retained, where anything at any moment can avoid being lost and buried, is no longer quite the same. In the texts accompanying the birth of photography, which were consequently written while it was still a delicate practice, a long way, at any rate, from the rapid execution of the snapshot that wouldn’t come until later with what François Brunet calls the “Kodak revolution,” it is quite striking to see that the new art’s potential to make an image of anything is immediately hailed with enthusiasm. And it is not surprising that in the midst of this concert, in which the leitmotiv of practical finality (archiving, memorizing, copying) ultimately prevails, Talbot is humming another tune, more musing or meditative from the start. For as he already points out in his report of 1839, it is also the most fragile and ephemeral things that, via photography, can be captured and fixed: “The most transitory of things, a shadow, the proverbial emblem of all that is fleeting and momentary, may be fettered by the spells of our ‘natural magic,’ and may be fixed for ever in the position which it seemed only destined for a single instant to occupy.”15 Shadow is thus placed at the heart of the tumult of photography, first of all on the basis of its fugitive quality. If a shadow can be photographed, it is because a channel in the course of time can be diverted; even with an exposure time that is still rather long (though it should be noted that Talbot’s method greatly accelerated things in relation to the daguerreotype), it is already the logic of the instant, the pure instant, the logic of the snapshot, that is foreshadowed. A photograph, which can seize a shadow, is itself like the shadow of the instant it seizes. This seizure is a suspension,

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a derivative in the course of time—an image, a hyperimage. The immobility of the image is complete, absolute, but what it captures and tells is mobility itself, the fugitive nature of any event. There is—and landscape painters were the first to know it and to feel it painfully—an infinite variability in the states of the sky, and a close and intimate correlation between the almost constantly changing luminosity and the passage of time which is experienced as being simultaneously inexorable and flexible.16 In this sense, a photograph is always atmospheric, and the interplay between the time of the pose and the opening of the lens, which was to be the operating mode of all photographic practice once the apparatuses allowed for such adjustments, is merely the technical consequence of the photographic’s hypersensitivity to variation. Capable of seizing a shadow, and thus, as Talbot expressly says, of transforming “the proverbial emblem of all that is fleeting” into a stationary wave or a pole of inertia, photography unfolds from the very beginning as an art that, while separating time from itself by posing it, also works with it, compresses, dilates, and ramifies it. Time is experienced in durations, by which standard one generally measures the temporal arts, whose sovereign figure is evidently music. Yet just as for all things musical the consideration of space plays a primary role, the consideration of temporality, for the image in general and for the photographic image in particular, is fundamental.17 If all images are outside of time, deposited outside of time—and this situation is an essential point, not a mere characteristic— at the same time, no image has left time in the same way; no image contains the same memory of time. And I would insist that with the notion of “memory of time,” nothing sentimental is being added here; it is purely a question of quan-

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tities, at least at the start. What one should ask oneself, when faced with the immobility or the suspension of the image, is this: how much time does a photograph remember? Here everything gets more complicated. To borrow terms used by Aristotle in the Poetics to describe the development of tragedy, one could refer to the photo as a simultaneous nouement and dénouement. Nouement, because the image seizes several temporalities all at once—in a simple portrait, for instance, in which the gaze, photographed as it withdraws into the incontrovertible here-and-now of the pose, always gives rise to a future divergence. And dénouement, because the image simultaneously appears as the sole possible result of that combination of temporalities, and as the calming of the very tensions that inhabit it. Shadow, for example (and this is particularly evident in the shadow of the ladder on the haystack, which I have not forgotten!), though indeed the emblem of fleetingness evoked by Talbot, presents to the image in which it is seized and motionless the chance of an extraordinary dilation. What is briefest and most fragile suddenly becomes that which most extends time’s length. This is the power that, within the possibilities of painting (which of course remain distinct), Giorgio de Chirico’s “metaphysical” paintings would exploit with great subtlety, almost as though in shadow there existed a science of prescience. Motionless, the photographed shadow deposits a kind of latent movement; it registers time like a clock that is stopped forever—not implying, as one could all too easily believe, that time no longer passes, but instead condensing in the needle’s head of the eternalized instant all the irreducible violence of the passing hours. In the (standard and contested) translation of the famous formula from Plato’s Timaeus where he condenses the idea of time, he renders the latter as a “moving image of eternity.”

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On the definitional horizon of this formula, so striking and compact in spite of all, one could say of a photograph that, conversely, it is like a motionless figure of passing time. For instance—and this would be cinema itself, which is to say capture grafted onto a movement—the shadow, on a wall, of branches shaken by a breeze: hence something I could personally watch for hours on end (but it never lasts for hours, each time there is only the miracle of a severalminute period during which, between the gentle swaying of the branches, the correspondingly fluid image of the leaves, the quantity of light, and the texture of the wall-screen, a perfect choreography comes together). Hence, too, an image similar to the ones Talbot saw projected in Italy. And hence, if one can imagine it, the extreme slowing down of that moving image that already seems to be in slow motion: thus a maximal slow motion, similar to that proposed by the artist Douglas Gordon in 24 Hour Psycho.18 Then, finally, at the ultimate limit of this ultraslow motion, a kind of extinguishing or fading of time—the freeze frame producing the image—the photo. Yes, like that. At the extremity of slow motion, the motionless, immobility as a silent shock, a fall, an end, a pause, a dream, then nothing: nothing but the image’s lack of noise: time stopped, a faded time, but one that virtually contains all speeds, contains and extinguishes them, and thereby conceals them. In the latent image, time was coming: time enough for it to come and stop at itself. In the realized, manifested, fixed image, what one sees is not time abolished; it

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is a memory of time unfurling like an omen. Strangely— and just as, without thickness, it still has (can still have) a depth—the image, without duration and fully complete in the instant, still has a tempo, a kind of length or integrated duration, which is condensed. This could be summed up in a formula: immobility is a vibration, an absolute of vibration, and it is this trembling of time, this trembling of things in time, that photography enables one to see. Perhaps, indeed, it is now time to return to the source, in other words to that very vibration emerging seemingly intact from an extraordinary and sovereign bath of presence—the image that, as Larry J. Schaaf says, “speaks about time and timing—about place and placement.”19 A haystack in the English spring, and a ladder propped against it, nothing else: Figure 1 here, plate 10 in The Pencil of Nature. The image has no background, so to speak. The framing highlights the haystack, which appears immense, even rising beyond the frame at the top. One can make out trees behind it, in particular the foliage’s play of shadow and light. In Histoire de voir, where this plate is reproduced, Michel Frizot points out that it is doubtless among “the first photographs ‘constructed’ by the framing, the geometry of volumes, the composition of the lines of shadow and light, and the ‘variety’ of the detail.”20 Perhaps the term “construction” is not entirely appropriate; perhaps there is simply a desire to adhere to a single object, which is shown this way for purely demonstrative reasons. In any case, it was apparently on the basis of the quality of the rendering and the ability to reveal the finest details that the haystack photograph—whose “modern” singularity is isolated in the collection—was chosen by Talbot, judging by what he says in the commentary: “One advantage of the discovery of the Photographic Art

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will be, that it will enable us to introduce into our pictures a multitude of minute details which add to the truth and reality of the representation, but which no artist would take the trouble to copy faithfully from nature.” He adds that the image retains “every accident of light and shade,” producing for some viewers “an air of variety beyond expectation.” A strange, neutral caption, since rather than an air of variety, one first sees the unity of a single compact object. Of course, there is undeniably an infinite variety of accidents on the surface of the haystack, each blade of hay vying to catch the eye (of the needle, one might almost say); the result on each side is a complex play of diversely lit grisailles. And yet, except for where it starts (under the ladder) and for the strands lying on the ground, beneath the long shady strip jutting inward at the base of the haystack, the hay in no way appears in the classic disorder of a large collapsing pile of jackstraws or an improvised bed. On the contrary—and no doubt this is primarily a characteristic of the referent, and thus of this very compact sort of haystack—the hay looks like a material, and almost has the density of a wall, not just because the haystack resembles a house (and not even a model house, for it is house-sized), but above all because of a kind of patina or wear, given that hay ages and homogenizes far more quickly and very differently than straw. One is nonetheless tempted to believe Talbot: the ladder itself, along with its shadow, is perhaps there merely to illustrate another “accident of light.” But this is not about agreeing or disagreeing with Talbot, or ascribing intentions to him that he may not have had, at least not consciously (we will come back to this unconscious aspect, which he signals himself in a truly prophetic way). It is about trying to understand why such an image, which is well thought-out from every point of view, escapes the restrictive program assigned to it. And for the moment I am leaving aside the call or the

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echo that the ladder produced in me, indicating another image, the one I mentioned at the outset of this story. Thus, for now, the haystack and nothing else, almost as though nothing were leaning against it, nothing but day, the enchantment (the madness) of day. Here, in what again is perhaps simply a realist program, is what I would like to call an object jump, in other words an event that is in no way a simple and subtle displacement, an event that is literally a kind of taking of power. Indeed, with this photo it is very much as though the parti pris des choses, the “side taken with things” (to borrow Francis Ponge’s well-known title), were already there, silently inscribed, and as though it were coming from the things themselves—as though, commanded by the pencil of nature, the object were asserting its presence as it had never done before, in this pure, matte radiation, this strange faded sovereignty. (And perhaps it was already on this basis that the haystack photo enjoyed a certain popularity in its day. In his monograph, Larry J. Schaaf cites several laudatory articles that appeared at the time, and points out that Talbot’s assistant printed small cards with the plate’s title, intended for the numerous copies offered for sale.)21 The history of the object’s status in the representational arts cannot be reduced solely to the matter of the still life, regardless of the latter’s importance and longevity from the Romans to the present day. Talbot very deliberately inscribes The Pencil of Nature within that history. First of all, he concludes the book with plate 24, which is indeed a pure still life that directly rivals painted still lifes (two baskets of fruit placed on a checked tablecloth) in spite of its coldness and its strikingly quasi-conceptual appearance—yet he gives no reason for this choice in the commentary, which is purely technical and focuses on the accidents of reproduction.

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But above all, he grants objects a significant place that can only be compared, in those early days of photography, to Hippolyte Bayard’s remarkable assemblages of garden tools. In effect, seven of the twenty-four plates represent objects (nine, if one counts the art object, with the two versions that are provided of a bust of Patroclus). It is in the commentary on one of these object plates, plate 6, that Talbot makes his position quite clear. Figure 5, then. The Open Door. In which one sees a door ajar, rather than fully open, leading from the outside into a room that remains entirely in darkness, where one can only just make out a window at the back. Against the left jamb leans a simple broom made of branches, while on the wall to the right hangs a lantern. Tangles of climbing plants can be seen on either side of the door, producing a kind of optical muddle and generating a moiré effect with what is out of shot. As the framing makes clear, the subject of this image is not the door as such, since it is cut off at midheight; rather, it is the composition of objects to which the door gives rise. In the commentary, Talbot begins by reminding the reader that the aim of his work “is to place on record some of the early beginnings of a new art,” and that with this plate, whose aesthetic intention is obvious, he wishes to provide a modest example of the “trifling efforts” of this art that is being tried out, it would seem, in the wake of grand painting. Nevertheless—and this is where things become interesting—strictly speaking, it is not the grand tradition of painting that Talbot invokes, but genre painting, which was generally considered to be a minor form in its day. He writes: “We have sufficient authority in the Dutch school of art, for taking as subjects of representation scenes of daily and familiar occurrence. A painter’s eye will often be arrested where ordinary people see nothing remarkable. A casual gleam of sunshine, or a shadow thrown across his path, a

Figure 5. W. H. Fox Talbot, The Open Door, calotype, late April 1844, plate 6 of The Pencil of Nature. © The British Library Board.

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time-withered oak, or a moss-covered stone may awaken a train of thoughts and feelings, and picturesque imaginings.” It is remarkable, incidentally, that in the list he produces, Talbot begins with two phenomena of light—a ray of sunshine appearing and a shadow spreading—that are metaphors for the action of the pencil of nature. But this passage is particularly noteworthy for two reasons. First, for the way he describes the ease of a possible relation between photography and painting: in effect, “a painter’s eye” sees, or is capable of seeing, what photography shows it is capable of showing. And, of course, for the position that Talbot accordingly assumes within the history of art: with the changing sky, the timeworn oak, and the moss-covered stone, it is very clearly a contemporary (one would almost say an exact copy) of Constable speaking. This is to say that we are in a transitional moment, when the schemas of Romanticism, without being supplanted, are nevertheless starting to vie with those of realism. This historical moment, by the way, cannot be described as a unanimous shift from ideality to veraciousness, or from a light touch to a tight grasp, but ought instead to be understood as a path full of snags and regrets, leading, in fact, from one idealization to another. The great question of realism (not only pictorial, but also literary, photographic, or cinematic realism) is in effect the question of intention, the visibility of intention: the real, rather than simply coming or being, is summoned and held, brandished, claimed. It is an idea of the real rather than the real itself, and realism, whether helplessly or cynically, manifests the effectiveness of that idea. In a word, realism is a style, and the real has no such thing; it unfolds or subsides independently of any style. Although unobtrusive and purely rhetorical, there is something slightly vapid in the picturesque arrangement of the objects in The Open Door, something of the weakness of the realist claim. It is as though things were displaying their

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humble side, at the same time offering an affected simplicity and producing the entirely typical effect of a mendicity of presence, a presence that has been implored.22 We may note that this image’s (very) relative weakness is in line with the subordinate position that the commentary assigns to photography; the latter, in spite of everything, is there only as a means to aid painting, quite simply by copying it. It nevertheless seems that the theme of the half-open door had a longer and more powerful resonance for Talbot. In effect, another view of this door exists, an older view (very precisely dated January 21, 1841) in which a distinctly similar broom is placed once more, except it is by itself on the other side, enabling Talbot’s mother to call the plate, rather cheerily, The Soliloquy of the Broom. Aside from the paleness and the arguably hesitant nature of the shot, the most striking thing in this first version, which in a way is preparatory to the one from The Pencil of Nature made three years later, and which is thus our Figure 6, is the unaffected and neutral character of the presentation, which avoids all the display of a market stall or an artistic effect; it is the contrast between this image, so simple and uncomposed, and the more declarative appearance of The Open Door. And while this is true of many other images produced by Talbot, to the point that one could almost say that the whole of his work is traversed by this sort of spectral objectivity, only in some of them is it absolutely vital, leaping out at the viewer. Before coming (or coming back) to the haystack, which is evidently the perfect exemplum, I would like to mention— away from The Pencil this time—the strange photo that shows, from the outside, the window of Talbot’s library at Lacock Abbey, namely our Figure 7. Larry J. Schaaf, who rightly sees in it “one of Talbot’s most enigmatic images,”23 emphasizes that it was taken just four days after the photo of the solitary broom, and hence “in a particularly fertile time for

Figure 6. W. H. Fox Talbot, The Soliloquy of the Broom, calotype, January 21, 1841. © The British Library Board.

Figure 7. W. H. Fox Talbot, The Window of Talbot’s Library at Lacock Abbey, calotype, January 25, 1841. © The British Library Board.

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his imagination.” What is certain is that these two images speak the same language, or (and this is no mere wordplay) make up the same silence. The half-closed sash window responds to the half-open door; the faint and oblique presence of the broom is echoed by the barely discernible presence of a handful of objects placed on the window ledge, one of which, perhaps transparent, is hard to identify; but above all there is the wall, and the solitude of the window in the wall, and in them a kind of refusal to open up, like a perfectly calm denial of representation. Neither horizon nor depth of field come to the gaze’s rescue in this image devoid of any figure (indeed, of practically any figural point of reference). It seems to be questioning the very power of photography, suspended between an interior that it does not enter—but that half-opens or announces itself by way of a yawning black background—and a wall that consequently serves as a simple screen of light with full bleed. A double background, then, all the more striking since the weave of the paper shows through, with the brand name, as though it were superimposed, producing a faint graph on the wall. It would seem that Talbot (on a technical basis, or for other reasons?) deemed the photo “bad,”24 but it stands out, along with and even more so than the one of the broom, as an image whose wake, or reserve of optical unconscious, is vast. It shows, in any case, that while The Haystack is exceptionally intense in its vacuity, it merely reveals or accentuates a feature that animates and torments Talbot’s entire photographic trajectory. With The Haystack, whether intentionally or not (and perhaps it is crucial that this not have been strictly or fully “intentional”), there is a kind of definitive irruption: of the thing on the one hand (the object shown as such, present in its pure separation, suspended in its weightiness), and of

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the photographic on the other (an image that is no longer accountable to painting, that performs the work of representation altogether differently). And this is where one must go back to the “photogenic drawings,” to those negative images of twigs and the crystallized sensation of completion that they induced—precisely in order to see the same sensation coming, only in the diurnal and neutral image, the absolutely nonsublimated image of an object planted in the middle of the field and occupying the whole of the frame: that object, that haystack, avoiding both the picturesque and the prescription of realism in order to exist fully within its rights or in its own right, to exist solely as an existence, as something that has no allegorical scope and that can be assigned neither to the regime of causes nor to that of effects, simply standing on the pure surface of the image as the reverberation of what is, as the excess of all that likewise nestles within being, and rests there. From the very start, photography’s power of focus, its power to concentrate its attention on a single thing, is immense. Perhaps in the beginning, thanks to the relative slowness of its implementation, it was even spontaneously oriented, attracted by that solitude. At any rate, this is quite often what one sees, and this condition, or this conditioning by unity (a face, a house, a tree . . .), would be maintained throughout the history of photography, along with the complex intensities of scenic arrangements and the interplay of links within the image. I am well aware that here we have the ladder and its shadow, which form a link (and much more), but if I take out the ladder temporarily, there is no link other than that of the object to itself, if such a soliloquy, to borrow the word from Lady Elisabeth Feilding, Talbot’s mother, is still—or already—a link. Not a dimming, but a clarity, the clarity of an irruption whose only violence is the violence of its appearance, the clarity (but not the transpar-

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ency, which is another matter) of a there is, plotted or articulated at one of its infinite points. Photography says there is a real. It does not certify its existence; it prolongs it, like a detached shadow. There is consequently a kind of shadow that remembers what was present in front of it. A photograph endlessly presents the present that was. Its own presence is none other than the discretion of a trace that appears as though it were retreating. A photo endlessly says “there is”: there is here in me what was in front of me, which I took while leaving it. But these are still ways of speaking that can fairly quickly become misleading, since a photograph, which is nobody, is mute: its “there is” is in freefall, like that of thought, of reverie. What it shows is outside of it, and its interiority is constituted solely by that pure outside to which, no matter what, it had to expose itself. And one could say here that to the very extent that it is condensed in that exposition, it encounters its plane of immanence or field of exactitude. What it thus exposes itself to (as long as that exposition lasts) is signification. The real (the unclosable sum of all possible referents, the totality of what is in and out of shot, the open) is ever signifying; to say this is simply to rephrase Novalis’s “everything speaks.” The real is the passive background that signifies, upon which—or against which—the photograph settles, not as a supplement (a shadow is not a supplement), but as a veil. The texture of this veil is immobility. To the fertile and moving flow of signification, a stopping time is given; the instant is extracted from the flow and becomes that veil, that “photo.” A veil or screen on which signification is caught red-handed, acting like a bath in which all existence is dipped as soon as it appears. And this is what one sees. This is the tumult in which photography spreads out, all the more violent given that the operation is pure, devoid of intentions (those of realism

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or anything else). In effect, signification, which precedes meaning, does not provide it, does not indicate it, and it is when signification is neutral that it is maximal, or—to put it in other terms—that the indexical system is at its peak. There is no lesson, no thesis, no judgment, and there is no determination of the index; the photograph (the image) is the pure index of the real’s propensity to be an index itself.25 Photography (or at any rate a photograph such as the one of the haystack, which has not left my sight) is this enigmatic tautology: this redoubling, this veil effect that shows the violence of meaning (the violence of the real) prior to any orientation, any utilization, any song or prayer. It is like a first degree of consciousness, a functional blank consciousness that, as it does not or cannot bear the shadow of intention, only has the truth of a beginning to convey—prior to thought, prior to the coming of thought, like the pure pensivity of nature dreaming of itself. A degree of innocence, one might say, that for Talbot is also a guarantee of faithfulness, of impartiality. A faithfulness, indeed, of which the “faithless” human-held pencil was incapable, an impartiality that unfurls independently of any aesthetic prejudice, as stated in the commentary on plate 2 of The Pencil of Nature, which shows a view of boulevards in Paris taken from an upperstory hotel window:26 “A whole forest of chimneys borders the horizon: for, the instrument chronicles whatever it sees, and certainly would delineate a chimney-pot or a chimneysweeper with the same impartiality as it would the Apollo of Belvedere.” As we can see, the undiscriminating nature of the photographic image, which many would choose to see as mere mechanical stupidity, is not only described by Talbot in positive terms; it already has a critical scope, at least in a latent state. As I have already suggested, it could be that with the haystack of Lacock, from his point of view as pioneer and

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researcher, Talbot simply wanted to produce a “good photo,” one that was particularly eloquent or annunciatory (with all its details, all the hay, the ultrahay of details). Yet what came about was not so much that demonstration (which is also present, of course) as a kind of implosion or revolution of the object’s status. And we can clearly see, without attributing more to him than he actually expressed, that Talbot truly foresaw this leap. Beyond what he says of the banal objects of everyday life in the commentary on the “Dutch” plate, beyond the equation he establishes between the figure of a chimney sweep and that of the Apollo Belvedere in the commentary on the boulevard plate, we do indeed approach the equivalent of a deposing of grandeur and the hierarchy of genres; it is indeed the prosaic destiny—the prose work— of photography which opens up. Presently we will see the latent chimney sweep of the boulevard walking along the embankment, multiplied by three in a marvelous and wellknown photo by Charles Nègre.27 As for the Apollo Belvedere, its star was beginning to wane. Already in England, in a traveler’s article that appeared in the Morning Chronicle (known to us thanks to Hegel’s mischievously quoting from it),28 it had been labeled a “theatrical coxcomb.” Photography and photographic emotion thus take their place, one that was yet to be measured, in the great deposing of idealities that swept the nineteenth century along. But more than this deposing, which is often still hesitant, what conversely stands out—through the new regimes of people and objects—is the establishment of the fact that there is no such thing as insignificance. Signification means equal rights between chimney sweeps and statues, between worthless things and grand signs; it is the possibility given (or restored) to a simple haystack, or a broom, or a window, to affect the whole of an image’s latent meaning by being drawn to nothing except themselves. I am not saying that this estab-

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lishing of a rule or a parti pris des choses was intended and pondered by Talbot, and that the image of the haystack is the resulting manifesto. I am saying simply that I see in it very distinctly the sign of a change in direction, the harbinger of a movement of recognition that, while there is nothing inherently iconoclastic about it, nonetheless assumes the significance of a nullification. In its way, the haystack opens up the very regime of object presentation breathtakingly embodied by Duchamp’s readymades. In any case, there is a simultaneously obvious and secret kinship between the readymade and the photograph. The readymade, one could say, acts like a three-dimensional photograph; it is like a hyperimage swept up in a Parousia of volume. (Duchamp’s entire approach, in fact, is related to the photographic. With the making of The Large Glass, with the consideration of cast shadows and the concern with optics in general, as well as with the direct use of the photographic medium to show states of form (Dust Breeding) or to serve as a matrix (the “draft pistons” of The Bride’s veil), Duchamp’s work breaks more new ground by being the first to incorporate photography, not as an accompaniment, but as a constitutive vehicle of the idea’s organization. But it is the readymade’s offbeat and aporetic mode of existence that almost painfully touches the ontological mystery of the photographic image. This warrants a detailed and careful study.) To stay within Duchamp’s lexical space (always so precise, so useful), one could say that photography performs a stoppage in time and space. A frame, placing itself on the instant it captures, prevents time from slipping away. The referent seized in this frame is perhaps no more important than a simple remark, but this remark is suspended for all time; the necessarily ungraspable nature of the instant is denied. The freeze frame in which a photograph consists is a pure invention; no animal or human gaze, however

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fixed, can attain that vertiginous, definitive immobility. And yet every photograph is definitive; the essence of a photograph is to be a graph that nothing henceforth can affect.29 In the strictest sense, photography is stupefying, always. Even if digital technology gives photographic suspension an extreme ease of erasure, there is still that instant of the forming-fixing of the image, and it remains startling. One could even say that by substituting a screen that encapsulates the image for the viewfinder that prepared or suggested it in traditional cameras, digital technique has made photography’s imaging of the real all the more stupefying, albeit at the risk of diluting the real into a kind of discontinuous pseudocapture. Back to Figure 1, if we ever left it. The Haystack. In connection once again with the object, the status of the object. While on the one hand it is generic, designating all haystacks just as a noun does for a given object, this denominative haystack is (was) also a particular haystack, a singular object. Removed from all triviality (neither the ladder nor the long thin stick leaning against it on the right are trivialities, strictly speaking), the haystack, this haystack, is at once an absolute and an individuality, a form (in the Platonic sense) and an actualization. And precisely insofar as it has been actualized, precisely insofar as it has been an inhabitant of the physical world, it has been able to make itself present and be presented as an image. No matter how great the photographic’s power of schematization, the “pencil of nature” can only ever trace an appearance and draw on the reality of what is presented to the senses. A photograph can espouse the notion,30 but only all at once, with no preliminary sketch. If what comes is (or seems to be) the thing itself, nevertheless at the origin of that coming there is no essentiality, no prefiguration, no schema: the figure is fully there,

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under its common name and in its unique form. And so we must temporarily leave the realm of what Mallarmé called the “notion,” in order to accompany this haystack in the resonance of its singularity, in a quasi-biographical sense. In other words, we must consider it within a history as well, inasmuch as it is a technical object, stemming from a specific tradition of cultivation linked to a way of life and a particular stage of agricultural evolution. But also inasmuch as it is, for the person who photographed it, a familiar object situated on his own land, a companion and a landmark. The haystack is a recitative of the countryside. Since the introduction of hayfields in the Middle Ages, it has been essential to the performing duo of agriculture and farming. Over time in the Western world, the evolving modes of active connection between all that pertains to the cultivation of grasses (primarily wheat) and all that concerns the breeding of animals have determined the look and importance of farm buildings and various uses of the land, as well as a number of objects and tools that play their part, sometimes very minor and very brief, in the middle of this grand score. The haystack is one such object, and if one wished to prove it had a history as such, it would suffice to observe that today it has practically disappeared from our countrysides, where it has been replaced by rolls that are fairly quickly removed from the fields before being stored in sheds and often even wrapped in colored plastic. Our atavistic reflex, as citydwellers unused to the country, is to find these new objects and their materials ugly or out of place, and, in return, to miss the days of yore when the haystack played a modest yet heroic role. It goes without saying that such a position is mostly sentimental (and that it is gainsaid by the often lovely punctuation effect of the hay rolls on the fields), but what interests me here is how it potentially distorts the way we

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look at Talbot’s plate, filing it purely and simply under the heading of the picturesque. As a constitutive element of the language of the farm, the haystack of course fulfills its picturesque role obediently, all the more so given that in a country such as England that was already industrialized by the mid-nineteenth century, the countryside, with its lowered economic standards, tended to become a conservatory of relatively permanent landscape forms (which for that matter, especially in aristocratic milieus, inherited an already established tradition of picturesque land modeling). Lacock Abbey, near Bath in Wiltshire, is entirely representative of this tendency, and it would seem that William Henry Fox Talbot (whose full name is appropriate here) was quite proud of it. In addition to the photographs of the haystack and the open door, one finds in The Pencil of Nature three views of the old abbey. The commentary on plate 15 (which shows a general view), citing the 1839 account of the art of photogenic drawing, notes that of all the buildings in the world, it is the first “that was ever yet known to have drawn its own picture.” The haystack, strictly speaking, is not a building, but its form and volume make it a kind of barn whose content— the hay—is its own envelope. It represents, at any rate, a form of storage that adds to strict functionality an aestheticizing counterpoint that is no product of chance, but an intended result. The form of the object contains a signature—the anonymous signature of a common art and a local way of doing things. Photography accounts for all of this in passing, but its force evidently comes from elsewhere, in particular from the neat way it extracts the object’s density from all this gangue of rural, picturesque, not to say pictorial connotations. With regard to form, what is immediately noticeable and almost surprising is the extraordinary regularity of the de-

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sign, the side combed and done up to the nines, stating that here there is tidiness and organization. The accumulation occurs according to an idea of form that eliminates chance as much as possible, and dismisses the projected configuration of those random aspects that are the mark of any pile and its near-indescribable mathematical complexity. This is all the more remarkable considering that haystacks, far from being permanent constructions, are on the contrary rather like inverse works in progress, enormous cakes of hay destined sooner or later to disappear. Here, this transitory aspect, while it is preserved, falls, so to speak, under the jurisdiction of the form: to be sure, the “cake” is sliced, but in the most regular and regulated way imaginable. There results a peculiar equilibrium that tips the ephemeral into long duration, and gives or seems to give a stable foundation to the passing of time. A large and sturdy object whose days are nonetheless numbered, the haystack of Lacock Abbey suggests at the same time, through its form and weight, a kind of power of inertia or nondiscontinuity in the way it inhabits time. With regard to light (let’s remember that it was first of all a matter of showing “every accident of light and shade”), the object sends itself in the sun. The stationary wave of its presence radiates in the light of spring, at the moment when, with winter gone, the countryside turns slowly toward its summer face, of which the hay itself is a reminder. With this reminder of summer warming up and beginning to shine, yet another valence comes to us: everything having to do with harvesting and gathering crops, with Ceres, with a certain opulence, a certain happiness linked to the wealth of the earth and those who own it. The image—and this is part and parcel of what constitutes it—is empty of all living presence, animal or human, but one can easily imagine, from this casual starting point, an entire script of genre scenes

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prompted by the mere idea of an English garden: young girls with flowers, gentlemen in light-colored suits, a small dog held in someone’s arms, perhaps someone on a horse . . . Yet this image is neither the décor for such a playlet nor the background of a group portrait; it solely concerns one (or two) object(s) and a material, namely the hay that occupies practically all its surface. Though it may not be the first thing that comes to mind, hay is also a possession, a commodity. With this haystack, one is looking at capital, and there is perhaps even an opaque abruptness in the way it is shown. Exaggerating only slightly, one could imagine, via mass reproduction, a Warholian future for this image, to which it would seem rather well suited. And it is at this point, through which passes the thin and sensitive thread of private property, that another estuary of connections opens up. Property presupposes a routine link to things, naturally intertwined with affect. There can be no question of reducing Talbot to the state of a landed proprietor (had he been nothing but this, he would be nothing at all), nor of saying that he “liked” this haystack or was somehow attached to it. What is at stake here is the way the objects that surround us come to inhabit us and are transformed into signs, subconsciously forming a mysterious network of energy that can be mobilized at any moment and that no voluntary agency can manage to eliminate altogether. Thus, although deliberately solar and devoid of effusiveness, this haystack is necessarily part of such a network, which would remain wholly inaccessible to us if it wasn’t cropping up in images that betray it. Faced with so objective a haystack as this, I can assert nothing save the resistance, despite everything, of the tip of the unconscious. Even if the “pencil of nature” obtained the image, even if the latter is imprinted without any intervention from the operator, there

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is nevertheless a transfer of investment. Totally exposed to the outside, from which comes the light that imprints it, a photograph carries in its grain a certain internal trace, like a refraction. That trace, which in truth is unexpected, involuntary, inevitable, goes hand in hand with what Walter Benjamin, once again in the theoretically felicitous text that is the Small History of Photography, was the first to call, in direct reference to the vocabulary of psychoanalysis, the “optical unconscious,”31 which is above all the unknown share that every photograph conceals from the very person taking it. Two things, however, must be distinguished here. First, there is what concerns the operator himself, the photographer, his secret, unspoken motives, the way the shadow of his psyche comes despite himself to interfere in the spectacle of the world, like an invisible reserve continuously bordering the visible. And from this point of view, it would be possible to consider that the image of the haystack—and for that matter, quite specifically, the photograph of the Lacock Abbey window—despite their stated ambition to be nothing more than pure positive testimony, are also like dream images, like reefs emerging from a tide of pensive and almost sleeping thoughts, transitional objects and ghosts sprung from the garden at Lacock. But there is also—and this is the other side of the visual unconscious, and actually simpler to grasp—the fact that in every image, something other than what has been strictly framed rises to the surface. The animal or human gaze is constantly distracted and endlessly roaming, endlessly caught in the network of patterns and affects governing the reasons for looking or staring, which it is continuously selecting and cutting out. Meanwhile, the “pencil of nature,” not being an equivalent living eye, “takes” everything in its view, including what the operator, while aiming, has

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not seen. It is remarkable, in any case, that Talbot should have been the first to signal this phenomenon, which he describes in the commentary on plate 13 of The Pencil of Nature, a photograph showing the entrance gate of Queen’s College in Oxford: “It frequently happens, moreover—and this is one of the charms of photography—that the operator himself discovers on examination, perhaps long afterward, that he has deposited many things he had no notion of at the time. Sometimes inscriptions and dates are found upon the buildings, or printed placards most irrelevant, are discovered upon their walls: sometimes a distant dial-plate32 is seen, and upon it—unconsciously recorded—the hour of the day at which the view was taken.” Talbot’s phlegmatic empiricism once again risks masking the scope of his words’ intuitive quality. It was in the infancy of the photographic art, at any rate, that this propensity to absorb the totality of the real was noticed, but what has most often been perceived in a negative light—an attitude that Delacroix sums up perfectly when he speaks of “a copy, false in a way because it is exact”33—is converted into a kind of latency still to come beyond the latent image that has been made. What the taking of a photograph leads to is not so much the exactness (in truth wholly relative) of a copy, however fascinating or exasperating, as the revelation of a state of reality that the ordinary gaze leaves dormant. Photography, in fact, is experienced as a factor of revelation, a potency of awakening. And almost automatically there comes to Talbot’s mind the example of the dial-plate that gives the hour when the shot was taken, the stopped hour of the freeze frame. Here, not only is there already a clear awareness of the stoppage and the caesura effect that are the mark of the photographic; this suspended and fixed time also evokes those other clocks on which the rioters of July 1830 are said to have fired in Paris. Walter Benjamin, who was fascinated

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by this anecdote and relayed it in his last text,34 accompanied it with verses by a witness of the time, evoking “latterday Joshuas, at the foot of every clocktower, / [who] were firing on clock faces to make the day stand still.” The link is perfectly formed, going from the act of aiming and taking the shot to that of the printer—in any case, the same quality of interruption and suspension is at stake. There is (and we will evidently return to this) a catastrophic power of the image, which also, in its own way, fires on time to make the day stand still. It halts everything at what has arisen in the midst of what it has gleaned. Yet within this temporal element and the gaps in the time of the revelation (as Talbot makes sure to say, it is “perhaps long afterward” that the image’s secret share is discovered), the question that imposes itself, or rather the question imposed by photography inasmuch as the latter is at once caesura, capture, and deposition, is the one formulated in his day by Plotinus on the subject of memory, when he asks “what a remembering principle must be,” or when he wonders, even more anxiously, “[not] what memory is, but in what order of beings it can occur.”35 It is in terms of such questions, their magnitude and resonance, that one ought to measure the operative scope of the visual unconscious, and more generally the very nature of photographic impregnation. For it is not only with regard to the shadow outlined by the young woman of Corinth that photography fulfils or actualizes a very old dream; it also has the effect of an ultrathin film that resembles those impressions from the physical world that settle on the soul, impressions evoked by Plotinus, and through him (coming as he does at the end of an era) by all of Greece. This is all the more true—we’ll need to stop here for a moment—given that the verb used by Plotinus to describe the settling of those impressions is the verb anamáttein,

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meaning “to produce an imprint by wiping something, as when one wipes dirty hands on a clean towel.”36 As we can see, we are fully within the definitional and apparitional zone of the regime of indices. But things go even further, and the parallel between the photographic and the memory sensations that affect the soul is a great deal more striking. In effect, Plotinus insists on making clear, borrowing an entire lexical material directly from Plato, that with these impressions (of, or in, or on the soul), which have no dimensions, “there is no resemblance to seal impressions, no stamping of a resistant matter,” seeing as they do not result from a down-thrust, a pressure (õthismós, the word used here, does indeed have that physical meaning), as would be the case if they were inscribing themselves in wax.37 Perceptible bodies that “wipe” the soul, marks that exist but exert no pressure: we would think ourselves in a dream. And in truth, we are dreaming; we are on a surface where thought imagines it is presenting itself to itself, such a long time before even the possibility of the thing. Like a kind of photograph—which means, and this is what matters most to us, that photography, not accidentally but essentially, is like a kind of thought. Not the thought in action of a subject who says “I think” (and the rest that follows . . .), but a kind of pure sending or passive action unfolding, winding itself between a subject and the world. It is by no means a matter of saying that the photograph is, or presents itself as, something immaterial, but of underlining once more what makes it, in terms of manifestation, a hyperimage, in other words an image that reaches the furthest extent of the ontic strangeness of images. In effect, the very possibility of correlating a photograph’s almost intangible being to the truly intangible being of the mind’s impressions and views is inscribed within photographic reality—and

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this, moreover, no matter what the stage of its technical evolution or the materials and media it uses. The perceptible reality of photography oscillates endlessly between that of a material wedge, dwindling to the point of being no more than a trace, and an ideality that, on the contrary, takes shape. Photography produces complete images, plenary images. This is what Rosalind Krauss emphasizes when she says that “the photographic image is inside its medium,” that it is “an integral part of it.”38 If one evidently cannot speak of a surface without a body, one must nevertheless consider not only the extreme thinness of the indexical sliver that the plane of photography shaves off the real, but above all, the indifference of that sliver toward its medium. Whether on a plate, on paper, on glass, or even on a screen, the photographic image neither detaches nor distinguishes itself from what bears it. In this sense it doesn’t really have parts; everywhere on its surface, it is itself, just like a shadow. We will come to shadow soon enough, but that would already mean dealing with the effect of the slightest accidents of light scattered on the surface and, beyond the general effect of grisaille, the diffuse distribution of black and white. For as well as its lack of thickness and its organic link to its medium, the photographic image, for quite a long time, also had that very striking feature that shaped our gaze to an even greater extent than we can assess—namely, not giving consistency to colors, remaining within a pure play of shadowgraphs. This implies that there is a corrective to add to the frequent claim (repeated even in these pages) that photography seizes the totality of what comes into its view. For a filter is there, and with that filter of black and white the image always slides more or less erratically toward the phantasmal. Visible appearance is fully there and restored, yet seemingly endowed with a lack, via which it establishes a disconformity. The lack is not felt as such, but the discon-

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formity produces a transfiguration: an invisible weft traverses the visible on the very skin of the image, like a tattoo. Despite the relatively recent dominance of color, we are so accustomed to black and white, so shaped by it, that something of the photographic’s very being seems unfailingly attached to it, tied to its palenesses and mottled grisailles, its effects of contrast and its sheens. And the photographic’s resemblance to thought—or, rather, to that which is thought, to that which imprints itself in thought—has been fostered primarily by black and white. In no way do I intend—how stupid it would be!—to find fault with color or to diminish its contribution (it should, in any case, be thought of more as a new filter and a new springboard for transfiguration than as a simple step climbed on the way to faithfulness to the referent). I am simply trying to understand the distance at which, in the very moment of its apparition, the photographic image, nonetheless described as an exact copy of the real, actually stood—relative to the real as well as to other representations, beginning, of course, with painting, against which it was immediately compelled to measure itself. In fact, the photographic and the pictorial are separated in the image by an abyss. Strictly speaking, they are two ways or two sides, two distinct manners of drawing from the reality of the world. Without color or thickness, the photographic image presents itself as a trace akin to a thought. In color, and full of material density, the pictorial image is not a trace, but a production, a purposeful act. It goes without saying that there is, or can be, something photographic about painting, something that pertains above all to the preoccupation with a smooth, transparent image. Even at the basis of imitation, this possibility exists, and it is in the order of things that painters should have realized it— well before photography existed as such, for that matter. I

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will say more about this presently, for indeed, a whole swath of contemporary art is written and thought along these lines. But on the other side, there is everything in painting that is made of flesh and desire, of spellbound thickness, and from that side, from the obsession with color and light that bore them, other haystacks come to us, a great deal more famous than Talbot’s, furthermore: paintings, in other words, swept up in a torment of exactitude and definition—the Haystacks of Claude Monet, of course, which it was no doubt inevitable I would end up summoning here, following the solitary haystack of Lacock Abbey. Monet, as we know, proceeded by successive painting “campaigns,” throwing himself for long periods of time into the same subject that he would attempt to exhaust, though with a nagging feeling of never quite succeeding, when it wasn’t one of total failure. As much as a new step toward a far-off and perpetually receding destination, each of these series was a chance to bring painting into crisis—a renewal or revival, and at the same time an interruption, a breakdown. Certain series are particularly representative of this endlessly reiterated attempt, through a single motif, to attain the perfection of an instant of fully realized pictorial light. Along with the one of the facades of Rouen Cathedral, the Haystacks constitute just such a series, perhaps the most dense, the most focused, the most revealing of Monet’s fundamental obsession. The canvases composing it were painted between 1890 and 1891, namely at the height of impressionism’s influence and radiance, but only for modern viewers do they stand in such glory. And if they do, it is above all as perfect examples of the aporetic vertigo in which each new motif was transformed for Monet. He did not have far to go before that vertigo opened up in front of him: sure enough, the Haystacks, in their various

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seasons, are the ones he found at the place known as the Clos Morin, a stone’s throw from his home in Giverny.39 Unlike the large constructed mass of Lacock Abbey, these were round haystacks of a smaller size, and most importantly, haystacks in the middle of a field. Yet what interested Monet, with these as with the other motifs, was the variation of light, or more precisely the way the being of an object or configuration of objects—a landscape—is at each moment differently affected by light. The most distinctive quest of impressionism, as Monet’s concentrated steadfastness allows us to define it, is thus also a matter of stopping and becoming, a matter of time. How to seize a passage? How to retain what is known precisely as an impression, necessarily transient, purely passing? All of which is to say that the fundamental concern of Monet (who was driven wild by the brevity of states of light) is ultimately quite close to the original concern of photography as described by Talbot. In this sense one could even define his undertaking as the attempt to hold the pencil of nature in nature’s place, the effort to impress even better and more quickly than nature. The aim was that the (fugitive, fleeting) impression imprint itself and become, in another sense, an impression thanks to the pressure of painting, to borrow Plotinus’s notion; the latter referred to a contact, an action, and thus immediately has the sense here of what is known in painting as a “touch.” But whereas this path, on the side of painting, implied the object’s gradual disappearance, on the side of photography it instead yielded the mise en abyme of appearance itself. Indeed, it is as a step along the road to that disappearance—and hence to what would be called abstraction—that Monet’s Haystacks are so important to the history of art, as attested by Kandinsky’s reaction in Reminiscences, the book in which he retraces the path that led him to exempt painting from any figurative contract, from all forms of extraction from the real

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world of objects. Before he had become a painter, when all he knew of painting was what came under the umbrella of the naturalist tradition, he encountered one of the Haystacks at an exhibition in Moscow.40 He tells how that painting, which disoriented him at first, went from being an obsession to a catalyst: “I had a dull feeling that the object was lacking in this picture.”41 With these words, he characterizes what began for him as a malaise only to become a revelation. In fact, to look at any one of the Haystacks, whatever its hour or season, is to realize that one is faced with something that simultaneously forms a mass and withdraws into itself in an effect of discontinuous palpitation. The haystack acts in the painting, writes Marianne Alphant, as “a zone of blindness and obsession. Blindness, because there is nothing to see in the backlit haystack, and because the richness of the painting seems instead to pour out elsewhere, in the dazzling chromaticism of the ground. Obsession, because the gaze keeps coming back to lose itself in the radiant obscurity of the haystack as though at the heart of the visible.”42 This object that forms a mass and absents itself, this halflight inhaled in the luminous immensity, can only be contrasted with the object violence and chromatic nullification of Talbot’s haystack. Here, on the threshold of modernity, are two paths. One, via painting, will approach the real to the point of dissolving into it—with the “impression” potentially considered as the relay leading to this fusion and effusiveness. The other, via photography and beyond the simple restorative capacity of “mechanical” art, suspends appearance in a quasi-ideal mode. On the side of painting, then, a concrete art (as Kandinsky demanded it be called) without magic, one that occurs within and through the density of the canvas, and where the only reality is what one sees. But on the side of photography, an art wholly flowing into the abstraction of the image, or into its magic.

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How these two paths, either alternately or simultaneously, would come to haunt modern art: this is the story one could tell. The path whose beginnings we are following here, trying to understand what an image is saying in its silence—what it maintains by remaining silent with such effectiveness—is perhaps the less familiar of the two, at least in the strict terms of art history where something still resists it, as if the readymade aspect of photography, in spite of all, had a sense of lack, if not of dereliction. Yet I look again and again at this haystack (which does not withdraw, does not tire), and it still seems to me just as perfect, and just as mysterious. The image’s values of reality and unreality are balanced in it, in a kind of massive, ghostly unity from which it draws all its power and a dull, deep resonance. The patch of world that comes with it is endlessly suspended beyond the springtime where it stood. There is also a ladder placed against the hay, doubled in a visible shadow. It is the other of the image in the image, and hence what we are now going to look at—at least, if we are able.

PART II The Shadow of a Ladder

Still Figure 1. Once more, then, The Haystack in the April light of Lacock Abbey, a calotype by William Henry Fox Talbot, plate 10 of The Pencil of Nature. The ladder is leaning in plain sight against the section of the haystack where its vertical shadow is imprinted. A ladder and a shadow that up to this point we have mainly avoided, but that evidently constitute the event of the image, causing it to swerve away from the strict relation to a single object in which it is possible to say, in spite of everything, that the photograph of the haystack remains, as we have been able to verify by plunging into the condensed violence of the framing or the nominal rectitude of the subject and the title. There are two things nonetheless, one leaning against the other, and so already a whole story. Taking into account the thin stick propped up diagonally on the right (so thin, in fact, that it could be a kind of rope pulled toward the ground from inside the haystack), one could no doubt go so far as to count three objects, but this would ultimately be a pure 59

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diversion. The grand affair here, in effect the only one, is the contact, the apposition, or, to borrow from the lexicon of pictorial tradition, the dispositio that connects the haystack and the ladder. A connection, all in all, of the most normal and banal sort. The two objects belong to the same world, the same register; there is nothing in their meeting that could go in the direction of Lautréamont’s “beautiful as,” no incongruity, no distortion, no sending or role-play. Neither umbrella nor sewing machine,1 nor their equivalent; nothing but the function of the countryside, nothing but a plain and compact tale, with a touch of lightness where the objects are touching. And yet if one looks carefully, this overly light contact in fact betrays an artifice: the ladder clearly has been placed this way on purpose, and too hastily if it was meant to be climbed, since the right upright is resting at the top in empty space, and not against the hay as would be necessary for proper support. But that is because the goal does not involve the normal, practical purpose of this (or any) ladder; the object has only been put in position and apposition here in order to produce a shadow—that vertical shadow, so crisp, falling straight like a dark double downstroke from the ladder’s luminous slanting line. Even if it is not claimed as such in the commentary on the plate (which, let us recall, primarily notes the quality of the rendering of “every accident of light and shade”), the shadow of the ladder imposes itself and implodes in the image—to the point that, far from looking at a mere “accident,” we are in the presence of an accent that has the power of a caesura, an additional interruption or aggravation at the very heart of the image’s suspension. There are, of course, other shadows cast in the plates of The Pencil of Nature, but none, I would say, has the clarity or obviousness of this one. Here the shadow has nothing to do with the optical unconscious, with a more or less clandes-

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tine trace forming an integral part of the luminous baggage of day. On the contrary, it depends on a device that stimulates it, a mise en scène that sought it and placed it in the image just so. It is, to borrow the words of the 1839 report I have previously cited,2 “the most transitory of things” that is thereby shown off, rather as though the “pencil of nature” had drawn itself at work, taking a photograph while capturing what can legitimately be considered its prototype. But before coming—or coming back—to this redoubling that is like a theory of the photographic enclosed within the image, we must yet remain at the stage of the object itself, which is to say the indexical node formed by the ladder, a node that acted as the relay carrying me toward the other image, the one of the man obliterated and imprinted, photographed by the atomic bomb. A ladder, then. Simple, fairly tall, solid, numbering fifteen rungs. It is at home in the countryside, in its element. Leaning against that haystack and catching the light to such an extent that it gives a relief effect—rather as though one were looking at the image through binoculars—the ladder is not, I think, encumbered with any symbolic intention, and its object regime is just as devoid of any signifying weight as that of the haystack; it indicates no descent or ascent, no climbing, no transcendence of access. It is there, in all the remote power of the silence of objects—a tool at rest, admittedly diverted from its standard purpose in order to serve as the index for a shadow’s inscription, in other words used purely as what is known in painting as a motif. But here, slightly set apart, something other than a strictly selfcontained presence is announced. In effect, if one flips through The Pencil of Nature, four plates later the motif in question returns, just as insistently: a ladder once again, placed in a different context, yet one in which it is equally impossible to believe its presence a

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result of chance. We are still at Lacock Abbey, but the ladder, taller this time—it numbers at least twenty rungs—is seen frontally, placed before a door and, on the second-floor level, before another opening, against a building that resembles the one we saw in The Open Door. Now, this plate, sure enough entitled The Ladder, is of very particular importance, since it is the only one in all the collection to feature human figures: three men standing around a ladder at the center of a mise en scène that is strange to say the least, one that gives an impression of incompleteness or extreme latency. In the commentary, Talbot says that over the course of the book he hopes to be able to present the reader with several examples of “portraits of living persons and groups of figures,” but as it is, of the twenty-four plates to which the installments were limited due to an anticipated lack of success, this plate is indeed the only scene with figures in the entire book. Hence plate 14 of The Pencil of Nature, which will here be Figure 8. We will recall the conditions of photographic operation in 1844, and how difficult they made the capture of living subjects. Even with the improvement of the calotype, exposure times were still too long to permit the seizing of life in action. It was therefore necessary to ask the figurants (a term that should be understood in the most literal sense, referring to people destined to form figures) to remain motionless when striking and holding a pose. What was relatively straightforward for the portrait (it is remarkable to note that portraits as such seem to have held little interest for Fox Talbot) became far more delicate when it came to scenes supposedly taken from real life, which thus had to be fully simulated, even if it meant arranging a quasi-choreography. Such was the case, for example, with the chimney sweepers

Figure 8. W. H. Fox Talbot, The Ladder, calotype, late April 1844, plate 14 of The Pencil of Nature. © The British Library Board.

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walking along the embankment, “taken” in 1851 by Charles Nègre, whose path we have already crossed and who seem in effect to be walking briskly, whereas in truth their steps are suspended, slackened by the gap of a photographic instant that had to last longer than the real instant it claimed to capture (Figure 9). Yet with The Ladder we are in another scenario, that of a composition with figures who are not simulating an action (at least not a picturesque or decipherable action) and consequently look like pawns who have been stuck in the image. Two of the three figures have their backs to us—which, if this is a group portrait, is singular to say the least—and only the third, the young man standing on the upper floor in the doorway, is looking toward the lens. In fact, it is practically impossible to guess what is going on and what they are doing in front of that building, with that ladder, with that same April light that projects the shadow of another ladder onto a haystack at another spot on the estate (the two photographs were taken within a very short time of one another). Between the man on the left, with his clear frock coat and his hair well-combed, and the other two walk-ons, dressed more like farmers (and who are no doubt employees of the Lacock Abbey estate), what is actually taking place is not even an obscure narrative, nor is it a genre scene. You could say that what is taking place is time, and that what they are doing is remaining still, stopped in the course of time, attending time; they have been designated for this, they are doing what they have been told, according to a mise en scène that has arranged their respective positions and postures and was even an object of debate. We know, in effect, that Talbot discussed this image with his artistic mentor Collen, who advised him against taking it in the form we now see.3 This lets us further suppose Talbot’s relative freedom from the proprieties of the representative tradition,

Figure 9. Charles Nègre, Les Ramoneurs en marche, 1851. © Charles Nègre / Musée Carnavalet/Roger-Viollet.

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and perhaps even his intuition of the modern, which we recognized, for instance, in the way the haystack is framed. But I must quote Talbot’s commentary on this plate at greater length. “If we proceed to the City, and attempt to take a picture of the moving multitude,” he writes, “we fail, for in a small fraction of a second they change their positions so much, as to destroy the distinctness of the representation, but when a group of persons has been artistically arranged, and trained by a little practice to maintain an absolute immobility for a few seconds of time, very delightful pictures are easily obtained.” Hence, the ladder scene, artistically arranged, contrasts with the living spectacle of the crowd, just as a capture contrasts with the uncapturable, and (even if Talbot neither says nor implies it) as the dead contrasts with the living. This “moving multitude” is of course what is missing from Daguerre’s celebrated view of the Boulevard du Temple, as well as from plate 2 of The Pencil, which also shows the boulevards and—perhaps intentionally—is the former’s respondent. Photography’s first urban landscapes, to put Philippe Jaccottet’s lovely title to a different purpose, are “landscapes with absent figures,” and one can clearly sense Talbot’s desire to attain photography’s optimal possibility, namely the maximal reduction of the exposure time, its quasi-reduction to an almost invisible point: the suspension of the snapshot, which is at once what is quickest and most absolute. And what must be emphasized, which is of great consequence for the secret line running through our tale, is that in the very movement through which the instant is reduced to meet the brilliance of the living, it ends up fixing suspension with such increased violence that the capture of real life becomes equivalent to a kind of absolute stop: the dead and the living are, as it were, sewn together in the portable bag of the instant. This is what Marey would later discover in his passionate quest for the movement, the

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inscribed movement, of time: “The image of a horse caught at 1/500 of a second, provided, even at the very rapid strides, the real position of the animal almost as distinctly as if it had been standing still,” he marvels at one point, filled with wonder by the strange contractions of time that his equipment made possible.4 But in 1844 with The Ladder we are not there yet; the instant must last in order to be captured, and the figures must pose without moving in this time retained. Yet as we have seen, and still see, what is so particular about this plate is that the three men are doing nothing except existing in the artifice of this duration. If they are striking a pose, it is not like in a group portrait, and if they are representing a genre scene, then the genre is admittedly unknown, and the scene devoid of all realist simulation and affected surprise. The enigmatic content of all photographic scenes—of all that constitutes a scene in photography—is thus increased tenfold here, and we find ourselves in a mode of the human figure’s appearance that would only be rediscovered later, infinitely later in photography. At any rate, looking at this black-and-white plate’s structure of waiting, one is spontaneously reminded of the arrangements of color images made today by Jeff Wall, in which the represented scene, inheriting the whole pictorial tradition of the historia while still set apart from simple narrative legibility, opens up a yawning gap between the figures who compose it. The way each figure of The Ladder seems at once to make up part of a triangle and to be acting alone, the turning play of space animated by the direction of their gazes—all of this truly evokes the quiet resonance and latent effects of Jeff Wall’s photographic enigmas. And in this economy of the enigma, far from being a dead center, the object—the ladder—plays the role of a kind of accelerator or intensifier of latency between the figures. The young man on the upper floor is touching the ladder with

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his left hand, while the man below on the right is touching it with his right. Running almost all the way up the image, the ladder is placed there as a line of equilibrium, but also as a conducting stroke establishing connections. Calmly, with the regular rhythm of its rungs, it goes from the paved ground to the hayloft and from one walk-on to another, but without being used; you would say, on the contrary, that around what is functioning as the subject or center of the composition, the three men were its servants. Shadow included, it is like the very model of the immobility in which the figurants must also remain. In an obvious way, and without one’s knowing why, it is the secret link or password of the image. The ladder holds the three figures together and acts in the composition as the mainspring of the historia, even if the latter remains hidden or enigmatic. Yet from this formative ladder of a historia situated at the heart of an ongoing action, we must now turn (return) to that other ladder that is pure suspension without action or history—or that only tells (however deliberately) the story of a shadow. Although situated at the center of the image and organizing its entire content, the ladder in the plate with figures still resembled what the theater world would call a prop. With plate 10 there is nothing along those lines. The ladder figures right in the middle, like the haystack against which it is leaning. And yet—and this is what stands out—at the same time it is only there to show its shadow, to serve as a foil for the shadow it casts. The shadow amounts to a figure and a figuration. Between the ladder from which it originates and the haystack that receives it, intangible between two densities, it is the true “subject of the picture,” the other subject of the photographic picture called The Haystack. In the plate with the figures, the shadow of the ladder is admittedly also present (slanting in relation to the ladder,

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which is upright), but it is essentially lost among the figures; it is merely one figure among several. In The Haystack, on the contrary, the elimination of all other figures gives the shadow—upright this time, in relation to the slanting ladder—an altogether different status. Inscribed on the skin of the haystack, which is made or woven of all the “accidents of light” of which Talbot spoke, the shadow draws the simultaneously thin and clear picture of another accident, which appears accentuated or condensed. Shadow as the condensation of an accident of light: no sooner has this definition emerged than one realizes it could be a definition of photography itself. Now, on this path, which is both that of thin, clear shadows and of the origins of photography, another object interposes itself, a comma—a cane: the one undoubtedly left on purpose against a column of the temple of Beni Hasan by Félix Teynard, in a photo he took in 1851 during his travels in Egypt. That very lovely and axiomatic image—Figure 10 here— is one I discovered in Denis Roche’s book Le Boîtier de mélancolie, which is above all a book about how rich the material and the act of photography are, about how they have inflected thought. The photo is commented on as follows: “The angle, the shadow, and the bamboo cane. They say all that can be said of the light that will have vanquished time, and of the time that will never cease to engulf the light.”5 Barely seven years after Talbot’s photo, and under a vastly different light that is nonetheless the same (from one end of the Earth to the other, there is only one light that is its own infinite variability), once more the fragile tale—the ritornello—of a shadow. With this “bamboo cane,” which is perhaps there only to give an idea of the size of the columns,6 the story that is decided in broad sunlight but told in a discreet mode is the same one told throughout the image

Figure 10. Félix Teynard, Tombeau d’Amménémès, Beni Hassan, Egypt, 1851. United States Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

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by the thick dark patches engulfed beneath the peristyle. Nothing rightfully separates this grand architectonic tale from the tiny melody hummed by the cane placed in broad sunlight. Nothing: it is the same story, the same duo of time and light, the same drama. Except that all at once, we understand this drama better, thanks to the wire-thin shadow that lightens its solemnity so as to make it tangible. The difference that one can see between objects (however thin or light) and their shadows is that the shadows are never forceful; to borrow Plotinus’s words characterizing the impressions of the soul, shadows neither result from nor produce any pressure. Their regime of existence is physical and material—they are like the breathing of light—but this physical existence is weightless. What consequently rises up, with Teynard’s cane as with Talbot’s ladder, is an entirely different existence: in parallel with the simple and placid existence of things, the ephemeral inscription of another possibility, another passage. The shadow is literally the living, vibrant ghost of the object, and as such, it establishes the field of appearance that will be unique to the photographic. To photograph shadows is in a way to show the pencil of nature at work, to portray, via the image of an image, an origin of the photographic. No doubt Fox Talbot’s gesture, like Félix Teynard’s, has to do in a more or less conscious way with this identification. From the start, the regime of images stemming from reflections (which are themselves natural and acheiropoietic) appeared comparable in men’s eyes to that of shadow. All photographs in which reflections are visible or active, working on the very presentation of the image, have that same effect of what could be called theoretical revival, or of splitting in two. Here again, we are dealing with images of images, and here again, what is first imaged and then retained

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in the photographic substratum is the aspect of a ghost, an ephemeral and weightless way of being, a brilliance. Where shadow would lean more toward the dull and dry, reflection projects itself fully into the liquid regime of glimmers. And those glimmers punctuate and perforate the whole history of photography. In no particular order, I perhaps first see a certain quality of fluid thickness in the seascapes of Le Gray, then puddles of water reflecting the sky (a puddle in Central Park taken by Kertész, another taken in Paris by Cartier-Bresson—both are famous, and how wonderful it is that puddles can become famous!), but also, of course, all the glints and accidents of light finely distributed, forming the grain of the rainiest photos of Stieglitz; whether they were taken on the boulevards of Paris or the streets of New York, one has the sensation that the glinting pavement is like a sensitive plate on which the sky imprints itself. I also see (and here everything is as fast as a sled ride) a street in Coimbra taken by Bernard Plossu as night falls, with the headlights of a bus revealing the film of the visible on the liquid road. And then, of course, everything having even more directly to do with the being of reflection, in other words with mirrors—for instance, and no doubt this comes to mind primarily thanks to an exhibition I saw not long ago at the Jeu de Paume, Friedlander’s numerous images featuring rear-view mirrors or screens. But this list would need to be much longer, and what should be said is that photography, by showing the action of mirrors, simultaneously shows what it shares with them and how it remains apart from their regime of capture. Yet the discussion of the nature of reflection and the quality of its revival within photographic grasp could, it seems to me, be the subject of another book. And here a dizzying chasm opens up, for in truth, my question in this book is not theoretical. I am not looking to provide a catalogue of

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image regimes, or to explore all the various mimetic channels by which one could go back to the aporetic heart of the absence/presence couple. I am simply looking to respond to the effect of a montage that sprang up between two images in which the shadow bears all the meaning. So, leaving aside the question (or the innumerable responses) of reflections, and before passing on to the second of those images, we must respond precisely to that passage made possible from one to the other. I said it at the start: the montage was almost immediate. For that matter, should we be keeping that word? Montage, in effect, presupposes a voluntary relation resulting from a decision. What happens when the decision is not made, but imposes itself from within, like something springing up? Can one, should one then speak merely of an association? I think not; I think the term “montage” should be kept in spite of all, for at least two reasons. First of all, because the term “association” is vague, and implies a pure passivity. Yet we are dealing with action. The relation imposes itself with a kind of violence, or at least with the effect of an irruption; there is something automatic and clear-cut about it. But above all, there is no reason to draw a sharp distinction between acts of thought production applying logical processes that are immediately recognized as such, and acts of production that seem to proceed from a discontinuous internal drift. Nothing here would allow us to contrast a solid universe made of constructions, or rather of constructability, with a universe of flux more or less exposed to its own dissolution. The progression, or more precisely what was known in the medieval world as the ductus, the conducting path of thought, occurs simultaneously as flux and as juncture; and while there is an alternation between the more or less joined-up moments and those more or less in flux,

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while one observes any number of blurs, sudden changes, and superimpositions during that long, even interminable course, it remains the case that with all those internal discontinuities, thought occurs and operates primarily as a continuum. This is why the automatic comparison with film is still valid when, as with the two images at the origin of this book, it is a matter of linking two still shots. At the heart of the continuous-discontinuous and conscious-unconscious flux of thinking, it is as though each image of the pass band were able to stop, and as though each freeze frame had the power to restart the film, having shifted its course. Between the fixed image and the movement image, the mind sees no essential difference. Based on the collages and juxtapositions of documents from art history on which Aby Warburg founded the expansive project of recapitulation that was the “image atlas” of Mnemosyne, studies have shown how productive the montage metaphor could be. In the age of cinema and psychoanalysis, within the very dense node formed by their co-emergence, it made it possible not just to account for the dynamic of a period, but also, within and beyond it, to open up an entirely new hermeneutic field.7 It is rather as if the impossibility of a monistic approach to the image had been given a field of action, one of considerable breadth and practical application. Every image potentially conceals another; the universe of those fixed images is permanently woven and ultimately held together by a latent connectability, and hence by a constant movement. These vectors of the revived history of forms have a great radiating power. One consequence (and not the least) of revealing this immanent field of agitation is to legitimize sudden historical changes, to give depth to what defies traditional regimes of historicity. Montage detaches an internal history of images that surfs freely over chronology. A logic of accumulations

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and parallels—a stratigraphic vision of time—is replaced by a pure activity that, via oblique surges of a kind, establishes an infinite possibility of escape. This is certainly not about denying the energy with which a history (the very one that would be called “History”) is objectively constructed, in spite of all; it is merely about liberating, alongside it, the germinative power of the latent connections that actual history never entirely covers up. This is what one could call the Benjaminian dimension of montage: the way the latter, as an act of thought (or of memory, but memory and thought are synonymous here),8 liberates from each trace of the past—an image, for instance—an energy that had been suspended there, at once present and hidden, so to speak. While the “optical unconscious” sensed by Talbot presupposed a kind of hidden reserve in the image, liable to reveal itself bit by bit like a development taking place after actual development, the exposure of each document or photograph to the possibility of being linked by montage brings out in the image a power of representation that exceeds appearance within appearance. This yields an inexhaustible hermeneutic manna: every image, while it is only itself, ends up, by virtue of that singularity, in a position to be connected to an infinite quantity of other images. It could almost be a theorem: the more singular the image, the greater its connective power. But this also means, even if the montage is formed in thought (and so passes via the psyche, a subject, an individual), that in the initial image there must be something that prepares the coming of the other image, however strange or unexpected the latter seems. And this is exactly what I have been trying to understand from the start: since Hiroshima came on its own and settled right beside the haystack, that means that in the photograph of the haystack, something, in perhaps a tiny, fragile, unobtrusive way, was preparing that coming. And it doesn’t matter that we can

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give that link the purely trivial and positive foundation of a transitional object—in this case, the slanting ladder, or its shadow—since the purely formal nature of the link is overwhelmed straightaway by a kind of hermeneutical tempest. It is that tempest, in both a real and a figurative sense, that I must now address, returning, or coming finally, to the photo of the man obliterated, the photo-imprint of Figures 2 and 3 reproduced at the start of this book, just after the one of the haystack. • Photographs, taken at Hiroshima and Nagasaki immediately or shortly after the dropping of the bomb. (One can’t really speak of a “bombardment” in this case, since each time there was only a single impact, and it is even said that when they saw a lone plane in the sky, the reassured residents assumed it was a mere reconnaissance flight.) Such photos are relatively few, at least when compared to what has become the norm these days for almost any event. There are several kinds: Those that show the “thing” itself, that incomprehensible mushroom cloud, or rather the “jellyfish cloud,” as it is called by Masuji Ibuse, who describes its disturbing transformations at several points in Black Rain, no doubt the clearest account of the days that followed August 6, 1945, in Hiroshima.9 Those that provide a general view—aerial or otherwise— of the field of ruins and ashes that the cities had become, Hiroshima even more completely so than Nagasaki, where the effects of the bomb, despite its greater power, were partially mitigated by the lie of the land. In Hiroshima, a flat city built on the multichannel delta of a river, and where the hypocenter (the term for the point on the ground situated

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directly below the actual point of the explosion, which was at an altitude of 580 meters) lay at the heart of the downtown area, 90 percent of houses and apartment buildings were destroyed by the wind or the fire. Those that present partial views—details, so to speak, of the disaster: a given building obliterated, crumbled, burned, a given street cluttered with rubble, the world in pieces. Those that show the victims of the explosion: the dead or the survivors of those fields of instantaneous ruins. Corpses burned to cinders and terrible processions of people in tatters, groups distraught, bodies shattered, covered in unimaginable outbreaks, skin falling off, body parts swollen or else torn away, and sometimes—alone or in a group, turned toward the camera—a person looking. Here—even if this already lies along another axis of reflection—we must reserve a special place for the photographs taken by Yo¯suke Yamahata in Nagasaki, which were truly conceived as the elements of a disaster landscape and, in the broadest possible sense of this word in photography, as compositions. As Michael Lucken shows in his article “Hiroshima-Nagasaki, des photographies pour abscisse et ordonnée,”10 if these images do contain an obvious concern for aesthetics (the framing, the arrangement of the figures), it is in the service of documentary tension, and does not work against it. An experienced war photographer, Yo¯suke Yamahata was sent to Nagasaki the day after the bombing, along with the artist Eiji Yamada and the writer Azuma Jun. Michael Lucken compares Yamahata’s successful work to the failure experienced at Hiroshima by Yoshito Matsushige, who, though likewise a professional photographer, was too shocked to be able to capture the horror and force of the annihilation around him.11 Lucken’s article also shows the simultaneous work done by Yamahata and Yamada, the former taking photographs and the latter drawing the same of-

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ten terrible scenes. In several photos, one can even see the artist at work—for example, the one taken in what had been the district of Matsuyama, where the hypocenter lay (Figure 11). As Lucken writes, “we suddenly realize that the image of the devastated plain, which had gripped us with terror, is also a Landscape to the painter.” Neither this adoption of a traditional pictorial scheme in the midst of hell, nor the way in which this utterly devastated landscape is at the same time being skillfully framed, comes as a shock. Here we see the inclusion of the work of mourning within artistic work that is being experienced as an automatic reflex and carried out in a kind of trance, as Yamahata himself goes on to testify. This possibility (of beauty alongside pure horror, of an intellectual construction alongside the destruction) is in itself a difficulty; it is, in truth, the pivotal question of any reporting, any activity that aspires to truth or faithfulness to its subject. There exists yet another category of images of the repeated event that was Hiroshima-Nagasaki: those, often taken later and already participating in the work of memory, that show objects testifying to the unprecedented violence of the explosion. Yet here it is in fact the things themselves, destroyed or transformed, that are the “photos” of the event: twisted bottles of sake, a watch stopped at the time of impact, a pair of binoculars, a flask, a lunchbox. Everything that felt and preserved the impact of the blast of fire. Objects functionally similar, in the end, to those of tombs, various objects of a gigantic tomb—but where the deformation and the patina, rather than resulting from the slow erosion of time, are the result of a single instant, a single, unique, and terrible shock. It is to this category that the photos of the man with the ladder belong, where what we can see is merely the (second) capture of a real trace, an impression produced by the

Figure 11. Yo¯ suke Yamahata, Nagasaki, August 10, 1945. The artist Eiji Yamada can be seen on the left (coll. Shogo Yamahata). © Yo¯ suke YAMAHATA / MAGNUM.

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lightning blast of the bomb. Hence the shadow we see cast on the wall, while the bodies that cast it were volatilized after having formed a screen in front of the surface that has been whitened everywhere else by the violence of the flash. Before further analyzing these images—and the mystery that, from one to the other, erases an object—it is necessary to describe and try to understand what made them possible: in other words, to turn to a regime of images where they are joined by other well-known documents and facts, which constitute what could be called the dossier of the A-bomb’s photographic effect. For indeed, the bomb, at the moment of its explosion, functions among other things as an ultrafast flash of extraordinary destructive intensity. At Hiroshima, the fireball created by the explosion (reaching a temperature of several million degrees at the center) spread radiation in all directions, starting with the ground, where it is estimated that near the hypocenter the temperature rose above 3,000°C. While the ceramic tiles of the roofs were melted and rebaked (yielding a characteristic lumpy texture) within a radius of 600 meters around the hypocenter, the surface of granite stone whitened, due to the breakup of quartz crystals, within a radius of 1 kilometer. Railroad ties, trees, and wooden gates, fences, and stakes, meanwhile, were for the most part set ablaze within an even wider radius. Survivors’ stories converge and report a number of singular phenomena, such as the sudden growth of certain plants, an isolated pine tree burning only at the top, or (sixteen kilometers from the explosion in this instance) the paddy field that suddenly began to shudder as a muffled noise, unlike any other, became audible.12 And what one has to imagine, beyond all the horror, is also the witnesses’ incomprehension of what had just occurred. But to a certain degree we must find a way of dissociating the light from the heat, even though they are evidently con-

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nected. It is light, a light violently stripped to its essence—a concentrated, exploding nucleus—that informs the photographic effect of the atomic bomb, its ability to “photograph” its passage or irruption by producing what are effectively acheiropoieta, not made by the hands of men (short of considering the pilot of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the Hiroshima bomb, or the pilot who dropped the bomb on Nagasaki, as the initial cameramen). I have not attempted to make a systematic inventory of these images or of everything documenting what resembled a tsunami of photons, but I will cite a few cases, each of them fairly distinct. It goes without saying that here, the slightest variable (location and orientation, the strength of the radiation, the material and shape of the surface or object interposed) can make a difference, and in particular produce a positive or negative effect. Thus, in a photograph taken by the American army at Hiroshima in November 1945, consequently more than three months after the explosion, the (light-colored) shadow of the parapet of the Yorozuyo Bridge imprinted on the asphalt of its own walkway, 800 meters from the hypocenter (Figure 12). Or on the stone steps of the entrance to a bank situated 260 meters from the hypocenter, again in Hiroshima, the dark trace of a man or woman who had been sitting there, probably waiting for the doors to open—it was a quarter past eight in the morning at the time of the explosion (these are the two examples most frequently cited and reproduced). Or on an electricity pole near the Meiji Bridge, the imprinted shadow of leaves from a Fatsia japonica (Figure 13), a quite magical-looking impression that, taken on its own, would be a pure example of the trembling yet fixed beauty that Fox Talbot was after in his “photogenic drawings,” but that, resituated in its catastrophic context, also evokes the

Figure 12. Anonymous (U.S. Army), Shadows Imprinted on the Parapet of Yorozuyo Bridge, Hiroshima, 1945.

Figure 13. Anonymous (U.S. Army), Leaves of Fatsia japonica Imprinted on a Pole, Hiroshima, 1945.

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many burned bodies on which the patterns of the light clothing worn in that month of August were reproduced. Or, in Black Rain, the piece of floorboard fished out of the sea three days after the explosion, which, even if it comes from a novel, was certainly inspired by recurring phenomena observed in reality. The narrator confirms as much, imagining how the impression could have been made: “It was unmistakably recognizable as a piece of floor-board from the corridor of a house. It was scorched black all over except for a design of Mt. Fuji with a sailing boat and pine trees, standing out white in unburned wood on the surface. The floor-boards must have been scorched by the heat when that monstrous ball of fire had flashed high over Hiroshima, leaving only the pattern from the frosted glass standing out on the wood; then the blast had lifted the fragment up and away and deposited it in the river or the sea.”13 And then the established fact, found in John Hersey’s book published in 1946,14 as well as in Kenzaburo Oe’s Hiroshima Notes,15 that hospital X-rays were marked by the radiation. None of these facts or documents has the enigmatic and tragic power of the ladder photograph that, with the human figure’s simultaneous presence and absence, possesses an absolute, ominous ghostly immediacy—but at least they afford us a slightly better understanding of its existence and mode of appearance, a diabolical “photogenic drawing” erasing its subject at the very second of registering it. This vanished man, erased and present, this memory of a man, a dispersed powder of being, this sentry (according to some unverified legends) effectively keeps watch past the time that extinguished him. He alone, like an absolute trace, is not such-and-such an anonymous individual: he is the entire species. What he presents is the simultaneous possibility of there being individuals and of their all vanishing.

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Hence his extraordinary haunting power, and the fact that one finds him cited in places as one of the very signatures of the twentieth century. Hence, also, the speed with which he hastened to take his place here beneath Talbot’s haystack. There nevertheless remains the unresolved question of the existence of those two documents, so different from one another—the one, which I’ll come back to, where the ladder is indeed an object, and the one where it, too, has vanished and no longer figures in the image except as a shadow, in the same way as the human silhouette. To begin with—and this is the first thing to verify—the two documents do depict the same place, with no possible ambiguity. The surface of parallel lines and scars that is the background wall, with what looks like a loop along the upright on the right-hand side, which serves as a signature, but also the scratches on the white ground, the tiled roof—everything shows that we are indeed looking at the same web of clues, in other words at the same spared wall of a wooden house in Nagasaki. But what happened? Did the ladder actually (and if so, very mysteriously) withstand the blast, only to be removed a short while later, its imprinted shadow being deemed more impressive? Or is this—another possibility—a different ladder placed there at a different moment? If so, why? To what end? Something is manifestly hidden here. Beyond the extraordinary violence of the blast, and seemingly at the very heart of the destruction, it is as though a strange ballet of ghosts were unfolding. And it must be stressed that the witnesses to the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were all struck by incomprehensible discrepancies at the very heart of the already incomprehensible event. Beyond the general logic of concentric circles spreading from the hypocenter—a logic, again, that on account of the absence of any relief was more active at Hiroshima than at Nagasaki—there was also,

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it seems, a random distribution of effects, with a number of variations and sudden changes, some objects remaining almost intact while others were volatilized. The ladder’s survival could perhaps be interpreted accordingly, if indeed it did survive. But looking at these documents, we must bear firmly in mind what is exceptional about them one way or another, and try to read, in the objects themselves and in their traces, something of the stupefaction that gripped the witnesses to the point of leaving the survivors unable to explain their own survival, as evidenced by a passage from Black Rain where the narrator, contemplating the dead carp in the pond located behind his house, says: “I, though, who had been on the deck of a train in Yokogawa Station [Yokogawa is a barely outlying neighborhood in the northern part of Hiroshima], had registered nothing with my senses apart from the ball of light and the blast. That fish should die, great granite posts be blown down, and walls be broken through, yet human beings on the ground come through almost unscathed, was beyond my understanding.”16 Such was perhaps true of this ladder, which also is (or appears) unscathed, but what matters above all in its case is the role it plays in the very constitution of the image. It is as though its ghostly presence were equivalent to a witness, as though the fact that it should still exist were exposing the sentry’s disappearance all the more (if we can be permitted to keep saying “sentry” for the silhouette of the man or woman we see on the wall). Irradiated, it is transfigured; it radiates in turn. Like the pulverized shadow, and to the same degree, it adds to the enormously potent optical unconscious, the enormous latent power of the image. At the exact moment when we could separate the world of shadows—the world of the dead—from the world of real objects, this ladder, if it has continued to exist, shifts the whole of reality, where it has thus remained, toward the

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shadows. The swallowed-up and the spared coexist, but what has been spared likewise stagnates in the incontrovertible nothingness. The ladder is like the guardian of that nothingness; it is what remains at the heart of the hollowed-out reality where the swallowed-up rises to the surface to form an image. This is hypothesis number one, linked to the document that triggered something for me. But in truth, had it been the other document emerging from the depths, if from the start the ladder itself had been not only a ghost but an imprint, a pure and simple negative (as was the case, I think, for most of the people who have mentioned this image), nothing would have changed. On the contrary, from one document to the other, the nature of what is shown does not change. It does not matter if the ladder itself suggests its own absent future or if its absence is deposited (so to speak) in the shadow’s inscription; it does not matter if, along with the “real” object, there is that additional ghost, strange and almost unwieldy, or if everything appears together in the same dissolution. The function of the image remains the same, and it is a kind of tragic condensation of a power attached to photography. A shadow imprinted directly on the skin of the world, on a wall that has become a sensitive plate, the picture of a pencil of nature gone crazy in the hands of man playing God, it is like a photograph made directly by light, a photograph that had accomplished in a split second the very program of gradual destruction that Balzac suspected the new art of containing. In effect—and this has even become a canonical anecdote, cited in every history of photography—we know thanks to Nadar, who relays the fact with his typical lightness of touch,17 that Balzac, while not judging photography as so many of his contemporaries did, was fearful of it, especially the photographic portrait. His notion was that with each shot the outermost layer of the sitter’s

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person was stripped away, everyone’s body being, so to speak, like a kind of spectral mille feuilles. For all that is genuinely fascinating about this strange and fanciful notion (akin to the fears so often expressed by primitive peoples), the flash of the atomic explosion provides a kind of foundation: a pseudophoto, or absolute photo, that not only strips away the final layer and reproduces it in the form of a shadow, but also destroys all the layers and the entire person in one go, thus—to repeat the very terms Nadar attributes to Balzac— achieving the transition from something to nothing. Now, if I am able to mention this, or to make such associations, it is on a physical basis. It is because the photographic itself is the bearer of that syncope via which light becomes shadow; it is because in the very nature of the photographic interruption there is something almost catastrophic. The caesura in every photographic image contains the program for the disappearance of what it suspends and salvages. Such is a photograph’s aporetical abyss. It cannot be alive; whatever its level of empathy with what it shows, it always has death in sight. Doubtless this was the intuition whispered to us by the montage: from one ladder to another, from the spring of 1844 to the summer of 1945, from the English countryside that one imagines buzzing with noise to a Japanese summer saturated with silence, the latent inversion contained in every moment and every place, the possibility of a fire permanently smoldering beneath the world, of which every shadow (even the faintest one, even that of a bamboo walking stick propped against a pillar) is the premonitory sign or oracle. “Light almost is photography,”18 said Walker Evans, while more recently, with regard to what he calls the “surface of photographs,” Jeff Wall has spoken of the “cloud of granular

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energy that physically makes the image.”19 These remarks, taken from the now enormous corpus of definitions of photography, are by no means the product of passing intuition or chance, and I quote them here as striking examples of a proximity between the very matter of the photographic and the mode of impregnation revealed by the flash of the bomb. This is the physical basis that enables us to think that while it is not a photograph in the strict sense, the image of the shadow cast and fixed at Hiroshima says something about what photography is. And what it says in this way has generic implications that apply to any photo—implications of which the Lacock Abbey haystack and its ladder, despite having come from a silky spring and the happy origins of photography, have here served as the symptom or testimony. With this solidarity burned between shadow and light, between life and death, it is as though the “black sun of melancholy” were at home, as though alongside the sun pictures wholly swept up in the dream of a diurnal capture, another shadow were settling within the very shadows revealed by that capture, a longer and more lasting shadow. Or, to continue in the Nervalian climate that is so propitious here, it is as though at the very heart of photographic capture, irreversibly, a “black spot” had settled or returned. Whoever has looked head-on at the sun Will seem to see, continually dancing About him in the air, a pallid spot. Likewise, a younger and a bolder man, I dared to look on glory for an instant: A black spot lingered in my greedy eyes. Now, like a sign of mourning on all things, No matter where my gaze should chance to fall, I see the black spot landing there!20

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In these lines by Nerval, between the “pallid spot” and the “black spot,” an immediate reversion from positive to negative occurs, and we will recall that beyond the doubtless elegiac tone, this black spot would come to represent for Nerval a definitive punctuation, the end of the “black and white” night that was his last.21 There is thus nothing particularly frivolous about evoking it here next to the traumatic reality of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which has no equivalent. Even as I make this observation, I am well aware of the power of these names, and of the suspicion of frivolity or inconsequentiality that, like Auschwitz, they cast upon everything else, on my efforts as on all others. But if I spoke of a hermeneutical tempest, it is because despite that suspicion—indeed, even before it could rear its head—the image of the man destroyed imposed itself on its own, literally sent by the image of the haystack. The haystack of Lacock Abbey and its thousand and one accidents of light: we remember it, we see it again, unaltered by the effect of the montage that it nonetheless produced. Intact, in that objective and unthreatened peace that is proper to it; in that harmony between weightiness and appearance, where it simultaneously surfaces and sinks down; in something of summer that bubbled up in April; telle qu’en elle-même,22 and such as it appears here. We are left to wonder where the capacity for concealment, the sending power that has led us all this way, could be nestling. Perhaps the “optical unconscious” is precisely this: neutral, bound to a kind of neutrality, to a zone of nonsignification that is like the reserve of all meaning, all possible coming. And perhaps, for there to be an awakening, there must exist first and foremost, and for a very long time, the equivalent of that faculty of reserve or delay that in the realm of plants is called dormancy.

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James Agee, who accompanied Walker Evans during their 1936 project reporting on poor farmers in Alabama, wonders at the outset of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men— that singular book that is in effect a report but that must also be read as the draft of a literature yet to come—about our ability (or, indeed, perhaps our inability) to stand before things and consider them in the fullness of their resonance. This is not, strictly speaking, the question of realism, but that of an approach that is both barer and finer, more helpless. Fine, not in the sense of refinement, but of an ability to descend into the very murmur of things and to slip into the folds of the world at the precise moment in which they take shape. Thus Agee speaks of what haunts him, what he has seen over the course of all those weeks spent on the road and beneath the farm canopies—unintentional still lifes, quiverings of dust toward the horizon, silent appeals in pale eyes; he thus speaks of “the immediate world” and of “the whole of consciousness, seeking to perceive it as it stands: so that the aspect of a street in sunlight can roar in the heart of itself.” This whole of consciousness then becomes one (the following emphasis is mine, for Agee’s formulation takes a rather surprising turn here) with “the effort to perceive simply the cruel radiance of what is.”23 It goes without saying that in the context into which I have transplanted it, citing it after talking about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the word “radiance”24 stands out, and it is perhaps what initially caught my eye in James Agee’s formulation, but this admittedly coincidental feature must become something more substantial, something that would do full justice to what is hereby invoked and defined, rather than simply noting its meaning in an anecdotal way. In the “cruel radiance of what is,” I think one must see nothing other than the terrible suspension of objects in time, akin to an extremely slow combustion through which the discontinuous

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fabrication of forms and existences is delivered and objectivized: the story of everything that exists and dies, which is also the expanse where everything and everyone lies. Between the time that slips by and the insistence of a present moment that dilates, a kind of binding takes place, and the “radiance” is simply what emanates from that tension. As such, it is absolutely generic, and informs every existence: existence occurs as radiance, and it is because nothing can escape the radiation that there is cruelty. From this point of view, a photograph, born of radiation, acts at the same time as its collection or deposit. A frail sign of existence, indicating that something has stood before it prior to being registered, photography—and in a way this would be a revival of the pencil of nature—acts directly and silently as that which can make the “signifying heart”25 of things reverberate. Immediately after evoking the “whole of consciousness” and the capacity to reach and remain at the “heart,” Agee says that the camera (the photographic apparatus) is “the central instrument of our time,” the one that, “next to unassisted and weaponless consciousness,”26 is, or would be, capable of going beyond that erasure of sorts to the furthest reach of the innocence that language, for its part, has only ever been able to skirt. A radiation, and that which collects it—yes, there is no doubt that this applies to the image of the haystack, as well as to what quivers within it, to everything that, despite its extraordinary poise, is fading away, is liable to fade away. The innocence of the implement, or the faithfulness of the pencil, would be precisely this: that nothing of what comes with the radiation captured by photography be entirely visible, and consequently that there be, in the hiddenness presented by the surface, an inexhaustible recharging of meaning: the black of blindness at the limit of shadow, and the explosion

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of a nucleus of light at the limit of the sun’s glimmers across the blades of dried grass. • “Appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger”27—this is how Benjamin, in the best-known and doubtless most quoted of his texts today, characterizes the historian’s work. The meaning of this moment of danger, this Augenblick der Gefahr, fluctuates—firstly, insofar as we are unable to separate it from the precise moment at which Benjamin came to evoke it: the early months of 1940, the start of the new world war, and thus for Benjamin a situation that was already the very essence of danger, as the future would confirm soon enough. But here, in this book, it is from the other side of that war, in other words the summer of 1945, that the moment of danger returns to us, finding in the terrible image of the imprint of the man on the paneled wall a kind of objectivization. At the very limit where the sentry disappears and his image appears, the moment of danger enters a loop and is continuously represented. This is why, although it is no more than a tomb, this image also appears as a threat to us. With it, in effect, the danger presents itself anew. It is at once what came and what is still there, present at the heart of what has been ruined. But the more surprising thing I mean to say, which is also the final destination of this book based on the montage of three images, is that the first of them, the one of the haystack, also inhabits the configuration of danger; it is for this reason that it can loom up so clearly as a memory. Thus can Benjamin’s formula be diverted from its precise (and complex) meaning within the taut development of his final theses on history, in order to designate, in the gravest

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of modes, what would be the very essence of the photographic act. Of course, no direct danger threatens the haystack, which on the contrary is even full of a tranquil verve, as we have seen time and again. But this tranquil appearance is itself no more than a mode of the radiation of existence, and every existence contains the possibility and the necessity of its own ruin. Likewise, a shadow begins to form beneath every occurrence of light, as evidenced by every shadow cast. Because each photograph, too, is in its own way a shadow, or a shadow’s deposit, it is the memory of a radiation, of an occurrence of radiation, and the omen of a ruin or an erasure. It was amid the play of these slippages that the “HiroshimaNagasaki” sheet slipped underneath the Lacock Abbey sheet, without my really having anything to do with it. But having seen that superimposition occur and sensed all that it might conceal, I thought, in the sway of the turmoil it provoked, that I would have to try, if not to understand it completely, then at least to analyze its hidden workings. At the end of this endeavor, which for me will simultaneously have assumed the outline of an attempt to approach the essence of photographic capture, I am aware that the narrative that took shape this way is already getting away from me, precisely as though every film, rewinding, must inevitably return into night.

Notes

Preface

1. Jean-Luc Godard, Histoire du cinéma (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 4:103. 2. See Georges Didi-Huberman, Génie du non-lieu (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2001), in particular 18–25. 3. Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, trans. Shane B. Lillis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Part I: A Haystack in the Sun

1. For further details, see the box on page 62 of the Nouvelle histoire de la photographie, ed. Michel Frizot (Paris: Larousse, 2001). For the full intellectual context and genesis of The Pencil of Nature, see François Brunet’s fascinating and remarkable book La Naissance de l’idée de photographie (Paris: PUF, 2000), 117–56. 2. “The daguerreotype is not an instrument that serves to draw nature, but a physical and chemical process that allows nature to reproduce itself,” as Daguerre wrote, for example, in the “1838 Prospectus,” a little-known text cited by François Brunet in La Naissance de l’idée de photographie, 50–51. 95

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3. These citations, as well as those that follow (unless otherwise indicated), are taken from the “Introductory Remarks” to The Pencil of Nature. There exists a French translation of Talbot’s complete text, with the plates on facing pages, in Sophie Hedtmann and Philippe Poncet, William Henry Fox Talbot (Paris: Éditions de l’Amateur, 2003). 4. Arago, for instance, in his famous speech of January 7, 1839, said that the method perfected by Daguerre “creates drawings and not colored pictures.” 5. It is not without interest to note that Thomas Wedgwood, the son of the ceramicist, coauthor with the physicist Humphry Davy in 1802 of a paper on a method of copying paintings onto glass, belongs fully to what François Brunet calls the “photochemical network,” which prepares the coming of actual photography. 6. It is sketched out in Karim Basbous’s fine essay on architectural drawing, Avant l’œuvre (Paris: Éditions de l’Imprimeur, 2006), in particular 45–47. 7. To these considerations on the softening effect of the mineral implement, one should add (even if in this case it is the surface that is mineral) Senefelder’s invention of lithography, which dates back to 1796, but whose widespread practice is basically contemporary with the earliest photographic efforts. 8. Plato, The Sophist, 240 b–c. 9. Walter Benjamin, Small History of Photography, in On Photography, ed. and trans. Esther Leslie (London: Reaktion, 2015), 66. 10. He indicates as much in De l’amour, where, we will recall, he sees the phenomenon of crystallization as the analogon of amorous passion. 11. Talbot to Herschel (1840), cited by Larry J. Schaaf, The Photographic Art of William Henry Fox Talbot (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 72. 12. Arnaud Claass, Journal de travail (20 février 1997–19 février 1998) (Toulouse : Maxence Fabiani/Les Imaginayres, 1999), 37. 13. Rosalind Krauss, “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” October 19 (Winter 1981): 26.

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14. Jean-Marie Schaeffer suggests in L’Image précaire (Paris: Le Seuil, 1987) that photograms cannot be considered as genuinely photographic (“canonical”) images, which is true as regards the positioning of the photographic mechanism (59– 63). Yet it seems to me that the criterion drawing = trace of light should be prioritized here, not just in terms of a history of photography but also in terms of the essence of images. 15. Talbot, “Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing . . . ,” report of 1839 reproduced in the collection Photography: Essays & Images, ed. Beaumont Newhall (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1980), 25. 16. Pierre-Henri Valenciennes, for instance, wrote in his Réflexions sur la peinture de paysage, published in 1801 (La Rochelle: La Rumeur des âges, 2005): “[When an object] is lit by the sun, and this light and its shadows continue to change with the movement of the earth, it is not possible to copy Nature very long without one’s chosen effect of light varying so quickly that one can no longer recognize it in the state in which one had begun it” (33). It is not without interest to note here that the more or less constant instability of states of light was Monet’s great torment. We will return to this. 17. Walker Evans noted as much, writing in an article from 1931 that “the element of time entering into photography provides a departure for as much speculation as an observer cares to make” (cited by Olivier Lugon in Le Style documentaire [Paris: Macula, 2001], 354). 18. Douglas Gordon’s tremendously powerful artistic proposition consists of screening Hitchcock’s film Psycho in extreme slow motion over a twenty-four-hour period. The dilation of the time of suspense opens onto a time that we have never seen before, never perceived in that way—a time that has more time than it does, a time that, for such a long time, shows only itself. 19. In his commentary on The Haystack, in Schaaf, The Photographic Art of William Henry Fox Talbot, 198. 20. Robert Delpire and Michel Frizot, Histoire de voir, vol. 1: De l’invention à l’art photographique, 1830–1880 (Paris: Centre national de la photo, 1989), 32.

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21. Schaaf, The Photographic Art of William Henry Fox Talbot, 198. 22. This effect would enjoy a considerable fortune in the arts, even to this day. 23. Schaaf, The Photographic Art of William Henry Fox Talbot, 108. 24. Schaaf, The Photographic Art of William Henry Fox Talbot, 108. 25. This is what is so wonderfully demonstrated in Antonioni’s film Blowup, which turns the index into a literal clue. 26. More than likely, the choice of this plate is deliberately echoing the first image of the Boulevard du Temple taken by Daguerre. 27. This image from 1851, which is at once realist (in the sense of an insistent will to bear witness) and contrived (it is, in fact, masquerading as a snapshot), nevertheless avoids any stylistic pathos and can legitimately illustrate the prose work of photography. (This work is so close to the prose whose appearance would be fixed not long thereafter in the poems of Le Spleen de Paris that one is all the more sorry to note Baudelaire’s blindness to the new art, however understandable his inability to see it as the agent of the modernity that he called for elsewhere.) 28. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. 2, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 766. 29. One could legitimately object that a photograph can be retouched, but retouching does not ultimately change photography’s relation to time. 30. The phrase alludes to a fragmentary text by Stéphane Mallarmé, Épouser la notion, first published posthumously in 1964.—Trans. 31. Benjamin, Small History of Photography, 68. The German term used by Benjamin is Optisch-Unbewußt. 32. There is indeed just such a dial-plate in the background of plate 13. 33. Delacroix, cited by Michel Frizot in the chapter “Un dessin automatique, la vérité du calotype,” in Nouvelle histoire de la photographie, ed. Frizot, 75.

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34. On the Concept of History (a text formerly translated and known under the title “Theses on the Philosophy of History”), trans. Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings, Volume 4 (1938–1940), ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 395. 35. Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), 281. 36. Luc Brisson, commentary on Traité 27 in Plotinus, Traités 27–29 (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 2005), 241n479. 37. Plotinus, The Enneads, 283. 38. Rosalind Krauss, Le Photographique (Paris: Macula, 1990), 97. 39. For everything here that has to do with Monet, I refer the reader to Marianne Alphant’s book Monet, une vie dans le paysage (Paris: Hazan, 1993), and especially to chapter 28 (“Des meules, des peupliers”). For it is literally up close, day by day and, when possible, hour by hour, that this book attempts to reconstruct the deepest weft of Monet’s pictorial experience. 40. Regarding Kandinsky’s encounter with one of the Haystacks and the problems of dating and identification that it raises, see Jean-Paul Bouillon’s commentary in his edition of Kandinsky’s Regards sur le passé (Paris: Hermann, 1974), n37. 41. Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (New York: Da Capo, 1994), 363. 42. Alphant, Monet, une vie dans le paysage, 491. Part II: The Shadow of a Ladder

1. In a famously startling simile from Les Chants de Maldoror (1869), frequently cited in surrealist circles, Lautréamont calls a young boy “beautiful . . . as the chance encounter on a dissection table between a sewing machine and an umbrella!”—Trans. 2. Cf. Talbot, Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing . . . , report of 1839 reproduced in the collection Photography: Essays & Images, ed. Beaumont Newhall (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1980), n18. 3. See Larry J. Schaaf, The Photographic Art of William Henry

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Fox Talbot (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 200. 4. In an article from 1882 on the “chronophotographic gun” cited by Anson Rabinbach in the long and fascinating chapter devoted to Marey in his book The Human Motor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 84–119. 5. Denis Roche, Le Boîtier de mélancolie (Paris: Hazan, 1999), 32. 6. Denis Roche proposes the following scenario: “Look at the thin bamboo cane that he [Teynard] pretends to have forgotten up against the right-hand column. Perhaps he had left it there before going to check his viewfinder, and decided that it was in its right place after all; or else, framing his image, he had understood that something was missing, and signaled to an assistant to go prop his cane against the pillar. Now it’s your turn: pretend to forget the cane, and like me, look only at its shadow and the acute angle they form together” (Roche, Le Boîtier de mélancolie, 32). 7. See Phillipe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, trans. Sophie Hawkes (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), as well as the chapter “Zwischenreich, Mnemosyne ou l’expressivité sans sujet,” in Sketches (Paris: Kargo & L’Éclat, 2005). See also Georges Didi-Huberman, The Surviving Image: Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms: Aby Warburg’s History of Art, trans. Harvey Mendelsohn (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017), as well as the section devoted to montage (120–50) in Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, trans. Shane B. Lillis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 8. Here and elsewhere, we see all that “memory” would stand to gain by being reunited with “thought,” and vice versa. And we see it because this is a truly vast worksite. Recently, in a text devoted to photographs, no less, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe spoke of “no doubt the most powerful word that is given to us to think about thought, memory” (in Eu égard, text published in Portraits/ Chantiers [Geneva: MAMCO-Presses du réel, 2004]). 9. Masuji Ibuse, Black Rain, trans. John Bester (New York: Kodansha International, 1969). The novel, which takes place five

notes to PaGes 77–89

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years after the explosion of the bomb, is structured around the desire to reconstitute the events of August 1945, and interwoven with a journal kept at the time. Although it is a fiction, the haunted exactness of the narration, stripped of all excess of pathos, is gripping. 10. Michael Lucken’s article, “Hiroshima-Nagasaki, des photographies pour abscisse et ordonnée,” appeared in the journal Études photographiques 18 (May 2006). The character of Y¯osuke Yamahata also appears in Philippe Forest’s novel Sarinagara, trans. Pascale Torracinta (San Francisco: Mercury House, 2009). 11. The few photographs that Matsushige was able to take in spite of all are still upsetting, but Michael Lucken correctly points out that “they could have been taken in any Japanese city at the time” and that they “do not adhere to the reality universally recognized as being that of Hiroshima” (“Hiroshima-Nagasaki, des photographies pour abscisse et ordonnée”). 12. Ibuse, Black Rain, 213. 13. Ibuse, Black Rain, 24. 14. John Hersey, Hiroshima (New York: Knopf, 1968). 15. Kenzaburo Oe, Hiroshima Notes, trans. David L. Swain and Toshi Yonezawa (New York: Marion Boyars, 1995). 16. Ibuse, Black Rain, 87. 17. Félix Nadar, When I Was a Photographer, trans. Eduardo Cadava and Liana Theodoratou (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015), 1–6. Incidentally, it is with the chapter “Balzac and the Daguerreotype” that the book begins. 18. Cited by Olivier Lugon in Le Style documentaire (Paris: Macula, 2001), 128. 19. Jeff Wall, Selected Essays and Interviews (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2007), 321. 20. The “Point noir” was first published, under the simple title “Sonnet,” in a prose version in 1830. A preliminary version in verse, entitled “Le Soleil et la gloire,” dates from 1832. The definitive version, with its new title, was included in Les Petits châteaux de Bohême. Nerval presented the text as the translation of a poem by Bürger, but such a poem has not been found.

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notes to PaGes 90–93

21. “Do not wait for me this evening, for the night will be black and white.” These words, written by Nerval in a note addressed to his aunt Jeanne Labrunie (see Claude Pichois and Michel Brix, Gérard de Nerval [Paris: Fayard, 1995], 363), have always struck me, not just as his final password, but as somehow containing the secret of his time on earth. Moreover, we who are descended from calotypes, spools, and celluloid cannot possibly separate Nerval’s words from the “black and white” of photographic impression. A black and white that Nerval knew, by the way, both as a witness (an uncertain one, to say the least) and as a practitioner (unsuccessfully, during his travels in the Orient). On Nerval’s relation to photography, see the interesting article by Paul-Louis Roubert, “Nerval et l’expérience du daguerréotype,” in issue 4 (1998) of the journal Études photographiques (Paris), which incidentally cites the “black spot” poem. 22. This phrase is a play on the celebrated first line of Mallarmé’s poetic homage to Edgar Allan Poe, “Tel qu’en Lui-même enfin l’éternité le change” (Transformed into Himself at last by eternity).—Trans. 23. James Agee, in James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2015), 10. 24. In French, radiation.—Trans. 25. In the French edition of Agee’s book, the phrase “so that the aspect of a street in sunlight can roar in the heart of itself” is translated as follows: “que l’apparence d’une rue exposée à la lumière du soleil puisse dans son rugissement atteindre son propre cœur signifiant” (my emphasis).—Trans. 26. James Agee, in Agee and Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 10. 27. Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, trans. Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings, Volume 4 (1938–1940), ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 391.

Jean-Christophe Bailly teaches at the École Nationale Supérieure de la Nature et du Paysage, in Blois, France. His books include The Animal Side as well as many other books and artists’ catalogues in French. Samuel E. Martin is Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His translation of Georges DidiHuberman’s Bark won the French-American Foundation Translation Prize.