The Miracle of Analogy is the first of a two-volume reconceptualization of photography. It argues that photography originates in what is seen, rather than in the human eye or the camera lens, and that it is the world's primary way of revealing itself to us. Neither an index, representation, nor copy, as conventional studies would have it, the photographic image is an analogy. This principle obtains at every level of its being: a photograph analogizes its referent, the negative from which it is generated, every other print that is struck from that negative, and all of its digital "offspring."
Photography is also unstoppably developmental, both at the level of the individual image and of medium. The photograph moves through time, in search of other "kin," some of which may be visual, but others of which may be literary, architectural, philosophical, or literary. Finally, photography develops with us, and in response to us. It assumes historically legible forms, but when we divest them of their saving power, as we always seem to do, it goes elsewhere.
The present volume focuses on the nineteenth century and some of its contemporary progeny. It begins with the camera obscura, which morphed into chemical photography and lives on in digital form, and ends with Walter Benjamin. Key figures discussed along the way include Nicéphore Niépce, Louis Daguerre, William Fox-Talbot, Jeff Wall, and Joan Fontcuberta.
The Miracle of Analogy is the first of a two-volume reconceptualization of photography. It argues that photography originates in what is seen, rather than in the human eye or the camera lens, and that it is the world's primary way of revealing itself to us. Neither an index, representation, nor copy, as conventional studies would have it, the photographic image is an analogy. This principle obtains at every level of its being: a photograph analogizes its referent, the negative from which it is generated, every other print that is struck from that negative, and all of its digital "offspring."
Photography is also unstoppably developmental, both at the level of the individual image and of medium. The photograph moves through time, in search of other "kin," some of which may be visual, but others of which may be literary, architectural, philosophical, or literary. Finally, photography develops with us, and in response to us. It assumes historically legible forms, but when we divest them of their saving power, as we always seem to do, it goes elsewhere.
The present volume focuses on the nineteenth century and some of its contemporary progeny. It begins with the camera obscura, which morphed into chemical photography and lives on in digital form, and ends with Walter Benjamin. Key figures discussed along the way include Nicéphore Niépce, Louis Daguerre, William Fox-Talbot, Jeff Wall, and Joan Fontcuberta.
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Overview
The Miracle of Analogy is the first of a two-volume reconceptualization of photography. It argues that photography originates in what is seen, rather than in the human eye or the camera lens, and that it is the world's primary way of revealing itself to us. Neither an index, representation, nor copy, as conventional studies would have it, the photographic image is an analogy. This principle obtains at every level of its being: a photograph analogizes its referent, the negative from which it is generated, every other print that is struck from that negative, and all of its digital "offspring."
Photography is also unstoppably developmental, both at the level of the individual image and of medium. The photograph moves through time, in search of other "kin," some of which may be visual, but others of which may be literary, architectural, philosophical, or literary. Finally, photography develops with us, and in response to us. It assumes historically legible forms, but when we divest them of their saving power, as we always seem to do, it goes elsewhere.
The present volume focuses on the nineteenth century and some of its contemporary progeny. It begins with the camera obscura, which morphed into chemical photography and lives on in digital form, and ends with Walter Benjamin. Key figures discussed along the way include Nicéphore Niépce, Louis Daguerre, William Fox-Talbot, Jeff Wall, and Joan Fontcuberta.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804794008 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/04/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 59 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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The Miracle of Analogy or The History of Photography, Part 1
By Kaja Silverman
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9400-8
CHAPTER 1
THE SECOND COMING
IT IS AS IMPOSSIBLE to know when photography began as it is to know when our first ancestors opened their eyes, but if we were able to locate one of these events, we would not have to search long for the other. The two photographic processes that were unveiled in 1839 by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot built on a number of earlier chemical experiments and discoveries, even the most cursory survey of which would include Angelo Sala's 1614 discovery that a nitrate of silver darkens when exposed to sun, Heinrich Schulze's 1724 realization that this darkening can be used to make an image, Thomas Wedgwood's late-eighteenth-century attempts to do just that, and John Herschel's 1819 discovery that hyposulphites can dissolve the unreduced salts of silver, which led to the invention of "hypo," a photographic fixer. Pride of place, though, would be given to Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, whose chemical experiments resulted in the first photographic image.
Daguerre and Talbot also relied on a much older optical device: the camera obscura. The classical camera obscura—the one that was the norm from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries—was a darkened chamber with a small aperture through which light entered, bearing a reversed and inverted stream of images that both originated in the external world and analogized it. This continuous flow of mobile and evanescent images existed only in the "now" in which it appeared, and since the viewer had to enter the camera obscura in order to see it, the two were spatially as well as temporally co-present.
This device formalized optical principles that had been accidentally discovered centuries earlier and that are as old as light itself. In the fifth century b.c., the Chinese philosopher Mo Ti noted the "image-making properties" of a small aperture. A century later, Aristotle was struck by the many crescent-shaped images of the sun that appeared on the ground beneath a tree during an eclipse of the sun, and attributed them to the small spaces between the leaves. In the eleventh century, the Arab scholar Alhazen discovered the same principles while investigating the formation of images in a darkened room, and he viewed the sun during an eclipse from a similar place. He described the latter experience in the following way: "If the image of the sun at the time of an eclipse—provided it is not a total one—passes through a small round hole onto a plane surface, opposite, it will be crescent-shaped ... If the hole is very large, the crescent shape of the image disappears altogether and the light [on the wall] becomes round if the hole is round ... with any shaped opening you like, the image always takes the same shape ... provided the hole is large and the receiving surface parallel to it."
"Receiving surface" sounds odd to a contemporary ear, since it suggests that the optical device that figured so prominently in the early years of chemical photography was receptive, rather than productive, but Alhazen is not the only early commentator who speaks in these terms; receptivity is a recurrent trope in pre-1700 accounts of the camera obscura. "When at the time of an eclipse of the sun, its rays are received in a dark place," John Peckham observes in Perspectiva communis (1279), "through a hole of any shape, it is possible to see the crescent-shape getting smaller as the moon covers the sun." "When the images of illuminated objects pass through a small round hole into a very dark room [and] you receive them on a piece of white paper placed vertically in the room at some distance from the aperture," Leonardo da Vinci writes in Manuscript D, "you will see all those objects in their natural shapes and colors." "If you have a piece of white paper or other material upon which [the images] of everything passing through the aperture may be received, you will see everything on the earth and in the sky with their colors and forms," Cesare Cesariano remarks in a note in his 1521 translation of Vitruvius's Treatise on Architecture. "The visible radiations [of] all [of] the objects without are intromitted, falling upon a paper, which is accommodated to receive them," Sir Henry Wotton writes in his famous 1620 letter to Francis Bacon about Johannes Kepler's tent camera obscura.
Since the viewer had to enter the classical camera obscura in order to see its images, he was also a receiver. This would have been hard to ignore, because the device had no focusing mechanism. The only way the viewer could render its often hard-to-see images more legible was to move around the sheet of paper on which they were received until he found the point at which they came into focus—i.e., to participate in the reception process. Daniele Barbaro describes this practice in his 1568 book, La Pratica della perspettiva. "If you take a sheet of paper and place it in front of the lens," he writes there, "you will see clearly on the paper all that goes on outside the house. This you will see most distinctly at a certain distance, which you will find by moving the paper nearer to or farther away from the lens, until you have found the proper position."
For centuries, the camera obscura was primarily used to watch solar eclipses, and it was put to this purpose because the human eye cannot tolerate the amount of light that floods into it when it looks directly at the sun. It consequently testified to the external source not only of the images that appeared on the screen, but also of those perceived by the human eye. So long as Christianity and Platonism were the dominant forces within Western thought, the notion that light enters the human eye from outside was unproblematic; illumination was, after all, a privileged signifier for both God and the demiurge. Since both systems of thought emphasize how blinding this divine light can be, the fact that a solar eclipse could be safely viewed only from the refuge of a camera obscura was also neither noteworthy nor particularly disturbing. And since the images that appeared within the device issued from a higher agency, they could be presumed to be a reliable source of information about what was happening in the external world.
However, in 1490 Leonardo noted that the human eye also resembles a camera obscura—that rays of light enter its dark "chamber" through a "small aperture," just as they do in the latter device, and that they also bear an inverted and laterally reversed stream of images. Because he was a largely secular thinker, he realized that both image streams originate in and refer back to a terrestrial source. He was also alive to their aesthetic properties. Leonardo likened the camera obscura's images to "paintings," and searched for other unauthored art works in the external world. "Cast your glance on any walls dirty with such stains or walls made up of rock formations of different types," he advises his fellow artists in Ashburnham I, "If you have to invent some scenes, you will be able to discover them there in diverse forms, in diverse landscapes, adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, extensive plains, valleys, and hills."
I say "unauthored works of art" because Leonardo did not view image making as a strictly human activity. He believed that there is an aesthetic capacity in all worldly things that allows them to generate images of themselves. "Every body fills the surrounding air with infinite images of itself," Leonardo writes in one notebook entry. "All bodies together, and each by itself, give off to the surrounding air an infinite number of images ... each conveying the nature, color and form of the body which produces it," he observes in another. This activity is self-presentational, and our look is its "lodestone." Bodies give themselves to be seen by us by sending us analogies or "portraits" of themselves. Leonardo was also interested in a different kind of human art making—one that would begin with the acceptance of this gift. "The mind of the painter must resemble a mirror, which always takes on the color of the object it reflects and is completely occupied by the images of as many objects as there are in front of it," he observes elsewhere in Ashburnham I.
Ancient scholars had two conflicting theories of vision. For some, as James S. Ackerman explains, "the eye was passive and simply received emanations from the outer world," but for others it was "active and cast out rays or a spirit to touch the seen object." When Leonardo urges painters to let their minds be "filled by as many images as there are objects before it," he might seem to be drawing on the first of these theories. In fact, though, he is only describing the initial stage in a complex process—one that is as much about giving as receiving. This process begins when the world conveys a visual analogy of itself to the human eye. The viewer receives this gift by relating it to similar things within his own memory reserve. Leonardo's artist goes one step further: he generates an external analogy for the one created through the "marriage" of the world's visual analogy with the viewer's mental analogy. This opens the analogical network to other viewers.
Paul Valéry provides an excellent description of this process in "Introduction to the Method of Leonardo." "At first the process [of receiving something] is undergone passively, almost unconsciously," he writes, "as a vessel lets itself be filled: there is a feeling of slow and pleasurable circulation. Later ... one assigns new values to things that had seemed closed and irreducible, one adds to them, takes more pleasure in particular features, finds expression for these; and what happens is like the restitution of an energy that our senses had received. Soon the energy will alter the environment in its turn, employing to this end the conscious thought of a person." Daniel Arasse also talks about the unusual dynamism and reciprocity of Leonardo's analogies, and says that the result is an "unfinished universality"—one oriented to the future.
Leonardo isn't the only early-modern viewer of the camera obscura who compares it to the human eye. Johannes Kepler also likens the inverted and laterally reversed images that enter this organ to those that enter the camera obscura, and he pushes the comparison a step further: he characterizes the retina as the ocular equivalent of the camera obscura's "receiving screen." "Vision ... occurs through a picture of the visible object at the white of the retina and the concave wall," he writes in his 1604 book, Ad Vitellionem paralipomena, "and those things that are on the right outside, are depicted on the left side of the wall, the left at the right, the top at the bottom, the bottom at the top."
Kepler calls this reversed and inverted "picture" the "retinal image," and refuses to posit a higher visual faculty that would rectify its "deformations." "Vision occurs when the image of the whole hemisphere of the world that is before the eye ... is set up at the white wall, tinged with red, of the concave surface of the retina," he declares in another passage in Ad Vitellionem paralipomena. "How this image or picture is joined together with the visual spirits that reside in the retina and the nerve, and whether it is arraigned within by the spirits ... to the tribunal of the soul or of the visual faculty ... I leave to the natural philosophers. For the arsenal of the optical writers does not extend beyond this opaque wall." Kepler thus refuses to argue that the blindness of the seeing eye can be overcome through the clarity of mental representation.
Like Leonardo, Kepler is also obsessed with analogies, or what he calls "correspondences," and he sees the camera obscura as the agency of their disclosure. His analogies, though, are divinely authored, and they operate synchronically rather than diachronically—as elements within a vast and already fully articulated system—a finished rather than an unfinished universality. He also gives his retinal discovery a stabilizing name; it is an "image," rather than a "flow of images." Finally, he conducted his cosmological observations with a camera obscura whose inversions and reversals were "corrected" through two convex lenses.
René Descartes seemingly picks up where Kepler leaves off in Discourse 5 of the Optics. He urges those who do not believe that the inverted and reversed images of the external world appear on the surface of the retina to peel away the back layers of the eye of a dead person or animal, insert it into the aperture of a camera obscura, facing outward, enter the camera obscura, and look at the retina from the other side. They will then perceive images just like those that appear on the camera obscura's receiving surface. But as we can see from the accompanying diagram, the experiment described by Descartes is calculated to disprove rather than to prove Kepler's claim. By placing a lifeless eye in the aperture of the camera obscura, Descartes renders the retinal image both visible and mechanical, and by positioning the viewer in front of this image, he transforms the latter from a blind receiver of external images into a knowledgeable observer of what he sees. A few pages earlier, he flatly declares that "it is the mind which senses, not the body." As Maurice Merleau-Ponty observes in "Eye and Mind," Descartes's Optics is "the breviary of a thought that wants no longer to abide in the visible and so decides to construct the visible according to a model-in-thought."
This is hardly surprising. Certainty was the defining attribute of the subject Descartes aspired to be, and there was only one foundation on which he was willing to base his beliefs: himself. The retinal image discredited this "self," since it showed that the images that our eyes receive do not correlate in a one-to-one way with the objects from which they derive. There is also a disconnect between the retinal image and what we "see," which means that there must be an agency within us that reverses its reversal and inverts its inversion before we perceive it. Shutting one's eyes and closing one's ears might block out the external world, but it offers no protection against this internal "other."
Descartes is clearly haunted by this thought, because he spends as much time in the Meditations and The Discourse on Method worrying about whether he is deceiving himself as he does worrying about whether others are deceiving him. He tries to banish it by transforming the device that Kepler compares to the human eye into a signifier for a new kind of interiority—one befitting a sovereign subject. The heated room to which he retreats in his search for truth is like the isolated space of a camera obscura, the darkness into which he is plunged when he closes his eyes like the darkness of that enclosure, and the mental representations that he places before his inner eye like the images that pass before the eyes of its viewer. Unlike the images in the physical camera obscura, or the mind described by Leonardo, though, those that appear within Descartes's mental camera obscura are stable, and he is both their producer and their viewer.
John Locke also invokes the camera obscura when describing his version of the modern subject. Since he believed that "external and internal sensations" were the "only windows" through which the light of understanding could enter into the "dark room" of the mind, he could not simply dispense with the outer eye, as Descartes had done, so he transformed the analogy between the physical device and its mental counterpart into a contrasting set. Like the camera obscura, the mind is a chamber into which images come, Locke argues, but what happens thereafter is very different. In the former, images enter and leave in a disorderly fashion, because perception reigns supreme. In the latter, though, what arrives is conceptually organized, and remains where it has been put, because understanding governs perception. "The understanding is not much unlike a closet wholly shut from light, with only some little opening left ... to let in external visible resemblances, or ideas of things without," Locke writes in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, "would the pictures coming into such a dark room but stay there, and lie so orderly as to be found upon occasion, it would very much resemble the understanding of a man." The "orderliness" described by Locke could be secured only by immobilizing the external world, and suspending the associative faculty through which we respond to its images.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Miracle of Analogy or The History of Photography, Part 1 by Kaja Silverman. Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents and Abstracts0Introduction chapter abstractThe introduction discusses the shortcomings of the three categories into which we have slotted the photographic image: representation, index, and mechanical copy. It shows that the first leads to a Cartesian account of photography, that caters to our will-to-power; that the second anchors the photographic image in the past, and associates it with absence and loss; and that the third promotes the belief that photography is about "sameness," and that capitalism can be defeated through its own operations—rationalization, consumption, disillusionment. It argues that the photographic image is actually an analogy, and it offers a preliminary definition of this term.
1The Second Coming chapter abstractThis chapter argues that the user of the room-sized camera obscura attributed its images to the world, and imputed an aesthetic value to them. They were self-portraits, drawn with the pencil of nature, and he was their receiver. When the camera obscura was transformed into a portable box, into which he could peer, and equipped with lenses and mirrors that rectified its inversions and reversals, the device's user began thinking of it as a tool, with which to "take views." This narrative began anew when Louis Mandé Daguerre and Henry Fox Talbot unveiled their rival processes. Photography's early practitioners and viewers attributed its images to the world, emphasized their aesthetic properties, conceptualized them as self-portraits, and thought of themselves as receivers. Industrialization fostered the illusion that photographic event begins with the human eye, and transformed the camera into a device for "taking pictures."
2Unstoppable Development chapter abstractThis chapter argues that early photographs were as labile as the camera obscura's image-stream. Because they required such long exposures, they emerged slowly, through the gradual accumulation of luminous traces, and they often vanished, blackened, or continued to change after they were chemically "fixed." Early photographs also changed in tandem with the world, revealing that it, too, is constantly evolving. After the photographic image was chemically stabilized, it no longer changed internally, but it continued to develop in other ways: through the memories and associations it triggered in the viewer's psyche, through trans-historical and cross-medium analogies, and through the "reproduction process."
3Water in the Camera chapter abstractThis chapter theorizes the developmental impulse in photography through Jeff Wall's notion of "liquid intelligence," and the human drive to master the world through his notion of "dry" or "optical intelligence." The human drive to master the world motivated the search for "fixative" agents. It also led to repeated attempts to equate photography with the camera, and to subordinate the camera to the human look. These goals proved surprisingly elusive; only after half a century of technological innovation did the verb "to receive" fall into disuse, and three other verbs—"to take," "to capture," and "to shoot"—become standard usage. Chapter 3 traces the journey leading from the former to the latter.
4A Kind of Republic chapter abstractThis chapter argues that photography does more than disclose the world to us. It also shows us that we are linked to each other through the most binding of analogies: the one called "chiasmus." Chiasmus is the most binding of analogies because it stitches the seer to what is seen, the toucher to what is touched, and visibility to tactility. Photography reveals these reversible and reciprocal relationships to us through the inversion and lateral reversal of the camera obscura's image-stream, the positive print's reversal of the reversal through which its negative was made, the chromatic variety of Fox Talbot's prints, the two-way street leading from the space of the viewer to that of the stereoscopic image, cinema's shot/reverse shot formation, and the cross-temporal practices of some contemporary artists.
5Je Vous chapter abstractAfter the industrialization of the chemical medium, photography went elsewhere. Chapter 5 discusses three instantiations of this "photography by other means": Freudian psychoanalysis, Proust's In Search of Lost Time, and the opening sequence in Chantal Akerman's The Captive. The tropes that were associated with the camera obscura and early photographs resurface in Freud's account of the psyche, and Proust's account of art-making. Both writers conceptualize the psyche as a receptive surface on which perceptual images are traced, identify the world as the source of those images, maintain that many of them never become conscious, and compare those that do not to undeveloped negatives. Both also liken the process through which unconscious images become conscious to photographic development, and Proust's narrator compares his relationship to Albertine to the relationship between a negative and a positive print. Akerman carries this project further in The Captive, her filmic adaptation of Proust's story.
6Posthumous Presence chapter abstractThis chapter argues that the most famous passages in Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of it Technological Reproducibility" come from "Little History of Photography," which privileges similarity rather than sameness, and reprises and expands upon the tropes associated with the camera obscura and early photography. Benjamin arrives at this account of photography while gazing at three nineteenth century photographs, and ruminating on a series of passages from Der Geist Meines Vaters, Max Dauthendey's memoir about his father. These passages all turn on the look—the male look, the female look, and the look that the figures in early photographs direct at the viewer. These passages inspire an astonishing claim: the claim that during the long exposures of early portrait photography, the sitter "grew" into the "picture," allowing the figures who appear in them both to solicit and to return the viewer's gaze.