Inadvertent Images: A History of Photographic Apparitions

Inadvertent Images

Inadvertent Images

A History of Photographic Apparitions

Peter Geimer

Translated by Gerrit Jackson

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2018 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America

Originally published as Bilder aus Versehen: Eine Geschichte fotografischer Erscheinungen. © Philo Fine Arts Stiftung & Co. KG, Hamburg, Germany.

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-47187-7 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-47190-7 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226471907.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Geimer, Peter, author. | Jackson, Gerrit, translator.

Title: Inadvertent images : a history of photographic apparitions / Peter Geimer ; translated by Gerrit Jackson.

Other titles: Bilder aus Versehen. English

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017038031 | ISBN 9780226471877 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226471907 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Photography—Psychological aspects. | Photography—History. | Photography—Philosophy. | Phenomenology.

Classification: LCC TR183 .G4513 2018 | DDC 770—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017038031

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Introduction

1  History and Prehistory

2  Visibility by Destruction/Disturbance

Incidents of Photography

3  Case Study I: Signs of Life or False Flames?

Jules Luys and the Controversy over Effluviography

4  Case Study II: A Self-Portrait of Christ or the White Noise of Photography?

Paul Vignon and the Earliest Photograph of the Shroud of Turin

5  Visible/Invisible

Critique of a Dichotomy

6  The Optical Unconscious of Photography

Notes

Index

Gallery of color plates

Introduction

In 1929 the Hungarian photographer André Kertész took a picture of the Paris cityscape. The photograph shows a steeply descending street in the 18th arrondissement, with the spire of Notre Dame de Clignancourt behind it and a sea of houses stretching to the edge of the frame. The photograph was presumably meant to bear a title such as Paris or View of Paris. When the glass negative was subsequently shattered, Kertész gave his picture another title: Broken Plate (fig. 1). It shows Paris but also, simultaneously, the glass of which the photograph is made. An accident has made visible what usually disappears in the vitreous transparency of the photographic medium. So Broken Plate keeps the beholder’s gaze wavering indefinitely: between the picture of the city and the material of the picture, between the representation and the web of cracks that disrupts it.

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

In his phenomenology of the photograph, Roland Barthes describes primarily one side of this indissoluble figure—the transparency of the photographic image. In this connection, he also brings up a picture by Kertész (fig. 2): There is a photograph by Kertész (1921) which shows a blind gypsy violinist being led by a boy; now what I see, by means of this ‘thinking eye’ which makes me add something to the photograph, is the dirt road; its texture gives me the certainty of being in Central Europe; I perceive the referent (here, the photograph really transcends itself: is this not the sole proof of its art? To annihilate itself as medium, to be no longer a sign but the thing itself?).¹ As is well known, Barthes saw this art of disappearance as the essence of photography. In contradistinction to other pictorial techniques, photography succeeds in annihilat[ing] itself as medium; by simply showing the thing itself, it ultimately becomes invisible. A specific photograph, in effect, is never distinguished from its referent (from what it represents), or at least it is not immediately or generally distinguished from its referent (as is the case for every other image, encumbered—from the start, and because of its status—by the way in which the object is simulated): it is not impossible to perceive the photographic signifier (certain professionals do so), but it requires a secondary action of knowledge or of reflection.² Barthes illustrates his utopian vision of the disappearance of the photographic substance with a peculiar comparison: The Photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the windowpane and the landscape.³ The old metaphor of the picture as a window on the world has been turned on its head: the picture Barthes writes about is not manufactured by artifice but shows itself of its own accord, appearing like a landscape in the field of view demarcated by the window—without indirection, mediation, or the likelihood of divergence. We see through a photograph as we see through a glass pane. A picture like the shot of the blind violinist who walked down a Hungarian village street decades ago, in this reading, allows our gaze to fall upon a moment in the past, but as the medium of such rendering-visible, it is itself intangible.

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

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

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

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

Like Kertész’s Broken Plate, Weston’s photograph guides our gaze into an impenetrable blackness. Here, though, the gaping hole is so large that we perceive it, not as a partial disruption of an otherwise unimpaired surface, but as the central motif dominating the picture. However insistently we seek to penetrate its secret, to get something out of it, the opaque black remains without depth, flat as the paper on which it appears. The gaze, Karlheinz Lüdeking writes, perpetually wavers between two competing aspects: now we see a hole in the pane held at a slight tilt by the hinge that is the bottom edge of the picture; now we see—almost as in Malevich—nothing but an abstract black form, located no longer in the oblique plane of the window depicted in the photograph but instead in the plane of the photograph itself. Weston’s picture is thus an example of photographic self-reflection: the opaque black area, Lüdeking argues, is where photography, otherwise transparent, exhibits its own nature as a medium. So what is shattered at the heart of the photograph is not just the windowpane it depicts, but also the transparency of the picture. We no longer see through it; instead, we are confronted with nothing but the mute substance of the developed photographic paper.⁸

Perhaps what appears for a brief moment as we gaze at Weston’s photograph is indeed that mute substance of photography: its blank ground, the pure and meaningless facticity of the material the picture is made of. But there is nothing to stop us from returning a moment later to seeing the jagged figure as the photographic image of a broken windowpane, bringing the almost Malevichian element back from the world of abstraction to the domain of unimpaired representation. Kertész’s Broken Plate, by contrast, exemplifies a different form of photographic self-reflection. Even if the deep black of the circular fault resembles—indeed, is virtually indistinguishable from—the black in Weston’s picture, it means a very different sort of darkness. There is a hole in the photograph from which the image of the city has disappeared. A piece of the depiction is missing. A part of the photographic representation been shattered with the glass. Unlike Evans and Weston, who merely quote the event of destruction/disruption, Kertész exhibits the real damage to the pictorial medium. Our gaze cannot get through, coming up against the opaque ground of photography.

With the simultaneity of imaging and image noise, Broken Plate exemplifies a nexus that will be crucial to the discussion in these pages: once the transparency of photography is disrupted, it becomes conspicuous. The beholder then no longer sees (merely) the motif for whose sake the picture was taken, its style or its form, but (also) the material in which it manifests itself. Even then, the photograph does not cease to transcend itself toward the thing it depicts, but the material conditions on which this transcendence rests become visible as well. That is why the conspicuity and obtrusiveness of the disruption entails a second and no less fundamental insight: image noise is not a deficit, not a negative mode of the pictorial register—on the contrary, it is a specific potential of photography. There is a visibility engendered by destruction or disruption. The shattering of the photographic plate has revealed what was hitherto invisible: its vitreous existence. What is lost in terms of the motif’s visibility is gained as the pictorial medium emerges into view.

And Broken Plate represents only one possible form of such photographic irritation: the subsequent damage suffered by an originally intact picture. The history of photography records countless instances in which the motif never came out at all, was lost somewhere along the way to visibility, or mingled with the fogs of photochemistry to the point where one became indistinguishable from the other. Interwoven with the familiar history of photography is a secret history of photographic artifacts, spots, and hazes that the handbooks of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries described as spurious phenomena, parasites, and enemies of the photographer (figs. 5 and 6). With these photographs, it is virtually impossible to tell where a picture has been disrupted, where the representation ends and the image noise begins: the disruption or noise is the picture, and once again, it takes no secondary action of knowledge (Barthes) to perceive it. The material becomes obtrusive. But when a medium that has been regarded from its infancy as an inscription of the real confounds that real with the visible traces of its own nature as a medium, that goes to the heart of the question concerning the truth of representation.

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

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

This brief sketch already suggests a basic methodological choice underlying the following considerations: the irreducible materiality of photography requires us to examine not just the finished product—the isolated and fixed picture—but also, and no less closely, the process of its generation; to study not just visibility, but also the rendering-visible. It is true that the meaning of images [. . .] is not sufficiently explained by a description of the causal trajectory of their genesis⁹—but neither does this meaning of the image exist independently of the conditions and particularities of its genesis. Pictures generated by technical implements in particular can be so enmeshed in the processes of their production that the contemplation of the resulting image cannot be divorced from how it came into being.

The individual chapters of the present book explore this nexus from a variety of perspectives. Chapter 1 delves into the prehistory of photography—those countless nonrepresentational, ephemeral, or accidental figures that light inscribed upon sensitive materials for centuries long before anyone knew how to harness it for the purposeful production of images. Why do the classical treatments shunt these unintended formations off to the realm of a prehistory distinct from the history of photography properly speaking? And what would a genealogy look like that took these evanescent and indeliberate traces into account as a no less integral part of the body of photographic imagery?

Chapter 2 traces the photographic contaminations from the early pictures of the French and English pioneers of photography to the scientists, artists, and amateurs who began to investigate them in the late nineteenth century. The abovementioned ambivalence of image noise comes into view: although it initially appeared primarily as defect, flaw, or even enemy, it soon revealed its specific surplus value. Artists like August Strindberg now elaborated an aesthetic of noise and exploited the vicissitudes of the photochemical processes to produce unpredictable images. In the field of scientific photography, researchers recognized that ostensible defects and contaminations frequently turned out to reveal phenomena that had hitherto gone unnoticed. Around 1900 attention increasingly turned to the depiction of objects, fluxes, or radiations that were virtually invisible to the naked eye (distant galaxies, objects in rapid motion, or phenomena like electricity, X-rays, or radioactivity). Light, it became clear, was only one of countless phenomena capable of affecting photographic plates and producing images. Photography turned out to be exemplary of those technologies of visualization that frustrate the attempt to compare the representation of a phenomenon to the ‘real’ thing, since the thing becomes coherently visible only as a function of representational work.¹⁰ The highly sensitive photographic materials confronted scientists and amateur photographers with an excessive production of traces whose invisible sources were often virtually undetectable. These photographic plates once again raised the question of the truth of photography: Did what they rendered even exist outside photography? Or were the traces that emerged from the developing bath products of the photographic apparatus itself?

Chapters 3 and 4 examine this dialectic of fact and artifact in two case studies. One concerns effluviographs, which, toward the end of the century, were regarded as proof of the existence of an invisible fluid of life; the other, the first photograph of the Shroud of Turin, which was said to reveal more and something other than the cloth itself. In both instances, skeptics objected; in the alleged discoveries of photography they saw photographic artifacts, mere defects and phantoms. Indicatively enough, however, they relied on photographic means to demonstrate that photography suffered from such dysfunctions. At stake in these debates, then, were conflicting interpretations of photography—the system of photographic recording that underlay them both was not in dispute. Photography had long ceased to be exclusively an instrument of research and had become an object of investigation as well; I will seek to show how these two functions interpenetrated and indeed sometimes coincided.

Chapters 5 and 6, in conclusion, consider the question of what seeing might even still mean in this world between visibility and invisibility, between message and noise. How is one to conceive of rendering-visible if doing so has become the mission of photographic implements that are not themselves capable of seeing, even though they allegedly operate in the depths of the invisible realm as the scientist’s artificial retina? Does this retina actually accomplish a technical extension of natural vision? Or does it engender artifacts of a mere quasi-vision that obey their own laws and whose compatibility with natural perception is subject to major limitations?

Some of the reflections I set forth in the following case studies of photographic examples will, I hope, be applicable to other techniques of rendering-visible as well. This book, in other words, is not primarily meant as an extended note on the history of photography. It uses photography as an example to contribute to the question of the underpinnings of technologically generated imagery more generally.

1

History and Prehistory

1.1 What is not (yet) a picture?

We know that things and people are always forced to conceal themselves, have to conceal themselves when they begin. What else could they do? They come into being within a set which no longer includes them and, in order not to be rejected, have to project the characteristics which they retain in common with the set. The essence of a thing never appears at the outset, but in the middle, in the course of its development, when its strength is assured.¹ Deleuze refers to the obscure origins of film in this passage; but the issue of photography’s genesis raises the same question. The difficulties commence once we try to trace a thing that has taken definite form—film or photography—back to its unstable beginnings; to the point, that is to say, when it was not yet the thing it would become in the course of its development. Historians have long sought to identify the historical origin of photography, the moment when it was first discovered or invented, and have come back with a variety of findings. Yet what has been said of the beginnings of the cinema applies no less to the provenance of photography: in a certain sense, it has too many pasts to have an origin.²

The following discussion will develop this idea more fully. My objective is not to recount yet again the early history of photography, which is well documented, nor to argue that the existing accounts should be regarded as obsolete. Instead, I want to inquire into the conception of the photographic image these accounts have presupposed, usually without rendering it explicit. Michel Frizot has rightly spoken of the invention of the invention of photography: as though, because there is ‘photography,’ there also must be, somewhere, the ‘invention’ of what did not exist before.³ So various historians have moved the inception of photography hither and thither along the axis of time, dating it back and forward, amending or correcting or rejecting altogether the genealogies outlined by earlier scholars. Some regard Johann Heinrich Schulze as the inventor of photography (Eder, Schiendl); others identify Nicéphore Niépce (Potonniée, Gernsheim, Baier) or Jacques Louis Mandé Daguerre (Brunel); yet others point to a scattered collective of photographers and proto-photographers who, around 1800, felt a desire to photograph (Batchen). They hardly ever ask which definition of the photographic image these stories about its invention and its inventors are based on. We may find a precise portrayal of the situation in an observation by Georges Canguilhem: "Of what is the history of sciences the history? That this question has not been asked is related to the fact that it is generally believed that the answer lies in the very expression ‘history of sciences’ or of a science.⁴ The history of photography has likewise seemed to be quite simply the history of what came to be established and institutionalized as photography over the course of the nineteenth century. This photography then serves as the point of departure for a retrospective search for its origin, its inception and invention. Identifying this historical origin inevitably entails another determination: the creation of a prehistory, which, though it somehow already belongs to the matter under consideration, is not part of the history of photography properly speaking and accordingly does not quite count. But why should the evolution of photography be divided into a history and a prehistory? Which distinguishing features of photography have had to be displaced into a historical antechamber so that its actual invention" could be localized in the first decades of the nineteenth century?

On July 18, 1689, lightning struck the belfry of the Church of the Holy Savior in the French village of Lagny-sur-Marne. The thunderbolt pierced the church’s vaulted ceiling and shot straight down into the missal, which lay open on the altar. The men who came to remove what was left of the ruined book encountered a strange sight: the book was open to the rite of the Eucharist, and the lightning had burned the letters into the altar cloth on which it lay. The words of the Consecration were clearly legible in inverted black letters on the white cloth. To the clerics’ great consternation, however, a gap loomed where the crucial message of the Last Supper—Hoc est corpus meum/This is my body—should have appeared. The lightning had skipped the words of the transubstantiation. Some claimed that the occurrence could not but be a miracle. But then the scholar Pierre Lamy was consulted, and he gave a more mundane explanation. The text of the Eucharist had been written in black letters, except for the climactic Hoc est corpus meum, which was written in red. Lamy knew that the black ink contained four parts essence of turpentine and four parts oil and was therefore extremely greasy. The red ink, by contrast, contained considerably less oil and instead an admixture of vermillion, making it very dry. Are there two things more dissimilar than these two inks? Lamy asked. And where but in this dissimilarity should one seek the reason why the flame of thunder imprinted the black letters but omitted the red ones?⁵

Even more interesting for our purpose than the incident itself is the 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.⁶ This last instance goes beyond the shadow-images of a few letters on an object in immediate physical contact with the receptive surface: a virtual image of the landscape has allegedly been transferred to the victim’s skin and fixed there. Flammarion remains vague on whether he credits the reports he has compiled, many of which must strike today’s reader as fantastic. Yet he treats the effect they describe as a physical fact whose cause must be sought in a phenomenon that requires further study: ceraunic rays emitted by lightning that produce correct or laterally reversed, blurry or clear photographic pictures of proximate or distant objects on human skin, animal hides, or plants.⁷ To describe the caprices of lightning, Flammarion relies on the same explanatory model Santini used before him: lightning photographs; the pictures it engenders are reproductions; the victim’s skin serves as a sensitive photographic plate in this natural imaging process.⁸

The comparison of skin to a photographic plate locates the functional principle of a familiar pictorial medium in a prehistory that did not yet know this technique at all. Human skin or animal hides, in these authors’ 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.⁹ This likeness may be engendered in immediate physical contact or from a distance. Its medium is the thunderbolt; but most importantly, the inscription happens naturally, which is to say, without human involvement: it is spontaneous (spontané). If lightning photographs, if the photographic image of a page of a book appeared on an altar cloth in 1689, then the history of photography is as old as lightning itself: before photography properly speaking, there was a photographic process, a photography without camera, lenses, or chemically prepared surfaces. This photography could have laid claim to the name long before the inventors of the new medium adopted it for their art in the early nineteenth century. Light-writing, in this perspective, always existed; invented by no one, it is an infinite series of spontaneous images¹⁰ without a clearly datable origin.

In tracing photography’s roots back into the seventeenth century, Flammarion and Santini outline a genealogy very different from the one favored around the same time by their countrymen Alphonse Davanne and Maurice Bucquet. Looking back at the photography section of the 1900 Paris world’s fair, the Exposition Universelle, Davanne and Bucquet posit a definition: The general term photography designates all processes that allow us to obtain the intended and durable image of a real object by virtue of the effects of rays visible or invisible to the eye.¹¹ This definition does not limit photography to imprints caused by visible light, acknowledging the pictorial effects of invisible rays (X-rays, radioactivity, electricity). Still, Davanne and Bucquet’s "retrospective museum