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CHAPTER 1
History and "Prehistory"
1.1 What is not (yet) a picture?
"We know that things and people are always forced to conceal themselves, have to conceal themselves when they begin. What else could they do? They come into being within a set which no longer includes them and, in order not to be rejected, have to project the characteristics which they retain in common with the set. The essence of a thing never appears at the outset, but in the middle, in the course of its development, when its strength is assured." Deleuze refers to the obscure origins of film in this passage; but the issue of photography's genesis raises the same question. The difficulties commence once we try to trace a thing that has taken definite form — film or photography — back to its unstable beginnings; to the point, that is to say, when it was not yet the thing it would become "in the course of its development." Historians have long sought to identify the historical origin of photography, the moment when it was first "discovered" or "invented," and have come back with a variety of findings. Yet what has been said of the beginnings of the cinema applies no less to the provenance of photography: "in a certain sense, it has too many pasts to have an origin."
The following discussion will develop this idea more fully. My objective is not to recount yet again the early history of photography, which is well documented, nor to argue that the existing accounts should be regarded as obsolete. Instead, I want to inquire into the conception of the photographic image these accounts have presupposed, usually without rendering it explicit. Michel Frizot has rightly spoken of the "invention of the invention" of photography: "as though, because there is 'photography,' there also must be, somewhere, the 'invention' of what did not exist before." So various historians have moved the inception of photography hither and thither along the axis of time, dating it back and forward, amending or correcting or rejecting altogether the genealogies outlined by earlier scholars. Some regard Johann Heinrich Schulze as the inventor of photography (Eder, Schiendl); others identify Nicéphore Niépce (Potonniée, Gernsheim, Baier) or Jacques Louis Mandé Daguerre (Brunel); yet others point to a scattered collective of photographers and "proto-photographers" who, around 1800, felt a "desire to photograph" (Batchen). They hardly ever ask which definition of the photographic image these stories about its invention and its inventors are based on. We may find a precise portrayal of the situation in an observation by Georges Canguilhem: "Of what is the history of sciences the history? That this question has not been asked is related to the fact that it is generally believed that the answer lies in the very expression 'history of sciences' or of a science." The "history of photography" has likewise seemed to be quite simply the history of what came to be established and institutionalized as "photography" over the course of the nineteenth century. This "photography" then serves as the point of departure for a retrospective search for its origin, its inception and invention. Identifying this historical origin inevitably entails another determination: the creation of a "prehistory," which, though it somehow already belongs to the matter under consideration, is not part of the history of photography "properly speaking" and accordingly does not quite count. But why should the evolution of photography be divided into a "history" and a "prehistory"? Which distinguishing features of photography have had to be displaced into a historical antechamber so that its actual "invention" could be localized in the first decades of the nineteenth century?
On July 18, 1689, lightning struck the belfry of the Church of the Holy Savior in the French village of Lagny-sur-Marne. The thunderbolt pierced the church's vaulted ceiling and shot straight down into the missal, which lay open on the altar. The men who came to remove what was left of the ruined book encountered a strange sight: the book was open to the rite of the Eucharist, and the lightning had burned the letters into the altar cloth on which it lay. The words of the Consecration were clearly legible in inverted black letters on the white cloth. To the clerics' great consternation, however, a gap loomed where the crucial message of the Last Supper — Hoc est corpus meum/This is my body — should have appeared. The lightning had skipped the words of the transubstantiation. Some claimed that the occurrence could not but be a miracle. But then the scholar Pierre Lamy was consulted, and he gave a more mundane explanation. The text of the Eucharist had been written in black letters, except for the climactic Hoc est corpus meum, which was written in red. Lamy knew that the black ink contained four parts essence of turpentine and four parts oil and was therefore extremely greasy. The red ink, by contrast, contained considerably less oil and instead an admixture of vermillion, making it very dry. "Are there two things more dissimilar than these two inks?" Lamy asked. "And where but in this dissimilarity should one seek the reason why the flame of thunder imprinted the black letters but omitted the red ones?"
Even more interesting for our purpose than the incident itself is the context in which it is recalled two centuries later. Emmanuel N. Santini, editor of the popular-science magazine Science en famille, recounts it in his work La photographie à travers les corps opaques par les rayons électriques, cathodiques et de Röntgen. Santini's treatise is one of the many late-nineteenth-century studies to address the potentials and characteristics of a "photography" produced not by natural light — as the etymology of the term, which means "light-writing," would seem to stipulate — but by other forms of physical radiation. The causes Santini mentions in the title of his study are electricity, cathode rays, and the X-rays discovered in 1895, subsuming their image-producing effects under the concept of a photography through opaque bodies. At a time when the existence of these invisible rays was no longer in doubt, it made sense to look for additional forms of such inscription. The image of letters imprinted, through the paper and binding of the missal, upon the altar cloth by lightning in 1689 suggests a novel variant of such lightless photography. Based on the official French account — according to which the first photograph was taken by Nicéphore Niépce in 1822 and the process was patented in 1839 — this meant backdating the genesis of photographic images by a century and a half in one fell swoop. The numerous other cases Santini recounts suggest, moreover, that such natural images had always existed.
And Santini is not the only one who sees the genealogy of photography coming apart. The astronomer Camille Flammarion, in his book Les caprices de la foudre (1905), addresses the "images produced by lightning," adding a whole series of events similar to the incident at Lagny: lightning "tattoos" the letters DD, the metal monogram on a purse, through the owner's clothes into his thigh; it shreds the pants and shoes of a day laborer caught in a thunderstorm in an open field, and outlines the "picture of a pine" on his skin. This last instance goes beyond the shadow-images of a few letters on an object in immediate physical contact with the receptive surface: a virtual image of the landscape has allegedly been transferred to the victim's skin and fixed there. Flammarion remains vague on whether he credits the reports he has compiled, many of which must strike today's reader as fantastic. Yet he treats the effect they describe as a physical fact whose cause must be sought in a phenomenon that requires further study: "ceraunic rays emitted by lightning that produce correct or laterally reversed, blurry or clear photographic pictures of proximate or distant objects on human skin, animal hides, or plants." To describe the "caprices" of lightning, Flammarion relies on the same explanatory model Santini used before him: lightning "photographs"; the pictures it engenders are "reproductions"; the victim's skin serves as a "sensitive photographic plate" in this natural imaging process.
The comparison of skin to a photographic plate locates the functional principle of a familiar pictorial medium in a prehistory that did not yet know this technique at all. Human skin or animal hides, in these authors' accounts, function "in lieu of" a sensitized glass plate; the lightning at Lagny serves "in the capacity of" the photochemically active light used two hundred years later to produce photographic images. And yet the comparison of the "ceraunic" imprint to the photographic image is more than an exchangeable metaphor. The interpretation of the lightning image as light-writing reveals a minimal definition of photography: "a body engraves its likeness on another body." This likeness may be engendered in immediate physical contact or from a distance. Its medium is the thunderbolt; but most importantly, the inscription happens naturally, which is to say, without human involvement: it is "spontaneous" (spontané). If lightning "photographs," if the photographic image of a page of a book appeared on an altar cloth in 1689, then the history of photography is as old as lightning itself: before photography properly speaking, there was a photographic process, a photography without camera, lenses, or chemically prepared surfaces. This "photography" could have laid claim to the name long before the inventors of the new medium adopted it for their art in the early nineteenth century. Light-writing, in this perspective, always existed; invented by no one, it is an infinite series of "spontaneous images" without a clearly datable origin.
In tracing photography's roots back into the seventeenth century, Flammarion and Santini outline a genealogy very different from the one favored around the same time by their countrymen Alphonse Davanne and Maurice Bucquet. Looking back at the photography section of the 1900 Paris world's fair, the Exposition Universelle, Davanne and Bucquet posit a definition: "The general term photography designates all processes that allow us to obtain the intended and durable image of a real object by virtue of the effects of rays visible or invisible to the eye." This definition does not limit photography to imprints caused by visible light, acknowledging the pictorial effects of "invisible rays" (X-rays, radioactivity, electricity). Still, Davanne and Bucquet's "retrospective museum of photography" knows only the "intended image" (l'image voulue). The genesis of images that appear "spontaneously" on plants and fabrics, on hides and skin, does not indicate a clear intention (unless one reads them as covert messages from higher beings, as the clerics at Lagny did), and so they are excluded from the realm of photographic phenomena.
Davanne and Bucquet were perfectly aware of the contingent quality of their definition: "It would be difficult to determine the date of [photography's] origin if one sought to take into account all remarks or studies about the changes in coloration effected by light — be it that such remarks or studies did not in fact aim to capture visible objects, be it that they did not achieve that aim. One ought to begin by defining what is meant by photography, and we propose the following definition." The difficulty recognized in this preface to their definition strikes at the core of any attempt to historicize photography. For the question of the inception of photography cannot be resolved by simply drawing up a chronicle of events or settling on an exact date. It points to the far more fundamental problem of what should properly be regarded as photography and what should not (yet). By alluding to "remarks and studies" they choose not to address, Davanne and Bucquet suggest another, already conceivable history of photography: a long history that would integrate widely scattered knowledge about changes in coloration effected by light, an archaeology of discolorations, instances of darkening, and other chance formations whose existence had not infrequently been observed, interpreted, and recorded long before the "inventors" of photography came up with the idea and the means for turning such photochemical effects into a durable and intended image. Davanne and Bucquet name two categories of "remarks and studies" they will exclude from their project of a history of photography: those that "did not in fact aim to capture visible objects" and those that "did not achieve that aim." The former include the numerous observations, going back as far as the early seventeenth century, of silver salts darkening when exposed to light, which were widely known to scholars around 1900. In Davanne and Bucquet's perspective, these observations do not come under consideration as events in the history of photography because they were not recorded with the intention of one day using the effect described to produce faithful likenesses. Also irrelevant were the notes of scholars who intended to use light-sensitive substances to create recognizable images, but whose experiments failed due to the intractability of the material. All of these "experimenters," Davanne had remarked as early as 1879 in a lecture on "photography, its origins, and its applications," "did not even come close to rendering a likeness of nature." If Flammarion and Santini were willing to register even an unintended imprint on an altar cloth as an event in the history of photography, the corpus of photographic images Davanne and Bucquet demarcated around the same time was far more narrowly defined. In their view, photography was a controlled and deliberate technique whose result must necessarily represent "a view of nature" (une vue de la nature).
In one way or another, all historians of photography have had to align their accounts of the new medium's beginnings with some such definition, as though their retrospection found the contours of photography's provenance manifestly etched in the irrefutable figure of what "photography" had eventually become. Despite the very different perspectives, motives, and interests shaping the writers' views, a basic narrative pattern ultimately came to prevail. In his 1938 book Die Photographie in Kultur und Technik, Erich Stenger put it as follows: "Photography in our sense came into existence only when the optical image of the camera obscura (and not the shadow-image of some translucent or sharply edged object) could be permanently recorded on a light-sensitive layer." Photography, that is to say, grew out of two strands of historical development: an optical one (the history of the camera obscura) and a photochemical one (the history of experiments concerning the light-sensitivity of silver salts). Depending on how far afield a historian was willing to venture in tracing the optical prehistory of photography, he might start with Aristotle (who had observed the image of the sun reduced to a crescent as it fell through the leaf canopy of a plane tree during a partial solar eclipse) or, nineteen hundred years later, with Giovanni Battista della Porta (who in his 1558 Magia naturalis recommended that artists use the image projected by the camera obscura as a drawing aid). Via the mobile and miniaturized box cameras of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this strand finally led to the cameras with lenses and light-sensitive pictorial media used by Nicéphore Niépce, Jacques Louis Mandé Daguerre, and William Henry Fox Talbot in the 1820s and 1830s to create their first durable photographs. The second strand, the exploration of light and its photochemical properties, could be traced to classical antiquity, with the "ancients' intimations of the effects of light" (Eder); to 1614, when the Italian doctor Angelo Sala studied the darkening of silver nitrate powder in sunlight; or to a century later, when the German physician Johann Heinrich Schulze, using a solution of silver salt as a light-sensitive ground, applied stencils to make inscriptions emerge as an effect of sunlight. This strand continued with Jean Senebier, who, around 1780, directed discrete parts of the visible spectrum onto horn silver and noted the different degrees of darkening they caused; Johann Wilhelm Ritter, who discovered ultraviolet rays using a silver chloride–soaked strip of paper; and Thomas Wedgwood and Humphry Davy, who made the silhouettes of leaves and insects' wings appear on leather and paper. At long last, the two strands merged in the studies and laboratories of Niépce, Daguerre, and Talbot.
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Excerpted from "Inadvertent Images"
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