Negative/Positive: A History of Photography 0429356811, 9780429356810

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NEGATIVE/POSITIVE

As its title suggests, Negative/Positive begins with the negative, a foundational element of analogue photography that is nonetheless usually ignored, and uses this to tell a representative history of the medium. The fact that a photograph is split between negative and positive manifestations means that its identity is always simultaneously divided and multiplied. The interaction of these two components was often spread out over time and space and could involve more than one person, giving photography the capacity to produce multiple copies of a given image and for that image to have many different looks, sizes, and makers. This book traces these complications for canonical images by such figures as William Henry Fox Talbot, Kusakabe Kimbei, Dorothea Lange, Man Ray, Seydou Keïta, Richard Avedon, and Andreas Gursky. But it also considers a number of related issues crucial to any understanding of photography, from the business practices of professional photographers to the repetition of pose and setting that is so central to certain familiar photographic genres. Ranging from the daguerreotype to the digital image, the end result is a kind of little history of photography, partial and episodic, but no less significant a rendition of the photographic experience for being so. This book represents a summation of Batchen’s work to date, making it essential reading for students and scholars of photography and for all those interested in the history of the medium. Geoffrey Batchen is Professor of History of Art at the University of Oxford. His books include Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (1997), Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (2001), Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph (2016), and Apparitions: Photography and Dissemination (2018).

NEGATIVE/POSITIVE A History of Photography

Geoffrey Batchen

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Geoffrey Batchen The right of Geoffrey Batchen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-40584-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-40583-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-35681-0 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

CONTENTS

List of figures Acknowledgements 1 Negatives and positives

x xxi 1

As an introduction to my book’s concerns, I examine a photograph of a Congolese photographer taken in 1948 and Noire et Blanche, a famous 1926 photograph by Man Ray. I also describe the themes of the book and the complexity of photography’s identity, a complexity continually reproduced through the interdependent relationship of negative and positive. 2 Inventing negatives

21

This segment traces the invention of the negative and the various ways in which negatives have subsequently been used by photographers, focusing in particular on how negatives have been manipulated to enhance the appearance of the prints generated from them. 3 Photogenic drawings

35

Inspired by a photograph by the Australian artist Justine Varga, a cameraless photograph that controversially won a portrait prize in 2017, this vignette looks at the history of hand-made negatives or clichés verre.

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Contents

4 More of the same

46

The history of Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother is examined in some detail. This iconic photograph, based on a negative exposed in 1936, was printed in multiple copies and various ways for many decades afterwards. 5 Control methods

59

Photographs change both morphologies and meanings over time, an argument pursued through a study of the fate of two Australian photographs exposed in the 1930s, Sunbaker by Max Dupain and Harold Cazneaux’s The Spirit of Endurance. 6 Created worlds

69

This section returns to the complexities that attend the manipulated negative, looking in particular at various examples of combination printing: a French daguerreotype and a Japanese albumen print; work by Gustave Le Gray, Oscar Rejlander, Henry Peach Robinson, Peter Henry Emerson, and Camille Silvy; and large-scale photographs by Frank Hurley and Andreas Gursky. 7 Hiding in plain sight

93

My account turns to those peculiar negatives that pose as a positive photograph, namely daguerreotypes, tintypes, and ambrotypes. The discussion ranges from daguerreotypes made in the 1840s and 1850s to American tintypes of the 1860s and Japanese ambrotypes from the 1880s, along with works using these same processes by contemporary antipodean artists James Tylor and Ben Cauchi. 8 The cult of the negative

107

The story shifts into the twentieth century with the invention of celluloid film negatives and thus contact sheets and roll film. I examine examples of contact sheets by Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, and Cindy Sherman, and then move on to consider the attitude to the negative adopted by Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, among others. 9 Electricity made visible

115

This section looks at the invention of an electronic matrix and the development of telephotography, introduced in the late nineteenth century but powerfully employed in the space race of the 1960s to send pictures of the moon back to Earth.

Contents

10 Authorship and ownership

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The division of negative from positive often involves a division of labour, and this has all sorts of consequences for the authorship and ownership of photographs. I look at examples of photographs taken by William Henry Fox Talbot but printed by others, sometimes with disastrous results. 11 Refashioning a past

138

It is not unusual for there to be a 120-year gap between the exposure of the negative and the making of prints from it. This commentary considers the ethics and historical consequences of this sort of practice. 12 Return of the repressed

147

This section offers a detailed analysis of the printing practices of Richard Avedon and Robert Capa, practices that have ramifications for the way we understand photographs to this day. 13 Proper names

159

Photography comprises a collaboration of nature and culture, but many photographs also enjoy a collaborative production that involves two or more makers. What does this mean for the meaning and value of such photographs? 14 Does size matter?

164

Few histories of photography address the issues of enlargement and reduction, capacities facilitated by the role of negatives. Enlargements of the work of Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, and Cindy Sherman are discussed, along with a consideration of the effects on the viewing experience of the size of prints by Andreas Gursky and Seydou Keïta. 15 Ordering things

175

This segment engages the repetition of certain types of photograph, and indeed with the popularity of typology as a mode of photographic practice. The work of Bernd and Hilla Becher is discussed at length in this context, along with that of Karl Blossfeldt, August Sander, Hans Haacke, and Martha Rosler, and the taxonomic collecting of vernacular examples by Artur Walther.

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16 Poses and settings

188

Any discussion of photography and reproduction must at some point acknowledge that the vast majority of photographs features a banal repetition of certain stock poses and settings. This segment looks at an ordinary American daguerreotype portrait and at the proliferation of standardised carte-de-visite portraits during the nineteenth century. 17 Hidden mothers

213

Why are certain poses and genres of pose repeated over and over again in photographs? What is the nature of their appeal? What does the dissemination of any particular configuration of bodies and things mean for the culture at large, and for the objects being so configured? I pursue these questions through an examination of the work of contemporary artist Linda Fregni Nagler. 18 Collecting things

221

The work of New Zealand–born artist Patrick Pound transforms collecting into a creative activity in itself. This segment considers whether such collecting is capable of a critical ref lection on its own economy of being. 19 Still life

230

Cabinet cards made to commemorate a deceased person all look much the same. But their predictable banality disguises their role as time machines that deny the fact of death through the promise of an eternal afterlife. Of course, life is always stilled in a photograph, as in street photography, a practice where people are captured while walking outside. A discussion of street photographs taken during the Holocaust raises issues about interpretation and post-memory. 20 Repetition and difference

244

In this segment, I ref lect on the snapshot as a genre of photograph, looking at the history of such photographs, the function of the photographer’s shadow found in many of them, the metaphoric implications of Japanese snapshots ruined in the 2011 tsunami, the massification of photographs enabled by social media sites, and the excavation of such sites by the German artist Joachim Schmid.

Contents

21 Negative/positive

ix

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My concluding pages ref lect on the schizophrenic turmoil hidden beneath the placid surface of most photographs, arguing that historians must both acknowledge this state of being and consider its consequences without fear or favour. Index

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FIGURES

1.1 1.2

1.3

1.4 1.5

1.6

Lennart Nilsson (Sweden), Mayola Amici at Work, near Stanleyville, Belgian Congo, 1948 gelatin silver photograph. Courtesy of TT Nyhetsbyrån, Stockholm Wayne Miller (USA), Photographer Robert Frank Looking at Negatives in the Home of Wayne Miller while Shooting for his book The Americans, California, USA, 1956 gelatin silver photograph. Courtesy of Wayne Miller / Magnum Photos Richard Beard patentee (UK), Portrait of a Man, c. 1843 ninth-plate daguerreotype (negative) 14.5 × 6.0 cm (open); Richard Beard patentee (UK), Portrait of a Man, c. 1843 ninth-plate daguerreotype (positive) 14.5 × 6.0 cm (open). Collection of the author Secondo Pia (Italy), Detail of Face from the Shroud of Turin, May 28, 1898 gelatin silver photograph from glass negative. Courtesy of Musée de l’Élysée, Lausanne Man Ray (USA/France), Noire et Blanche, 1926 gelatin silver photograph 20.6 × 27.5 cm. Courtesy of The Elton John Collection/Tate Modern, Man Ray Trust/ADAGP Man Ray (USA/France), Noire et Blanche, 1926 gelatin silver negative photograph 21.6 × 27.3 cm. Courtesy of The Elton John Collection/Tate Modern, Man Ray Trust/ADAGP

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8 10

13

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Figures

2.1

2.2

2.3

2.4

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2.7

2.8

3.1

William Henry Fox Talbot (England), Latticed Window (with the Camera Obscura), August 1835 photogenic drawing negative 3.6 × 2.8 cm (image), 6.9 × 14.9 cm (mount). Courtesy of National Science and Media Museum, Bradford Cover: ‘Pictures formed by the action of light,’ Mechanic and Chemist: A Magazine of the Arts and Sciences, 13 April 1839 ink-on-paper print from wood engravings after photogenic drawings 22.0 × 13.0 cm. Courtesy of Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington Anna Atkins (England), Laminaria saccharina, c. 1843 cyanotype, from Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions 25.5 × 20.0 cm. Courtesy of New York Public Library, Spencer Collection John Beasley Greene (France/Egypt), Pompey’s Pillar, Alexandria, 1853–54 waxed paper calotype negative 30.5 × 24.5 cm. Private collection, courtesy of Hans P. Kraus Jr., New York Eugène Piot (France/Italy), Santa Maria del Fiore—Le Dôme, 1852 waxed paper calotype negative with gouache and red paper 34.0 × 24.0 cm. Courtesy of Bibliothèque de l’Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, Collections Jacques Doucet, Fonds Piot, nég. 030 John Murray (England/India), Nagina Mosque, Agra Fort, India, 1857–60 waxed calotype paper negative with added pigment 36.8 × 45.9 cm. Courtesy of The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Julia Margaret Cameron (India/England/Sri Lanka), Untitled [Madonna and Two Children], 1864 albumen photograph from scratched collodion glass negative, Plate 31 from the George Frederic Watts Album 29.1 × 22.1 cm (image). Courtesy of The George Eastman Museum, Rochester Běla Kolářová (Czechoslovakia), Peach stones (from Traces series), 1961 gelatin silver photograph from cliché verre negative 21.8 × 17.6 cm. Courtesy of Galerie Krobath, Vienna Justine Varga (Australia), Maternal Line, 2017 chromogenic photograph 160.0 × 125.0 cm (frame). Courtesy of the artist, Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne

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3.2

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4.4 4.5

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Charles-Francois Daubigny (France), Vaches à l’Abreuvoir, plate 1858–1862, print 1921 salt print photograph from painted glass cliché verre negative 16.5 × 19.9 cm. Courtesy of The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Len Lye (New Zealand/England/USA), Portrait of W.H. Auden, 1947 gelatin silver photograph 40.5 × 33.5 cm. Courtesy of Len Lye Foundation Collection, GovettBrewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth Planche VI, ‘Grand état dermographique sur une femme des basses classes, apathique, surmenée, déprimée, d’intelligence obtuse et bornée,’ from Marie Pierre Toussaint Barthelemy, Etude sur le dermographisme ou dermoneurose toxivasomotrice (Paris, 1893). ink-on-paper photomechanical reproduction Gustave Le Gray (France), Mer Méditerranée, Sète, No 18, 1857 albumen photograph from collodion glass negative 31.8 × 41.1 cm. Courtesy of The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Dorothea Lange (USA), Human Erosion in California (Migrant Mother), 1936 gelatin silver photograph 34.1 × 26.8 cm. Courtesy of J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Dorothea Lange (USA), Destitute Pea Pickers in California; a 32-Year-Old Mother of Seven Children, 1936 gelatin silver photograph on card with typed text. Courtesy of Library of Congress, Washington, DC Dorothea Lange (USA), Human Erosion in California (Migrant Mother), 1936 gelatin silver photograph. Courtesy of Library of Congress, Washington, DC Dorothea Lange (USA), Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, 1936 gelatin silver photograph (printed c. 1975) 49.4 × 39.6 cm (image) 50.6 × 40.7 cm (sheet). Courtesy of National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (purchased, 1975) Photographer unknown (Australia), Cover of Good Weekend magazine, Sydney Morning Herald, August 7, 2004 ink-on-paper photomechanical reproduction. Courtesy of Fairfax Syndication Harold Cazneaux (New Zealand/Australia), A Giant of the Arid North, 1937 gelatin silver photograph (from a silver nitrate negative exposed in 1937) 36.9 × 42.0 cm. Courtesy of The National Library of Australia, Canberra (PIC Drawer C27 #PIC/8893/192)

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Harold Cazneaux (New Zealand/Australia), The Spirit of Endurance, 1937/1950 gelatin silver photograph (printed c. 1950 from a silver nitrate negative exposed in 1937) 28.1 × 33.1 cm (image). Courtesy of The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney Édouard Baldus (Germany/France), Le Cloitre Saint Trophime, Arles, c. 1851 salt print photograph from ten paper calotype negatives 36.7 × 41.4 cm. Courtesy of The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Marie-Charles-Isidore Choiselat (France), The Pavilion de Flore and the Garden of the Tuilleries, September 1849 daguerreotype 15.5 × 18.9 cm (image). Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Baron Raimund von Stillfried (Austria/Japan) or Kusakabe Kimbei ( Japan), Wind Costume, 1870s–1890s hand-coloured albumen photograph 22.9 × 17.4 cm. Courtesy of The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Gustave Le Gray (France), Grande Lame—Méditerranée— N° 19, 1857 albumen photograph from collodion glass negatives 32.3 × 41.2 cm (Courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département Images et prestations numériques, Paris); Gustave Le Gray (France), Étude de nuage. Clair-obscur, c. 1856–1857 albumen photograph from collodion glass negatives 32.0 × 41.5 cm (Courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département Images et prestations numériques, Paris); Gustave Le Gray (France), Seascape with a Ship Leaving Port, 1857 albumen photograph from collodion glass negatives 31.3 × 40.3 cm (Courtesy of The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles) Henry Peach Robinson (England), Fading Away, 1858 albumen photograph from five collodion glass negatives 23.8 x 37.5 cm. Courtesy of The Victoria & Albert Museum, London Peter Henry Emerson (Cuba/England), “A Stiff Pull”, 1885 albumen silver photograph 22.9 × 29.1 cm (Courtesy of The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles); Peter Henry Emerson (Cuba/England), A Stiff Pull. [Suffolk.], 1888 photogravure 20.8 × 28.6 cm (Courtesy of The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles) Camille Silvy (France/England), Untitled [River Scene, France], negative 1858, print 1860s albumen photograph from two collodion glass negatives 25.7 × 35.6 cm. Courtesy of The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

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Camille Silvy (France/England), Twilight, 1859–1860 albumen photograph from glass negatives 27.4 × 22 cm. Courtesy of The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles 6.9 Frank Hurley (Australia/France), The Raid [77. An Episode after the Battle of Zonnebeke], 1917–1918 gelatin silver photograph from 12 glass negatives [subtitle: ”Australian infantry moving forward to resist a counter attack. On the extreme right a machine brought down in f lames is burning fiercely. Our advance is supported by bombing planes, whilst the enemy is supporting his attack with a heavy barrage.”] original mural c. 472.4 × 609.6 cm. Courtesy of The State Library of New South Wales, Sydney 6.10 Andreas Gursky (Germany/USA), 99 Cent, 1999 chromogenic photograph from multiple negatives207.01 × 336.55 cm. Andreas Gursky, VG BILD-KUNST, Bonn. 6.11 Installation view of Andreas Gursky (Germany), Ocean III, 2010 chromogenic photograph. Collection of Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, New Zealand, purchased with funds from the Graeme Maunsell Trust, M A Serra Trust, Lyndsay Garland Trust and Dingley Trust, 2012 [installation photograph by Jennifer French, 2012]. Andreas Gursky, VG BILD-KUNST, Bonn. 7.1 William Edward Kilburn (England), Queen Victoria with the Princess Royal, the Prince of Wales, Princess Alice, Princess Helena and Prince Alfred, January 17, 1852 scratched daguerreotype 9.1 × 11.5 cm (image). Courtesy of Royal Collection Trust, London 7.2 James Tylor (Australia), The Landing (from the Karta [The Island of the Dead] series), 2016 Becquerel daguerreotype with scratches 10.2 × 15.2 cm. Private Collection, Sydney/ Courtesy of GAGPROJECTS | Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide and Vivien Anderson Gallery, Melbourne 7.3 Photographer unknown (England), Portrait of a Man in a Studio, c. 1850s painted ambrotype 9.4 × 17.2 cm (open). Collection of the author 7.4 Makers unknown ( Japan), Standing Man with Bowler Hat on a Pedestal, November 19, 1892 ambrotype in kiri-wood case, with inscribed calligraphy in ink 12.4 × 9.5 × 1.5 cm (closed). Collection of the author

6.8

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Photographer unknown (USA), Portrait of a Woman, c. 1860–70s tintype (collodion negative on enamelled iron sheet) 9.3 × 5.6 cm. Collection of the author 7.6 Ben Cauchi (New Zealand), Untitled #10 (from Sea of Vapours), 2015 collodion on glass (ambrotype) 36.0 × 28.0 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney 8.1 Robert Frank (Switzerland/USA), Guggenheim 174/ Americans 44—Miami Beach, from The Americans, 1955 gelatin silver contact sheet Overall: 25.3 × 20.2 cm. Courtesy of Andrea Frank Foundation /the Pace gallery/ National Gallery of Art, Washington DC 8.2 James Alinder (USA), Ansel Adams with a Straight and a Fine Print of Moonrise, 1981 gelatin silver photograph. Courtesy of the artist 9.1 Shelford Bidwell (England), Image Focused upon Transmitter + Image as Reproduced by Receiver, 1881 ink on paper [from Shelford Bidwell, ‘Selenium and its Application to the Photofone and Telephotography,’ Notices of the Proceedings at the Meeting of the Members of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, 11 March 1881, 12] 21.7 × 13.7 cm (publication). Collection of the author 9.2 Photographer unknown, Wire-photo of a Portrait of a Man, March 1923 gelatin silver photograph 10.3 × 10.4 cm. Collection of the author 9.3 Associated Press (USA), Wirephoto: Russia claims this is the hidden side of the moon as photographed by instruments in their Lunik III, 1959 gelatin silver photograph 25.4 × 206 cm. Collection of the author 9.4 NASA (USA), Associated Press Wire Photo: This is a recropped version of JPL5 of today to provide larger copy of the upper left-hand section, showing the last picture from the Ranger VII spacecraft, 1964 gelatin silver photograph 20.6 × 22.5 cm. Collection of the author 9.5 Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, The first image of a black hole in galaxy Messier 87, released April 10, 2019. Courtesy of Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration 10.1 Nicolaas Henneman (Netherlands/England), The West Façade of Westminster Abbey, exposed before May 1845, printed early 1846 salt print from calotype negative; plate XXII, The Pencil of Nature 16.2 × 18.3 cm (image). Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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10.2 Usually attributed to Nicolaas Henneman / William Henry Fox Talbot (England), The Reading Establishment, c. 1846 two salted-paper photographs from calotype negatives (right half of print intensified by Harold White in 1940s) 19.9 × 48.1 cm. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 10.3 William Henry Fox Talbot (England), View of One of the Towers of Orleans Cathedral, taken c. 5pm on June 21, 1843 salted paper photograph from calotype negative (printed by Nicolaas Henneman & Co. at the Reading Establishment in early 1846), as published in The ArtUnion: Monthly Journal of the Fine Arts and the Arts, Decorative, Ornamental, Volume the Eighth. London: Printed by Palmer and Clayton, June 1846, page 143 19.2 × 15.5 cm (image). Collection of the author 11.1 Maxime du Camp (France/Egypt), Westernmost Colossus, the Great Temple, Abu Simbel, 1850 salt print photograph from calotype negative (printed by firm of Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard in 1852) 22.7 × 16.2 cm. Courtesy of The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles 11.2 William Henry Fox Talbot (England), Magnified Microscopic Specimen, c. 1842 salted paper photograph from calotype negative (printed by Brian Coe in 1976) 17.0 × 10.9 cm. Collection of the author 12.1 Thomas Barrow (USA), Untitled (from the Cancellations series), 1975 toned gelatin silver photograph 27.94 × 35.56 cm. Collection of the author 12.2 Richard Avedon (USA), Ronald Fischer, beekeeper, Davis, California, May 9, 1981, 1981 gelation silver photograph 56 1/4 × 45 inches (image). Courtesy of The Richard Avedon Foundation 12.3 John Loengard (USA), Richard Avedon Holding Negative for Ronald Fischer, Beekeeper, Davis, CA., 1981, 1993 gelatin silver photograph. Courtesy of the artist 12.4 Robert Capa (Hungary/USA/France), Untitled [American Troops Landing on D-Day, Omaha Beach, Normandy Coast, France], 1944 gelatin silver photograph 24.1 × 35.5 cm. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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12.5 Robert Capa (Hungary/USA/France), “The First Wave,’ Life magazine, 16: 25 (19 June 1944), 26 ink-on-paper photomechanical reproduction 35.6 × 26.3 cm. Collection of the author © 1944 The Picture Collection Inc. Reprinted from LIFE with permission of The Picture Collection Inc. 13.1 Andreas Müller-Pohle (Germany), Digital Scores III (after Nicéphore Niépce), 1998 Iris giclée print on Aquarell Arches grain satiné. Production: Artificial Image, Berlin eight panels, 66.0 × 66.0 cm each. Courtesy of the artist 14.1 László Moholy-Nagy (Hungary/Germany/USA), Selfportrait, 1926/1929 gelatin silver photograph, taken in 1929, of a photogram made in 1926 36.1 × 24.0 cm. Courtesy of National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 14.2 Seydou Këita (Mali), Untitled [‘Odalisque’], 1956–57 gelatin silver photograph, printed in 1998 40.0 × 57.0 cm. Courtesy of Seydou Keïta/SKPEAC – The Artur Walther Collection and CAAC – The Pigozzi Collection, Geneva 14.3 Seydou Këita (Mali), Untitled [Woman with Radio], 1950s vintage gelatin silver photograph 16.5 × 11.5 cm. Courtesy of Seydou Keïta/SKPEAC – The Artur Walther Collection and CAAC – The Pigozzi Collection, Geneva 15.1 Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher (Germany), KugelGasbehälter (Spheric Gas Tanks), 1963–1983 nine gelatin silver photographs 173.0 × 143.0 cm. Courtesy of the Estate of Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher, represented by Max Becher, and The Artur Walther Collection 15.2 Hans Haacke (Germany/USA), detail from Shapolsky et al., Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, May 1, 1971, 1971 9 photostats, 142 gelatin silver photographs, and 142 photocopies dimensions variable. Courtesy of Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; licensed by Scala 15.3 August Sander (Germany), Raoul Hausmann als Tänzer [Raoul Hausmann as Dancer], 1929 gelatin silver photograph (modern print by Gerd Sander) 26.0 × 18.8 cm. Courtesy of Die Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur - August Sander Archiv, Köln / DACS, London

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16.1 Photographer unknown (USA), Mrs Charles A. Buckeley and Three Children, c. 1850 daguerreotype 12.0 × 15.2 cm (open). Courtesy of New York Historical Society, New York 16.2 Bingham studio (Paris), Portrait of a Standing Man, c. 1865 albumen photograph from collodion glass negative (carte de visite) 10.3 × 6.3 cm. Collection of the author 16.3 Disdéri studio (Paris), Portrait of Emperor Napoléon III, c. 1860 albumen photograph from collodion glass negative (carte de visite) 10.5 × 6.1 cm. Collection of the author 16.4 Richard Beard studio (London), Karl Marx, May 1861 albumen photograph from collodion glass negative (carte de visite) 10.5 × 6.2 cm. Courtesy of Archiv der sozialen Demokratie der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung 16.5 John Mayall studio (London), HRH The Prince Consort, 1861 albumen photograph from collodion glass negative (carte de visite) 10.3 × 6.2 cm; John Mayall studio (London), Prince Albert, 1861 albumen photograph from collodion glass negative (carte de visite), inscribed in pencil: “late Prince Consort” 10.4 × 6.2 cm; John Mayall studio (London & Brighton), Prince Albert, 1861 albumen photograph from collodion glass negative (carte de visite), with advertisement on verso for “J.L. Houghton, Stationer,” printed after 1864 10.3 × 6.2 cm; John Mayall studio (London), Prince Albert, 1861 albumen photograph from collodion glass negative (carte de visite), with tax stamp on verso for “E. & H. Anthony, New York”, printed 1863–65 10.1 × 6.1 cm. Collection of the author 16.6 Post Office Photographic Studio (Melbourne), Portrait of a Man, c. 1870 albumen photograph from collodion glass negatives (diamond cameo carte de visite) 9.9 × 6.2 cm. Collection of the author 16.7 J.C. Moutton studio (Fitchburg, MA, USA), Portrait of a Seated Woman Holding an Open Carte-de-Visite Album, c. 1865 albumen photograph from collodion glass negative (carte de visite) 9.5 × 6.2 cm. Collection of the author

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17.1 Unknown photographer (USA), Child sitting on Lap of ‘Hidden Mother,’ 1870s tintype (collodion negative on enamelled iron sheet). Courtesy of Linda Fregni Nagler, Milan 17.2 Unknown photographer (USA), Child sitting on Lap of ‘Hidden Mother’ Covered in Striped Blanket, 1870s tintype (collodion negative on enamelled iron sheet). Courtesy of Linda Fregni Nagler, Milan 18.1 Patrick Pound (New Zealand/Australia), Photography and Air, 2012 assemblage of snapshot photographs dimensions vary. Courtesy of the artist 18.2 Patrick Pound (New Zealand/Australia), detail from Photography and Air, 2012 gelatin silver snapshot (dated March 1938). Courtesy of the artist 19.1 Roehm & Montgomery studio (Eaton Rapids, Michigan), Floral Tributes with Ribbons, Vases and a Photograph, c. 1890s albumen photograph from collodion glass negative (cabinet card) 16.5 × 10.8 cm. Collection of the author 19.2 George Waterhouse studio (St. Johnsbury, Vermont), Floral Tribute with Photograph of Woman (“Mother”), c. 1890s albumen photograph from collodion glass negative (cabinet card) 16.5 × 10.8 cm. Collection of the author 19.3 Photographer unknown (USA), Woman Walking in the Street, Summer 1937 gelatin silver photograph 7.5 × 17.3 cm. Collection of the author 19.4 Photographer unknown (Czernowitz), Ilana Shmueli and Her Mother, Czernowitz, c. 1943 gelatin silver photograph 20.1 Photographer unknown (USA), Mary V. Castlebury, Aged 16, with Photographer’s Shadow, November 1942 gelatin silver photograph 12.9 × 9.9 cm. Collection of the author 20.2 Photographer unknown (USA), Seated Woman, with Photographer’s Shadow, c. 1940s gelatin silver photograph (on verso: “This was taken out front, boo the shadow”) 13.6 × 8.5 cm. Collection of the author 20.3 Photographer unknown ( Japan), Snapshot, c. 2011 damaged chromogenic photograph

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20.4 Erik Kessels (Netherlands), Installation view of 24HRS in Photos, 2011. Courtesy of the artist 20.5 Joachim Schmid (Germany), pages from Self (in the Other People’s Photographs series), 2008 printed book 17.6 × 37.0 cm (open). Courtesy of the artist

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Disclaimer The author has made every effort to contact copyright holders of works reprinted in Negative/Positive to obtain permission to publish extracts. This has not been possible in every case, however, and we would welcome correspondence from those individuals/companies whom we have been unable to trace. Any omissions brought to our attention will be remedied in future editions.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As its title suggests, Negative/Positive begins from the negative, a foundational element of photography that is nevertheless usually ignored in histories of this medium. The fact that a photograph is often split between negative and positive manifestations means that its identity is always simultaneously divided and multiplied. But it also means that the act and implications of reproduction are at the heart of photography’s contribution to modern life. That act is also the motivating logic of this book. It comprises a compilation of fragments from at least 25 of my previously published essays, but rewritten and supplemented with new research to form a continuous narrative about this particular theme. Thanks is owed to all those colleagues, friends, editors, publishers, and designers who have helped to hone the earlier manifestations of those texts, and who have generously supported my work in a myriad of ways over the years. The choice of theme was a logical extension of my most recent work on photography’s various modes of dissemination. But my interest in the role of the negative was also inspired by the art practice of my partner Justine Varga, who subjects her own matrices to a rigorously creative interrogation of a sort that demands an art-historical equivalent. I am grateful to her for sharing with me both her art and her life. The stories told in this book are conveyed by an interaction of texts and images. Those images are present because of the skill and perseverance of Olena Chervonik, who gathered the majority of them for this purpose. I feel fortunate to have been able to persuade her to help with this project. A number of artists and institutions allowed their images to appear here free of charge, an act of generosity for which I thank them. The cost of the remainder was covered by two of my employers: Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand and the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. I acknowledge them both for their active support of my

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Acknowledgements

scholarship. I also owe thanks to Natalie Foster at Routledge for her enthusiastic reception of my book proposal, and to Jennifer Vennall for helping to shepherd it to the finish line. This book has been significantly improved by the editing of my text and the design work done by Deanta Global. Finally, I send greetings to all my readers and thank them for spending time with this book. I hope it inspires them to write their own critical histories of photography.

1 NEGATIVES AND POSITIVES

A photographer glances down at his watch; time is on his mind. In his right hand, held high, is a glass negative in a wooden frame. The gesture conveniently reveals that he has previously captured two people posing for a portrait, a standing man and a seated woman. Visible only in negative, their tones have been reversed, as if they had been x-rayed rather than photographed. Behind that negative, unseen by us, is a piece of light-sensitive photographic paper. For this photographer is shown at work in his darkroom, printing a photograph by pressing a negative tightly against the paper in the frame and exposing both to artificial illumination. Beside him, on a table, is a still life of implements important to his work: another negative propped up in a drying rack, a glowing kerosene lamp, a funnel, and what appears to be a sheet of cardboard propped against a wall [Figure. 1.1]. We are, it seems, witnessing a key moment in the coming into being of a photograph, the dramatic moment of that photograph’s birth. The year is 1948 and the man holding the negative is Mayola Amici, a photographer working in a town near Stanleyville in the Belgian Congo. He has been photographed by Lennart Nilsson, a Swedish photojournalist. The picture is one of a series of scenes designed to illustrate each step in Amici’s work, from negotiating with a client, to taking her photograph, processing negatives, and, finally, displaying finished prints to attract future clients. Each shot has been carefully orchestrated, a collaboration between Amici and Nilsson in the interests of promoting the idea of a modern Africa for the readers of Life magazine, where these pictures eventually appeared.1 Fifteen years later, on April 30, 1965, Nilsson was to become world famous for another series in Life, also devoted to the “Drama of Life before Birth.” That drama was signalled on the magazine’s cover by one of his photographs of an 18-week-old human foetus.2

2

Negatives and positives

FIGURE 1.1

Lennart Nilsson (Sweden), Mayola Amici at Work, near Stanleyville, Belgian Congo, 1948 gelatin silver photograph

It’s always difficult to know where to begin any history of photography, but the darkroom, site of this particular primal scene, seems as good a place as any. This is where negative and positive used to be brought together under a red glow to consummate the photographic act, recreating in a careful orchestration of light and dark an inverted version of the relationship that had already taken place outside, in the back of a camera. Throughout the age of analogue photography, the photographer had to move inside another such camera to discover how faithful a repetition of its subject the exposure had achieved, to see what differences between world and picture, negative and positive, photography had wrought. Already then, a dynamic interplay of repetition and difference is very much in evidence. We are reminded that the process of creating an analogue photograph has always consisted of the skilful manipulation of disparate parts—the objects or

Negatives and positives

3

light that the photograph recorded, the negative produced by the initial exposure, the various prints made from that negative—with each in some way reproducing and transforming the other part. The interaction of these parts was often spread out over time and space and could involve more than one person, giving photography the capacity to produce multiple copies of a given image and for that image to have many different looks, sizes, and makers. As even an arbitrary survey makes plain, this creates all sorts of complications in any story that might be told about photography and photographs. The negative is an indexical trace of light, with any tonal variations a chemical, and thus directly physical, response to that light. Photographic prints are one step removed from this tracing; they are an indexical impression of the negative rather than of the subject they portray. These prints are made when light is allowed to travel through the negative and fall onto a piece of light-sensitive paper, thereby re-reversing the tones created in the initial exposure. As a consequence, when we see an analogue photograph, we know that almost certainly a negative and the print we are looking at were once literally parallel to each other. They were either directly touching, as in Amici’s contact printing, or held an exact distance apart, with the negative placed in an enlarger and the paper positioned directly below, to be bathed in a light shone through one onto the other. However, this kind of parallel existence is an aspect of photographic life that is seldom, if ever, made visible in published histories of photography. Indeed, negatives have rarely been reproduced or discussed by scholars at any length.3 For example, the 776 pages of Michel Frizot’s otherwise impressive A New History of Photography, published in 1994, includes only nine reproductions of negatives among its over 1,000 illustrations, almost all of them from photography’s earliest years. No negative is shown in conjunction with a positive imprint. This book, still one of the most comprehensive survey histories available, also never reproduces the same image more than once, thus suppressing altogether the functioning of the negative.4 A similar observation could be made of Mary Warner Marien’s more recent Photography: A Cultural History, another voluminous survey text notable for its eclectic range of photographic images. It contains just 7 reproductions of negatives among its 600 illustrations.5 In these (and most other) histories, negatives are truly the repressed, dark side of photography. Negatives are equally elided in what we might call photography theory. Roland Barthes, for example, says in Camera Lucida that, when he looks at a photograph, a “sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze.”6 But, to write this book, he primarily looked at photomechanical reproductions of photographs in books and magazines, or at personal snapshots— not at negatives. In other words, in order to conjure the peculiar psychological, even carnal, character of photography’s indexicality, Barthes presumed to look through the magazine image to the photograph at its source, and then through that again to the negative from which that photograph was printed. That’s a very long umbilical cord.

4

Negatives and positives

But such elisions of the negative are common in many texts anxious to insist on the indexicality of the photograph. Rosalind Krauss, for example, posited this inf luential description of photography in 1981: For photography is an imprint or transfer off the real; it is a photo-chemically processed trace causally connected to that thing in the world to which it refers in a manner parallel to that of fingerprints or footprints or the rings of water that cold glasses leave on a table.7 Once again, Krauss’s discussion of “photography” simply leaves out the negative. By never mentioning negatives in the rest of her essay, she implies a direct indexical connection between “the world” and a positive print, a connection in which a negative has no role except as a non-mediating conduit between one and the other. In contrast, William Henry Fox Talbot described photography in terms of a relationship of negative and positive images as early as 1835, making it central to his conception of the medium and to his own practice: “If the paper is transparent the first drawing may serve as an object to produce a second drawing, in which the lights would be reversed.”8 Already, then, Talbot f lags many of those issues that complicate any study of the role of the negative within photography. The negative (along with positive, the word was first proposed by John Herschel in February 1840) is a transparent object that is subject to reversal.9 Once reversed, each piece of paper becomes the other of its mate. Thus, the interactive, interdependent relationship of negative and positive ensures that photography has a distinctively binary identity, with all the complexities this brings in its wake. One of those complexities is that some photographs are negatives, even when they aren’t. As photo-historian Larry Schaaf has pointed out, an important point that must be kept in mind is that, from a physicalchemical point of view, there is no essential difference between a negative and a positive in Talbot’s work; the latter is merely a negative of a negative.10 Herschel’s naming of the negative as a separate entity, however, insists on dividing photography into two, insists on an “essential difference” between one of these things and its mate, even when they are physically identical. And the very language used to make that division, negative and positive, is rhetorically infused with prejudice. The distinction between them therefore comes with a disparity in value; it represents a political as well as a technical hierarchy. Oliver Wendell Holmes, for example, recognises this difference in strikingly pejorative terms in his 1859 essay “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” describing a collodion glass negative as “perverse and totally depraved … as if some magic and diabolic power had wrenched all things from their properties.”

Negatives and positives

5

In such a negative, Holmes says, “everything is just as wrong as it can be, except that the relations of each wrong to the other wrongs are like the relations of the corresponding rights to each other in the original natural image.”11 In short, he describes the interaction of nature and negative, and then positive and negative, as a kind of othering. And he also makes clear that this type of relationship has moral, metaphysical, and perhaps even theological implications. In other words, he proposes that there is a lot more at stake in the relationship between negatives and positives than a mere transfer of images. One is reminded of a proposition about the photograph put by Barthes in Camera Lucida: The Photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the windowpane and the landscape, and why not: Good and Evil, desire and its object: dualities we can conceive but not perceive.12 Even on a practical level, we do tend to treat negatives differently than we do photographic prints. We look at negatives, hold them (to the light, in order to see them the better), and then use them to make something else. We look at them only in order to imagine how their positive version will appear; as Holmes has suggested, they invite an inversion of our usual way of looking. They exist in the present as utilitarian tools, redolent with potential, remaining incomplete entities until and unless their tones are reversed through a process of printing [Figure 1.2]. By contrast, photographic prints are assumed to be entirely whole and complete, an end product in and of themselves. We treat those prints as images rather than objects. Against all logic, we look through them, with the light

FIGURE 1.2

Wayne Miller (USA), Photographer Robert Frank Looking at Negatives in the Home of Wayne Miller while Shooting for his book The Americans, California, USA, 1956 gelatin silver photograph

6

Negatives and positives

behind us, as if they offer a window onto some past moment, into some other world. Negatives are transparent (or, more accurately, translucent). And yet, by appearing to be opaque, they tend to be regarded as things in the world rather than as pictures of something else, whereas positive prints, although in fact not able to be seen through, offer an illusion of transparency, as if they themselves are not there. As we’ve seen, the naming of a negative as a distinctive entity divides photography into two. But this duality is almost always but a prelude to a devolution into one plus many. For negatives are (usually) unique, whereas photographic prints are (often) multiples, being produced as replicas (or near replicas) of each other. For this reason, all photographs suffer from some form of multiple personality disorder. They necessarily begin from a split identity, with any positive print dependent on but separated from the negative which begat it. But that print is then split again into a number of identical siblings, with copies sometimes being churned out in the thousands or even millions. As a consequence, a photographic print is never present in and of itself. It is, instead, always just one part of a chain to which it refers even when no other part is present. It is the tip of an otherwise invisible iceberg of activity. A photographer usually begins the process of making a photographic print by putting the negative into a carrier, and then into an enlarger, before making a series of test strips. Thus, the photographer starts by conducting some experiments with the negative in private (sometimes even in the dark, blindly). Dictated partly by the need for trial and error and partly by experience, these experiments are designed to fail, or at least to allow a sequence of contrasting juxtapositions of success and failure on a single piece of photographic paper. Here in the darkroom, then, a photograph is imagined before it is made, prompted by the look of these strips of sequentially exposed paper, these failed versions of a future photograph. As failures, test strips are usually regarded as no more than ephemera, and are generally discarded after use. The darkroom is therefore the place where photographs are produced but also tested, notated, transformed, rejected, reprinted, found wanting, and destroyed. It’s a place, in other words, where the ruined photograph is a commonplace, where the ruin comes first, where a photograph is ruined many times before it is declared whole and ready for public exposure. It would be interesting to attempt a history of the test strip, of those pieces of photograph judged to be necessary but incomplete, to be not quite photographs because they are nothing but photographs (because they signify nothing but themselves). Among other things, an examination of such objects affords us a tantalising glimpse of that spacing which joins but separates negatives from positives.13 Test strips in hand, the photographer then attempts to produce a master print, usually an enlargement from the projected negative. This master print is taken as an ideal model, with the production of all subsequent prints being carefully calibrated to make them look as exactly like that first one as possible. In

Negatives and positives

7

other words, photographic prints are facsimiles of each other, rather than of the negative from which they were derived. Indeed, as technology has improved, it is often impossible to tell which print came first, original and copy being identical in appearance; as Walter Benjamin puts it, “from a photographic negative … one can make any number of prints; to ask for the ‘authentic’ print makes no sense.”14 Simultaneously authentic and inauthentic, the original and a copy, these prints are each made from the same negative but they are also estranged from it, faithful to the negative’s relative disposition of tones even while looking nothing like it. These ref lections point us to a troubling but crucial question: what exactly is a “photograph?” Is it just the negative, the original indexical trace of the world being depicted? Or is it a single positive “master” print, generated from that negative? Or does a photograph necessarily comprise the two of them together, symbiotically joined in eternal union? Of course, as we’ve just noted, many prints can be made from any given negative. Is “a photograph” therefore best conceived as the collective presence of all the prints ever made from a particular negative? This would give it a plural rather than a singular identity. But the questions don’t end there. Could the photograph in fact be a more virtual entity again, the “image” created by an individual photographer in the back of his or her mind’s eye at the moment before, at, or even sometime after, the exposure of a negative? Perhaps, in order to simplify matters, we should simply replace all these questions with just one: when and where does a photograph begin (or end)? To focus on the role of the negative is necessarily to address all these questions, and therefore to consider in critical terms the nature of photography’s mode of being in the world. As already noted, the very language used to describe the relationship of negative and positive is both morally loaded and racially inf lected, semantically infused with difference and prejudice. On February 14, 1839, not long after the discovery of photography was first announced, Herschel observed in a diary entry that, in a photographic negative, “fair women are transformed into negresses.”15 The analogy was commonly employed in photography’s early years, and not only for paper photographs. In a daguerreotype, the negative version of an image is always present, f lashing into visibility whenever this kind of photograph is handled. The positive image is therefore continually haunted by its other, as if the photograph is a modern version of those medieval memento mori in which death is always lurking somewhere in the background, warning us of our mortality. Some early commentators on daguerreotype portraits recognised both this warning and the racial implications of having a positive that is also a negative [Figure 1.3 a, b]. A poem, titled “From a Lady to her Lover, on Receiving his Photographic Portrait. Executed by Mr. Beard,” was included in the 1844 memoir Leaves from the Scrap Book of an Awkward Man issued by Frederick Lokes Slous [aka Selous], chairman of the London Stock Exchange and husband of poet Ann Holgate Sherborn. The “Lady” of the poem’s title was apparently not impressed

8

Negatives and positives

FIGURE 1.3

Richard Beard patentee (UK), Portrait of a Man, c. 1843 ninth-plate daguerreotype (negative) 14.5 × 6.0 cm (open); Richard Beard patentee (UK), Portrait of a Man, c. 1843 ninth-plate daguerreotype (positive) 14.5 × 6.0 cm (open)

when given a daguerreotype portrait of the man she loved taken by a studio owned by Richard Beard. Is this your likeness? Well, I never Saw such a fright! How could you ever? You’ve broken troth: oh, George, for shame! You swore you’d always be the same, And now how changed! Take back your present; To me ‘tis anything but pleasant. The writer soon reveals what exactly is so unpleasant about Beard’s daguerreotype portraits: they erase the difference between the races as well as between social classes. The poem suggests that this erasure is further exacerbated in early Beard studio portraits by the darkness of their metallic tones. Those black and guilty looks reveal That you’ve been tempted on to steel.

Negatives and positives

9

Oh, that a Beard should so disfigure, And change a white man to a nigger! The speaker goes on to complain further about the transformation of her beloved George into a cadaverous version of himself, leaving instead “what may be like you, when you’re dead.” This apparent morbidity was another common complaint about early photographic portraits. With these anxieties made plain, the poem comes to the sort of conclusion calculated to strike fear into the studio owner it names: “Your portrait, sir, has lost my heart: I hate this foe-to-graphic art!”16 Similar racial anxieties appear near the end of an essay published in Charles Dickens’s journal Household Words on March 19, 1853. A visit to the studio of Nicolaas Henneman in Regent Street resulted in a detailed description of the collodion-on-glass process. One of Henneman’s assistants was photographed: The image was then made perfect; but, as the light parts were all depicted by the blackest shades, and the black parts were left white, the courteous assistant was there represented as a negro. That negro stage was not of course the finished portrait, it was “the negative”.17 Racial metaphors of this kind attempted to find a language for the otherness of the negative, its inversion of tones, its transformation of light into dark. But this metaphor was doubly fraught, as the positive image was in fact dependent, and inseparably so, on this same “negro stage.” Many suppressed the anxieties aroused by this dependence by repeating various kinds of racial humour, much like Dickens’s reporters.18 Herschel sought to resolve the tension by shifting from a social metaphor to a scientific one. In adopting the language of positive and negative from that used to describe the poles of a magnet, Herschel imagined photography as a phenomenon similarly fraught by a binary opposition. In effect, he proposed that each element is necessary to the other’s existence but also its direct antithesis in character.19 Usually confined to the darkroom, and therefore hidden from public view, the negative version of a photograph has nevertheless sometimes been favoured over, or shown in conjunction with, its positive one. Perhaps the most celebrated of all negative images was produced by Italian photographer Secondo Pia on May 28, 1898, a consequence of his photographing of the Shroud of Turin [Figure 1.4]. Having made two exposures of the Shroud using a pair of electric lamps as his source of illumination, Pia was surprised to see a positive image of a human face appear on his glass plate after development in the darkroom, a face which became even more clearly articulated when printed; that is, when turned back into a negative apparition of itself. Peter Geimer describes the predictable reaction to this revelation: “The Son of God had left an image to posterity whose true nature only the photographic plate could reveal—a negative.”20 This cloth, which itself bears the negative imprint of a body, generated

10

Negatives and positives

FIGURE 1.4

Secondo Pia (Italy), Detail of Face from the Shroud of Turin, May 28, 1898 gelatin silver photograph from glass negative

a photographic negative that looked like a positive, and then, when this was printed in high contrast, a positive photograph that looked like a negative. This last inversion of tonal values made visible that which was previously indiscernible, apparently a portrait of Christ himself. The theological promise of the negative, its latent capacity to speak from beyond the grave, was here made manifest. It was the negative print, therefore, that was the one most eagerly reproduced and circulated among the faithful. Either that, or negative and positive versions of the full body were reproduced, side by side, as if to permanently conjure a visual f lickering between life and death, a continual act of resurrection reiterated in photographic terms.21 In this same decade, some artists also sought to exploit the negative as an image form, and with similarly profound effects. The French painter and printmaker Edgar Degas was, near the end of his life, also a photographer. A number of his photographic prints reveal his interest in experimenting with the complex character of the medium. One made in 1895, for example, is composed from a sandwiching of two negatives, so that horizontal and vertical versions of a scene

Negatives and positives

11

end up overlapping each other, resulting, as Douglas Crimp has suggested, in a “hallucinatory, spectral image.” According to Crimp, “Degas’s photograph, itself doubled, may be said to ref lect upon [photography’s] double operation, to implicate the negative in the print.”22 Another gelatin silver photograph from this same year shows a ballet dancer undertaking an exercise. However, in this instance, Degas has f lipped his negative to reverse the composition. But he has also divided the print between positive and negative manifestations, so that the girl’s body is solid even as her face turns away from the camera into another mask of spectral obscurity. For Crimp, “language begins to fail” in any attempt to account for such a photograph: “When light and dark, transparency and opacity, are reversed, when negative becomes positive and positive, negative, the referents of our descriptive language are dissolved.”23 No wonder, then, that avant-garde photographers in the 1920s and 1930s, and especially those associated with the surrealist movement, also experimented with so-called negative prints. As we’ve seen, the usual tonal relationships are reversed in such photographs, so that a positive print looks like its negative. Various means can be used to generate this result, including placing photographic paper normally used for prints in the camera and exposing it like film, photographing a negative, or printing from a positive transparency or inter-negative.24 However it has been made, a negative print of this sort confuses our usual expectations in front of a photograph, jolting us into a double take in keeping with the reversals involved. There are many examples from this period. The German photographer Willi Ruge had six enlarged negative prints published in Bilder-Courier in 1927, all street scenes inhabited by what look like walking spectres.25 But negative prints were also produced in 1924 by Jaroslav Rösler in Czechoslovakia, in the late 1920s by Franz Roh and László Moholy-Nagy (printed by his wife Lucia Moholy) in Germany, and in the same period by Man Ray and Maurice Tabard in France. The German artist Gertrud Arndt produced a spectacular example in 1930 for Bauhaus Portfolio I, submitting a close-up portrait of a Bauhaus architecture student, titled Wera Waldeck (Negative). In 1929, Tabard combined a negative and positive image in a single portrait of a woman, an experiment repeated in 1934 by the American photographer Gordon Coster. In his case, a woman’s face was exactly split between these two states of being, with half the sheet printed as a negative and half as a positive, as if to resolve in a single picture photography’s own irremediably split personality.26 An equally disquieting effect could be achieved by brief ly exposing a negative or print to light during its development in the darkroom. This was a technique first described by Armand Sabattier in 1862 and adopted by surrealist photographers like Man Ray and Tabard in the 1920s. The end result, although unpredictable, often looks as though negative and positive have been layered over one another, accentuating forms with a dark outline that marks the transition between reversed and non-reversed areas of the photograph. As Rosalind Krauss has written, such techniques establish “a kind of testimony to a cloven reality,”

12

Negatives and positives

but also enact a doubling in which negative and positive versions of a photograph are encountered simultaneously.27 This doubling, she suggests, “opens the original to the effect of difference, of deferral, of one-thing-after-another, or within another: of multiples burgeoning within the same.”28 In the case of Man Ray’s Noire et Blanche, any such multiplication effect was grounded in questions of racial and sexual difference, linking photography’s peculiar characteristics as a medium to these larger dispositions of power. The photograph first appeared in the pages of the French edition of Vogue magazine in May 1926, accompanied by the words Visage de nacre et masque d´ébène [Motherof-pearl face and ebony mask] and an allusive text. Almost certainly not written by the photographer, this text associated women with “primitive nature,” a common prejudice of the time. The title it now goes by, with its explicit contrast of black and white, was not used by Man Ray (he called it Composition). Noire et Blanche first appeared with the photograph only when it was printed in the Belgian journal Variétés in July 1928, and then again in the French Art et Décoration in November of the same year.29 Much has been written about the possible meanings of the photograph. It consists of a peculiar kind of still life, featuring the disembodied head of Man Ray’s partner Alice Prin, known by her stage name of Kiki de Montparnasse. Kiki’s eyes are closed (as if she is dreaming) and she rests on a pool of blackness, created by the casting of her own shadow. Her face is as sleekly styled as a minimal sculpture by Constantin Brâncuși, or perhaps as the ovoid face and lacquered hair of the African-American chanteuse Josephine Baker, who had taken the Parisian theatrical world by storm in 1925 with her jazz-inspired dance routines. Kiki’s face sits on its side on a table next to a dark African portrait mask, made by the Baule people of Ghana and the Ivory Coast, a tourist-object which she is holding upright with one hand 30 [Figure 1.5]. The mask, here stripped of any accompanying rattan and turned into a static figurine, was borrowed from George Sakier, an art director at French Vogue. It’s unlikely that Man Ray knew much more about it beyond its signification as a piece of African sculpture representing a female head. In Côte d’Ivoire, the French colony that was its likely place of manufacture, it had a more specific purpose: “Often commissioned to honor a female beauty, they were featured in a performative tradition known as ‘Mblo,’ which combined dramatic skits and solo dances. When danced, the portrait’s subject, or ‘double,’ was present to accompany it.”31 It turns out that each of the elements of Man Ray’s photograph embodies this same doubling or mirroring; each offers a performance of a presumed authenticity that is itself already a performance. The direct juxtaposition of European and African versions of a woman’s face, in the context of the exoticism accorded l’art nègre in Paris in this period, implies an interdependent equivalence between them. It’s as if the sleeping model is dreaming up a version of her inner self. Indeed, we know that Man Ray experimented with a number of possible combinations of his model and the mask, in each case concerned to offer us a direct juxtaposition of her face and this figurine.

Negatives and positives

13

FIGURE 1.5

Man Ray (USA/France), Noire et Blanche, 1926 gelatin silver photograph 20.6 × 27.5 cm

FIGURE 1.6

Man Ray (USA/France), Noire et Blanche, 1926 gelatin silver negative photograph 21.6 × 27.3 cm

14

Negatives and positives

In one case, he had a topless Kiki hold the mask upside down, so that it and her face touch at the chin, as if she is looking into a mirror. When he came to make a drawing after another of these photographs, where she is holding the mask up against her cheek, Man Ray further distorted Kiki’s face, elongating it, adding some texture to her hair, and shading one side to make it more closely resemble the carving. The inference, once again, is that one and the other, the positive and the negative, are interchangeable. All this was in keeping with a popular belief that associated the sexual desires of women with their primitive “African” heritage, just as the Vogue text had implied. To understand the nature of woman, the argument went, one must acknowledge the continuing inf luence of her evolutionary origins (hence Sigmund Freud’s reference to the “dark continent” of female sexuality, among many other examples).32 Having slyly conjured this erotic subtext within the pages of a fashion magazine, Man Ray may well have also wanted to advance a similar argument about the necessary conjunction of black and white states of being that made his own photographic medium possible. Indeed, it has been reported that this print was in fact made using a number of different negatives, perhaps as many as four.33 The initial glass negative was projected onto a piece of film to make an enlarged and cropped reversed-tone inter-negative, which was then extensively retouched, simplifying Kiki’s face, removing any stray hairs, and ensuring her eyebrows appeared as a single line. This altered image was then exposed onto yet another sheet of film (thus rereversing the tones again and providing a negative image from which positive prints could be made). The end result of all this was a matrix that is part painted, part photographic, and several times removed from the initial exposure. The mutually constitutive aspect of this relationship between what are otherwise opposites is accentuated by Man Ray’s decision in this same year of 1926 to make a reversed negative print—that is, a positive print that looks like a negative—from his initial glass-plate exposure, using an inter-negative of the kind just described.34 Now Kiki’s face is black and her hair white, in contrast to the glowing, almost radioactive, mask that she holds [Figure 1.6]. The racial juxtaposition has been swapped, too, suggesting again that black and white are equivalents, two sides of the same coin (an analogue, perhaps, for conscious appearance and our repressed unconscious, the “dark side” of the psyche). The fact that Man Ray decided to reverse the composition as well as the tonal range suggests that positive and negative were meant to be seen together, as almost exact opposites (they are in fact each cropped slightly differently), although it is not certain whether he ever exhibited them like this himself.35 By the way, it is well to remember that Man Ray rarely printed his own photographs, leaving that work to assistants from about 1923 onwards (Berenice Abbott and Jacques-André Boiffard, for example, both worked as Man Ray’s studio assistant in the 1925–26 period). So, others were responsible for the actual labour we’re talking about here, and for the complex production of both this negative print and the 24 positive prints of Noire et Blanche, each of them a unique

Negatives and positives

15

object with quite distinct visual qualities, that were made during Man Ray’s lifetime.36 Other copies were printed after his death, an indication of this image’s enduring appeal and the growing value of photographs in the art market.37 Interestingly, in 2017, the curators of The Radical Eye exhibition at the Tate chose to hang the two prints owned by Elton John, one positive and one negative, in reverse chronological order, as if the negative print came before the positive one.38 The conceit is repeated in a Taschen book about Man Ray published in the same year, which again chose to reproduce the two images in this same order, as if to imply that, of course, the negative always comes first.39 But this is the point: in this particular case, it did and it didn’t. A negative begat a positive, which was turned into a positive that looks like a negative, which is now treated as if it is a negative from which the positive was subsequently derived. What makes Man Ray’s negative print such an uncanny object is its ability to offer up this experience of the impossible, this simultaneity in which a single photograph can be both before and after itself, can be both and therefore never quite either. His photograph offers an oscillating encounter of one and other within the same image. The image thereby complicates the racist presumptions of its own composition by associating all such binary oppositions with a dynamic that is never neutral or natural but always already raced, always already sexed. A powerful metaphor for the complex identity of photography itself, a metaphor here made inseparable from a consideration of difference, this print is a reminder of what is at stake in the remainder of our discussion: modernity, identity, desire, power—in other words, pretty much everything. Noire et Blanche is exceptional in its self-consciousness, but it’s an exception that points to the rule. As we’ve seen, most photographs are dependent on a generative relationship between one thing and its other, between a negative and the positive prints made from it. In keeping with the usual political economies of such binary structures, although it comes first, temporally and spatially, the negative is almost always regarded as a secondary entity in these discussions. It is inevitably seen as a mere supplementary vehicle for the photograph it produces and makes possible. This helps to explain why the negative, or, more accurately, the relationship of negative and positive, has attracted relatively little critical attention in histories of photography. What still needs to be teased out, however, are the ramifications of this denigration and its links to a broader set of issues similarly under-examined within the established discourse about photography. This book aims to give this relationship the attention it deserves, and to do so as part of a wider consideration of the role that reproduction has played throughout the history of photography. Its central concern, as in so much of my work, is the complex identity of the photograph. Mimicking at least one element of its subject, the book has adopted the form of the test strip, re-employing shreds of my already published essays, extended with new research and segues, as if they were all experiments towards this particular narrative, this continuous account of photography’s history. Or perhaps the better analogy is a combination print, with its myriad of older exposures interpreted anew, their joins carefully disguised to

16

Negatives and positives

offer the illusion of a coherent whole. In either case, the end result amounts to a selective anthology of essays drawn from a variety of sources. Idiosyncratic in its choices and chronology, my historical montage isn’t a comprehensive account of the relationship of negative and positive, an impossible and possibly even inadvisable aspiration in any case. But it does at least aim to be representative. The book has been written by an Australian-born scholar while resident in New Zealand, after a 25-year sojourn in the United States. Its contents ref lect that trajectory. It is, in other words, a truly global product, a history of photography written partially in New York and partially somewhere on the world’s periphery. It is simultaneously international in outlook and autobiographical in tone; it addresses both artistic and vernacular practice; it examines familiar masterpieces but also anonymous and ordinary photographs; and it takes for granted that photographs made in Australia and New Zealand, along with those from more familiar places, can have something interesting to say to the rest of the world. In the spirit of this introduction, Negative/Positive will be looking at examples of photographic reproduction and copying from a variety of perspectives, beginning from the use of negatives in the printing of photographs. But it will also encompass a number of other related issues, from the business practices of professional photographers to the repetition of pose and setting that is so central to certain photographic genres. As the title of my book suggests, through the slash that joins even while separating its two words, this account will seek to trace the inherent complexity of a relationship that is indivisible and yet dividing. The result will be a kind of little history of photography, a partial and episodic one but, I believe, no less significant a rendition of the photographic experience for being so.

Notes 1 See Lennart Nilsson, ‘Speaking of Pictures … Congo Society Flocks to Jungle Photographer,’ Life Magazine, 27: 2 (August 8, 1949), 12–13. 2 See Lennart Nilsson, ‘Drama of Life before Birth,’ Life Magazine (April 30, 1965). It should be noted that many of the embryos pictured in Nilsson’s photo-essay had, according to Life, “been surgically removed … for a variety of medical reasons.” In other words, at least some of these photographs depicted the drama of life after death, rather than before birth. 3 There are, of course, exceptions. For those, see John Loengard, Celebrating the Negative (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1994); Larry J. Schaaf, ‘British Paper Negatives 1839–1864,’ Sun Pictures: Catalogue Ten (New York: Hans P. Kraus, Jr., 2001); Anne Cartier-Bresson et al., Éloge du négatif: Les débuts de la photographie sur papier en Italie 1846–1862 (Florence: Fratelli Alinari, 2010); Nicolas Le Guern, ‘Éloge de la simplicité, adaptation et évolution du calotype en France de Fox Talbot à Gustave Le Gray.’ In Sylvie Aubenas and Paul-Louis Roubert eds., Primitifs de la Photographie: Le calotype en France 1843–1860 (Paris: Gallimard and Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2010), 19–33; Cornelia Kemp, Unikat, Index, Quelle: Erkundungen zum Negativ in Fotografie und Film (Bonn: Deutsches Museum, 2013); Witold Kanicki, Ujemny biegun fotografii: Negatywowe obrazy w sztuce nowoczesnej (Gdańsk: Fundacja Terytoria Książki, 2015); Eugenia Parry, ‘Silence and Slow Time: Ref lections on a cache of waxed paper negatives by John Beasley Greene (1832–1856),’ Sun Pictures: Catalogue Twenty-Three (New York: Hans P. Kraus Jr., 2016). To its credit, a 2018 catalogue devoted to the

Negatives and positives

4 5 6

7

8

9

10 11 12 13

14

17

work of Oscar Rejlander includes both a number of his glass negatives and details about printing dates and even the names of printers, when known. See Lori Paul, Oscar G. Rejlander: Artist Photographer (Ottawa: Canadian Photography Institute of the National Gallery of Canada, 2018). Michel Frizot ed., A New History of Photography (Köln: Könemann, 1998). Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History (New York: Prentice Hall & Harry N. Abrams, 2002). Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 81. See also Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Camera Lucida: Another Little History of Photography,’ in Geoffrey Batchen ed., Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009), 259–273. See Rosalind Krauss, ‘The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism’ (1981), The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1985), 110. I have elsewhere offered a critique of this kind of definition of indexicality; see Geoffrey Batchen, ‘This Haunting,’ in James Elkins ed., Photography Theory (New York: Routledge, 2007), 284–286. Talbot made a written record of his notion of negative–positive photography in Notebook ‘M’ (entry #141) on February 28, 1835, and then mentioned the possibility again in his first published paper about photogenic drawing. See William Henry Fox Talbot, ‘Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing, or, The Process by Which Natural Objects May Be Made to Delineate Themselves Without the Aid of the Artist’s Pencil’ (1839), in Beaumont Newhall ed., Photography: Essays & Images (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1980), 30. “To avoid much circumlocution, it may be allowed me to employ the terms positive and negative, to express respectively, pictures in which the lights and shades are as in nature, or as in the original model, and in which they are the opposite, i.e. light representing shade, and shade light.” John Herschel, ‘On The Chemical Action of the Rays of the Solar Spectrum on Preparations of Silver and Other Substances, Both Metallic and Non-Metallic, and on Some Photographic Processes,’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 130 (February 20, 1840), 3. Immediately before this suggestion, Herschel had pointed to the importance of a photography that can generate multiple copies from a single matrix. “A much more important line of inquiry, as far as applications are concerned, appeared to be the exact reproduction of indefinitely multiplied facsimiles of an original photograph once obtained, by which alone the publication of originals could be accomplished. And this seemed the more deserving of attention, as it was understood that M. DAGUERRE’S pictures admitted of no such reproduction, thus giving a decided superiority to the use of paper, or other similar material, provided it could by any means be wrought up to equal perfection of effect.” (2–3) Larry Schaaf, The Photographic Art of William Henry Fox Talbot (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 19. Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,’ The Atlantic Monthly, 3 ( June 1859), as reprinted in Newhall, Photography: Essays & Images, 55. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 6. See Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Ruination,’ Art Monthly Australasia #218 (Sydney, April 2016), 38–44. It is interesting that Talbot, Herschel, and Hippolyte Bayard all kept their test strips and experiments, obviously believing that they were of enduring significance. See Bayard’s test strips, for example, in Michel Poivert, Hippolyte Bayard (Paris: Nathan, 2001). Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’ (1935–36), in Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin eds., The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2008), 24–25. Early photographers in fact struggled to make each print a replica of the one before. See, for example, the range

18

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16

17 18 19

20

21

22 23 24 25 26

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of colours and tonalities in the prints generated in 1845 from Talbot’s negative for Gate of Christchurch in Janine Freeston, ‘A Dash of Colour’ ( January 18, 2019): https ://talbot.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/2019/01/18/a-dash-of-colour/ (accessed January 30, 2019). John Herschel writes of this “strange effect” in his diary entry of February 14, 1839, as quoted in Larry Schaaf, Out of the Shadows: Herschel, Talbot, and the Invention of Photography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 59. Of course, the reverse was also true. Marcy J. Dinius points out that, when you handle a daguerreotype portrait of the African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass, “his image reverts from positive to negative and what was dark becomes light (and vice versa). Through this uncanny effect that is exclusive to the daguerreian medium, Douglass can be seen as ‘white’—if only for a moment, and only if racial identity is based on the color of one’s skin.” Marcy J. Dinius, The Camera and the Press: American Visual and Print Culture in the Age of the Daguerreotype (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 215. Ann Holgate Sherborn (?), ‘From a Lady to her Lover: On Receiving Her Photographic Portrait Executed by Beard,’ in Frederick Lokes Slous [aka Selous], Leaves from the Scrap Book of an Awkward Man (London: Stewart and Murray, Old Bailey, 1844), 110–111. Thanks to Karen Hellman for sharing this poem. William Henry Willis and Henry Morley, ‘Photography,’ Household Words 7: 156 (March 19, 1853), 57. See also Arlene M. Jackson, ‘Dickens and “Photography” in Household Words,’ History of Photography, 7: 2 (April–June 1983), 147–149. See Tanya Sheehan, ‘Comical Conf lations: Racial Identity and the Science of Photography,’ Photography and Culture, 4:2 (2011), 133–155. In 1830, Herschel argued, for example, that one should “regard every particle of light as a sort of little magnet.” I have argued elsewhere that an interest in magnetism, and especially electromagnetism, was one of the conditions of possibility for the conception of photography. See Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Electromagnets,’ Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997), 143–157. Peter Geimer, ‘A Self-Portrait of Christ or the White Noise of Photography?: Paul Vignon and the earliest photograph of the Shroud of Turin,’ Grey Room, 59 (Spring 2015), 10. In May 1931, Giuseppe Enrie photographed the Shroud for a second time, confirming Pia’s results and initiating a further public dissemination of negative images derived from it. Polish scholar Witold Kanicki has pointed out that the Shroud of Turin features in the French version of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, but not in the English translation. In the French edition, we find the sentence: ”la Photographie a quelque chose à voir avec la résurrection: ne peut-on dire d’elle ce que disaient les Byzantins de l’image du Christ dont le Suaire de Turin est impregné, à savoir qu’ elle n’était pas faite de main d’homme, acheïropoïétos?” Richard Howard translated this as follows: “Photography has something to do with resurrection: might we not say of it what the Byzantines said of the image of Christ which impregnated St. Veronica’s napkin: that it was not made by the hand of man, acheiropoietos?” Once again, the negative (the image on the Shroud of Turin) has been displaced in favour of a positive (the image on Veronica’s napkin). I thank Witold Kanicki for drawing this to my attention, in an email dated June 15, 2020. See Roland Barthes, La chambre claire: Note sur la photographie (Paris: Cahiers du Cinema, Gallimard, Seuil, 1980), 129, and Barthes, Camera Lucida, 82. Douglas Crimp, ‘Positive/Negative: A Note on Degas’s Photographs,’ October, 5 (Summer 1978), 91. Ibid., 99. Gordon Baldwin and Martin Jürgens, Looking at Photographs: A Guide to Technical Terms (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2009), 63. Mitra Abbaspour ed., Object.Photo: Modern Photographs 1909–1949 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2015), 350. See Simon Baker and Shoair Malian eds., The Radical Eye: Modernist Photography from The Sir Elton John Collection (London: Tate Publishing, 2016), 101. In 1936, French

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27 28 29

30

31

32

19

photographer Roger Parry made a negative print self-portrait, rendering his skin tones as black and his eyes as white blanks. See Robert A. Sobieszek and Deborah Irmas, The Camera I: Photographic Self-portraits from the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection (Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Harry N. Abrams, 1994), Plate 62. Rosalind Krauss, ‘Photography in the Service of Surrealism,’ in Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston, L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism (New York: Abbeville Press, 1985), 28. Krauss, ‘The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,’ The Originality of the AvantGarde, 109. For a history of the making and distribution of this photograph, see Wendy A. Grossman and Steven Manford, ‘Unmasking Man Ray’s Noire et Blanche,’ American Art, 20: 2 (Summer 2006), 134–147. Man Ray had previously, in July 1924, published a photograph titled Black and White, on the cover of the journal 391. See Wendy Grossman, Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 80. Man Ray would have seen a direct juxtaposition of “Negro” sculpture (from an exhibition titled Statuary in Wood by African Savages) and one of Brancusi’s disembodied heads, such as Sleeping Muse of 1910, in the pages of Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work magazine in October 1916. See the reproduction in Dawn Ades, ‘Instrument of a New Vision: Photography in the First Machine Age,’ The Radical Eye, 35. Man Ray recalled seeing both of these exhibitions at Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery in New York in 1914. See David E. Setford, ‘Essay,’ Man Ray’s Man Rays (West Palm Beach, FL: Norton Museum of Art, 1994), 19. On the impact of Josephine Baker on her contemporaries, see Karen C. Dalton and Henry Louis Gates Jr., ‘Josephine Baker and Paul Colin: African American Dance Seen Through Parisian Eyes,’ Critical Inquiry, 24: 4 (Summer 1998), 903–934. Some of those contemporaries explicitly described Baker as a “female ebony statue,” a statue that moved. For extensive commentaries on the meanings of Man Ray’s photograph, see also Whitney Chadwick, ‘Fetishizing Fashion/Fetishizing Culture: Man Ray’s Noire et Blanche,’ Oxford Art Journal, 18: 2 ( January 1995). 3–17; Wendy Grossman, ‘(Con)text and Image: Reframing Man Ray’s Noire et Blanche,’ in Alex Hughes and Andrea Noble eds., Phototextualities: Intersections of Photography and Narrative (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003), 119–135; David Bate, ‘Black object, White Subject,’ Photography and Surrealism: Sexuality, Colonialism and Social Dissent (London: I.B. Taurus, 2004), 172–202; and Grossman, Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens, 1–5, 129–133. See the on-line commentary accompanying Reconfiguring an African Icon: Odes to the Mask by Modern and Contemporary Artists from Three Continents, a 2011 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York: https://www.metmuseum.org /exhibitions/listings/2011/reconfiguring-an-african-icon/photo-gallery (accessed December 1, 2019). Wendy Grossman identifies the mask as “one made specifically for Westerners”; see Grossman, Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens, 131. Thanks to Allison Moore for sharing her research on tourist art and Noire et Blanche. In The Question of Lay Analysis (1926), Freud wrote that, “we know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys. But we need not feel ashamed of this distinction; after all, the sexual life of adult women is a ‘dark continent’ for psychology.” Sigmund Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis, Standard Edition vol. 20. (London: Hogarth Press, 1926), 212. For a broader context for this association of female sexuality and Africa, see Sander Gilman, ‘The Hottentot and the Prostitute: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality,’ Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 15–31. It is interesting that Jacques Doucet, who bought a copy of Noire et Blanche from Man Ray in 1926, also at this time owned Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), a key work in Gilman’s discussion. See Stripped Bare: Photographs from the Collection of Thomas Koerfer (Christies auction catalogue, 9 November 2017), Lot 8.

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33 See Elodie Morel, “‘My highlight of 2017’—Man Ray’s Noire et Blanche” (Christies 2017): https://www.christies.com/features/2017-highlight-Man-Rays-Noire-et-Bl anche-8794-1.aspx (accessed 31 December 2018). 34 Man Ray had at least one other negative print made in response to an earlier positive version of the same image, in this case a solarised exposure of a nude woman with one hand draped over her head, made in about 1931. The October 1940 issue of Harper’s Bazaar reproduces this same image, with its familiar hollowed outlines, but now as a negative print titled Beauty in Ultra Violet. See Manfred Heiting, Man Ray (Taschen, 2017), 52–53. 35 In some ways, the direct comparison of positive and negative versions of a photograph recalls technical samples in which the two are juxtaposed for instructional purposes, as in the sample produced in 1855 by Alphonse Davanne and Aimé Girard showing a negative and positive view of Paestum. See Cartier-Bresson, Eloge du négatif, 20. There is a similar juxtaposition of two negatives and their positives in an album of calotypes and salt prints composed in Scotland by John Adamson in the 1840s. See A.D. Morrison-Low, Photography: A Victorian Sensation (Edinburgh: National Museums of Scotland, 2015), 32. 36 See Alain Sayag ed., Atelier Man Ray, 1920–1935: Berenice Abbott, Jacques-André Boiffard, Bill Brandt, Lee Miller (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1982), 7, 20. Thanks to Raymond Spiteri for this reference. 37 See Grossman and Manford, ‘Unmasking Man Ray’s Noire et Blanche,’ American Art, 142–143. Steven Manford has complained about the circulation of posthumous prints of Noire et Blanche. He comments, in particular, on the appearance of such prints in a 2007 book, Man Ray: Unconcerned But Not Indifferent, and in the exhibition in Spain that accompanied it. As he says, “I know [they are posthumous prints] because I was responsible for authenticating the original working negatives and for the subsequent manufacturing of these study prints. Little did I know then that my research aids, which were not exhibition-quality prints, would appear in a book and travel to Spain!” Steven Manford, ‘Lost Trust: The legacy of Man Ray continues in turmoil,’ Art on Paper, 12: 2 (November/December 2007), 44. 38 Elton John paid US$607,500 for a diptych of the two prints at Christie’s New York in 1998—a record for any photograph at the time. To put that figure in context, in August 2017 a single positive print of Noire et Blanche sold in Paris for over US$3,000,000. The Radical Eye: Modernist Photography from the Sir Elton John Collection, curated by Simon Baker and Shoair Malvian, was presented at the Tate Modern in London between November 10, 2016 and May 21, 2017. The hang of the two prints of Noire et Blanche in the exhibition replicated the order in which they hang above their owner’s bed in Atlanta. 39 Heiting, Man Ray, 38–39.

2 INVENTING NEGATIVES

Given all the distinctions already outlined, can a negative even be called a photograph? Talbot, the English inventor of photography, certainly thought so. For him, a photogenic drawing was indeed a photograph, whatever the disposition of its tones. Talbot’s first exhibition of photographs, in the library of the Royal Institution in London on January 25, 1839, consisted of nothing but negatives, some made in the back of a camera obscura but most made as contact prints. This included a photograph often referred to in the literature as “the first negative,” a photogenic drawing inscribed by Talbot himself with the words Latticed Window (with the Camera Obscura) and dated to August 18351 [Figure 2.1]. But can a negative that is never printed, never turned into a positive, even be called a negative? Surely both are required for either to exist as separate entities? At this stage, when he had made nothing but negatives, it seems that Talbot didn’t recognise the distinction. He produced his first reversed-tone positive prints from a camera-made photogenic drawing negative only in April 1839, the result again being a picture that showed the inside of a window in the South Gallery of his own house.2 The first-ever reproduction of a photograph, a wood engraving that appeared on the cover of The Mechanic and Chemist in London in the same month, showed both a negative and its positive print; the editor must surely have been in touch with Talbot about his latest experiments.3 The journal’s readers therefore would have taken for granted that each of these elements was a necessary component of this new phenomenon that came to be called photography [Figure 2.2]. A few months later, in August 1839, Talbot sent a selection of his photographic work to a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Birmingham. This selection included 64 cameraless photographs, all negatives, and 21 made with a camera (some of which may also have been displayed as negatives).4 This was the same month in which the details of a competing process,

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Inventing negatives

FIGURE 2.1

William Henry Fox Talbot (England), Latticed Window (with the Camera Obscura),August 1835 photogenic drawing negative 3.6 × 2.8 cm (image), 6.9 × 14.9 cm (mount)

the daguerreotype, named after its inventor Louis Daguerre, were published in France. The daguerreotype didn’t use a separate negative, and was therefore incapable of producing multiple images of itself. This became a key point of distinction for Talbot’s process. Nevertheless, at first the distinction did not seem to be a crucial one. What is often described as the first book of photographs, produced by Englishwoman Anna Atkins and her servants in parts between October 1843 and about 1854, comprised a series of cyanotype contact prints made from samples of seaweed and algae.5 It consists, in other words, of nothing but negatives. Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions eventually led to the production of over 6,000 of these negatives, with each sample of algae placed in the centre of the page to produce an image that looks as if it is f loating in a sea of cyan [Figure 2.3]. The specimen blocked light from reaching the light-sensitive paper, resulting in a white reversed-tone silhouette of the form of each plant. This means that the algae served as the matrix for each image (it was the negative’s negative), being moved from sheet to sheet to create a sequence of unique impressions of the same sample. Sometimes the specimen was f lipped from exposure to exposure, so that, on different sheets, a single sample can be seen from two or more perspectives. As Larry Schaaf suggests, “the chances are that a reader would have come away with similar knowledge from each of these.”6 Talbot also produced a photographically illustrated book, The Pencil of Nature, again issued in parts, between June 1844 and April 1846. The only negative to appear was issued in December 1845, a photogenic drawing of a piece of lace

Inventing negatives

FIGURE 2.2

23

Cover:‘Pictures formed by the action of light,’ Mechanic and Chemist:A Magazine of the Arts and Sciences, 13 April 1839 ink-on-paper print from wood engravings after photogenic drawings 22.0 × 13.0 cm

listed as Plate XX. In the text that accompanied it, Talbot explained why he hadn’t bothered to print a positive version: “In copying such things as lace or leaves of plants, a negative image is perfectly acceptable, black lace being as familiar to the eye as white lace, and the object being only to exhibit the pattern with accuracy.” 7 With his image showing the black lace as a pattern of white lines on a sepia ground, Talbot recognises from the outset that photography provides an indexical truth-to-presence, even if not necessarily a truth-to-appearance.

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FIGURE 2.3

Anna Atkins (England), Laminaria saccharina, c. 1843 cyanotype, from Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions 25.5 × 20.0 cm

A photograph, he reminds us, tells us that something was there in some past moment of space and time, but not exactly what it looked like. A negative is the primary evidence of that past presence, and thus, perversely (given its reversal of “natural” tones), is also photography’s most realist component. In the text that accompanied the last photograph, Plate XXIV, in this same book, Talbot again comments on the role of the negative in photography. Based on his experience of the need to produce multiple salt prints from calotype negatives to make such a book possible, Talbot discusses what happens when the paper negative is “casually torn or defaced,” or simply wears out from frequent use. He tells us that he would make a new negative by photographing the same objects again, thereby generating another picture, different from, but not worse than, the original one. This, he tells us, was necessary for two of the earlier plates in The Pencil of Nature (Plate V, Bust of Patroclus and Plate VI, The Open Door, both of which incorporated prints from two variant negatives).8 There are many differences between one type of negative and the next. A photogenic drawing, for example, has its image embedded in the fibres of the paper that holds it, giving it a diffuse look. A calotype is made in a similar way, its light sensitive chemicals having been soaked into its paper substrate.

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25

However, after exposure and development, Talbot would sometimes iron and/ or oil or wax a calotype negative before printing from it, especially if the paper were relatively thick.9 This enabled shorter printing times. However, in the case of added wax, it also made the paper more brittle and prone to breakage, while increasing the contrast in the positive version (a difference that had to be taken into account while printing).10 This wax can be felt when the negative is handled and seen when it is looked through. The waxing of negatives was done at the whim of the printer, but photographers were aware that not all exposures benefitted from this treatment; Talbot’s colleague Calvert Richard Jones, for example, was particularly fussy about which of his photographs was to be waxed and which was not (work done, not by him, but by his printer, Nicolaas Henneman).11 Despite its name, the “waxed paper” process introduced in 1848 by the French photographer Gustave Le Gray was different again, involving the impregnation of very thin paper with wax before it was infused with light-sensitive chemicals. This waxing filled the pores of the paper, making it smoother and more transparent (and thus allowing a more detailed negative to be produced). The paper could be prepared 10–14 days before use and could be developed several days after exposure. For all these reasons, many photographers adopted it as their process of choice. One who used it extensively was the French-born photographer and archaeologist John Beasley Greene, who employed Le Gray’s method while photographing in both Paris and Egypt. As Eugenia Parry has written, “a pile of Greene’s waxed paper negatives looks strange today.” They were strange when they were made. Always dark, but not lightbitten black, instead they were all shades of chemical browns and purples. The images they hold don’t seem like pictures. They’re not of anything. They’re configurations of light and shade that don’t seem to ask us to make sense of what they depict. Greene and his fellow photographers made positives from negatives, which was the point…. Suddenly, in the matrix, what had been a clear version of experience became a dark-field abstraction. Unfamiliar? Macabre? A perfectly romantic idea.12 Flat, abstract, and opaque when laid on a table, these waxed negatives come to life when held up to a light source, giving off “a richly colored glow and a spiritual intensity not unlike the colors of stained glass windows.”13 A view of Pompey’s Pillar, photographed near Alexandria in 1853–54, presents this monument as it might have been seen at night under spotlights (if such things then existed), offering an iridescent column isolated against a black sky [Figure 2.4]. No doubt Greene could envisage the (far less interesting) print that he could make from this object. But for us, the negative remains other-worldly, imbued, as Parry suggests, with dark Romantic associations familiar from prints and paintings being produced a little earlier in this same century.

26 Inventing negatives

FIGURE 2.4

John Beasley Greene (France/Egypt), Pompey’s Pillar, Alexandria, 1853–54 waxed paper calotype negative 30.5 × 24.5 cm

Despite the aesthetic potential of the Le Gray method, English photographer Benjamin Brecknell Turner preferred Talbot’s calotype procedure, and he has left us over 250 paper negatives made using it. Turner’s negatives tend to be much denser in tone than those of his contemporaries, perhaps because he used a glass plate to keep his paper moist and f lat in the back of his camera (using small paper tabs to keep the paper in place, the impressions of which can still be seen on its edges). This moistness helped retain the sensitivity of the calotype chemistry,

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while the glass, if of a greenish tint, may also have enhanced the process by facilitating the passage of the more actively photogenic wavelengths of light. In some cases, Turner also used a bit of ink to retouch his negative and remove elements, such as a line of rocks, that didn’t suit his compositional preferences.14 But this was typical of photographers producing paper negatives, an ability to enhance selected areas or suppress others being one of the process’s great advantages. We can find many examples in the earliest years of photography’s existence where photographers sought to exploit this capacity. The French photographer Charles Nègre, for example, frequently used both black ink and pencil shading to improve his negatives, and sometimes waxed them as well. Louis-Adolphe Humbert de Molard similarly worked on his negatives of genre scenes. In one now titled Farmyard Scene, from 1848, he applied some varnish to the foreground to increase its transparency and thus its darkness in the positive salt print, thereby allowing his central figures to retain their visual primacy in the composition. He also applied some varnish to areas of the workers’ clothes to accentuate their texture.15 Eugène Piot, working in Italy in the early 1850s, used pieces of red paper to mask the skies in his negatives and thereby ensure both an evenly toned print and sharp edges for any buildings that are featured (edges that the photographer could reshape with his added paper during the process) [Figure 2.5]. He also sometimes retouched his negatives with gouache on the reverse side. The negative thereby became a kind of textured collage object, a combination of translucent and opaque papers, but also of photograph and paint, depth and f latness, realism and abstraction.16 The English photographer John Murray produced hundreds of paper negatives, most exposed in the 1850s while he was stationed in India. Although he used paper specially manufactured for the use of photographers, the textures of the paper fibres still remained a problem, resulting in an uneven tone in any positive print.17 Murray therefore typically painted the skies of his negatives with black ink or paint, to ensure a clear, creamy expanse in any positive print. He also used a yellow dye or bleach to colour in some of the shadow areas, to help bring out the details [Figure 2.6]. These additions give his negatives a very distinctive appearance and tactility. Painterly brushstrokes are apparent in their skies that are invisible in a positive print, where the black pigment registers only as a blank area, as nothingness. As in all these cases, Murray’s work is a reminder of an “anything goes” attitude to the negative as long as the final print met certain preordained aesthetic standards. But it also underlines the fact that photography involves both taking and making, one more aspect of the medium that is often suppressed in histories devoted to it. Julia Margaret Cameron was another inveterate experimenter, in her case using wet collodion glass-plate negatives. She was notorious for her unorthodox printmaking, leaving fingerprints and other imperfections in the albumen surface of the finished photograph or in the collodion on her negatives. She even remembered that in December 1863, when she was first given a camera and began photographing, “my first picture I effaced to my consternation by rubbing

28 Inventing negatives

FIGURE 2.5

Eugène Piot (France/Italy), Santa Maria del Fiore—Le Dôme, 1852 waxed paper calotype negative with gouache and red paper 34.0 × 24.0 cm

my hand over the filmy side of the glass.”18 In one case, for a work she titled either Sappho or Adriana, depending on the print, she made positive photographs from an 1866 glass negative, even though it was broken. In other cases, a crackling of the collodion on her negatives, “beyond any power to arrest,” resulted in a honeycomb pattern extending over the surface of some of her albumen prints. It was a problem that she claimed had ruined “45 of my most precious negatives.” She blamed the “fatally perishable” chemicals she used rather than, as seems more likely, an insufficient washing of her negatives after fixing.19

Inventing negatives

FIGURE 2.6

29

John Murray (England/India), Nagina Mosque, Agra Fort, India, 1857–60 waxed calotype paper negative with added pigment 36.8 × 45.9 cm

These were technical problems that Cameron did not welcome. But she also sometimes deliberately scratched her negatives (to leave a halo inscribed over the head of one of her subjects), wrote in ink on the albumen print itself (filling in lines from a letter being read by her subject), experimented with silhouette formats and photograms, smoked the back of a negative to produce the appearance of diaphanous clouds in the finished print, bleached a print to give its subject an unearthly radiance, employed composite printing where it suited her (even combining photograms and camera images), and at least three times printed her negatives in reverse (producing a more diffuse version of the image as a result)20 [Figure 2.7]. In short, she was always working creatively with her medium, and especially her negatives, with an eye towards enhancing the artistic potential of her prints. Throughout the twentieth century, professional photographers continued to add pigment to or otherwise embellish their negatives if they thought it would improve the eventual print. But some photographers took such interventions to an extreme, as if to ref lect on the substance of the very medium being employed. In the late 1930s, for example, the Belgian artist Raoul Ubac deliberately melted the emulsion on some of his negatives using a small heater, a process called brûlage. In line with Surrealist thinking, the distortion of the negative, resulting in a molten and contorted image in any positive print, allowed for the play of

30 Inventing negatives

FIGURE 2.7

Julia Margaret Cameron (India/England/Sri Lanka), Untitled [Madonna and Two Children], 1864 albumen photograph from scratched collodion glass negative, Plate 31 from the George Frederic Watts Album 29.1 × 22.1 cm (image)

chance in the creative act while also turning photography into a production of the formless.21 In the 1940s and 1950s, a number of German artists associated with the subjective fotografie movement chose to pour chemicals onto their negatives to induce unpredictable, painterly effects in the gelatin silver prints they made from them.22 In recent years, some dealers have exhibited these negatives as stand-alone works. In 2018, for example, a glass negative coated with a crazed multi-coloured emulsion made by Karl-Heinz Hargesheimer, or Chargesheimer, in the 1948–53 period was shown, backlit by an LED light, at the booth at Paris Foto for Galerie Julian Sander.23 This kind of deformation of the negative could also have political ramifications. Between 1957 and 1961, the Polish artist Bronislaw Schwabs made over 200 cameraless photographs in his native city of Poznán, many of them printed from celluloid or glass negatives which had been soaked in water or even set on fire.24 Recalling the haptic, organic surfaces of Matter Painting, these photographs were described by some Polish critics as examples of “anti-photography,”

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a disparagement motivated by the way Schwabs’s work rejected the social realism espoused by his communist government.25 Another eastern European artist, Běla Kolářová, also rejected state-sanctioned social realism, instead choosing, from 1961 on, to make what she called “artificial negatives” in her own kitchen.26 Seeking to produce art from the negligible detritus of everyday life, she placed scraps of onion peel or peach pits directly on her celluloid negatives, or embedded them in a layer of paraffin spread over the negative, before placing them in her enlarger and printing from them [Figure 2.8]. As she claimed, in an essay later pulped after the suppression of the Prague Spring, “they must be given a chance to manifest their existence in ways that are different from the more f lattering image seen through the f lawless optics of the photographic apparatus.”27 Using hand-made negatives and repeated elements, Kolářová insisted that the geometry of the everyday has something profound to say about life in general. In the mid-1950s, the Japanese artist Shigeru Onishi made a similar claim. Through his photographs, he presented what he called “metamathematical propositions” dedicated to knowing “the conditions of the object’s formation” and

FIGURE 2.8

Běla Kolářová (Czechoslovakia), Peach stones (from Traces series), 1961 gelatin silver photograph from cliché verre negative 21.8 × 17.6 cm

32 Inventing negatives

thus the nature of its existence. Varying the temperature of his developing solutions between 8 and 80 degrees, and intentionally discolouring his prints with acetic acid, Onishi dissolved the usual spatial-temporal parameters we associate with photographs, turning them instead into unstable and f luid entities. Having eschewed pictorial and therefore social illusion, as one critic of the time noted, “his work aggressively takes a stand against all that harms and injures us.”28 A decade later, in the late 1960s, some Japanese photographers came to associate certain visual qualities—a rough, blurred, and out of focus appearance [are-bureboke]—with a photography grounded in an existential physicality, pictorially manifesting a bodily connection to the reality they pictured. To that end, both Daido Moriyama and Takuma Nakahira sometimes poured boiling water over their negatives to make them darker and more grainy, producing photographic imagery that was captured quite literally in the process of disintegration.29 “I wanted to go to the end of photography,” declared Moriyama, and to do that he started at the beginning, with an attempted transubstantiation of his negative.30 As we’ve already heard, some photographic processes combine negative and positive in a single object. A late example of such a process, the instant film found in the Polaroid SX-70 camera, introduced in 1973, incorporated a lightsensitive emulsion, protected under a layer of Mylar, that remained wet and malleable for up to 24 hours after exposure. Working in his kitchen in New York, Lucas Samaras exploited this technical quirk to manipulate the emulsion with a stylus or his fingers while his pictures, invariably of himself, were still developing. Between 1973 and 1976, Samaras produced large numbers of these colourful psychedelic-looking self-portraits, mutilating himself and photography with equal enthusiasm.31 More recently, between 1998 and 2006, the Lebanese artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalit Joreige have presented a body of colour photographs printed from strategically burned negatives under the umbrella title Wonder Beirut. These photographs come with a poignant backstory, involving a fictional photographer living in that city who reportedly damaged his postcard negatives as corresponding parts of the city were destroyed during the civil war of the 1970s. According to one commentator, “Hadjithomas and Joreige transform Abdallah’s original postcards from clichéd tourist souvenirs into dreamscapes, pseudo-ravaged by iridescent bubbles of melted color and glowing ruptures.”32 This last example equates the destruction of parts of the negative with the demolition of the world captured in its emulsion. This automatic association of photograph and world, as if the f lesh of one is an extension of the other, lends a particular psychological weight to any deliberate deformation of a negative. After all, such deformations attack both the material and immaterial aspects of the photograph as a cultural entity: both the chemical substrate that makes any photography possible and the comforting humanist values signified by a photograph’s image clarity and perspectival rationality. For all these reasons, the negative is obviously photography’s most vital, and yet also its most vulnerable, component.

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33

Notes 1 See, for example, Colin Harding, ‘The World’s Earliest Surviving Photographic Negative Is In Our Archive’ (May 22, 2013): https://nationalmediamuseumblog .wordpress.com/2013/05/22/the-birth-of-photography-30th-birthday-countdown/ (accessed 25 October 2019). For a detailed analysis of the photograph, see Geoffrey Batchen, ‘A Philosophical Window,’ History of Photography 26: 2 (Summer 2002), 100–112. 2 Schaaf, The Photographic Art of William Henry Fox Talbot, 50–51. 3 For more on The Mechanic and Chemist (April 1839), see Larry Schaaf, ‘Revelations & Representations’ (May 27, 2016): http://foxtalbot.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/2016/05/. 4 See the list of Talbot’s exhibits in Mike Weaver ed., Henry Fox Talbot: Selected Texts and Bibliography (Oxford: Clio Press, 1992), 57–58. John Herschel was another early photographer who didn’t seem to distinguish between negatives and positives, despite having coined the terms. Of the over 300 photographs by Herschel in the collection of the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford University, only four are made with a camera. See Silke Ackermann, Director’s Choice: Museum of the History of Science Oxford (London: Scala, 2016), 72. 5 See Larry J. Schaaf, Sun Gardens: Cyanotypes by Anna Atkins (New York: The New York Public Library, 2018). 6 Ibid., 69. 7 William Henry Fox Talbot, ‘Plate XX,’ The Pencil of Nature (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, December 1845), np. 8 Talbot, ‘Plate XXIV,’ (April 1846), ibid. 9 William Henry Fox Talbot, letter to Constance Talbot, Doc#4282 ( June 15, 1841): www.foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk/letters (accessed 15 October 2018). 10 Larry Schaaf suggests that the earliest known dated negative that was waxed by Talbot was taken on August 16, 1839; there are about 1,400 surviving waxed Talbot negatives in all. See Schaaf, The Photographic Art of William Henry Fox Talbot, 24. 11 Ibid. 12 Parry, ‘Silence and Slow Time,’ Sun Pictures: Catalogue Twenty-Three, 11. 13 Ibid., 12. 14 Schaaf, Sun Pictures: Catalogue Ten, 62. See also Martin Barnes ed., Benjamin Brecknell Turner: Rural England through a Victorian Lens (London: V&A Publications, 2001). 15 Larry Schaaf, Sun Pictures: Catalogue Thirteen (New York: Hans Kraus Jr., 2004), 16. 16 See Cartier-Bresson, Eloge du négatif, 16, 21. 17 Schaaf, Sun Pictures: Catalogue Nineteen, 22, and Schaaf, Sun Pictures: Catalogue Ten, 89. Linnaeus Tripe was another English photographer working in India who extensively reworked his waxed-paper negatives with pigment. As Roger Taylor suggests, “For him, they [his negatives] were the photographic equivalent of etching plates or lithographic stones, and direct intervention on the surface with paintbrush and pigment played a legitimate role in enhancing the printed result.” Roger Taylor, ‘The Pioneering Photographic Expeditions of Linnaeus Tripe,’ in Roger Taylor and Crispin Branfoot eds., Captain Linnaeus Tripe: Photographer of India and Burma, 1852–1860 (Munich: DelMonico Books/Prestel, 2014), 36. Tripe applied waterbased pigment to his negatives in thin layers, allowing him to evoke clouds and other atmospheric effects in a convincing manner. These additions allowed Tripe to convey different kinds of clouds but also to correct the appearance of overexposed foliage. In this last case, he followed the example of art teachers like James Duffield Harding, who, in his lesson about drawing oak trees, advocated using short strokes to mimic the look of leaves. See Taylor, Captain Linneaus Tripe, 38–39, and ‘Photographic Practices of the 1850s,’ National Gallery of Art, Washington: https:/ /www.nga.gov/features/captain-linnaeus-tripe-photographer-of-india-and-burma/ PhotographicPractices.html (accessed 31 December 2018).

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18 Julia Margaret Cameron, ‘The Annals of my Glass House’ (1874), in Newhall, Photography: Essays & Images, 135. 19 Cameron, as quoted by Marta Weiss, Julia Margaret Cameron: Photographs to Electrify You with Delight and Startle the World (London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 2015), 39-40. 20 See Julian Cox and Colin Ford eds., Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2003) and Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Julia Margaret Cameron, The Complete Catalogue: review,’ CAA-reviews (October 2003): www.caareviews.org/ (accessed 21 October 2003). 21 See Rosalind Krauss, ‘Corpus Delicti,’ L’Amour Fou, 65-70. 22 See Geoffrey Batchen, Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph (New York: DelMonico/Prestel, 2016), 33-34. 23 For more on Chargesheimer and Galerie Julian Sander, see: https://galeriejuliansand er.de/artwork/chemigramme/ (accessed 10 May 2019). 24 For more on the career of Schlabs, see the essays by Magdalena Wróblewska, Maciej Szymanowicz, and Dotota Luczak in Bronisław Schlabs: Krok w nowoczesność = Bronisław Schlabs: Step into Contemporaneity (Poznań: Fundacja 9/11 Art Space, 2012). 25 See Alfred Ligocki, ‘Antyfotografia,’ Fotografia, no. 9 (1959), 444. 26 See Matthew S. Witkovsky, in Foto: Modernity in Central Europe 1918–1945 (Thames & Hudson, 2007), 214, and Matthew S. Witkovsky, ‘Thought Patterns,’ in Běla Kolářová, ed. Alice Motard (London: Raven Row, 2014), note 4, http://www.rave nrow.org/exhibition/bela_kolarova/ (accessed 5 February 2016). 27 Běla Kolářová, One of the Ways (1968), in Motard, ed., Běla Kolářová, http://www .ravenrow.org/exhibition/bela_kolarova/ (accessed 5 February 2016). See also Alice Motard, ‘Běla Kolářová’s Velvet Revolution,’ Mousse 26 (2010), pp. 86–93; Witkovsky, ‘Thought Patterns’; and Karel Císař, ‘The Alphabet of Things,’ in Motard, ed., Běla Kolářová, http://www.ravenrow.org/exhibition/bela_kolarova/ (accessed 5 February 2016). 28 Tatsuo Fukushima, Camera ( June 1956), as quoted in Ryuichi Kaneko, ‘Shigeru Onishi: Emanating hatred,’ Shigeru Onishi (1928–1994): In Search of Meta-Infinite (Tokyo: MEM, 2017), 5. Thanks to Yasufumi Nakamori for bringing this artist to my attention. 29 Takanashi Yutaka, Raika na me/Like a Leica Eye (Tokyo: Mainichi Communications, 2002), 131, as cited in Yuko Fuji, Photography as Process: A Study of the Japanese Photography Journal Provoke (PhD dissertation, Graduate Center of the City University of New York, 2012), 89. 30 Daido Moriyama, 1984, as quoted in Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, The Photobook: A History Volume 1 (London: Phaidon, 2004), 298. 31 See Carol Squiers, ‘What is a Photograph?,’ in Carol Squiers ed., What is a Photograph? (New York: Prestel/International Center of Photography, 2014), 14. 32 Michelle Lim, ‘Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige,’ in Kelly Baum ed., Nobody’s Property: Art, Land, Space 2000–2010 (Yale University Press, 2010), 116. See also Tarek El-Ariss, ‘The Beachcombers,’ Di’van, No. 5 (December 2018), 34–43.

3 PHOTOGENIC DRAWINGS

No wonder so many artists have begun their engagement with the act of photographing by excavating the creative capacities of the negative. The contemporary Australian photographer Justine Varga, for example, subjects her colour negatives to both a prolonged exposure to light and a series of physical and chemical abrasions, all in an effort to indexically record certain aspects of her everyday existence.1 The negative from which her photograph Desklamp was printed was placed on top of the reading lamp on her table and then left to absorb light, dust and accidental knocks and touches over a year-long period. Dated 2011–12 to indicate this extended duration, the print reproduces this experience in terms of an array of mottled hues marred by splotches of darker or lighter pigment, the whole framed by the notched outlines of the piece of film from which it has been derived. As one commentary has suggested, By overexposing the negative, Varga surrenders the image to what is ordinarily considered a technical error. A mistake that usually results in the obscuration of a subject has become the desired means of representation. The degradation of the negative has become a compositional feature.2 This approach to the act of photographing has not been without controversy. In 2017, a national prize for photographic portraiture in Australia was awarded to Varga’s chromogenic photograph titled Maternal Line [Figure 3.1]. A deliberately incendiary story on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald led to a number of others, quickly spreading via social media all across the globe.3 Each of these stories repeated two ideas: that the work could not possibly be a photograph as no camera was used in its production, and that Maternal Line could not be a portrait as no person was discernible in it.

36 Photogenic drawings

FIGURE 3.1

Justine Varga (Australia), Maternal Line, 2017 chromogenic photograph 160.0 × 125.0 cm (frame)

The work in question was printed in an edition of five photographs from a single sheet of colour negative film. Here’s how the artist has described the making of it: One day, not so long ago, I came upon my maternal grandmother hunched over a table, vigorously testing a series of pens by scribbling with each of

Photogenic drawings

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them in turn on a piece of paper. Captivated by this busy repetition of gestures, so reminiscent of her character, I asked her to continue her task, but on a piece of 4 × 5 inch negative film. Having left these traces of her hand on this light-sensitive surface, she also, at my request, rubbed some of her saliva on the film, doubling her bodily inscription there. I then processed the film and printed it at large scale. A collaboration across generations, with her born in Hungary and me in Australia, the resulting image looks abstract but couldn’t be more realist; no perspectival artifice mediates her portrayal of herself or our genetic link, with both now manifested in the form of a photograph.4 Common sense and the laws of physics would suggest that the piece of film being discussed here should have been completely fogged by the extended duration to light that it was made to endure. But every negative is affected by light in this same way, to greater or lesser degrees. As Varga has written, “To expose a negative is to ruin it. From the moment it is exposed to light, that negative is spent.”5 We are reminded again of the calculated acts of ruination that always occur in the analogue darkroom, those acts of testing and experimenting that make the printing of any photograph possible. In his 1990 exhibition catalogue for the Louvre, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, Jacques Derrida studiously links the three themes of his title—blindness, self-portraiture and ruins—declaring them to be inseparable aspects of the creative act.6 Indeed, he argues that ruin is always already at the origin, that there is always a scribbling in place even before the first mark is made, on a piece of film or anywhere else.7 A ruin, he implies, is a necessary corollary to all processes of representation. Varga’s work bears out that contention. For something strange seems to have happened to her negative for Maternal Line during its long exposure. It’s as though this negative reached its representational limits, died, and then passed to the other side of those limits and came back to life. Thereby resurrected, the piece of film registered its prolonged exposure to light and dark, and to the scribbles left on its surface by the artist’s grandmother, as swathes of colour and accumulated incidental marks. These were then turned into a shared visibility in the darkroom, where the negative was translated, through the process of trial and error previously described, into a 153.0 × 125.0 cm paper print. As it happens, Maternal Line is another negative print, its tones having been re-reversed during the complicated process of its production (not that you would know that, unless you had studied the negative closely). The finished photograph is of a size that immerses the body of the viewer. This matters. Decentring its observers, refusing to give them a singular resting place and therefore insisting they take an active role in its decipherment, Maternal Line turns this looking into an intimate, even subtle, experience, an interactive back and forth to be absorbed over time rather than in an instant. In other words, the perception of

38 Photogenic drawings

this photograph replicates the duration and economy of exchange involved in its production. Although unfamiliar to many of its critics, this kind of treatment of a negative, this photogenic drawing process, has a long history. Varga here arranged for some telling marks to be made on a standard piece of light-sensitive negative film, turning that negative into a photo-graphic. This was a procedure invented by Talbot in Geneva in 1834, when he had a friend make some drawings on sheets of varnished glass exposed to smoke, using an engraver’s needle to scratch through this darkened surface. As Talbot later recalled, “when this is placed over a sheet of prepared [photogenic drawing] paper [and exposed to the sun], a very perfect copy is obtained, every line which the needle has traced being represented by a dark line upon the paper.”8 This use of a non-photographic matrix as the basis for a photographic print came to be known as cliché verre. A group of artists associated with the Barbizon movement in France adopted this same practice in the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s, including Charles-François Daubigny, Jean-François Millet, and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. Photographer friends like Adalbert Cuvelier may have assisted them to master the process. The artist would scratch a drawing through a collodion-covered glass plate, using an etching needle, stick, or even the blunt end of a paintbrush. More rarely, as in Corot’s Le Songeur of 1854 or Daubigny’s Vâches à l’abreuvoir from about 1860, a composition would be sketched by painting different densities of emulsion or paint onto the glass surface. The brushstrokes became a visible element of the final image, given form by a few incised lines [Figure 3.2]. Once it had dried, this plate would be placed face-down on a sheet of light-sensitive paper, usually salt paper, and exposed to the sun. To achieve a varied effect, the glass plate could also be f lipped over or a second plate of glass could be inserted between image and paper, producing a softer interpretation of the original image thanks to the refraction of the light rays through the glass. The end result of all this was a contact-printed photograph of the drawing or painting. Sometimes a plate would be reworked, just as in more traditional matrices, and then printed again, allowing for a second state of the image to be circulated.9 Often bordering on abstraction, these photographs demonstrate both the f luid, intimate gestures and rapid hatching adopted for this process (sometimes in the same print) and the consistently even tones that photographic printing of this kind made possible. These kinds of images are well known (Corot alone made 65 individual cliché verre images in his career, nearly twice his total output of lithographs and etchings), but are usually discussed by connoisseurs of prints, rather than by historians or curators of photography.10 Experiments with cliché verre were not confined to French artists. The English caricaturist George Cruikshank drew a portrait of the photographer Peter Wickens Fry by scratching through an albumen-coated glass plate on December 19, 1851. A single albumen print taken from this matrix has survived, very likely made by Fry himself. The image shows Fry looking through his glasses at a piece of paper, presumably the very photograph we too are beholding. Above

Photogenic drawings

FIGURE 3.2

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Charles-Francois Daubigny (France), Vaches à l’Abreuvoir, plate 1858–1862, print 1921 salt print photograph from painted glass cliché verre negative 16.5 × 19.9 cm

him are the words “Etched on Glafs Dear me! How very curious!”11 In 1937, the French magazine Cahiers d’Art reproduced four photographs printed from cliché verre matrices that had been painted and engraved onto glass sheets by Pablo Picasso. Man Ray, who himself made a series of cliché verre prints in 1924, wrote a Preface for the portfolio. Each of these photographs consisted of portraits of Dora Maar, some showing her in profile and some frontal. Some of them also bear the impression of a piece of muslin placed between the glass and the gelatin silver paper during exposure, one of a number of interventions undertaken during the printing process. The photograph titled Portrait of Dora Maar has even been rendered in negative tones. The end result of all this work in the darkroom is a series of ambiguous photographic surfaces, dense with implied textures and painterly effects, and offering a form of portraiture simultaneously hand-made and mechanical.12 Ten years later, the New Zealand-born artist Len Lye made a series of almost 50 cameraless portraits in New York of friends and notable figures in the arts. One of these figures was the Anglo-American poet W.H. Auden, who, like Lye, was a refugee from the war in Europe. In 1947, Lye made four separate portraits of Auden. How exactly these portraits were made remains a matter of speculation. It seems

40 Photogenic drawings

likely he first made Auden lie with his head on a sheet of photographic paper and then exposed him to light from a number of angles, leaving behind a blurred white silhouette on a black background. This piece of paper was then used as a negative to make a reversed impression on another sheet, so that Auden’s head was now a black blur on a white background. A third print was made from this second impression, during the exposure of which Lye superimposed a sheet of glass on which Auden had written some lines from his poem Music is International, a rumination on art and fascism, along with the poet’s signature and a date, May 17, 1947. This is a portrait conveyed, not through likeness (for all you can see is the distorted shape of Auden’s cheek pressed against the paper), but through the evidence of a direct touch of a face on a photographic surface and the identifying traces of the subject’s handwritten poetry and signature13 [Figure 3.3]. In the case of Varga’s work, her grandmother scribbled vigorously on a piece of light-sensitive film, such that marks and luminosity were continually layered over each other, erasing and adding to each other, as if into infinity. The negative thereby becomes a palimpsestic object, and thus a metaphor for memory itself. After first proposing memory to be a kind of photographic apparatus, in 1925 Sigmund Freud proposed another “concrete representation” for “the functioning of the perceptual apparatus of our mind,” a magical Wunderblock that allows him to “imagine one hand writing upon the surface of the mystic writing pad while another periodically raises its covering sheet from the wax slab.”14 Featuring a surface simultaneously breached and virgin, marked and unaltered, this writing machine is an instrument that Derrida soon renders in terms of what he calls spacing: “neither space nor time … the impossibility for an identity to be closed in on itself, on the inside of its proper interiority, or on its coincidence with itself.”15 Photography, memory, space, time, identity; it appears all these issues and more are opened up for questioning in Varga’s work. And so is the practice of portraiture. By having her subject leave her identifying marks on a sheet of film, Varga’s photograph promises the possibility of portraying a relationship, a “maternal line” between women, that a mere likeness of any one of them could not perhaps convey. Maternal Line becomes, in other words, a photograph of and by two women that defies that judgmental scrutiny of their appearance so familiar to women everywhere. Varga’s grandmother was asked to transfer an everyday activity—the testing of pens, typical of her daily busy-work and thus a signature of her character—onto a negative, along with a trace of her saliva, of her DNA. Such a request already depends on a certain intimacy and trust between the artist and her subject. It necessarily speaks to a quite specific kind of relationship between them. The lingering presence of Varga’s grandmother is evoked by the remnants of her bodily gestures and even by the marking of a piece of film by parts of her actual body, by a smear of her genetic code.16 In other words, the negative that results is not just of Varga’s grandmother; it is actually comprised of her; it is her. All of this is in keeping with Varga’s conception of photography: “The emulsion of each of my works is choreographed as a kind of photographic skin; this

Photogenic drawings

FIGURE 3.3

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Len Lye (New Zealand/England/USA), Portrait of W.H.Auden, 1947 gelatin silver photograph 40.5 × 33.5 cm

skin supports a fragile armature of place and the echo of its memory.”17 One is reminded of Nadar’s sly anecdote about a corpulent Balzac and his “vague apprehension” at the prospect of being daguerreotyped (which he nevertheless allowed in 1842): Therefore, according to Balzac, each body in nature is composed of a series of specters, in infinitely superimposed layers, foliated into infinitesimal pellicules, in all directions in which the optic perceives this body. Since

42

Photogenic drawings

man is unable to create—that is, to constitute from an apparition, from the impalpable, a solid thing, or to make a thing out of nothing—every Daguerreian operation would catch, detach, and retain, by fixing onto itself, one of the layers of the photographed body. It follows that for that body, and with every repeated operation, there was an evident loss of one of its specters, which is to say, of a part of its constitutive essence.18 Nadar unkindly suggested that “Balzac had only to gain from his loss, since his abdominal abundances, and others, permitted him to squander his ‘specters’ without counting.” Others may indeed have had more to lose from becoming a photographed body. Ponder, for example, the photographs taken of certain female patients in the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris in the late nineteenth century. Exhibiting what Georges Didi-Huberman has described as a “dermographic” or even “autographic” capacity of the skin, these women would exhibit words written lightly on their bodies with a rubber stylus (“Satan” was one of the words used as an “experimental signifier”) in the form of obediently calligraphic swellings, welts or drops of blood19 [Figure 3.4]. The pressure of the stylus is answered by its other, a relief sculpture induced from human f lesh. No doubt with the cliché-verre process in mind, by 1879 those who embodied this phenomenon came to be designated as a femme-cliché, as a “photographic woman.” For these women, the literal and the figurative was conjoined as a single bodily inscription (a texture), dissolving any distinction between surface and depth, culture and nature. As Didi-Huberman remarks, this is a body-image that “swells

FIGURE 3.4

Planche VI, ‘Grand état dermographique sur une femme des basses classes, apathique, surmenée, déprimée, d’intelligence obtuse et bornée,’ from Marie Pierre Toussaint Barthelemy, Etude sur le dermographisme ou dermoneurose toxivasomotrice (Paris, 1893). ink-on-paper photomechanical reproduction

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between vision and touch, like something blind which gropes for sight and expression.”20 The photograph as body, the body as photograph: wherever we look, we find photography—itself entirely dependent on an interaction of vision and touch, and of light and dark, sight and blindness—associated with an oscillation of opposing but interdependent forces. According to Derrida, “this concept of the photograph photographs all conceptual oppositions, it traces a relationship of haunting which perhaps is constitutive of all logics.”21 As we have witnessed, this relationship is in fact always already in process, latent in the negative from its inception and waiting there, ready to be coaxed into visibility.

Notes 1 The colour negative also has a history. Kodak introduced Kodachrome 35mm slide film in 1936, but it was not until 1942 that the first colour negative film, Kodacolor film for prints, was announced. As with black-and-white negatives, Kodacolor negatives are based on a system of opposites, with the chromogenic hues reversed into their respective complementary colours. The negative film itself typically came with an overall red-orange cast due to an automatic colour-masking feature (to defy inherit deficiencies in the image-forming dyes) that ultimately results in improved colour reproduction. For an overview, see Katherine Bussard and Lisa Hostetler, Color Rush: American Color Photography from Stieglitz to Sherman (New York: Aperture, 2013). 2 Isobel Parker Philip, ‘About Desklamp,’ On-line Collection: Art Gallery of New South Wales: https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/303.2013.1/ (accessed 20 December 2018). 3 See Andrew Taylor, ‘Nice Frame: But Is It a Photograph?,’ Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney, July 25, 2017), 1; ‘Prestigious Australian Photography Prize Won by Woman Who Never Took a Photo,’ Stuff ( July 25, 2017): https://www.stuff.co.nz/e ntertainment/arts/95095275/prestigious-australian-photography-prize-won-by-wo man-who-never-took-a-photo (accessed 26 July 2017; Joanne Shoebridge, Miranda Saunders and Samantha Turnbull, ‘Art Controversy: Hate-Mail after Grandmother’s Saliva Wins $20,000 Portrait Prize,’ ABC News ( July 25, 2017): http://www.abc.net .au/news/2017-07-25/olive-cotton/8741262 (accessed 26 July 2017); Bernard Lagan, ‘Justine Varga’s Saliva “Portrait” Leaves Artists Spitting,’ The Times (London, July 26, 2017): https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/justine-varga-s-olive-cotton-awardwinning-saliva-portrait-leaves-artists-spitting-0sdkvk8k8 (accessed 27 July 2017); Will Gompertz, ‘Spitting Image: Can Drool Be Art?’, BBC News (London, July 26, 2017): http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-40732772 (accessed 27 July 2017); Andrew Taylor, ‘Olive Cotton Award: Is it a Photo? Is it a Portrait? Should Justine Varga’s Grandmother Be Given the Prize Money?’ Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney, July 27, 2017): http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/olive-cotton-award-is-it-a -photo-is-it-a-portrait-should-justine-vargas-grandmother-be-given-the-prizemo ney-20170726-gxj8n5.html (accessed 28 July 2017); Andrew Taylor, ‘Fallout Over Portrait Win Calls Copyright into Question,’ Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney, July 28, 2017), 9; Lisa Davies, ‘Editorial: Justine Varga’s Olive Cotton prize: Questions of Art Over a Grandmother’s Prizewinning Scrawl,’ Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney, July 28, 2017): http://www.smh.com.au/comment/smh-editorial/justine-vargas-olivecotton-prize-questions-of-art-over-a-grandmothers-prizewinning-scrawl-20170 726-gxj8ps.html (accessed 29 July 2017). Versions of this story were subsequently retold in blogs published in English, Chinese, Filipino, Russian, Spanish, Greek, Dutch, Arabic and Polish.

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4 Justine Varga, ‘2017 Olive Cotton Award Winner Justine Varga Provides Insight Into Her Controversial Win,’ Byron Arts Magazine ( July 26, 2017): http://www .byronartsmagazine.com.au/blog/2017/7/26/2017-olive-cotton-award-winner-jus tine-varga-provides-insight-into-her-controversial-win (accessed 27 July 2017). See also Shaune Lakin and Justine Varga, ‘The Maternal Line,’ Artlink, 37:4 (Adelaide, December 2017), 70–74. 5 Justine Varga, Apperception (exhibition brochure, Stills Gallery, Sydney, 2016), np. 6 See Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) and Meyer Raphael Rubinstein, ‘Sight Unseen,’ Art in America, 79: 4 (April 1991), 47–53. 7 Indeed, the history of photography is itself founded on an origin story consisting of a set of ruins, of a series of experimental “first photographs” that did not survive their own exposure to light. Unable to be fixed, the early experiments of Tom Wedgwood and Humphry Davy survive only as textual ghosts, described in an 1802 journal article but otherwise invisible to us. These first photographs are truly palimpsests then, erased inscriptions present only as historical memories, a lost presence (an imagined blackened surface) inhabited by their complete absence from the visual record. See Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Touché: Photography, Touch, Vision,’ Photofile, #47 (March 1996), 6–12. 8 William Henry Fox Talbot, manuscript addendum to ‘Note Respecting a New Kind of Sensitive Paper’ (March 21, 1839), as quoted in Schaaf, Out of the Shadows, 40. 9 See James Crump, ‘Radical Images,’ The Hand-Drawn Negative: Clichés-verres by Corot, Daubigny, Delacroix, Millet and Rousseau (New York: Peter Freeman Inc., 2007), np. 10 See Geoffrey Batchen, Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph (New York: DelMonico/Prestel, 2016), 7, 13-14. See also Elizabeth Glassman and Marilyn F. Symmes, Cliché-verre: Hand-Drawn, Light-Printed (Detroit: Detroit Institute of the Arts, 1980); Alain Paviot, Le Cliché Verre: Corot-Delacroix-Millet-Rousseau-Daubigny (Paris: Musée de la vie romantique, 1995); James Crump, The Hand-Drawn Negative (New York: Peter Freeman Inc., 2007); and Thomas Ketelsen, Vom Licht gezeichnet: Camille Corot und das Experiment “Cliché-verre” (Köln: Wallraf das Museum, 2010). A number of Corot’s cliché verre plates were reprinted in 1921 by French engraver and publisher Maurice Le Garrec. See Colta Ives, ‘Corot: Two Travelers in a Forest,’ The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin: Recent Acquisitions, A Selection, XLIX: 2 (Fall 1991), 47. Among the few histories of photography to include examples of cliché verre is Jean-Luc Daval, Photography: History of an Art (Geneva: Skira, 1982), 34-35. 11 See Glassman, Cliché-verre, 69, and Roy Flukinger, The Gernsheim Collection: Harry Ransom Center (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 92–93. 12 See Anne Baldessari, Picasso and Photography: The Dark Mirror (Flammarion/Houston: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1997), 204–207. See also Mary Ann Caws, ‘Dora the Photographer,’ in John Richardson ed., Picasso and the Camera (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2014), 252–256. 13 Thanks to Stefani Georgieva for pointing out the connection between Varga’s portrait and Lye’s work. On Lye’s portrait of Auden, see Rebecca Loud, ‘W.H. Auden (But Who Is Worthy)’ in Geoffrey Batchen ed., Shadowgraphs: Photographic Portraits by Len Lye (Wellington: Adam Art Gallery, 2011), 30–31. For more on Lye’s series of cameraless portraits, see Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Shadowgraphs,’ Aperture #213 (Winter 2013), Cover and 94–99; and Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Shadowgraphs: Photographic Portraits by Len Lye,’ in Paul Brobbel, Roger Horrocks and Wystan Curnow eds., The Long Dream of Waking: New Perspectives on Len Lye (New Plymouth: Len Lye Foundation, 2017), 161–170. Kodak initiated a vernacular example of cliché verre when in 1906 it introduced an affordable, easy-to-use, portable, folding pocket camera that made postcard-sized negatives. Photographic images could be printed at one-to-one size at home onto thick card stock with pre-printed “postcard” backs, ready for a message and an address. Some of these cameras also included a window at the rear of

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14 15 16

17 18 19

20 21

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the instrument through which an operator could scratch or scrawl a caption or message directly onto the negative with a metal tool. This allowed the photographic print to include both a camera-made image and a hand-written text in the same emulsion. See Todd Alden, ‘And We Lived Where Dusk Had Meaning: Remembering Real Photo Postcards,’ Real Photo Postcards: Unbelievable Images from the Collection Of Harvey Tulcensky (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005), 6–7. See Jacques Derrida, ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’ (1966), translated by Alan Bass, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 196–231. This passage conf lates two paragraphs from Jacques Derrida, Positions translated by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 43, 94. See Shaune Lakin, ‘Why I Chose the “Spit and Scribble” Photograph: Olive Cotton Judge on the Global Furore,’ The Guardian (August 2, 2017): https://www.theguard ian.com/artanddesign/2017/aug/02/why-i-chose-the-spit-and-scribble-photograph -olive-cotton-judge-on-the-global-furore (accessed 3 August 2017). Justine Varga, ‘Surrendering to the Photograph’ (unpublished lecture), National Visual Art Education Conference, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (20–22 January, 2016). Félix Nadar, ‘Balzac and the Daguerreotype,’ When I was a Photographer (1900), translated by Eduardo Cadava and Liana Theodoratou (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2015), 4 (see also xvii–xx). See Toussaint Barthélemy, Etude sur le dermographisme ou dermoneurose toxivasomatrice (Paris: Societé d’Editions scientifiques, 1893), Planche VI. For commentaries on such images, see Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘The Figurative Incarnation of the Sentence (Notes on the ‘Autographic’ skin)’ (1984), Cabinet, #13 (2004), 49–53; Georges DidiHuberman, ‘Une Notion de “corps-cliché” au XIXe siècle,’ Parachute, #35 (1984), 8–14; Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, translation by Alisa Hartz (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003); and Claudie Massicote, Trance Speakers: Femininity and Authorship in Spiritual Séances (McGill-Queens University Press, 2017),172–175 . Didi-Huberman, ‘Figurative Incarnation,’ 50. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Deaths of Roland Barthes’ (1981), in Hugh Silverman ed., Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Merleau-Ponty (Routledge, 1988), 267.

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In most of the examples already discussed, negatives have represented an opportunity for a creative intervention within the act of photographing itself. For other photographers, negatives have offered a chance for a demonstration of technical virtuosity. Although he had pioneered the use of waxed-paper negatives, for example, Le Gray chose to use collodion-on-glass negatives to produce his celebrated series of at least 43 marine studies, the first of which was taken in about 1856.1 The following year, in April, he set up his tripod and camera to face out to sea at Sète, on the Mediterranean coast. There he took, among other pictures, the view of the water and a distant Mount Adge that he subsequently titled Mer Méditerranée-Cette-no 18 (Figure 4.1). Signed in reverse in the lower right-hand corner of the negative, a declaration of both its artistic status and the photographer’s copyright, the image is notable for the dappled light on the surface of the sea and the extraordinarily dramatic cloudscape hovering overhead, redolent of a divine presence. In other marine scenes, Le Gray achieved this effect by combining two negatives (a practice to which I will return in a moment). But in this case, he was able to demonstrate his supreme technical mastery of the collodion process by capturing these varied light effects in a single exposure.2 Le Gray’s seascapes were widely exhibited and hailed by critics and fellow photographers in both France and England, and there was considerable demand for them in the growing market for art photographs. One photograph, then titled Sea and Clouds (but subsequently called Brig on the water), was exhibited at the Photographic Society of London in late 1856; an advertisement in the Journal of the Photographic Society claimed that 800 copies had been ordered by enthusiastic viewers.3 As further evidence of this demand, there are a number of salted paper prints of Mer Méditerranée-Cette-no 18 taken from the same negative, some much darker than others, and at least one that has been varnished with albumen to increase its surface sheen. When seen together, these photographs demonstrate

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FIGURE 4.1

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Gustave Le Gray (France), Mer Méditerranée, Sète, No 18, 1857 albumen photograph from collodion glass negative 31.8 × 41.1 cm

the very different tonal range, visual effects, and emotional moods that a master printer like Le Gray could extract from the same matrix. A similar observation might be made of two prints from the same paper negative ascribed to the French photographer Édouard Baldus. Titled Gare de Boulogne, Côté de Paris and taken in 1855 on commission from railway proprietor Baron James de Rothschild, this image was included in a sumptuous album of 50 prints presented as a gift to Queen Victoria during her state visit in August of that year. An experienced architectural photographer, Baldus positioned his camera to capture two sides of the new building, giving it a three-dimensional mass and presenting it as the very embodiment of national progress, combining as it does modern architecture and industrial capitalism in the same structure. In short, this photograph functions as both a document and a potent symbol. A miniature version was incorporated into an elaborate cartouche below a map of the train journey taken by the Queen that was included in the album.4 Five years later, Rothschild ordered another 25 presentation albums modelled on the one made for Victoria. An examination of two prints from these different albums, one salted paper and the other a later albumen silver print, but made from the same negative, again offer two quite different visual experiences, one dark and the other warmer in tone. They are a reminder that photographic images are often reproduced many times, to suit different clients, contexts, and aesthetic tastes. It

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is the capacity to print from negatives that gives the photographic medium this distinctive f lexibility.5 But it also gives photographers the chance to manipulate or, to put it in terms meant to be more pejorative, “doctor” their images. As we’ve seen, nineteenthcentury photographers did this as a matter of routine. In fact, it has always been a common practice among professional photographers to suppress or enhance elements of a negative during the printing process if that achieves a better-looking photograph. Any number of examples could be canvassed here, drawn from across the whole of photography’s history, each reiterating this same basic truism of photographic practice. Rather than further repetitions of the same, let me look in detail at some particular examples from the twentieth century that demonstrate some of the consequences of such manipulations. These examples can tell us quite a lot, not only about what photographers value in their own work, but also about what historians and curators, who usually choose to ignore such interventions, value in theirs. Consider, for example, the decision to remove a thumb from the foreground of Dorothea Lange’s famous Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California (Figure 4.2). Taken in early March of 1936, the 4 × 5-inch nitrate film negative on which this image is based was one of seven Lange exposed that day. They were taken, in an unknown sequence, to record the situation of a 32-year old woman Lange found camped on the side of the road in a make-shift tent, accompanied by four of her seven children.6 Lange had the previous year taken up employment as a photographer with the federal government’s Resettlement Administration (RA), later known as the Farm Security Administration, working under the direction of Roy Stryker. As Lange lived in Berkeley, California and Stryker was based in an office in Washington, DC, he mostly communicated with her by letter, sending her general instructions as to the kind of images he wanted. These images would then be distributed from Washington through their reproduction in newspapers, magazines, books, government pamphlets, exhibitions, or any other vehicles that offered themselves. Despite his reluctance, Lange came to an arrangement with Stryker whereby she was sometimes allowed to develop her own negatives in her home darkroom (with costs paid by the RA) and make several prints from each. She was then to forward the negatives and one proof print of each to Washington. There the negatives would be printed by others, using her print as a guide, for mass distribution as needed. Lange’s negatives joined a file system that eventually amounted to 178,000 black and white negatives, 107,000 photographic prints, and over 1,600 colour transparencies. It is notable that when you search today for a “negative” in the Library of Congress search engine, where all these items are held, all that comes up are digital positives; once again, negatives as negatives are repressed from history. Speaking of repression, it is now common knowledge that Stryker would punch holes through any negatives he deemed unusable, thus “killing” them. Altogether, he killed about 100,000 negatives. Two things are worth noting about this: first, that Stryker kept these fatally mutilated negatives in the FSA

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FIGURE 4.2

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Dorothea Lange (USA), Human Erosion in California (Migrant Mother), 1936 gelatin silver photograph 34.1 × 26.8 cm

file even after they had been punched; and second, that he never killed any of Lange’s negatives.7 Thanks to her unusual arrangement with Stryker, Lange was able to show the photographs taken at Nipomo to a local newspaper soon after arriving home, and two of them (although not Migrant Mother) were published in the San Francisco News on March 10, 1936 (“Ragged, Hungry, Broke, Harvest Workers Live in Squallor”

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[sic]). Migrant Mother did, however, appear in the next day’s issue by itself, again to illustrate a story about the (always unnamed) woman’s plight. This one was titled “What does the ‘New Deal’ mean to this Mother and her Children?” Its caption offered an assessment of the photograph of a sort that has been often repeated: This remarkable photograph epitomizes the human side of one of California’s oldest and gravest problems … Here, in the fine strong face of this mother, photographed at the camp of starving pea-pickers … is the tragedy of lives lived in squalor and fear, on terms that mock the American dream of security and independence and opportunity in which every child has been taught to believe.8 The photograph was soon picked up by other media outlets. The New York Times, for example, published a substantially retouched and cropped version of the composition on July 26, 1936 (with the background painted over to isolate the heads), and then again on August 30 of the same year, but this time cropped down even further to show just the face of the woman (accompanied by a caption claiming her as “a worker in the ‘peach bowl’”).9 Lange’s photograph also featured in an issue of Survey Graphic in September, under the heading “Draggin’-Around People.” The image appeared again, uncredited, in a publication called Midweek Pictorial on October 17, 1936, accompanied by a title that asked readers to “Look in her Eyes!” (which is actually impossible to do, as the woman looks away from the camera; one can only look at her eyes). It was overlaid with a map designed to visualise the plight of the “millions like her.”10 Although simply listed under the photographer’s name, the photograph we know today as Migrant Mother was soon included in a touring exhibition (which opened on September 28 at Rockefeller Center in New York) and annual publication organised by U.S. Camera magazine. Here it was presented as an exemplary act of photography, as a work of art rather than a document. Right from its beginnings, then, this image was asked to perform two, not always entirely compatible, tasks: to represent the situation of this particular woman, and to symbolise the millions of other similarly situated Americans the New Deal was meant to help (as Lange herself remarked, it was “just one more of the same”).11 Given the subsequent fame of Lange’s photograph, the image published in Midweek Pictorial is familiar. However, a close inspection reveals a thumb in the right foreground, belonging to someone (perhaps the mother herself ) reaching out to grasp a post acting as a tent pole. This thumb is also clearly present in a vintage (although now restored) print held by the Library of Congress, where most of the FSA archive was deposited in 1943. Pasted onto a brown sheet of cardboard, this print is accompanied by a type-written text: “Destitute peapickers in California; a 32 year old mother of seven children. February, 1936” [Figure 4.3]. It can again be seen in a large version (captioned “Migrant Worker’s Hungry Family, California”) which was exhibited in the First International Photographic Exposition in New York in April 1938.12

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FIGURE 4.3

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Dorothea Lange (USA), Destitute Pea Pickers in California; a 32-Year-Old Mother of Seven Children, 1936 gelatin silver photograph on card with typed text

As an experienced professional photographer, Lange was anxious that the prints that represented her in exhibitions should be of a high quality. She insisted, for example, that she be sent her Migrant Mother negative so she could make and sign her own photograph of it for the U.S. Camera show in 1936: “Please send me the negative of the mother and children. Pea pickers of which I wrote … I couldn’t afford to show prints, unsigned, which I have not even seen. I’ll send the negative right back …”13 Lange did send it right back, but her employment was terminated in October 1936 in any case, one of three occasions on which Stryker fired her. She was reappointed in January 1937, for example, only to be dismissed again in November of the same year (although Stryker did buy some of her negatives from her). Lange then decided to prepare a book with her husband, Paul Taylor, to be titled American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion, a combination of texts and her photographic images. By September 1938 she was once again employed by

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Stryker and asked his permission to work on the book as well, with Ansel Adams having agreed to do some of the printing for her. Stryker and Lange continued to argue over her desire to ensure that high-quality prints be made from her negatives, which by this stage were being sent straight to Washington for processing. In March 1939, she sent him a list of negatives she wanted to borrow so that she could prepare prints of her photographs for American Exodus. At this point, the story becomes murky. Some scholars have reported that Stryker declined to send them (given that Stryker wrote to her, on March 24, to say that “I just don’t see how we can possibly release so many negatives, and so many important ones for this long a time … I hate like the devil to turn you down on this.”) In this version of events, a determined Lange instead went to Washington in June to supervise their printing. Letters show that Stryker made sure she was allowed access to the negatives for only four days, curtailing her ability to have them printed as she wished.14 However, we also have a letter that Lange sent to Stryker on May 16, 1939, where she refers to a negative depicting “mother and children” that is surely the one we know as Migrant Mother: In regard to retouching the negatives which you sent me to be included in the Museum of Modern Art collection: The negatives were retouched in my presence by the best retoucher on the Pacific Coast … I also call your attention to the fact that a glaring defect in the other negative (mother and children) has been entirely eliminated. You say: “Whoever retouched the negatives was a little careless in his work.” This is not the fact, for the negatives were handled with the utmost care.15 The inaugural exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), curated by Beaumont Newhall and Ansel Adams, was titled Sixty Photographs: A Survey of Camera Esthetics and was shown from December 31, 1940, to January 12, 1941. Installation photographs show that Migrant Mother was hung next to a photogravure by Paul Strand of a blind woman (New York, 1915). The accompanying catalogue lists Lange’s photograph as Pea Picker Family, California, dates it to 1936, and records that it was a “Gift of Albert M. Bender” (a prominent collector from San Francisco). The image is reproduced on page 11, and, contrary to the information in Lange’s letter, features that thumb.16 So does the installation image showing the photograph on the wall in the exhibition. Once again, confusion reigns. Could the museum have acquired a different print than the doctored one Lange made in May of 1936, as part of a package of works donated by Bender? Unfortunately, the museum subsequently lost the Bender print in September 1952, eventually replacing it with another, thumbless one.17 Whenever it occurred, at some point Lange took the opportunity to have several of her negatives retouched, including the one for Migrant Mother. She had them improved, just as she would have done with commercial portraits in her own studio. This change was made despite Lange having, pinned on the wall of

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her darkroom, a guiding quotation from the English philosopher Francis Bacon that advised “the contemplation of things as they are … without substitution or imposture.” A little later, in 1952, Lange insisted that “whatever I photograph, I do not molest or tamper with or rearrange.”18 Nevertheless, as Sally Stein would have it, “with art on her mind, [Lange] temporarily took leave of her New Deal senses and decided to have a corner of the negative retouched.”19 Thus, by mid-1939, that thumb (in Lange’s view, as we’ve seen, a “glaring defect”) was suppressed in the negative itself, so that subsequent prints of Migrant Mother show only a ghostly digit, just a barely visible trace of what once was there (Figure 4.4). Stryker believed that such retouching undermined the credibility of photographs that depended for their authenticity on a raw documentary appeal, especially given the considerable criticism faced by New Deal policies and the propaganda that promoted them.20 And indeed, the deletion of the thumb subtly changes the emphasis of the image, from the journalistic focus that motivated Lange’s mission, with its sense of immediacy and specificity of place and time, to something more general, more timeless (as so many commentators have indeed claimed, including, many years later, Stryker himself ).21 As it happens,

FIGURE 4.4

Dorothea Lange (USA), Human Erosion in California (Migrant Mother), 1936 gelatin silver photograph

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Migrant Mother did not appear in the final version of American Exodus. However, by November of 1939, Lange was again told to cease working for the FSA and was not hired by Stryker again.22 The thumbless version of Migrant Mother was the one that subsequently became the standard manifestation of this image, the one held today by most museums and published in most books representing Lange’s work. Without this distraction in the foreground, a viewer’s eyes are directed to the face of the woman who occupies the centre of the picture. On either side of her are two young children, both with their heads turned away from the camera. Looking off to one side and holding her right hand pensively to her worried face, their mother embodies maternity under siege, an impression underlined by the lack of a man in the composition. No explanation for her situation is offered by the photograph itself. Instead we are invited to put ourselves in her place, to imagine what we would do if we found ourselves destitute and alone. As a scene, it is full of emotion and didactic implication, speaking of a universal humanity that is deserving of our charity (and thus our reassurance) rather than our guilt or fear.23 In all these ways, the picture admirably fulfils the definition of the documentary photograph published by William Stott in 1973: Simplifying, then: documentary treats the actual unimagined experience of individuals belonging to a group generally of low economic and social standing in the society (lower than the audience for whom the report is made) and treats this experience in such a way as to try to render it vivid, “human,” and—most often—poignant to the audience.24 Many prints have been made over the years from Lange’s retouched negative, most of them ordered directly from the Library of Congress, with these prints produced by anonymous technicians working in Washington. Sometime in the late 1940s, the negative seems to have been damaged and a new negative was produced, presumably by rephotographing a standard version of the retouched photograph. This new negative was the one used, for example, when large prints were made by Irwin Welcher for the images by Lange that were included in Edward Steichen’s 1955 Family of Man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (where Migrant Mother was shown in a section devoted to calamities). Welcher was also the printer, working under her supervision, for Lange’s retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.25 It was shown in a section titled New California and accompanied by a quotation from the photographer admitting that “these photographs … are a product of the files,” files that she went on to describe as her “autobiography.”26 The exhibition opened in 1966, shortly after her death. This death did not, however, stop the f low of Migrant Mothers from continuing. In 1975, for example, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne bought a portfolio of Lange prints produced in that same year, including a posthumous print of Migrant Mother (Figure 4.5). Obviously, a negative has the capacity to

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FIGURE 4.5

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Dorothea Lange (USA), Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, 1936 gelatin silver photograph (printed c. 1975) 49.4 × 39.6 cm (image) 50.6 × 40.7 cm (sheet)

live on, generating further offspring, even when its maker has gone. As Lange remarked in 1960, “it has, in a sense, lived a life of its own through these years; it goes on and on.”27 Whether inspired by aesthetic concerns or by a desire to remove a distracting detail from a photograph intended to make us focus on a face (and the two motivations are hardly incompatible), Lange’s actions are a reminder that photographs are never static or singular. All prints are manipulations derived from the tonal information gathered on a negative. Sometimes that manipulation includes the removal of a detail or the erasure of a background. As we’ve just seen, the photograph known as Migrant Mother is the product of three negatives and many, many printers, some named but most remaining anonymous. It comes with different looks and in different sizes, and has induced a variety of meanings, as its context has changed over the years. Thanks to the role played by its various negatives, there are, in other words, many Migrant Mothers. To match the complexity of

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entities like this, our histories of photography are going to have to be similarly complex, self-consciously acknowledging and ref lecting on this multiplicity of identities in one, a multiplicity that stems once again directly from the interaction of negatives and positives.

Notes 1 See Ken Jacobson, The Lovely Sea-View: A Study of the Marine Photographs published by Gustave Le Gray, 1856-1858 (Petches Bridge: Ken and Jenny Jacobson, 2001). 2 There is some debate as to which prints by Le Gray were made using more than one negative. Mer Méditerranée-Cette-no 18 is listed as coming from a single collodion glass negative in Sylvie Aubenas et al., Gustave Le Gray 1820–1884 (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002), 367. 3 See Journal of the Photographic Society (22 December 1856), as cited in Aubenas, Gustave Le Gray, 317. 4 This map is reproduced in Malcolm Daniel, The Photographs of Édouard Baldus (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994), 47. See also Eugenia Parry Janis, At the Still Point: Photographs from the Manfred Heiting Collection, Volume 1 1840–1916 (Amsterdam: Cinubia, 1995). 136-137. 5 In similar fashion, Hippolyte Bayard made at least ten coated salt prints from a collodion glass negative he exposed of a man looking up at the St-Étienne portal of Notre Dame Cathedral, while it was undergoing restoration. Each of these prints looks quite different. As Eugenia Parry has said, each treatment “sheathes the stones in the shadows of holy mysteries.” See Eugenia Parry, ‘Photography and the Spirit: Hippolyte Bayard,’ in Daniel Blau ed., Hippolyte Bayard: Photography and the Spirit, a collection of photographs from 1839 to 1849 (Munich: Daniel Blau Photography, 2010), np. We can see a similar exploration of what can be created from a single negative in the three variant prints made between 1905 and 1909 by Edward Steichen of his 1904 image of the Flatiron building in New York. According to the on-line catalogue of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which owns them, “Steichen’s three variant printings of The Flatiron, each in a different tonality, evoke successive moments of twilight and forcefully assert that photography can rival painting in scale, color, individuality, and expressiveness.” See www.metmuseum.org/art/collction/search/267838 (accessed 10 May 2019). 6 Dorothea Lange, ‘The Assignment I’ll Never Forget,’ Popular Photography (February 1960), as transcribed in Newhall, Photography: Essays & Images, 262–265. For a detailed reconstruction of the taking of this photograph, see Sally Stein, Migrant Mother, Migrant Gender: Reconsidering Dorothea Lange’s Iconic Portrait of Maternity (Discourse/ Mack Books, 2020), 59–85. 7 See Allen C. Benson, ‘Killed Negatives: The Unseen Photographic Archives,’ Archivaria, 68 (Fall 2009), 20. A number of artists and curators have presented prints made from these punched negatives, including Lisa Oppenheim, Killed Negatives: After Walker Evans (2007); Etienne Chambaud, Personne, 2008, in his A Brief History of the Twentieth Century (2008); William E. Jones, Killed: Rejected Images of the Farm Security Administration (PPP Editions, 2010); William E. Jones, Punctured (5-minute film, 2010); Bill McDowell, Ground: A Reprise of Photographs from the Farm Security Administration (Daylight Books, 2016); Patrick Pound, Cancelled Archive (TarraWarra Museum of Art International, Healesville, Victoria, September 2–November 12, 2017); Killed Negatives: Unseen Images of 1930s America, an exhibition curated by Nayia Yiakoumaki and shown at the Whitechapel Gallery in London (May 16–August 26, 2018). 8 The San Francisco News (March 11, 1936), 3, as transcribed in Sarah Hermanson Meister, Dorothea Lange: Migrant Mother (New York, The Museum of Modern Art,

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10 11 12 13 14

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2018), 21. As soon as she had got home to San Francisco, Lange had contacted W.B. Jenkins, state director of the Surplus Commodities Division, to report on the situation in Nipomo, and, as a consequence, on March 9 some emergency food supplies were rushed to the camp. See ibid., 18. The photograph was first used to illustrate a story titled ‘WPA Replies to Farm Critics,’ The New York Times (Sunday July 26, 1936), E7. It is credited to “Lange, from Resettlement Administration,” and captioned “a destitute mother, the type aided by WPA.” The Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired the photographic archive of the New York Times in 2001, including a copy of Lange’s print. Sarah Meister, a curator at MoMA, describes the print, which is characterised by the museum as a “gelatin silver print with gouache (painted and airbrushed), ink and grease pencil,” as “clumsily but effectively minimizing the presence of Thompson’s offending thumb.” Meister, Lange, 34. The print has indeed been extensively retouched. A close inspection shows the thumb to be still there in the print, but painted over so as to blend it in to the foreground. As such, it appears to be the earliest version of Migrant Mother in which the thumb has been repressed. It is worth noting that, when a version of the image was reproduced in an issue of Ken magazine published in April 1938, captioned “Poverty Sits in the Green Fields,” the offending thumb was simply cropped out, along with the bottom of the image. It was similarly cropped when the image was reproduced in Archibald Macleish, Land of the Free (New York: Harcourt, Bruce and Co., 1938), 9. On this kind of cropping, see Stein, Migrant Mother, 62–64. See Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, 284. Dorothea Lange, ‘The Assignment I’ll Never Forget,’ Photography, 263. See Meister, Dorothea Lange, 30. Lange, to Edwin Locke, Stryker’s assistant, September 10, 1936, as quoted in Anne Whiston Spirn, Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange’s Photographs & Reports from the Field (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 29. See ibid., 31–33. In a letter to photographer Russell Lee dated June 18, 1939, Stryker again claims that Lange’s partner “got all excited because we wouldn’t let Dorothea have a whole f lock of her negatives for Ansel Adams to print from.” See Spirn, ibid., 32. Letter from Lange to Stryker, dated May 16, 1939. The letter is found in the Roy Stryker Papers, University of Louisville (Kentucky). I thank Amy Purcell for supplying me with a copy. For a discussion of this correspondence, and its discrepancies, see Stein, Migrant Mother, 122. ‘The new department of photography,’ The Bulletin of The Museum of Modern Art, 2: Volume VIII (Dec-Jan 1940-41), 6, 11: https://www.moma.org/documents/moma _catalogue_2089_300144985.pdf (accessed 7 May 2019). See Meister, Dorothea Lange, 30. As prints often were during Edward Steichen’s time as curator of photography, the new one was mounted on a sheet of Masonite. The J. Paul Getty Museum also owns a print of Migrant Mother, complete with visible thumb, that the museum dates to 1936, and which is signed and dated by Lange. In this instance, at least, it seems she was happy to put her name to an unadulterated print, signing it on the front, like an art work. The same museum owns another print of the image that the museum describes as a “copy photograph” (and therefore, presumably, is a photograph of a photograph) printed by Arthur Rothstein in about 1960. This one has no signature from either photographer. Lange, quoted in Modern Photography magazine, and quoted again in Spirn, ibid., 325. Sally Stein, ‘Passing Likeness: Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother and the Paradox of Iconicity,’ in Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis eds., Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (New York: ICP, 2003), 345-346. The notion that Lange removed the thumb “with art on her mind” has been more recently repeated in Alona Parker ed., Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing (Munich: Prestel, 2018), 100. The removal of the thumb has been much discussed. See, for example, James C. Curtis, ‘Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, and the Culture of the Great Depression,’

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22 23 24 25 26 27

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Winterthur Portfolio, 21: 1 (Spring 1986), 17–19, and Meister, Dorothea Lange, 31. Lange’s description of the thumb comes from her letter to Stryker justifying its removal, dated May 16, 1939. “When Dorothea took that picture, that was the ultimate. She never surpassed it. To me, it was the picture of Farm Security … Migrant Mother has all the suffering of mankind in her but all the perseverance too. A restraint and a strange courage. You can see anything you want to in her. She is immortal. Roy Stryker, in Roy Stryker and Nancy Wood, In This Proud Land: America 1935–1943, As Seen in the FSA Photographs (New York: Galahad Books, 1973), 19. An inf luential version of this story is told in F. Jack Hurley, Portrait of a Decade: Roy Stryker and the Development of Documentary Photography in the Thirties (Louisiana State University Press, 1972), 68–75, 140–143. See Martha Rosler, ‘In, Around, and Afterthoughts (on Documentary Photography) (1981–82), from Richard Bolton ed., The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999), 303-340. William Stott, Documentary Expression in Thirties America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973) 62. Jacob Deschin, ‘Dorothea Lange and Her Printer,’ Popular Photography, 59: 1 ( July 1966), 70. Lange is quoted in the Master Checklist compiled by John Szarkowski for the Dorothea Lange exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art exhibition in 1966. Lange, Popular Photography (February 1960), in Newhall, Photography, 264.

5 CONTROL METHODS

Perhaps you’re thinking that the previous example is an unusual one, that I have deliberately picked out an exceptional case in order to advance my argument? In fact, the story that has just been told is typical, certainly for photographs that have enjoyed canonical status within the history of photography. I have written before, for example, about the complex identity of Sunbaker, a photograph taken by Max Dupain in the 1930s and still Australia’s most iconic photographic image.1 Until recently, this photograph was always dated to 1937 (including in my own previous essays about it). In those essays, I recounted the tale of how, despite being lauded as an example of early modernism, Sunbaker was in fact first printed in 1975, the year that Dupain was accorded a retrospective exhibition at the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney. The curators of this exhibition, no doubt anxious to establish a genealogy for Australian art photographers working in the 1970s, had encouraged the 64-year-old Dupain to sift through his back-catalogue of negatives and to make large exhibition prints from those that, in retrospect, looked most modernist (Figure 5.1) This included some negatives, like the one that begat Sunbaker, from which Dupain had never printed before. Given his own preference for documentarystyle work (“clear statements of actuality,” he called it), Dupain was reluctant to print this photograph and even more reluctant to have it featured as the exhibition’s poster image.2 The curators, however, were insistent, and it immediately became his signature picture.3 Over 200 prints were subsequently made of it during Dupain’s lifetime, using at least two slightly different croppings of the original negative image. As it was a difficult negative to print from, at some point Dupain made an inter-negative by photographing a master impression of Sunbaker, and henceforth he used this new negative as his matrix. Understandably, this resulted in prints with less visual information than in optimal examples taken from the original negative. After his death, his studio partner Jill Scott

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FIGURE 5.1

Photographer unknown (Australia), Cover of Good Weekend magazine, Sydney Morning Herald, August 7, 2004 ink-on-paper photomechanical reproduction.

continued to produce prints of Sunbaker, responding to the market demand for copies of the photograph. Further complicating this story is the inconvenient fact that Dupain had, in 1948, published another, more anecdotal version of this composition in a monograph claiming to be devoted to his best work. This version had been printed from a different negative taken on the same day, a negative that has since been lost. The front of the published version was signed by Dupain and dated 1940. So, in 1975, the photographer remembered taking these exposures in 1937, but in 1948 he remembered the year as 1940! Already we have a bit of confusion to unravel. And this confusion doesn’t end there. After his death, it was discovered that Dupain had included a snapshot version of the 1948 image in an album devoted to the holiday at Culburra Beach during which it was taken. Research by curator Shaune Lakin on this album, now held by the State Library of New South

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Wales in Sydney, has revealed that another photograph taken on the same holiday shows a person reading the January 1938 issue of the Australian Women’s Weekly.4 Henceforth, and despite the artist’s signature and 1937 date on the front of the many prints that he made during the latter part of his life, Sunbaker will need to be dated 1938. Or, if the label for this photograph wants to be accurate, it will need to provide information that at least hints at the entirety of its history, and thus at the true complexity of its identity: for example, “gelatin silver photograph made by the photographer after 1975 from a 35mm negative exposed in 1938.” What I’m trying to persuade you is that, if you care to scratch beneath the surface of any well-known photograph, you will frequently find similar sorts of complexities. We find them again, for instance, when we look closely at the history of another of Australia’s most familiar photographs, The Spirit of Endurance. It’s worth considering this example in some detail, if only to tease out the difficulties that face any historian of this medium. “I think of all the photographs I have taken this is the one which best expresses all that I have always wanted to do.” So said the photographer, Harold Cazneaux, speaking in 1952.5 The negatives from which The Spirit of Endurance was derived were exposed in 1937 sometime between May 19 and 25, when Cazneaux, his wife Winifred, and their only son, also named Harold, were camping in the Flinders Ranges in South Australia. The family camped for nearly a week on property owned by a Mr George Hunt, during which time Cazneaux made at least three separate 3 × 4 inch exposures on his nitrate film of an isolated and aged river red gum tree. One of these exposures frames the tree vertically, while the other two adopt a horizontal point of view. Interestingly, none of them shows the tree in its entirety (although other pictures taken on this trip by Cazneaux do show it in the distance). For these three exposures Cazneaux came in relatively close, shooting his subject from well below, perhaps standing his tripod in the dried creek bed itself, and looking slightly upwards so that he enhances the tree’s sense of monumentality and grandeur. One consequence of this decision is that the tree appears to be stretching backwards, its roots shaking themselves loose from the soil, leaves stirring in the hot wind. Another is that we get to see much more of the roots of the tree than we do of its leafy canopy, which is largely cropped out of each of the pictures. The spread of these roots is accentuated by the gently rolling hills that make up the horizon line behind. But the tree is the unchallenged subject of this picture. It takes centre stage. It neither stands to one side and frames the scene that extends beyond it, as in the picturesque tradition, nor does it fill the mid-distance, with sky above and earth below. Cazneaux instead focuses our attention on the tree’s trunk, or, more precisely, on the dark hollow within its trunk, a void exposed to us by his camera like a gaping scar (Figure 5.2). By August 1937, Cazneaux had made an exhibition print of the scene and sent it to the London Salon of Photography under the title A Giant of the Arid North (it was listed by them as The Giant of the Arid North). This choice of title

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FIGURE 5.2

Harold Cazneaux (New Zealand/Australia), A Giant of the Arid North, 1937 gelatin silver photograph (from a silver nitrate negative exposed in 1937) 36.9 × 42.0 cm

underlines the anthropomorphic qualities his camera has already accentuated, even as it poses a contrast between the still-living tree and the infertile dryness of the desert that surrounds it. A similar print may have also been shown at the Adelaide Camera Club’s exhibition in August of the same year. It’s not known, in fact, which of the three negatives was used to make these two pictures. There are several extant prints taken from the vertical negative, allowing the tree’s canopy to fill the top third of the picture plane so that the trunk appears to be leaning on a diagonal from the lower right corner back towards the upper left. However, the first published version of the scene appeared in The Home Annual of October 1937 under the title Giant Gum from the Arid Land of the North, Wilpena, S.A., and was a slightly cropped print taken from a horizontal negative now held by the National Library of Australia and listed as J699. This version of the scene clearly shows two fence posts to the left of the tree, as well as others standing in a line back further towards the horizon, unmistakable markers of European habitation, exploitation, and ownership of the land.

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Despite receiving f lattering praise for this picture, by December 1937 Cazneaux had decided to switch to another horizontal negative ( J725), this time showing the same tree trunk from a closer position and framing out the most prominent fence posts. A version of this view, again slightly cropped on all sides, was published in Bank Notes in that month, titled once again A Giant of the Arid North. Another version of this negative, with some manipulation of the tree’s twigs, was reproduced in The Australian Photographic Review in January 1938 as A Flinders Giant. Subsequent prints from this negative often incorporate this kind of manipulation (which the photographer liked to call his “control methods”).6 In this instance, Cazneaux artificially extended the ends of a silhouetted branch to create a much more pronounced and dynamic fork and suppressed certain background details (making the remaining posts barely discernible). Another horizontal version from J725 was hung in London at the Royal Photographic Society in their May 1938 exhibition as A Great Gum of the Arid Lands, although it was illustrated and reviewed in The Amateur Photographer and Cinematographer of May 11, 1938, as A Giant of the Arid North, and then again under this title in that year’s Photograms of the Year, where it was described as “a thing of beauty and a joy forever.” 7 Interestingly, in 1950, Cazneaux sent yet another version of this same image to London for an exhibition of prints by the Sydney Camera Circle, held at the Royal Photographic Society. In this case, however, he reversed the image entirely, so that the tree appears to lean slightly from left to right. This also means that the trunk’s symbolic void now faces to the left, such that we encounter it in a more natural manner, as we “read” the image from left to right (Figure 5.3). This version was reproduced in The Photographic Journal of October 1950, and a similarly reversed bromoil print appeared in The Australasian Photo-Review of December 1952 (with Cazneaux noting that the reversed composition had “stronger impact”).8 Note how this picture’s various symbolic titles, softened background, and manipulated details are juxtaposed with the hard outlines, aggressive centrality, and cropped trunk of the tree in the foreground. Indeed, there is barely any other foreground in this picture. From roots to foliage, the tree subtends the picture plane like a single calligraphic stroke, a surprisingly bold compositional gambit for a photographer known as an anti-modernist. The trunk is to the picture plane as the hollow is to the tree, giving this picture a double wound—the first to the f lesh of the tree and the second to the eye of the beholder. We can already say several things about Cazneaux’s photographic practice (and perhaps about photographic practice in general) based on this one example. Cazneaux was obviously not averse to returning to his various negatives of a given scene and changing his mind about which of them offered the most effective means of producing the ideal image. Contrary to our own tendency to privilege the moment of origin, this image was for him a constantly varying entity, according to the needs of the moment of printing or his own evolving aesthetic preferences. This is also indicated by a frequent shift in titles, sometimes

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FIGURE 5.3

Harold Cazneaux (New Zealand/Australia), The Spirit of Endurance, 1937/1950 gelatin silver photograph (printed c. 1950 from a silver nitrate negative exposed in 1937) 28.1 × 33.1 cm (image)

stressing a metaphoric meaning and sometimes providing exact details of locale and setting (and sometimes both). He also was not afraid to manipulate his prints to achieve his aims, even when this meant significantly altering the original photographic document. For him, the negative was a mere starting point for a long process of considered picture making. As we’ve heard, this picture came in various versions and with many different titles. It was in fact first published as The Spirit of Endurance fairly late in its career, in a magazine called Australia: National Journal on May 1, 1941. This version is one where the tree leans slightly from right to left, as in the first iterations of this composition. It was reproduced along with a statement by Cazneaux headed “My Most ‘Australian’ Picture.” This giant gum tree stands in solitary grandeur on a lonely plateau in the arid Flinders range, near Central Australia—where it has grown up from a sapling through the years, and long before the shade cast from its giant limbs ever gave shelter from heat to white man. The passing of the years

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has left it scarred and marked by the elements—storm, fire, water—unconquered, it speaks to us of a spirit of endurance. Although aged, its widespread limbs speak of a vitality that will carry on for many more years. One day, when the sun shone hot and strong, I stood before this giant in silent wonder and admiration. The hot wind stirred its leafy boughs and some of the living element of this tree passed to me in understanding and friendliness expressing the Spirit of Australia.9 Cazneaux’s choice of this new title, and his explicit association of the spirit of the tree with the “Spirit of Australia,” acknowledges the specific historical circumstances in which his readers were encountering his image. For of course Australia was now at war, caught up in a life and death struggle for survival. At a time when the outcome of that struggle was far from certain, Cazneaux proposes that the Australian landscape—supposed source of his country’s national character— be taken as a symbol of endurance in the face of whatever difficult challenges lay ahead. As his photograph so ably certifies, the tree had endured and so would Australia and its people. But this overtly nationalist sentiment may well have had a more personal element to it as well. For Cazneaux’s son Harold was at that very moment in Tobruk in the deserts of North Africa, engaged in a defence of this outpost against an assault by previously unstoppable German and Italian troops that had begun in April of this same year. Not only had young Harold been present when his father made the original negatives for The Spirit of Endurance, but he even had a small copy of the print with him in Tobruk, as a sort of personal talisman. No wonder Cazneaux wrote about this image with such hopeful passion about survival and fortitude! Tragically, Harold Ramsay Cazneaux died on September 14, 1941, during that famous battle. For the remainder of his life, Cazneaux could not help but associate this image with his personal loss; the endurance it represents must have henceforth been as much his own as his country’s. It is yet further evidence of how the meanings and values of photographic images are constantly shifting and developing, as malleable as the physical form of the photograph itself. This story also underlines the difficulty of describing exactly what a photograph is. This difficulty is made manifest in the labels and captions employed by museums to represent the identity of Cazneaux’s photograph. The entry for this photograph in the 2008 catalogue that accompanied a survey of Cazneaux’s career at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, for example, follows convention in dating the print to the year of the exposure of its negative, 1937, rather than to the date of its production, c. 1950. This particular caption also conf lates all the titles of prints Cazneaux made from other negatives exposed at the same time (they are all listed under the same entry), as if every version of this composition—vertical or horizontal, left-leaning tree or right, bromoil or gelatin silver, made in 1937 or in 1941 or in 1950—all mean the same thing, indeed are the same thing.10 For this curator, The Spirit of Endurance is obviously an abstraction rather than a thing; an image, not a photograph.

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The current on-line catalogue for this institution repeats this misinformation, and never mentions a printing date anywhere in its database. It even claims, in an accompanying discussion of the photograph (now called simply Spirit of Endurance and dated 1937, although this print must be from 1950 or later), that “Cazneaux called this photograph his ‘most Australian picture’.” And yet, as I have just shown you, when he used that phrase Cazneaux was actually referring to a completely different composition and a different photograph. Only in its ninth sentence does this catalogue entry mention that “Cazneaux f lipped the negative he shot of this tree in the enlarger as he felt it best expressed what he was after in the final image.”11 And so, with this apparently synonymous slide of words—from photograph to image—do we come back to this book’s central question, to the questions of what a photograph is and how we are to invent an appropriate discourse for it, how we are to place it in time and space, as a thing in the world and as an entity in history. This labelling is merely following what are now standard museum conventions. But think for a moment what those conventions are saying about the identity of photography, about its place in the world. Such labels refer their viewers to the date of something the museum doesn’t even own (the negative); to something that looks nothing like the item they do own; and to an event that occurred almost 20 years before this object even came into existence (an object, a print, that was in fact made in Sydney, not in South Australia, where the negative was exposed). In a single label, the mode of reproduction of photography—that interaction of negative and positive print at the heart of all analogue photographs—is simultaneously repressed and valorised. My commentary thus far suggests that, in engaging with photography, we are undoubtedly dealing with an unusually complex and slippery phenomenon. The least we can do, then, is be pedantically precise about how we describe, label, caption and catalogue any particular instance of that phenomenon we encounter. Labels and captions need to provide precise information about the nature of the object being described, including both the date of exposure of its negative and the date of its production as a print and/or its distribution as an image. In my view, all that information should be given equal weight. We need to throw off our metaphysical obsession with moments of origin and instead embrace the troubling political economy of dissemination within which photography has always operated. That isn’t going to be easy. There is a lot at stake in the titling, dating, and description of photographs, including their value in the market place and in the museum. We must nevertheless resist the pressure to tell half-truths or to perpetuate outright falsehoods. In an age when lying is being ameliorated with the euphemism “post-truth,” honesty has become a political as much as a moral necessity. For those of us in a position to do so, speaking truth to power is surely the least we can do, even when all we are doing is undertaking the apparently humble labour of cataloguing photographs. But this change in emphasis from origin to dissemination is also going to require a significant reorientation of our understanding of our object of study.

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No longer can we be content with tracing a history of photographs, as if the production of autonomous objects is all that photography is about. But nor can we automatically subsume the photograph to its image, as if the first is a mere footnote to the second. No, henceforth we must find ways to encompass the dynamic relationship between the material and immaterial manifestations of the photographic experience. The aim is not to resolve this relationship and return it to some sort of fixed certainty. On the contrary, we must keep the contradictions alive in order to tease out all their troubling implications. And to do that we must tenaciously address the particularities of both photographs and their images, in whatever mediums and in whatever numbers they might appear. Only when we do this effectively, only when we critically engage the spacing of photograph and image, and only when we articulate this spacing in terms of a process of displacement, can we finally begin to offer a history about, rather than just of, photography. The view I have presented of Cazneaux’s Spirit of Endurance is, of course, only a small part of the history of this photographic image, which now graces the walls of many of Australia’s art museums and is familiar to that country’s citizens as a national icon from its frequent reproduction in all sorts of contexts (having even appeared as a postage stamp). But its story is the story of so many photographs. As we’ve already seen, a negative can be exposed at one time and then printed at another, allowing a photographer to reinterpret a given image many times or even to reinterpret that photographer’s own career in retrospect. To only analyse a photograph at the moment of its first production, as if its entire meaning is caught at its origins, is to misrepresent the nature of photography. To suppress this medium’s reproducibility is, in short, to offer a distorted understanding of both its history and its character.

Notes 1 See Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Creative Actuality: The Photography of Max Dupain, Art Monthly Australia, No. 45 (November 1991), 2–5; Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Max Dupain: Sunbakers,’ History of Photography, 19: 4 (Winter 1995), 349–357; and Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Taking and Making,’ Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001), 82–106, 205–211. For a more recent commentary on the ubiquity of this photograph in Australian culture, see Martyn Jolly, ‘The Sunbaker: Baked in’ (2017): https://martynjolly.com/tag/max-dupain/ (accessed 22 May 2020). 2 Max Dupain, in Sydney Ure Smith ed., Max Dupain: Photographs (Sydney: Ure Smith, 1948), 12. 3 Dupain’s 1975 retrospective was initially curated by Graham Howe, the founding director of the Australian Centre for Photography. After disagreements with photographer David Moore, Howe resigned in June of 1975 and Moore took over the organisation of the exhibition and the selection of the work in it. Howe recalls being shown a print of the 1948 Sunbaker by Dupain, but, when its negative could not be found, it seems Moore encouraged Dupain to use the alternative negative and print a large photograph from it. From an email by Howe to the author, sent on February 4, 2017. 4 Thanks to Shaune Lakin for sharing his research; email to author, January 30, 2017.

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5 Harold Cazneaux, ‘Milestones’ (October 27, 1952), transcript from a lecture given as part of Australia’s Tribute to Harold Cazneaux, National Library of Australia MS 5955. What follows is drawn from Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Endurance: The Photographs of Harold Cazneaux,’ in Natasha Bullock ed., Harold Cazneaux: Artist in Photography (Sydney: Art Gallery of NSW, 2008), 122–131. 6 Cazneaux, ‘Milestones,’ ibid. 7 F.J. Mortimer ed., Photograms of the Year: 1938 (London: Iliffe & Sons, 1938), Plate XLIX. 8 See Jack Cato, ‘The Cazneaux: Being the Biography of Harold Cazneaux,’ Australasian Photo-Review, 59: 12 (December 1952), 721–771. 9 Harold Cazneaux, ‘My Most “Australian” Picture,’ Australia: National Journal (May 1, 1941), 25. 10 Bullock, Harold Cazneaux, 170. 11 See https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/134.1975/ (accessed 24 October 2019).

6 CREATED WORLDS

As already noted, negatives can be manipulated during printing. But if this doesn’t achieve a photographer’s aims, then he or she can also combine one negative with others to produce a composite print. Once again, photography’s history is full of interesting examples. Le Cloitre Saint Trophime, Arles, by Édouard Baldus, for instance, represents this photographer’s evolving effort to solve a particular technical problem: the photographing of a complicated interior that recedes deeply into space and is articulated with areas of light and dark. Dated 1851, the image was made by combining ten paper negatives, cut and joined to match the architectural details of the cloister and painted over to make the final positive image look as seamless as possible. Baldus even included one portion printed from a hand-painted negative1 [Figure 6.1]. This mode of photograph-making, using an extended printing process and employing cut-out paper masks, was supposedly devised by Hippolyte Bayard a little earlier.2 A description of the technique was published by French critic Ernest Lacan in August 1852, with the author suggesting that Bayard’s method gave the photographer the freedom of a painter, allowing sky and landscape to be poetically (artistically, even unnaturally) combined: “Lighter or stronger tones of the clouds, harmonizing or contrasting with the general tonality of the work, will give it great merit.”3 However, one can point to even earlier examples, suggesting that this practice has a long history. A remarkable daguerreotype by the French photographer Marie Charles Isidore Choiselat, The Pavillon de Flore and the Garden of the Tuilleries, was exposed in September 1849, presenting us with a scene in Paris that boasts a dramatically moody sky. That look was achieved by blocking the sky out with a piece of paper or linen for part of the long exposure time, turning the image into a double exposure4 (Figure 6.2). The doctoring of photographs is also demonstrated, to less elevating effect, by a French photographer named Léon Crémière in his albumen print titled Pilote,

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FIGURE 6.1

Édouard Baldus (Germany/France), Le Cloitre Saint Trophime,Arles, c. 1851 salt print photograph from ten paper calotype negatives 36.7 × 41.4 cm

Chien de Saintonge, now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Crémière was well known in the 1860s as a photographer of animals, exhibiting such pictures at the Société française de photographie and at the Exposition Canine at the Tuileries. A visual memorial to the finer points of the noble hound named on its paper label, this photograph by Crémière offers a formal profile view of the animal with head and tail held high. The obedient pose was steadily maintained for the necessary seconds by the assistance of a human hand on the head and a rope attached to the tail. However, these props have been clumsily eliminated in the printing process, so clumsily that the shadow of the hand remains visible against the background wall, like a ghostly imprint of the original negative. The manipulation of appearances was not confined to European photographers. We can, for instance, also find examples of the practice in Japan. A painted albumen photograph from the 1880s, usually ascribed to either Baron Raimund von Stillfried or Kusakabe Kimbei, shows a young woman with a traditional janome umbrella posed in a studio, leaning forwards into what appears to be a rain storm5 (Figure 6.3). Recalling the look of wood-block prints by Hiroshige, the rain slants across the picture in a series of sharp white lines, running diagonally from left to right, some of these lines crossing her body and some

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FIGURE 6.2

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Marie-Charles-Isidore Choiselat (France), The Pavilion de Flore and the Garden of the Tuilleries, September 1849 daguerreotype 15.5 × 18.9 cm (image)

of them blocked by it. The force of the wind is such that parts of her garment have been lifted, revealing the layers beneath. Her clothing has been beautifully painted, with the undergarment rendered in a particularly striking red colour. To achieve all this, modifications have been made to the collodion negative as well as the albumen print. The lines of rain have, for example, been carefully painted onto the negative with a very fine brush, and the threads or wires used to hold up the layers of garment have been touched out, so that they are invisible in the final print. Mio Wakita has suggested that the pose follows the conventions for a bijinga image, an image of a beautiful woman, and even of a sub-category termed abuna-e or “risqué” pictures. Hence the apparently inadvertent exposure of the woman’s undergarments, with the red layer signifying that she is young and unmarried, and hence available to the viewer for erotic fantasy. The photographer assumes that such signs are universal, as the photograph often comes with an added caption that is printed in English rather than Japanese, either Girl in Heavy Storm or Wind Costume.6 The attribution of such photographs is uncertain, given the exchange of negatives between those photographers who worked in Japan in the Meiji period. Kusakabe Kimbei, for example, seems to have begun

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FIGURE 6.3

Baron Raimund von Stillfried (Austria/Japan) or Kusakabe Kimbei (Japan), Wind Costume, 1870s–1890s hand-coloured albumen photograph 22.9 × 17.4 cm

as a dealer in photographic pictures, before working as an assistant in the studios of Felice Beato from about 1863, and then, possibly, for Baron Raimund von Stillfried. By 1880, Kimbei had opened his own studio in Yokohama, a studio that could well have inherited negatives from these two predecessors. The transference of negatives from one professional photographer to another was in fact common during the nineteenth century. For example, when Carleton Watkins went bankrupt in 1875, he was forced to hand over 500 mammoth-plate glass negatives, 100 or more imperial-size negatives, and more than 1,500 stereo negatives to his creditor, John Jay Cook. These negatives then came into the possession of Cook’s partner, Isaiah Taber, who issued his own prints from them for many years.7 An even more complex series of transactions can be traced through the history of photography in New Zealand. In 1894, that country’s leading studio, Burton Brothers, purchased the collodion

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glass negatives of William P. Hart, made by Hart in the 1870s and 1880s. The new owners then printed from these negatives, adding their own trademark inscription. Burton Brothers was bought out in turn by Muir & Moodie, and they too printed from the Hart negatives, again replacing previous signatures with their own. In 2015, New Zealand’s national museum, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, exhibited an unframed inkjet print made from one of Hart’s glass negatives, thus continuing this practice of appropriation into the present.8 Whoever its maker, the artifice of the Japanese photograph is made plain, and indeed is part of its aesthetic appeal. Other kinds of manipulations are harder to notice, or are deliberately made invisible. As we’ve heard, when the need arose, both Baldus and Gustave Le Gray used more than one negative to make a positive print. One of Le Gray’s most celebrated albumen prints, Great Wave, Sète of 1857, was made using two negatives, allowing a curling wave and a cloudy sky to appear in the same remarkable picture. On occasions, he used the same sky negative in two or more different compositions, adding a glowering prescribed mood to each scene in which it appeared9 (Figure 6.4a,b,c). Sometimes Le Gray even combined negatives taken using quite different photographic processes. In one case, titled View of Montmartre, Le Gray used a waxed-paper negative (made in 1849) for the landscape and a collodion-on-glass negative (made in 1850) for the sky, combining the two to produce a single salted paper print. In another example, he used a paper negative made in 1852 for the landscape and a glass negative made in 1856 for the sky, combining them sometime between 1856 and 1859.10 In each case, the picture that results looks “real” but is in fact a strange combination of different times and spaces, offering a hyperreality usually associated with digital imaging rather than nineteenth-century photography. Such combinations soon became a common feature of photographic exhibitions. As is well known, the Swedish-born English photographer Oscar Rejlander shot 32 collodion glass negatives to make his 1857 albumen montage titled Two Ways of Life, or Hope in Repentance. Rejlander photographed no less than 16 figures (many of them members of a touring “pose plastique” troupe, used to holding frozen attitudes), with some of them shot in a mirror to get the right perspective. He used interchangeable negatives, each printed in turn, beginning with the foreground figures, with the rest of the paper protected with black velvet during the process. This allowed Rejlander to produce at least nine different versions of the basic composition and thereby demonstrate what he called “the plasticity of photography.”11 The composition shows two students, one facing a potential life of sin and the other a life of chastity and good works. As Jordan Bear has argued, this was an image that addressed itself to the two possible modes of life facing workers in modern industrial Britain—as one critic put it, to be a “criminal in the grip of the police” or to be toiling “industriously in the workshop.” In the midst of debates about Combination Acts, legislation intended to outlaw the formation of unions, the fact that Rejlander made this image from multiple negatives was itself seen as significant.12

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FIGURE 6.4

Gustave Le Gray (France), Grande Lame—Méditerranée—N° 19, 1857 albumen photograph from collodion glass negatives 32.3 × 41.2 cm; Gustave Le Gray (France), Étude de nuage. Clair-obscur, c. 1856–1857 albumen photograph from collodion glass negatives 32.0 × 41.5 cm; Gustave Le Gray (France), Seascape with a Ship Leaving Port, 1857 albumen photograph from collodion glass negatives 31.3 × 40.3 cm

Rejlander’s experiments led Englishman Henry Peach Robinson to put aside portraiture and landscape and to concentrate instead on the artistic possibilities of combination printing. Over the years, he published 11 books and numerous articles on artistic photography, the most inf luential of which was Pictorial Effect in Photography, Being Hints on Composition and Chiaroscuro for Photographers, issued in 1869.13 In his books, Robinson emphasised traditional artistic principles of pictorial unity and grace, and concluded with a chapter on combination printing (suggesting that “a method that will not admit of modifications of the artist cannot be art”). Most importantly, Robinson argued that “the materials used by photographers differ only in degree from those employed by the painter and sculptor … a subject must be imagined, and imagination is art.”14 The f lexibility of composition made possible by the use of multiple negatives (and the fact that it allowed the actual printing from those negatives to be done by assistants)

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FIGURE 6.5

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Henry Peach Robinson (England), Fading Away, 1858 albumen photograph from five collodion glass negatives 23.8 × 37.5 cm

facilitated both the implementation of such an imagination and the multiple production of its photographic manifestations. Robinson’s best-known albumen print, Fading Away, was made in at least two versions in 1858 from five separate collodion glass negatives, with an extract from a poem by Shelly printed on the mat (Figure 6.5). Some criticised the fact that the light in the picture seemed to have no coherent source, a result of its complicated means of production. Others complained that it was too disturbingly realistic.15 His Sleep of 1867 was composed from four negatives, and it exhibits similarly odd juxtapositions and a distorted perspective. This runs counter to Robinson’s own warning to other photographers wanting to make combination prints not to depart from “truth to nature,” especially if such departures “shall be discovered by the closest scrutiny.”16 But such scrutiny was inevitable, especially as evidence of “mechanical” elaboration of a photographic print was equated with a type of manual labour considered antithetical to art.17 The critic for The British Journal of Photography, for example, immediately noticed the print’s visual inconsistencies: [Robinson’s] picture entitled Sleep, appears to have been printed from several negatives, from the fact of minute portions of external nature being

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visible through the wooden window frames. A shrub in a f lower pot, behind the sleepers, is somewhat out of focus, although the figures in the foreground and the waves in the extreme distance are alike sharp—effects which are likely to attract the attention of the matter-of-fact observer.18 Despite these criticisms, Robinson continued to be quite open about his techniques, sometimes describing them in considerable detail. He tells us, for example, that the background for When the Day’s Work is Done, produced in 1877 from six negatives in total, was composed from two of these negatives. They were not printed separately, he said, but were instead “cut down with a diamond and mounted on a piece of glass rather larger than the whole picture, the edges being placed in contact, making, in fact, one large negative of the interior of the cottage.”19 But this wasn’t the only way he worked. Another important photograph, Bringing Home the May from 1862, was printed from nine separate negatives to present a bas-relief frieze of female figures in rural costume, pensive and self-absorbed. Each of the glass negatives used to compose this frieze was printed one at a time onto a single sheet of specially made albumen paper, with Robinson or his assistants rolling up the unexposed portion in black velvet during the extended printing process. As a consequence of the difficulty of this printing, Robinson believed that only one “moderately good” copy was achieved. However it was made, contemporary viewers appreciated the harmony of the overall composition as well as the soothing reference to a pre-industrial English tradition.20 In this case, then, an experimental photographic technique was used to propagate conservative social and cultural values. The same could be said for the work of Robinson’s greatest rival, Peter Henry Emerson. In seeking to represent the ideal and the imaginary through combination printing achieved in the darkroom, through trickery if you like, Robinson—it seemed to some other photographers—had lost touch with the ultimate touchstone of aesthetic judgment: nature. Only a rigorous return to nature via a form of optical naturalism—the kind of naturalism seen in, for example, Impressionist painting—could ensure photography’s establishment as a viable, modern art form. In keeping with the Impressionists’ “scientific” optical approach to painting, Emerson, a doctor by training, argued for photography as a “Pictorial Art.” He claimed that the artist’s task was not to imitate other paintings (as Robinson had done), but rather to emulate the effects of nature on the eye (whatever the medium one was using). Emerson also insisted that the photographer must be true to the place and people he is depicting; accuracy of depiction and action was essential to naturalistic photography, if, that is, it was to attain the look of truth, if it was to be true to nature (in this case, the nature of rural labour). With that in mind, Emerson took to photographing traditional English pre-industrial rural workers, producing what amounted to folkloric documents of a dying way of life. Between 1886 and 1895, he published eight books on his ideas and photographs, often generating controversy and debate.21

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According to Emerson, writing in 1889, Nothing in nature has a hard outline, but everything is seen against something else, and its outlines fade gently into that something else, often so subtlely that you cannot quite distinguish where one ends and the other begins. In this mingled decision and indecision, this lost and found, lies all the charm and mystery of nature.22 To achieve that end in his photographs, Emerson played down contrasts and manipulated his depth of field. By this and other means, he deliberately blurred more distant planes and areas surrounding the main object in each picture, and emphasised certain details in the shadows. Ironically, this had the long-term effect of licensing photographic artists to forget the accurate rendition of “reality” and think instead of making pictures (rather than pictures of something) with their chosen medium. Taken in 1886, A Stiff Pull remains one of his best-known pictures, being published as a photogravure as Plate IV in an 1888 book titled Pictures of East Anglian Life (Figure 6.6b). In his Preface, Emerson describes it as exemplary of naturalistic photography of the sort he was interested in promoting. As a rule, Emerson rejected the retouching of photographs or negatives. Despite his own rhetoric, however, this photograph is in fact a combination print; to make the final version, Emerson has removed a tree that once sat at the right on the horizon line and replaced a placid sky with a dramatic, cloudy one [Figure 6.6a]. The use of two negatives made these compositional adjustments possible, adding drama and mood without disturbing that softness of focus this photographer associated with naturalism. Emerson’s selective use of focus here deliberately concentrates our eyes on one particular place in the picture, on the blade of the plough and its clod of earth. Only this element is still, with all else caught in f lux.

FIGURE 6.6

Peter Henry Emerson (Cuba/England), “A Stiff Pull”, 1885 albumen silver photograph 22.9 × 29.1 cm; Peter Henry Emerson (Cuba/England), A Stiff Pull. [Suffolk.], 1888 photogravure 20.8 × 28.6 cm

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In this picture, everything is in motion, subject to movement and time, except for the act of labour itself.23 Oscar Rejlander had once prophesied that “the time will come when a work will be judged by its merits and not be the method of its production.”24 Despite Emerson’s own emphasis on the importance of precisely that method of production, Rejlander’s creed was the one that now held sway amongst many amateur photographers with artistic ambitions. Those photographers entered into a new era of experimentation, seeking the expression of mood rather than mechanical accuracy, and searching for techniques that would give their prints texture and colour as well as truth to nature. As the French photographer Robert Demachy argued: Let the amateur photographer use as much oil, gum or platinum as he likes; let him touch up his photograph with paint or attack it with a scraper: that is perfectly all right with me, so long as he shows me a picture such as the next man could not produce … Perhaps we will be accused of effacing the specific character of photography. That is indeed our intention.25 Once again, then, the state of the negative (always the key to the “specific character of photography”) was a significant issue in this kind of photography. Any manipulation of negative or print in the darkroom was now allowed as long as the ensuing photographic print offered the right kind of phenomenological experience to the viewer. Negatives were combined, f lipped, or retouched by a vast range of ambitious photographers, from Demachy and Edward Steichen to Anne Brigman and even Paul Strand.26 Propagated by elite camera clubs and their journals, the aesthetic standards of Pictorial photography—softly focused, impressionistic, symbolically suggestive, socially conservative—soon became a set of conventions that could be emulated wherever the photographer happened to be situated. You could make an evocative Pictorial photograph in your backyard as easily as in a major city or before a magnificent landscape. For both these reasons (its conventionality and its placelessness), Pictorialism quickly became an international style, as readily found in Japan, Australia, or New Zealand as in the United States or Europe. This continued to be so right up into the 1940s.27 As a consequence, a provincial photographer like George Chance, resident in Dunedin in the south of New Zealand, could make a photograph in the 1920s that was simultaneously specific to his locale and global in its aesthetic values. He might photograph a stand of beech trees in his neighbourhood, but he would then print this image through a textured screen (itself a photograph of a piece of wallpaper featuring finely-hatched lines that he photocopied onto a piece of glass) to give his scene a slightly other-worldly, blurred appearance. When necessary, he would apply washes to his negative or retouch it with a pencil before printing the image through his screen onto a piece of warm-toned bromide paper. Sometimes, depending on the scene, Chance would also use a second “cloud” negative and make a combination print, much as Emerson had done.

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This final print might be lightly bleached and then sepia toned, all in order to accentuate its tonal depths and lustre. Such a photograph was exhibited with his own camera club but also in London with the Royal Photographic Society. In both places, these various manipulations were admired as necessary steps towards an aesthetically elevating photographic experience.28 The use of a second negative to patch some clouds into a scene that otherwise wouldn’t have them was a standard procedure during the nineteenth century. It’s worth returning to this era for a moment to consider this practice in more detail. As we’ve heard, Gustave Le Gray employed it to enhance the appearance of some of his seascapes.29 Le Gray, however, was not the only French photographer making landscape pictures by this means. Between 1858 and 1860, his compatriot Camille Silvy produced four versions of his photograph River Scene, France, each quite differently composed and printed and using at least two negatives to produce the dense atmospheric effects in the sky above the river [Figure 6.7]. He merged these negatives using India ink finely applied at the join with a thin brush. For one print, he drew an extra bank of cloud onto the negative, and also added some trees. All this helped to enhance the appeal of his main subject: the iconography of leisure on the outskirts of the urban metropolis of Paris. The people in the scene have been carefully arranged, with Silvy telling us in an annotated version that the group on the river bank were “railway workers.” He

FIGURE 6.7

Camille Silvy (France/England), Untitled [River Scene, France], negative 1858, print 1860s albumen photograph from two collodion glass negatives 25.7 × 35.6 cm

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also tells us that the person actually operating the camera was Félix Moutarde, and that Moutarde accidentally included some of the bridge he was standing on, along with a fragment of the portable dark tent he was using to prepare the glass plates used as negatives; these details were burned out by Silvy in the darkroom.30 A copy of this photograph was shown in the third annual exhibition of the Photographic Society of Scotland in Edinburgh in 1858 (along with other combination prints by Rejlander and Robinson) and favourably reviewed as the most perfect photographic landscape produced up to that time. As one critic wrote, “it is impossible to compose with more artistry and taste than M. Silvy has done … in which one doesn’t know whether to admire more the profound sentiment of the composition or the perfection of the details.”31 But the photograph was also seen by some British observers to have a hidden political agenda (an assumption prompted by a coup in France engineered by Napoleon III in 1852): a singular picture with a dark thunder cloud ready to burst, black as midnight, yet clear and transparent in the shadows. Is this a true portrait of that country? Is it a method of speaking out, yet escaping the fate of a political martyr? To these questions I cannot reply, as I do not profess to be able to solve such enigmas.32 This presumption, that Silvy might be “speaking out,” is based on the writer’s knowledge that the photographer has added elements to the picture to enhance its appearance, that the picture has been carefully, even actively, composed, and not just taken. In 1859, Silvy produced an even more complex composition, titled either Twilight or Evening Star [Figure 6.8]. Two people, a man and a boy, stand together under a street lamp, with the street itself receding into an indistinct distance, its features blurred by a descending fog and the onset of night. Identifying suppressed but visible joins in the print, Weston Naef has described its manufacture as follows: “One negative was required for the street lamp, another for the foggy background, a third for the architecture at the right, and a fourth for the two standing figures.”33 Mark Haworth-Booth speculates that the light in the lamp may also have been drawn onto the glass negative, and points to the deliberately blurred figure in the background as a sign of the photographer’s interest in depicting “the fugitive” and, therefore, of the picture’s modernity.34 Oscar Wilde could almost have had this picture in mind when he wrote his essay The Decay of Lying, published in 1891. He has one of his characters defend the ethos of art for art’s sake with the following example: Where, if not from the impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows? At present, people see fogs, not because they are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects.35

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FIGURE 6.8

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Camille Silvy (France/England), Twilight, 1859–1860 albumen photograph from glass negatives 27.4 × 22 cm

In these various examples, the “faked” photograph was, and sometimes still is, regarded as something capable of offering a truth that could not otherwise be represented. A similar argument was made to justify the making of enlarged combination prints to represent the combat experience of the First World War. Between 1916 and 1919, a number of exhibitions of photographs were held at the Grafton Galleries in London and elsewhere (France, Australia, Canada, and the United States) to inform and shape public opinion about the war. Initiated

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by Lord Beaverbrook, eventually to be made Minister of Information and therefore the British government’s chief propagandist, these exhibitions featured a number of gigantic photographs of battle scenes. Standing at about 3 × 6 metres, Dreadnoughts of the Battlefield, for example, was printed in sepia in separate panels by Raines & Co. in 1918 from a number of negatives shot either at the front or behind the lines by the Canadian photographer Ivor Castle. It was then coloured with spray guns before being touched up by hand. Claimed to be the “largest photograph in the world,” and to have been taken “during a recent advance on the Western front,” no mention was made of its composite means of production; instead, it was praised for being “so vivid that it brings the realization of modern battle into the heart of London.”36 Australian photographer Frank Hurley was another who indulged in such techniques, despite the vehement opposition of some of his superiors. He had delivered a paper to the Photographic Society of New South Wales on composite printing some time before the outbreak of war, exhibiting an image composed from several negatives that showed different animals photographed at the zoo gathered together in a single scene, a scene given unity by its accompanying cloudy sky.37 Using masking and vignette techniques, a composite print would be made and then retouched to hide any joins, before this print was re-photographed to produce a final negative. After being told he could not include composite prints of the Australian war effort at these London exhibitions, Hurley threatened to resign from his position as an official war photographer. Based on his frustrating experience at the front, he believed that it was “impossible to secure effects [such as shell bursts], without resorting to combination pictures.”38 Eventually, he received permission to make six mural-size images, as long as they were clearly labelled as having been made from multiple negatives. Although they featured actual battle sites, some of these negatives were also taken of rehearsals and some of re-enactments, and the fictional appearance of the final prints drew some adverse comments from soldiers.39 The Raid, for example, combined 12 negatives while purporting to show Australian troops advancing to the attack supported by airplanes, one of which has crashed in f lames [Figure 6.9]. Over 6 metres wide, the completed composition used images shot during prebattle manoeuvres along with others taken many miles away in Palestine. Hurley described it as “realistic of battle; the atmospheric effects of battle smoke [being] particularly fine.”40 Another example, Morning After the Battle of Paschendaele, was described by one reviewer as “taken under machine gun fire,” despite being composed from several different negatives exposed at different times, including one of a magnificently moody sky, made all the more so by having had its clouds darkened during the printing process. Hurley called such images “Photographic Impression Pictures,” a term borrowed from the Pictorialist rhetoric of camera clubs.41 Fake though these scenes may be, many contemporary observers claimed that a viewing of them “stirs the imagination to a perhaps more intimate realization of what prodigies of devotion and sacrifice those shell swept trenches of Flanders witnessed.”42

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FIGURE 6.9

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Frank Hurley (Australia/France), The Raid [77. An Episode after the Battle of Zonnebeke], 1917–1918 gelatin silver photograph from 12 glass negatives [subtitle: ”Australian infantry moving forward to resist a counter attack. On the extreme right a machine brought down in flames is burning fiercely. Our advance is supported by bombing planes, whilst the enemy is supporting his attack with a heavy barrage.”] original mural c. 472.4 × 609.6 cm

These examples accentuate what has always been a commonplace practice among professional photographers, the combination and/or manipulation of negatives in order to create, enhance, or significantly transform the resulting photographic print. Sometimes this practice is intended to merely idealise or elevate the subject of that photograph; sometimes the intention has been to deceive, whether for profit or propaganda purposes.43 Needless to say, the ethical distinction between these two intentions is a permeable one. But whatever the intention of the photographer or picture editor, a viewer of photographic images should automatically set aside any naïve assumptions about the truthfulness of the photograph and recognise that all such images are manipulations of one sort or another. The making of every photograph involves the calculated calibration of visual information captured in an exposure to light, even as it also involves the privileging of just one moment of time over many others and the f lattening of a moving, three-dimensional world onto a geometrically proportioned, twodimensional (and often monochromatic) surface. In other words, photographers intervene in every photograph we ever see. Whether by merely directing; or by directly interfering in the scene to be captured; or by selecting, cropping, excluding, and in other ways making pictorial

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choices; or by manipulating the tones of the negative or print in the darkroom or on screen, photographs are always made, not merely taken. As no less a figure than Edward Steichen wrote in 1903, “every photograph is a fake from start to finish, a purely impersonal, unmanipulated photograph being practically impossible.”44 The introduction of digital technologies merely underlines this axiom.45 In 1983, the American artist Nancy Burson, for example, used some computer experts to help her construct a series of composites out of existing photographs.46 To make Mankind, she scanned photographic images of an Asian man, a Caucasian man, and a Negroid man into a computer and then layered them over each other, weighted according to then-current population statistics. The finished portrait resembles a photograph, not a particularly good one, but good enough to put a face to an otherwise invisible concept. In 1993, an illustrator for Time magazine adopted a similar approach, digitally merging the faces of 14 models, supposedly representing the racial mix of the USA in that year. This ideal woman (why not a man? why a naked woman?) was 15% Anglo-Saxon, 17.5% Middle Eastern, 17.5% African, 7.5% Asian, 35% Southern European, and 7.5% Hispanic. Both these examples used digital technology. But the idea of layering multiple exposures to create a single portrait is an old one, and not dependent on any particular photographic technology. In 1877, Francis Galton, a promoter of eugenics, proposed making up composite albumen photographs printed from multiple exposures on a single glass plate negative (e.g. of the faces of criminals) to establish a series of mean human “types.”47 This history shadows all efforts to produce an ideal visage through the manipulation of photographic portraits, a commonplace aspect of contemporary mass culture. The March 2008 issue of Vogue magazine contained no less than 144 photographic images that had been manipulated (all by one company, Box Studios, consisting of 80 employees headed by Pascal Dangin). About 107 of these manipulated images were advertisements and 36 were fashion shots, and then there was the cover image of an almost unrecognisable Drew Barrymore, originally shot by Steven Meisel. Interestingly, Dangin has said that he aims to use his digital tools to restore images to the look of particular kinds of film-based photographs; he adds red, for example, to grass in order to make it look more like the muted, multi-layered green produced by Kodachrome film.48 In this case, at least, digital manipulation is deployed to make photographic images look more photographic. So the question should never be about whether a photograph has been manipulated; it should be about how, and to what ends, that manipulation has taken place. One might well ask those very questions of a contemporary iteration of Pictorialist photography, the work of the German artist Andreas Gursky. Gursky’s images are often (but not always) combination prints. More precisely, they are often made using digital manipulations in which a scene has been improved through the removal of certain details, or enhanced by the addition of others, so that an image ends up spliced with itself, extended, made more of, expanded, re-invented.49

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In Rhein II, made in 1999, for example, Gurksy carefully eliminated a group of buildings on the far bank of the river, leaving the picture unsullied by any deviations from its distillation of the world into a series of disarmingly parallel lines. Other scenes, such as a diptych showing the interior of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (1994) or of a seemingly vast building, Atlanta (1994), are made by combining a number of images shot at right angles to one another. The photograph titled 99 Cent (1999) was similarly composed out of multiple exposures taken in a shop in Los Angeles, allowing the photographer to, among other things, multiply the number of items on sale, enhance the scene’s colours, and add a ref lection to the shop’s ceiling [Figure 6.10]. Nevertheless, details of exactly how this artist’s photographs have been made are hard to come by, even in catalogues purporting to be about his work (they talk about the pictures, but in fact don’t say much about the work required to make them).50 What we do know is that, to capture the details of a given scene, Gursky typically uses two large-format film cameras, positioned side by side, one with a slight wide-angle lens and the other with a standard lens. The negatives from both are then scanned and the data obtained is digitally manipulated to make composite images that resemble photographs. These are then printed at large scale. So seamless are these combinations that it’s hard to know when or where any deception begins and ends. In every case, however they have been made, Gursky’s images shimmer with repetitions and intricacies and spatial expansions beyond the capacity of the human eye to encompass and comprehend on its own; it’s a familiar world made into an abstract one, or, if you like, an abstract one made to seem natural and familiar. It’s hard to know which is which. In front of a Gursky photograph, we are caught uncertainly, disturbingly, between these

FIGURE 6.10

Andreas Gursky (Germany/USA), 99 Cent, 1999 chromogenic photograph from multiple negatives 207.01 × 336.55 cm. Andreas Gursky, VG BILD-KUNST, Bonn.

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two options, between the intensely real and the frightening un-real.51 This alone imparts a sense that something is awry—not just with the picture, but also with the world-view it represents. It’s important, then, that these pictures are presented as photographs (rather than, say, as paintings), for this makes a distinct difference to the way we regard them. Their photographicness holds us in suspension before them, not sure whether to give in to belief or to exercise scepticism. In this sense, it doesn’t seem to matter whether the subjects of these photographs are rows of shoes, the f loor of the Chicago Stock Exchange, North Koreans in a stadium, or a view of the River Rhine. What matters is how each of them, as photographs, induces a certain affect in anyone who looks at them. So, what is this affect? And how does it relate to what the photographs are about, or even to what they are? Are Gursky’s hyperbolic, abstracted photographic images—in their size, mode of production, range of subjects, and prohibitive cost—the perfect artistic manifestation of global capitalism, as some commentators have suggested? Or are they also somehow about this capitalism, allowing us a critical purchase on the social and political complexities of our own historical moment?52 Pamela Lee is one scholar who equates the meaning of the pictures with their pictorial characteristics and those pictorial characteristics with the artist’s use of multiple matrices. As she points out, in any of Gursky’s images, [no] matter just where things are plotted relative to the standard coordinates of foreground, middle ground, and background, nearly everything seems available to the same inexhaustible visuality … as if everything was equalized by some invisible and ambient wash. No focal points structure our response to the picture, because the resolution is everywhere the same. Lee equates this “everywhereness,” “unmoored from both the territorial and material,” with global capital itself, which similarly works, she says, to “bathe all social relations in an ambient and allover wash.”53 Gursky’s photograph of an Amazon warehouse (Amazon, 2016), to take but one example, is more than just a pseudo-document of endless rows of books waiting to be shipped to online customers. The photograph itself is this corporation’s doppelgänger. It is a luxury good enabled by the same digital economy that makes Amazon’s own business model possible. And it provides an equivalent perspective on the world it exploits, a perspective simultaneously omnipresent, pitiless, placeless, and global. However, on some occasions, this “everywhereness,” and its lack of a specific focus, can offer a way of understanding the world that might not otherwise be possible. Consider, for example, a series of six photographic images depicting the world’s oceans released by Gursky in 2010. Employing numerous digital files of data derived from high-definition satellite imagery, Gursky has fashioned panoramic composite views of those parts of the world usually given short shrift,

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those spaces between land masses that give that land definition, the absence that makes their presence visible. The scale of Gursky’s pictures absorbs us into these interstitial spaces, visually immersing us in their ambience. Ocean III, for example, features an extraterrestrial view of the Pacific, framed by the edges of Australia on one side and the Americas on the other [Figure 6.11]. The blue expanse between them, occasionally dotted with islands—most of them tiny but for the two major islands that make up New Zealand—has been digitally inf lected with variable depths and stretched out of shape to fit a rectangular format. Inspired by Gursky’s viewing of graphic f light-path simulations on his TV monitor during a trip from Dubai to Melbourne, this is a photograph of the absence of land, of a nothing which makes everything else possible. They are depictions of negative space. Contrived though they are, Gursky’s photographs of these negative spaces again manage to make visible that which is usually invisible, the “ocean within us,” as the Tongan intellectual Epeli Hau’ofa once put it—the otherness that makes any identity whatsoever possible, including both photography’s and our own.54 Like his nineteenth-century predecessors, Gursky offers up photography as an artful fiction, a fiction made possible by the combination of multiple images and by our own naïve faith in the veracity of photographic seeing. As the artist says,

FIGURE 6.11

Installation view of Andreas Gursky (Germany), Ocean III, 2010 chromogenic photograph. Collection of Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, New Zealand, purchased with funds from the Graeme Maunsell Trust, M A Serra Trust, Lyndsay Garland Trust and Dingley Trust, 2012 [installation photograph by Jennifer French, 2012]. Andreas Gursky, VG BILDKUNST, Bonn.

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“while my images are comprised of many details—which you can explore in depth because of the high resolution—that’s not what they are about. Each one is always a world of its own, created.”55 As we’ve seen, across photography’s history, the medium’s veracity has been closely tied to the role accorded the negative in the production of a photograph. When this role is made noticeable—when, for example, it is clear that more than one negative has been used—it draws attention to the fact that such a photograph is indeed “created” rather than simply taken. This is often said to undermine any photograph’s claim to be a truthful representation of what it purports to depict. For many, the negative is the source of a photograph’s ethical, or even moral probity; if the negative is not pure, if it has been mucked around with in some way, if it has been allowed to be promiscuous, then any photograph made from that negative is necessarily tainted. And yet, a significant number of photographers have argued exactly the opposite: that a greater truth than mere appearance can be rendered in a photograph only through the use of multiple and/or retouched negatives. For these photographers, true insight is possible only when the negative’s impurity is taken for granted and even exploited. The negative, it turns out, is a site where all these opposing forces are held in a state of irresolution, where every potential outcome is available but none is assured. No wonder, then, that the negative is so often seen as photography’s most dangerous element, the element to be feared, controlled, and, if possible, suppressed.

Notes 1 Malcolm Daniel, The Photographs of Édouard Baldus, 21–22. 2 Despite this claim about Bayard, “no prints or negatives evincing his use of the technique survive.” See Mia Fineman, Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012), 260, note 4. 3 Ernest Lacan, ‘Épreuves photographiques avec ceils,’ La Lumière (August 7, 1852), 53. 4 See the entry on this 1849 daguerreotype in Quentin Bajac and Dominique de FontRéaulx, Le daguerréotype français: un objet photographique (Paris: Musée d’Orsay, 2003), 217–218. 5 Both the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art list this photograph as a work by Baron Raimund von Stillfried, but it has also been credited by others to Kusakabe Kimbei. In a section of her book titled ‘The Precarious Issue of Attribution,’ Mio Wakita offers the following salutary reservation: “I basically take the stance of regarding all the images included in studio albums bearing Kimbei’s studio stamp as part of Kimbei’s oeuvre … In this sense, I regard Kimbei as a producer of the ‘Kimbei’ brand rather than solely an image maker.” Mio Wakita, Staging Desires: Japanese Femininity in Kusakabe Kimbei’s Nineteenth-Century Souvenir Photography (Berlin: Reimer, 2013), 21. Luke Gartlan transcribes the name as “Kinbei” and points out that there is only limited evidence that this photographer ever worked for von Stillfried. See Luke Gartlan, A Career in Japan: Baron Raimund von Stillfried and Early Yokohama Photography (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 143, 222. On the iconography of the umbrella in Japanese imagery, see Julia Meech, Rain and Snow: The Umbrella in Japanese Art (New York: Japan Society, 1993), and especially 80–81. 6 See Wakita, Staging Desires, 105–106. 7 See Weston Naef, Carleton Watkins in Yosemite (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008), 9.

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8 See Athol McCredie, New Zealand Photography Collected (Wellington: Te Papa Press, 2015). 9 See Marnin Young, ‘Photography and the Philosophy of Time,’ Nonsite.org, #19 (2018): https://nonsite.org/article/photography-and-the-philosophy-of-time (accessed September 11, 2019). 10 See Aubenas, Gustave Le Gray 1820–1884, 350. 11 See Virginia Didier, ‘Rejlander The Two Ways of Life,’ in Alison Smith ed., Exposed: The Victorian Nude (London: Tate, 2001), 79; O.G. Rejlander, ‘On Photographic Composition: with a description of Two Ways of Life,’ Journal of the Photographic Society of London, 4 (April 21, 1858) as reprinted in Peter C. Bunnell ed., The Photography of O.G. Rejlander: Two Selections (New York: Arno Press, 1979); and Edgar Yoxall Jones, Father of Art Photography: O.J. Rejlander 1813–1875 (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society Ltd, 1973), 7. See also Leif Wigh, Oscar Gustave Rejlander 1813 (?)– 1875 (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1998) and Lori Paul et al., Oscar G. Rejlander: Artist Photographer (Ottawa: Canadian Photography Institute of the National Gallery of Canada, 2018). It is worth noting that the best surviving version of Rejlander’s composition is a carbon print copy made in 1925, 50 years after the photographer’s death. 12 Jordan Bear, ‘Dangerous Combinations: Photography, Illusion, and the Conspiracy of Labour in 1850s Britain,’ Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 32:2 ( June 2010), 139– 152. See also Jordan Bear, ‘Shadowy Organization: Combination Photography, Illusion, and Conspiracy,’ Disillusioned: Victorian Photography and the Discerning Subject (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), 32–52, 167–168. Daniel Novak makes a direct comparison of the work of Rejlander and Robinson and the thinking of Karl Marx about work in general: “Like the photographic negative, the laborer must be able to produce an infinite number of self-portraits in perfect condition, despite the increasingly imperfect condition of the ‘original’ laboring body.” See Daniel Novak, ‘Labors of Likeness: Photography and Labor in Marx’s Capital,’ Criticism, 49: 2 (Spring 2007), 125–150. 13 H.P. Robinson, Pictorial Effect in Photography: Being hints on composition and chiaroscuro for photographers, to which is added a chapter on combination printing (London: Piper and Carter, 1869). 14 Henry Peach Robinson, ‘Paradoxes of Art, Science and Photography,’ Photo-American, 3 (May 1892), 179; Henry Peach Robinson, ‘Preface,’ Picture Making by Photography (London, 1884), np. 15 After Robinson had presented a paper titled ‘On Printing Photographic Pictures from Several Negatives’ at a meeting of the Photographic Society of Scotland on March 13, 1860, a number of commentators published criticisms and complaints. For details, see Margaret Harker, Henry Peach Robinson: Master of Photographic Art 1830–1901 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 26–28. Some critics nevertheless praised Robinson’s Fading Away of 1858, with the Illustrated London News of March 16, 1861, reporting that “this painfully real little picture group for a short season attracted groups of admirers round the windows of the photograph dealers.” See Brian Lukacher, ‘Powers of Sight: Robinson, Emerson, and the Polemics of Pictorial Photography,’, Pictorial Effect, Naturalistic Vision, 33. But others objected to both the realism or otherwise of the picture, and the techniques used to achieve it. 16 Henry Peach Robinson, Pictorial Effect in Photography, 198, as quoted in Jane Fletcher, ‘From the Archive: Sleep,’ Archive (Bradford: National Museum of Photography, Film & Television, January 2005), 17. 17 For an extended commentary on Robinson’s “mechanical” techniques and the critical response they received, see Emily Talbot, ‘“Mechanism” made Visible: Process and Perception in Henry Peach Robinson’s Composite Photographs,’ History of Photography, 41: 2 (2017), 141-158. Steve Edwards places such commentaries in a broader social and political context, arguing that “the overarching issue in the midcentury texts is one of petite-bourgeois uncertainty and unease.” See Steve Edwards,

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18 19

20

21

22 23

24 25

26 27

28 29

The Making of English Photography: Allegories (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 124. Unknown, The British Journal of Photography (22 November 1867), 556, as quoted in Fletcher, Archive, 17. Robinson, as quoted in Ellen Handy, ‘Pictorial Beauties, Natural Truths, Photographic Practices,’ Pictorial Effect, Naturalistic Vision: The Photographs and Theories of Henry Peach Robinson and Peter Henry Emerson (Norfolk, Virginia: Chrysler Museum, 1994), 14. As a consequence, Robinson issued smaller copies photographed from this master print. Copies of Bringing Home the May continued to be made from his negatives in subsequent decades, some as late as 1980. See Harker, Henry Peach Robinson, 34–38. A critic writing in the Photographic News of November 7, 1862, had this to say about Bringing Home the May: “It is harmonious in sentiment; the landscape is an unquestionable spring landscape: the children and damsels—there is too much of life about them to be perpetually called ‘figures’—are in the spring of life; the whole picture is pervaded by the feeling of springtime. There is harmony in the action, purpose, occupation, and pose in each figure, which perfectly connects them as a whole, although divided into separate groups; and there is a feeling of gladness and freshness expressed in every part of the picture. It is harmonious as a composition, harmonious in gradation of tones; there is perfect gradation in the sunlit and well pronounced foreground objects, and gradation in the distant hazy woods.” Such was its popularity, the work was also reproduced as a wood engraving in the Illustrated London News in 1863. For overviews of Emerson’s work, see Nancy Newhall, P.H. Emerson: The Fight for Photography as a Fine Art (New York: Aperture, 1975) and John Taylor, The Old Order and The New: P.H. Emerson and Photography 1885–1895 (Munich: Prestel, 2006). Peter Henry Emerson, Naturalistic Photography for Students of Art (London: Sampson, Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1889), 150. See Charles Palermo, ‘The World in the Ground Glass: Transformations in P.H. Emerson’s Photography,’ The Art Bulletin, LXXXIX: 1 (March 2007), 130–147. Emerson claimed, in Naturalistic Photography, that “printing in clouds is admissible because, if well done, a truer impression of the scene is rendered.” See Robin Kelsey, Photography and the Art of Chance (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2015), 354, and 126–148; and Douglas Nickel, ‘Peter Henry Emerson: The Mechanics of Seeing,’ in Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimpson eds., The Meaning of Photography (Williamstown, MA: Clark Art Institute, 2008), 59–75. Emerson also had a number of his other photogravure plates retouched to add or remove clouds or other details. See Taylor, The Old Order and The New, 52–56. Rejlander first makes this argument in his 1858 article for the Journal of the Photographic Society of London; see it in Bunnell, The Photography of O.G. Rejlander, 192. See Robert Demarchy, ‘On Why I Adopted the Gum Process’ (1897), ‘On the Difference Between a good Photograph and an Artistic one’ (1899), ‘On English Photographic Art’ and three responses (1906), in Bill Jay, Robert Demarchy: Photographs and Essays (London: Academy Editions, 1974), 22–24, 29–31, 37, 38–39. See, for example, the impressive array of examples offered in Mia Fineman’s Faking It. For two overviews of Pictorial photography, see Philip Prodger et al., Impressionist Camera: Pictorial Photography in Europe 1888–1918 (London: Merrell, 2006) and Alison Nordström ed., Truth Beauty: Pictorialism and the Photograph as Art 1845–1945 (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 2008). See William Main, ‘George Chance (1885–1963): His work and Inf luence on New Zealand Photography,’ George Chance: Photographs (Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 1986), 13–14. See three examples of seascapes by Le Gray that each share the same sky in Fineman, Faking It, 48–49.

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30 See Mark Haworth-Booth, Camille Silvy: River Scene, France (LA: Getty Museum Studies on Art, 1992) and Mark Haworth-Booth, Camille Silvy: Photographer of Modern Life (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2010), 22–25. 31 The critic is quoted in Gordon Baldwin et al., Masterpieces of the J. Paul Getty Museum: Photographs (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1999), 40. A later critic was less kind: “the extreme darkness of the sky was not in harmony with the tone of the rest of the landscape, and it was easy to perceive that the sky and the body of the landscape had been printed from two different negatives.” Unknown, in the Photographic Journal (February 15, 1860), 158, as quoted Haworth-Booth, Camille Silvy: River Scene, France, 89. 32 Unknown [‘Sel d’Or’], 1859, in Liverpool’s Photographic Journal, as quoted in Haworth-Booth, Camille Silvy: River Scene, 17. 33 Weston Naef, Photographers of Genius at the Getty (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2004), 40. 34 Haworth-Booth, Camille Silvy: Photographer of Modern Life, 59. 35 Oscar Wilde, ‘The Decay of Lying—An Observation,’ Intentions (1891): https://ww w.sscnet.ucla.edu/comm/steen/cogweb/Abstracts/Wilde_1889.html (accessed June 26, 2019). 36 See Martyn Jolly, ‘Composite Propaganda Photographs during the First World War,’ History of Photography, 27: 2 (Summer 2003), 162. 37 Ibid., 162. 38 Hurley, from his diary entry of September 26, 1917, as quoted in Martyn Jolly, ‘Australian First-World-War Photography: Frank Hurley and Charles Bean,’ History of Photography, 23: 2 (Summer 1999), 142. 39 Jolly, ‘Composite Propaganda,’ History of Photography, 164. 40 Hurley, May 26–28, 1918, as quoted in Martyn Jolly and Kate Morschel, ‘Frank Hurley: Composite Photography in the Great War’, Raw View, #8 (Finland, 2017), 58–63. Thanks to Martyn Jolly for generously sharing his research. 41 See Jolly, ‘Australian First-World-War Photography,’ History of Photography, 145. 42 Sydney Morning Herald (March 13, 1919), as quoted in ibid., 145. 43 For useful overviews of this history, see, for example, Dino A. Brugioni, Photo Fakery: A History of Deception and Manipulation (Dulles, Virginia: Brassey’s, 1999); Martha Rosler, ‘Image Simulations, Computer Manipulations; Some Considerations’ (1994), Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975–2001 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004), 259–320; and Mia Fineman, Faking It (2012). 44 Edward Steichen, ‘Ye Fakers,’ Camera Work, 1 ( January 1903), 48. Steichen himself combined negatives when necessary, as in the two negatives he used to make his gum bichromate print, Rodin, Le Penseur, of 1902. See https://www.artic.edu/artworks /66683/rodin-le-penseur (accessed November 6, 2019). 45 For an overview, see Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Ectoplasm,’ Each Wild Idea: Writing Photography History (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001), 129–144, 215–218. 46 See Nancy Burson, Richard Carling, and David Kramlich, Composites: ComputerGenerated Portraits (New York: Beech Tree Books, 1986). 47 See Peter Hamilton, ‘Policing the Face,’ in Peter Hamilton and Roger Hargreaves, The Beautiful and the Damned: The Creation of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Photography ( (London: Lund Humphries, 2001), 93–99. 48 Lauren Collins, ‘Pixel Perfect,’ The New Yorker (May 12, 2008): www.newyorker.c om/magazine/2008/05/12/pixel-perfect (accessed May 10, 2019). 49 See David Cunningham, ‘Renouncing the Single Image: Photography and the Realism of Abstraction,’ Photographies, 9: 2 (May 2016), 147–165; and Christopher Williams-Wynn, ‘Images of Equivalence: Exchange-Value in Andreas Gursky’s Photographs and Production Method,’ Photography & Culture, 9: 1 (March 2016), 3–24. 50 See, for example, Peter Galassi, Andreas Gursky (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2001).

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51 See Alix Ohlin, ‘Andreas Gursky and the Contemporary Sublime,’ Art Journal, 61: 4 (Winter 2002), 22–35. 52 Critics are divided on this question. Katy Siegel is among those who have argued that “we need these big brilliant photos to show us our big bland, dense world … like the best modern artists, he refracts the conditions of his time.” Alex Alberro takes a darker view: “Rather than reveal something about the unsettling nature of globalization and the social and economic forces that create and govern the sites and objects he photographs, Gursky, in his ultimately nihilistic way, is clearly more interested in another game—a pictorialist celebration of style, craftsmanship, and the perfect photographic image.” Katy Siegel, ‘Consuming Vision,’ Artforum 39: 5 ( January 2001), 104–114, and especially 114. Alex Alberro, ‘Blind Ambition,’ ibid., and especially 114. 53 Pamela Lee, ‘Gursky’s Ether,’ Forgetting the Art World (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012), 77. 54 See Christina Barton ed., ‘Introduction to “Liquid State”,’ Reading Room: A Journal of Art and Culture, #4 (2010), 5, and Peter Brunt, ‘Afterword,’ in Peter Brunt et al., Art in Oceania: A New History (London: Thames & Hudson, 2012), 500–501. 55 Andreas Gursky, as quoted in Dale Berning Sawa, ‘Andreas Gursky on the Photograph that Changed Everything: “It was Pure Intuition”,’ The Guardian ( January 18, 2018): www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/jan/18/andreas-gursky-each-photo graph-is-a-world-of-its-own-best-photograph-salerno-harbour (accessed January 19, 2018).

7 HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT

As already mentioned, the daguerreotype was one process where negative and positive were combined in the same photographic image, thereby offering a quite particular, even peculiar, perceptual experience. Not having a separate negative, each daguerreotype is a unique object and, unless it has been re-reversed with an added mirror, an inverted image. The negative is there but not there, visible at one moment and invisible the next. Indeed, for the daguerreotype image to be made legible to the eye, its negative version must be suppressed (along with the image of the observer, ref lected back from the shiny silver surface).1 The object thereby insists on a movement of the body of the beholder, a manoeuvring of either the plate or one’s head to an angle where that negative can no longer be seen. The body of the observer becomes a prosthesis to the photograph, a necessary component to its appearance (and the negative’s disappearance). This combination of negative and positive might also explain the almost holographic quality of daguerreotype images, as if the eye of the beholder takes in a subliminal stereoscopic view of virtual and actual image simultaneously.2 Another unusual visual effect is a result of the daguerreotype’s inability to register certain hues. The size and morphology of the metallic nanoparticles on the surface of the daguerreotype scatter the light ref lected from them, resulting in a form of plasmonic image that only records some colours and not others.3 In daguerreotypes taken of silhouettes, for example, the profile appears as a blank, and therefore black, shape in a silver rectangle, giving the impression one can see through the sheet of metal into nothingness (inviting us to look through and at the photograph simultaneously). A close inspection of the unusual surface topography of the daguerreotype is not confined to the present. An essay published in The Literary Gazette in December 1841, for example, reports Antoine Claudet’s rather remarkable thoughts on the daguerreotype as follows:

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He compares the daguerreotype surface, when viewed through a powerful microscope—the darker parts to the starless heavens; the gradations of tints to the constellations and stars, according to their numbers and assemblage; and the brighter portions, composed of a multitude of globular molecules of mercury, to the milky way, thickly studded with myriads of luminaries.4 In line with this astronomical view, Claudet went on to make a striking variety of daguerreotype images, including “scientific experiments on the effect of various rays,” six daguerreotypes of “light of a candle,” a “negative portrait” (produced by exposing the plate through yellow glass), “image of the sun produced during a clear atmosphere” and again “when it appears red through a fog,” “image of the moon produced during a clear night,” “image of the solar spectrum,” and an “image of clouds, taken instantaneously during boisterous weather; interesting study for artists.”5 Interesting indeed. Given the complex surface of the plates, daguerreotype images are fragile entities (none of the ones by Claudet just described has survived), suspended in a delicate amalgam of microscopic mercury globules and oxidised silver on a copper surface. To touch that surface is to damage it. François Arago, in his report to the Chamber of Deputies of July 3, 1839, warned that touching the surface of a daguerreotype was like “brushing the wings of a butterf ly.” Another experienced pioneer, Charles Chevalier, reported in 1841 that they could be damaged by “the rubbing of a f ly’s wing.”6 To preclude the intervention of f lies and butterf lies, and indeed of clumsy human fingers, daguerreotypes were covered in a sheet of protective glass and bound up in a case or frame. This glass also adds to the dimensional perception of the daguerreotype image. It comes as a shock, then, to find examples that have been deliberately scratched and therefore ruined. A group portrait of Queen Victoria and young members of her family was taken by William Edward Kilburn on January 17, 1852 [Figure 7.1]. As Victoria recorded in her journal: “Went back to the Gardens, where a Daguerreotype by Mr. Kilburn was taken of me & 5 of the children. The day was splendid for it. Mine was unfortunately horrid, but the children’s were pretty”.7 Apparently Victoria had been captured with her eyes closed. She therefore scratched out her face on the plate in a blizzard of annoyance, leaving herself decapitated but the children unblemished, and strangely unperturbed. We find the same gesture made for more political reasons on a series of contemporary daguerreotype plates produced by the Australian artist James Tylor in 2016. The series is titled Karta (The Island of the Dead). In each example, Tylor took daguerreotype photographs of locations where indigenous Aboriginal people had been killed by European settlers during the nineteenth century. The artist then scratched out the site of those deaths, obliterating part of the surface of each daguerreotype and thereby re-enacting a historical act of violence in pictorial terms. In The Landing, for example, the work commemorates a Ngarrindjeri woman and her baby who drowned while trying to escape from enslavement on Kangaroo Island, or Karta, as it is known in the Ramindjeri and Kaurna

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FIGURE 7.1

95

William Edward Kilburn (England), Queen Victoria with the Princess Royal, the Prince of Wales, Princess Alice, Princess Helena and Prince Alfred, January 17, 1852 scratched daguerreotype 9.1 × 11.5 cm (image)

languages [Figure 7.2]. Here, then, is another form of photographic blankness, a strategic erasure of both negative and positive to signify an atrocity otherwise beyond representation.8 Some of Tylor’s daguerreotypes exhibit hints of blue or green tones, a result of a slight overexposure of the plate during the formation of the image. Nineteenth-century photographers learned to exploit this chemical reaction to solarisation, deliberately creating a continuous blue sky over a given landscape, an abstraction posing as natural, or even as nature. Millions of daguerreotypes, and thus millions of negative/positive photographs, were made during the nineteenth century. But it was certainly not the only process in which negatives posed as positives. The specifications of the ambrotype process, wherein an underexposed collodion negative is produced on a sheet of glass, were first published in March of 1851 in The Chemist by sculptor Frederick Scott Archer. Collodion, an invention of 1847, exploited the fact that guncotton was soluble in ether, producing a sticky solution that could be infused with light-sensitive chemistry and made to adhere to glass. Collodion was originally imagined as a dressing for wounds, a kind of transparent, artificial skin. Archer even proposed peeling off the collodion negative and storing it for future development and use, allowing the glass plate to be used over and over again. However, it was soon discovered that when that glass is backed with a dark coating—black paint or cloth, for example—the negative appears as a positive image. In an ambrotype, then, the negative is once again repressed in order to make

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FIGURE 7.2

James Tylor (Australia), The Landing (from the Karta [The Island of the Dead] series), 2016 Becquerel daguerreotype with scratches 10.2 × 15.2 cm

the positive possible, making it always present but absent nevertheless (unless the photograph is taken apart and its layers separated). It also makes ambrotype images inverted and unique, like daguerreotypes. The resulting image lacks the shiny surface of the daguerreotype, and this relative drabness has been held against it ever since. No histories of the ambrotype have been written, and little attention is paid to them in the market for or the literature on photography (as usual, these two things are in lock-step).9 And yet this was a very popular process, being cheaper to make than a daguerreotype and yet still offering the comforting weight of glass and the capability of being bound up in a leather case. Photographers found inventive ways to promote the process; one, Keith’s of Liverpool, inscribed his cases with the word “hyalographic,” referring to “the art of writing or engraving on glass.” Another, Davis & Co. of Boston, advertised that “three to four hundred Pictures per day” were made at this studio, at 25 cents for each ambrotype. The format at least promised the photographed subject the immortality implied by its name (ambrotype comes from the Greek word ambrotos, meaning immortal). Some ambrotypes were also coloured on the reverse side of the glass, giving the image a striking appearance in which photographic and graphic elements are given equal weight [Figure 7.3] Interestingly, this was a type of photograph that became very popular in Japan. Ambrotypes were among the first photographs to be made by Japanese photographers exclusively for Japanese clients and were produced in large numbers in Japan in the 1880s and 1890s, well after the process had been superseded

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FIGURE 7.3

97

Photographer unknown (England), Portrait of a Man in a Studio, c. 1850s painted ambrotype 9.4 × 17.2 cm (open).

in the West. Usually featuring full-length studio portraits of individuals and groups, they were presented in light Kiri-wood cases, carefully handcrafted to snugly fit each image. These cases sometimes feature a photographer’s stamp or inscription as well as a message or poem from the client; a portrait of a young man might be accompanied, for example, by several poems brushed onto the case by his father, exhorting him to live an upright life. In many ways, these unique combinations of photography and calligraphy exemplify the tensions of the Meiji era, a time when Japan was seeking to reconcile its own traditions with the ways of the West, including the widening inf luence of photography itself. An early example shows a samurai in Western dress holding his sword, already an incongruous image. Dated 1867, the image was thus made at the end of the Edo shogunate—a time of great social upheaval, when Japan began to make its transition from feudal to modern society. The sitter’s new (and yet discordantly foreign) uniform and samurai sword indicate a personage of high rank. After the advent of the Meiji era, the samurai caste was abolished, and by 1876, samurai were no longer allowed to wear their swords in public. This man therefore hovers on the edges of two eras, not quite belonging to either. Another ambrotype, dated on the case to precisely December 19, 1892, shows a young man standing in traditional robes facing the camera. Beside him is a pedestal, traditionally a base for a piece of sculpture but here made to support a bowler hat, so that the hat is presented like an ethnographic object on display [Figure 7.4]. It’s as if this photograph is trying to put “the West” in inverted commas, drawing our attention

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FIGURE 7.4

Makers unknown (Japan), Standing Man with Bowler Hat on a Pedestal, November 19, 1892 ambrotype in kiri-wood case, with inscribed calligraphy in ink 12.4 × 9.5 × 1.5 cm (closed)

to this other culture’s difference and strangeness, but doing so using a medium that is the epitome of this same strangeness.10 A rhetorical Japan also inhabited another process that combined negative and positive in a single photographic image: the tintype. The tintype is a photograph exposed on a standardised metal surface, coated (“ japanned”) in a dark, hardened varnish.11 Once again, as an underexposed collodion negative developed on a small sheet of lacquered iron, a tintype has the appearance of a positive print but no possibility of being reproduced in multiple manifestations. Each tintype image is, as in daguerreotypes and ambrotypes, unique and (usually) inverted. Before all else, then, a tintype declares that appearances can be deceptive, even—or perhaps especially—photographic appearances. Tintypes were cheap (one advertisement offers $1.50 per dozen or 18 “vignette ferreotypes” for 50 cents), at least compared to the daguerreotype process that they succeeded and, to a large degree, displaced. Where the silvery daguerreotype image was easily damaged and highly ref lective and thus difficult to see, tintypes have a dull but stable surface that invited handling and close looking. Indeed, many small tintypes were touched as much as they were seen (touching and seeing became complementary stages of the same photographic encounter). For all these reasons, tintypes invited a physical intimacy denied by other kinds of imagery.

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Generated on a thin sheet of metal, tintypes could be easily sent through the mail or mounted in an album, or kept in embossed paper mats made especially for this purpose [Figure 7.5]. They were also presented in leather and thermoplastic cases, identical to the ones in which daguerreotypes were also packaged, or were set in jewellery, and came in every conceivable size. Light and durable, they could be carried in a pocket; one American Civil War soldier reported that a tintype of loved ones he had in his shirt managed to stop a bullet and save his life.12 Although produced in huge numbers from the late 1850s through to the 1960s (making it the longest-lived of all photographic processes), tintype makers remain largely anonymous. Even when a photographer’s name is pasted on a paper label on the back of a tintype, it tends to be that of one of hundreds of forgettable small-town and itinerant photographers who took up the process.

FIGURE 7.5

Photographer unknown (USA), Portrait of a Woman, c. 1860–70s tintype (collodion negative on enamelled iron sheet) 9.3 × 5.6 cm

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The tintype had no masters and generated no masterpieces. Even its name (and certainly its spelling) was a matter of dispute: ferrograph, melainotype, melanotype, ferrotype, ferotype, ferreotype, bon-ton, gem. The use of a variety of names for the same process is a reminder of the cut-throat competition between photographers and the many disputes over improvements to the basic formula, all in the interests of securing a greater market share. Many advertisements even implied that tintypes were a category unto themselves, separate from mere photographs, hence labels like “Photographs and Ferrotypes,” “Gems, Photographs and Ferreotypes,” “Ferreotype and Photograph Gallery.” Despite the process having already been described in France in 1853 by Adolphe-Alexandre Martin, a patent for “photographic pictures on japanned surfaces” was issued to an American, Hamilton Smith, in February 1856. He then sold it to Peter Neff and his father, a wealthy Cincinnati businessman. Neff immediately set about exploiting the process for commercial ends, offering licenses to professional studios at $20 each and offering to supply them with properly prepared plates of iron. Smith and Neff were based in Gambier, Ohio, but the first tintype factory was established in Cincinnati. The factory processed thin iron plate imported from England, baking it in ovens to obtain the necessary blackened coating. Subsequent factories were established in Middleton, Connecticut, nearer the major markets on the eastern seaboard of the USA, while competitors soon established rival factories in Lancaster, Ohio and Peekskill, New York (the tintype industry moved from west to east, rather than, as in all previous photographic innovations, the other way around). By 1862, this competitor, Victor Griswold, could boast of two factories with a dozen ovens and between 40 and 50 employees. As Reese Jenkins has pointed out, “the basic problems confronting the tintype manufacturers were price competition and oversupply; ultimate success in solving the problems derived from coordinating strategies in technology, marketing, and supply of raw materials.”13 Here, then, are the beginnings of a new story about photography, one centred on commercial rather than artistic innovation. It’s a story about shops and sales figures, product diversification and patent law, technical refinements and creative advertising, duoplistic market structures and supply jobbers. From such tensions came two competing styles of coating—glossy and eggshell—and a range of surface tints, including blue, green, red, chocolate, and white (most of which never became popular). The market for these refinements consisted of professional photographers (there were virtually no amateur tintype photographers until the twentieth century) and their customers. Success was measured in dollars and cents, not in artistic achievement, hence the endless, mechanical repetition of standard poses and settings (after all, we all want to look like ourselves but also as much as possible like everyone else). Indeed, the perverse theatricality adopted by some customers of tintype studios should be taken as a confirmation of its lack in most other examples; the exceptions prove the dominance of the rule. Interestingly, a number of contemporary artists have taken up collodion photography in recent years, making both tintypes and ambrotypes on modern

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substrates like acrylic or aluminium. Unique and hand-made, such photographs offer a counter-point to the vast proliferation of ephemeral digital images seen on social media, the new home of photographic banality. The challenge for these artists is to make work that goes beyond the nostalgic allure of the antique—that is in fact contemporary. The New Zealand–born photographer Ben Cauchi, now resident in Berlin, meets this challenge by filling his pictures with signs of conjuring and performance while also ref lecting on the permeability of truth and falsehood, and on the relationship of seeing to knowing. In other words, their apparent simplicity belies their level of ambition. At the heart of Cauchi’s art is a testing of our normal suspension of disbelief in front of a photograph. This is a testing, then, of faith itself, making his photography a philosophical, even a theological, exercise as much as a production of images and artefacts.14 Many of Cauchi’s images re-stage familiar scenes from the history of nineteenth-century photography, adding a further confusion of past and present to his use of obsolescent wet collodion processes, and yet another kind of repetition to our list. The ambrotype titled Mixing Solutions, from 2003, is both a reminder of just how complicated these processes are and a replay of a daguerreotype made by Robert Cornelius in Philadelphia in 1843, a self-portrait of the photographer as alchemist.15 The Photographer’s Hand (A Tribute), made in 2006, similarly recalls at least two famous predecessors. In August 1845, the Boston studio of Southworth and Hawes fulfilled a commission by daguerreotyping the open hand of Captain Jonathan Walker on which had been branded the letters “S. S.,” for “slave stealer,” after Walker’s unsuccessful attempt to free seven slaves.16 In 1861, the French photographer Nadar used electricity to light his exposure of the scarred hand of an unnamed banker. This photograph was described as a “chirographical study,” as if this single body part could be taken as a key to the character not just of an individual but of an entire profession.17 Cauchi seems to be proposing something similar in this study of his own hand, inviting us to undertake some impromptu palmistry to divine his inner motivations. The Photographer’s Shirt, another ambrotype from 2003, mimics the appearance of an 1867 photograph by François Aubert titled Emperor Maximilian’s Shirt after his Execution. Aubert’s picture documents the surviving evidence of this momentous political event in Mexican history. The martyred emperor’s shirt is hung up so that we can see the bullet holes and bloodstains that despoil its surface, as if to make of it a relic for the modern age.18 Cauchi’s shirt is pristine in comparison, although a soiled collar bespeaks of otherwise unseen labour. Nevertheless, his actual execution seems to have been stayed, at least for now. Suspended cloths and shrouds are frequent motifs in Cauchi’s work, sometimes implying an absent or departed body—sometimes literally called Ghost—but all acting like a magician’s prop to hide something that is apparently about to be revealed (but never is). One, Stained Cloth (2007), again recalls Aubert’s hanging shirt, but in this case the stains have been left there by the noxious chemicals employed in Cauchi’s photography, a reminder that this medium comes with its own inherent dangers.

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Self-portrait with Hovering Cloth, an ambrotype from 2005, shifts from the realm of magic to that of the paranormal, showing Cauchi sitting at a draped table while witnessing, perhaps even while telekinetically inducing, the levitation of a small black cloth. We tend to believe what we see in a photograph, but that naivety is called into question here, as it is in other, related works. In Pseudo-levitation (2003), for example, we see the artist’s outstretched hand with a small Bible suspended beneath, a prodigious feat except that we can clearly see the wires that make this suspension possible. Faith is once again conjured, but in a disturbing context wherein trickery is also revealed (or perhaps a confidence trick is unveiled). As you can tell, humour is never far from Cauchi’s own performances for the camera, but it is a knowing, black sort of humour in which irony is turned into a critical tool—you’re never quite sure if the joke is on him, or on us, or perhaps on life itself. A more recent body of work puts this performative aspect aside and instead reproduces numerous examples of a single, enigmatic subject: a crumpled sheet of paper. Once again, this choice bounces an echo from photography’s own history into the present, in particular László Moholy-Nagy’s efforts in the 1920s to formulate a kind of syntax for photography. With this in mind, Moholy-Nagy set out to explore systematically what he took to be one of the “basic elements of the photographic process,” the fact that photography depends before all else on the “light-sensitivity of a chemically prepared surface.” He produced numerous photographs that demonstrated the “possibilities of light-composition, in which light must be sovereignly handled as a new creative means, like colour in painting and sound in music.”19 He sought to make visible, in other words, photography’s particular conditions of representability. One late example, his Diagram of Forces, made in the 1940s, is a picture almost impossible to describe in pictorial terms. It comes with a handy description of its mode of production written in pencil by the artist on the back: “A light sensitive paper was made wet, squashed and exposed to light. The result is a ‘diagram of forces’ projected on the f lat sheet.”20 In 2006, the American artist Walead Beshty exhibited a series of photographs he called Pictures Made by my Hand with the Assistance of Light. Once again consisting of crumpled sheets of photographic paper exposed to light, these are a direct response to Moholy’s challenge, an attempt to make photographs that are true to their own materiality, free from optical illusion or representational affectations. Beshty has suggested that he is striving for “the possibility of a materialist photograph—one where the material of the print and the image it contained were one and the same, where the material was a generator of an image rather than merely a support for an image.”21 One might channel Roland Barthes to associate such pictures with “pensiveness”: “Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.”22 By declining to allow the viewer a passive reception of an elsewhere once seen by someone else, this kind of photography forces us to think about the activity of seeing taking place in the here and now, confronting us with our own perceptual agency. These are photographs that turn the act of viewing back onto the viewer.

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Cauchi repeats this gesture, but using an antique photographic medium, as if skipping a stone across the surface of photography’s history, jumping from the twenty-first century to the 1920s to the 1850s and then back to now. Collectively titled Sea of Vapours and made in 2016, his one-of-a-kind collodion-on-glass photographs offer nothing but a tromp l’oeil depiction of the folds and creases of a f lattened sheet of paper. This paper is seemingly suspended beneath the surface of the plate, from edge to edge [Figure 7.6]. The

FIGURE 7.6

Ben Cauchi (New Zealand), Untitled #10 (from Sea of Vapours), 2015 collodion on glass (ambrotype) 36.0 × 28.0 cm

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piece of paper and the photograph of that piece of paper have merged into a single indistinguishable artefact, as have the negative and positive versions of that photograph. Sombre in tone and fragile in appearance, each picture is a psychologically infused, deceptively realistic illusion of texture and depth. Apparently unmarked but discarded anyway, these photographed sheets conjure a writing that has never taken place, promising an act of communication even while forever holding it in suspension. Once again, through a combination of sleight of hand and historical regurgitation, Cauchi proffers a powerful metaphor for the state of photography in our present age.

Notes 1 This oscillation of negative and positive states of the daguerreotype image exercised the imaginations of a number of early commentators on the medium. See, for example, Alan Trachtenberg, ‘Likeness as Identity: Ref lections on the Daguerrean Mystique,’ in Graham Clarke ed., The Portrait in Photography, (New York: Reaktion Books, 1992), 173–192. Nowadays, it is rare indeed to find a daguerreotype reproduced in its negative incarnation. In a 2019 paper (Queer Images, Escaping Digitization), art historian Olena Chervonik offered the following ref lections: “Apart from their uniqueness and inherent non-reproducibility, they [daguerreotypes] were nonbinary in their unstable visual identity, which depended on the dynamic process of viewing to be activated by the observer. Daguerreotypes present one of these complex visual identities, identities that I choose to call ‘queer.’ My paper thereby offers a metaphoric extension of non-binary identities from the realm of human relations to objects … These queer images, with their non-binarism and complex viewing dynamics, escape a digitization that otherwise fossilizes this play of differences. They enter digital archives in their crippled states as fixed and thus misrepresented identities. Moreover, even in cases of a standard photographic binarism, typically only a positive print emerges to the level of public viewing as part of an online or off line demonstration. Its negative, its repressed Other, exists behind-the-scene, relegated to archival boxes and rarely seeing the light of day. In fact, the situation is even more complex. Even when collections choose to represent negatives alongside positives, often those negatives as tangible objects look quite different from their digitized forms.” I thank Olena Chervonik for sharing her paper with me. 2 See Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Light and Dark: The Daguerreotype and Art History,’ Art Bulletin LXXXVI: 4 (December 2004), 768. 3 See Steve Carr and Micol Spinazzi, ‘Trailblazing Finds of Daguerreotype Properties Revealed by Metropolitan Museum of Art and UNM’ ( June 10, 2019): https://news .unm.edu/news/trailblazing-f indings-of-daguerrerotype-properties-revealed-by-t he-metropolitan-museum-of-art-and-unm (accessed 26 June 2019). Antoine Claudet exhibited an experimental daguerreotype at the Great Exhibition in 1851 which, he said, “shows that all the tints of blue, indigo, and violet, produce white in photography, and that all tints of green, yellow, orange, and red, produce black, or rather they have no photogenic action.” See http://peib.dmu.ac.uk/itemphotographer.php ?photogNo=73&orderby=coverage&photogName=Claudet%2C+Antoine+Fran% 26ccedil%3Bois+Jean+(1797-1867) (accessed January 1, 2020). 4 See ‘Daguerreotype and Electrotype,’ The Literary Gazette, #1301 (December 25, 1841), 838. 5 For more details, see http://peib.dmu.ac.uk/itemphotographer.php?photogNo =73&orderby=coverage&photo gName =Clau det %2 C+Ant oine+Fran% 26cce dil%3Bois+Jean+(1797-1867) (accessed December 30, 2019). Many of Claudet’s

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6

7 8 9 10

11

12

13 14 15 16 17 18

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experimental daguerreotypes, including those shown at the Great Exhibition of 1851, were destroyed during a fire in his London studio in 1868. Both Arago and Chevalier are quoted in Françoise Reynaud, ‘Le daguerreotype comme objet’, in Le daguerréotype français: Un objet photographique, eds Quentin Bajac and Dominique de Font-Réaulx, exhibition catalogue (Paris: Musée d’Orsay, Paris, 2003), 98. See https://www.rct.uk/collection/2932491/queen-victoria-with-the-princess-roya l-the-prince-of-wales-princess-alice (accessed 22 April 2019). For more on this theme, see Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Looking Askance,’ in Geoffrey Batchen, Mick Gidley, Nancy K. Miller, and Jay Prosser eds., Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis (London: Reaktion Press, 2012), 227-240. One of the few publications specifically about ambrotypes is Paul Cox, Beautiful Ambrotypes: Early Photographs (Travelling Light, 1989). See Geoffrey Batchen, Yoshiaki Kai, and Masashi Kohara, ‘Japanese Ambrotypes,’ Trans Asia Photography Review, 1: 2 (Spring 2011): https://quod.lib.umich.edu/t/t ap/7977573.0001.206/--japanese-ambrotypes?rgn=main;view=fulltext (accessed October 1, 2012). Unfortunately, relatively little has been published on ambrotypes in histories devoted to Japanese photography. Some examples from the collection of Charles Schwartz are reproduced, but not discussed, in Anne Wilkes Tucker et al., The History of Japanese Photography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). But see also Charles Schwartz, Japanese Ambrotypes 1860–1890: Images from the Charles Schwartz Collection (1960–1890) (New York: Charles Schwartz Ltd., 2009) and Geoffrey Batchen ed., Suspending Time: Life, Photography, Death ( Japan: Izu PhotoMuseum, 2010). On the reconciliation of tradition and modernity in Meiji-era Japan, see Stephen Vlastos, ‘Tradition: Past/Present Culture and Modern Japanese History,’ in Stephen Vlastos ed., Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan (University of California Press, 1998), 1–16. What follows is drawn from Geoffrey Batchen, ‘The Art of Business, in Steven Kasher ed., America and the Tintype (New York: International Center of Photography and Steidl, 2008), 17–24. But see also Floyd Rinhart, Marion Rinhart, and Robert Wagner, The American Tintype (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999); Peter Palmquist, Frozen in Iron: A Selection of Tintypes from the Peter E. Palmquist Collection (Arcata: Peter Palmquist, 2001); and Janice G. Schimmelman, The Tintype in America 1856–1880 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2007). The story was told in the printed record of The Anniversary and Re-Union of the Tenth New York Calvary Veteran Association in 1891: “Comrade Tuton exhibited a tintype of his best girl, which he wore over his heart, and a Minie bullet imbedded in it. The tintype saved his life, but some other fellow married the girl.” See https:/ /www.ebsco.com/blog-archives/article/before-the-selfie-daguerreotypes-tintypes -and-the-birth-of-affordable-photo (accessed December 31, 2019). Reese Jenkins, Images and Enterprise: Technology and the American Photographic Industry 1839–1925 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 42. See Geoffrey Batchen, ‘The Way of All Things,’ in Aaron Lister ed., The Evening Hours: Ben Cauchi (Wellington: Victoria University Press/Wellington City Gallery, 2013), 11–15. See, for example, the daguerreotype by Cornelius and an engraving made after it in M. Susan Barger and William B. White, The Daguerreotype: Nineteenth-Century Technology and Modern Science (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 97. See the entry for this daguerreotype in Grant Romer and Brian Wallis eds., Young America: The Daguerreotypes of Southworth and Hawes (New York: International Center of Photography, 2005), 307. See the entry for Nadar, Banker’s Hand, 1861, in Maria Morris Hambourg et al., Nadar (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994), 247. See the account of this execution and Aubert’s photograph in Frizot, A New History of Photography, 142–143.

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19 László Moholy-Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1969), 28, 32. What follows is drawn from Geoffrey Batchen, ‘“Photography”: An Art of the Real,’ in Carol Squiers ed., What is a Photograph? (New York: Prestel/ International Center of Photography, 2014), 46–62. 20 The verso of this photogram is reproduced in Leland D. Rice and David W. Steadman eds., Photographs of Moholy-Nagy from the Collection of William Larson (Claremont: Pomona College, 1975), 35. Moholy-Nagy also includes instructions for his printer: “for the cut maker: please print it hard so that you get some white.” 21 Walead Beshty, ‘Walead Beshty in Conversation with Jacob Proctor,’ in Walead Beshty: Pulleys, Cogwheels, Mirrors and Windows (Michigan: umma projects; University of Michigan Museum of Art. 2009), 24. 22 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 55, 38.

8 THE CULT OF THE NEGATIVE

Although popular during photography’s first three decades, processes in which negative and positive are made inseparable were definitively superseded when detailed exposures on glass or film became possible. The so-called wet collodion process was published in 1851 and soon dominated commercial photography, before being displaced in its turn in 1871 by a gelatin dry plate negative process. It is more difficult to determine an origin point for negatives exposed on film— on cellulose nitrate or cellulose acetate—but this innovation is usually dated to 1887 and ascribed to the work of an American named Hannibal Goodwin. An Episcopal priest, Goodwin was motivated by his desire to find a f lexible, transparent substrate onto which he could place projectable images to accompany his teachings from the Bible. The nitrocellulose roll film that he devised wasn’t granted a patent until 1898, by which time George Eastman had started production of a similar process. By the 1920s, a cellulose diacetate film had replaced the more f lammable cellulose nitrate variety, before being replaced in turn by cellulose triacetate and then, in 1955, by polyester.1 The introduction of 35mm film stock and a roll mechanism had a number of significant effects on the practice of photography, allowing for the use of lighter cameras and faster exposures. Most importantly, it made the taking of photographs a sequential, rather than a stop motion, activity. No longer required to load a new sheet of glass into the camera each time an exposure was desired, photographers could now shoot a number of negatives of a given scene or activity within a short temporal span. And, when developed and fixed, those negatives were joined together in that sequence as a small scroll, to be unfurled and held up to the light for examination, like a row of stills from a fractured movie. This experience shifted the way photographers thought about photographing, making the logic of seriality a central aspect of the medium throughout the twentieth century.

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In this context it is interesting that, in recent times, we have begun to see contact sheets—close cousins to the negative—being published in exhibition catalogues, or even being shown in exhibitions. These give us another chance to see the photographer at work. When, for example, we look at the contact sheet that includes Child with a Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, NYC, 1962, by Diane Arbus, we can see that the image we know so well turns out to be the tip of a pyramid of rejected images rather than a single decisive moment.2 We watch as Arbus repeats the shot over and over again, eleven times in all (with one break where she photographs a family group instead), waiting for something untoward to happen, something different from the norm. The contact sheet is an interesting object in itself, being both a single continuous photograph and a collection of smaller photographic images, printed in sequence according to their place in a strip of negative film. Printing those negatives in this fashion turns them into a small movie, a movie about the act of photographing this particular scene. Contact sheets suggest that every photograph is a kind of film still. By running our eye along these strips, we bring these still photographs back into motion, so that they are no longer still at all. By this means we also begin to see the method by which, for example, Arbus induced an ordinary child into acting out the theatre of rage (we see how this artist helps to produce what she seemed to merely document). Or we see that, in her Untitled Film Still #7, shot in 1978, the American artist Cindy Sherman decided to crop the image offered by her original negative, deleting a male figure that she had once imagined might be included in this shot, remembering of course that she set up everything in it to be photographed.3 This decision to crop ensures that she is the only person seen in full in her own picture (adding to the sense that we are unwelcome voyeurs when we look at them and her). Sherman recalls how she deliberately tried to make the first six of her Film Stills look “cheesy” by using warmer chemicals during development to make the film reticulate, “which gives it a sort of crackling, grainy look.”4 This has made these negatives difficult to print from ever since (work no longer done by Sherman herself ). At one point the artist misplaced that roll of film and for many years had to rephotograph an existing photograph when copies were needed. So this is an image that has had at least two negatives, the second a palimpsest of the first. To take another example, Robert Frank made no less than 27,000 exposures (amounting to 760 rolls of film) during his three cross-country trips to shoot pictures for what eventually became The Americans, each of them numbered in sequence.5 A scrutiny of Frank’s contact sheets soon reveals that many of the images that appear in the various editions of The Americans, such as the one of the Miami elevator girl who so took the fancy of Jack Kerouac in his Introduction to the book, have been cropped down from the scene framed by the original negative6 [Figure 8.1]. Once again, that negative is one of 17 of the elevator girl shot by Frank that day, some of them showing her posing for the photographer and others featuring her at work, oblivious to his presence. Surely, then, the art of

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FIGURE 8.1

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Robert Frank (Switzerland/USA), Guggenheim 174/Americans 44—Miami Beach, from The Americans, 1955 gelatin silver contact sheet Overall: 25.3 × 20.2 cm

this project was in the editing, in the thousands and thousands of acts of omission and deletion that resulted in the choice of this frame from the 16 other ones, and the similar process that led to the selection of the 83 prints that actually ended up in the book. Any one of these images represents this displacement in microcosm, a summation of that constant process of repetition and difference by which most photographs are produced. Frank used a Leica camera and made rectangular exposures on his rolls of 35mm film, whereas, from 1963 on, Arbus employed square negatives. It is a

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reminder that film negatives were made in several different sizes and proportions throughout the twentieth century, depending on the camera used and the needs of the photographer. Photographers like Edward Weston, who wanted to produce a broad range of tonal values in his prints, employed a relatively large negative in the back of an 8 × 10 inch Seneca folding-bed view camera. This enabled him to capture as much visual information as possible in each exposure (which, in the case of his photographs of vegetables, could be as long as four and a half hours). Inspired by a meeting with Alfred Stieglitz in 1921, Weston came to emphasise the need for a technically superb negative and a sharp clear print, unsullied by darkroom manipulations; so-called “straight” or “pure” photography. This purity was based on the assumption that a photograph “cannot survive corrective handwork.” 7 These beliefs soon took on an ethical and even spiritual association, with the photographic artist conceived as a kind of seer, possessing insight beyond the normal, and seeing beneath the surface of things to their hidden depths and dynamics, to the essence of life itself. As Weston put it: “The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating f lesh.”8 Despite the care he took during the development of his negatives, gradually coaxing out of them what he believed to be the optimal balance of highlights and shadows, Weston nevertheless also extensively dodged and burned during the printing process to ensure that he achieved the look he wanted in his final prints. This is a contradiction also found in the work of Ansel Adams. Adams had met Stieglitz in 1930, but also Paul Strand, who, Adams later remembered, “showed me his negatives” rather than prints. These negatives were apparently so “gorgeous” that Adams decided to give up his musical studies and become a full-time photographer.9 By 1932 he had fallen in with Weston and a group of other young Californian photographers who propagated on behalf of the “purist” approach to photography already described. An important aspect of this approach was the notion of “previsualisation.” Adams sought to eliminate trial and error from this approach with his “Zone System” (codified with Fred Archer in about April 1943), a formula based on light readings and exposure times that allowed the practitioner to pre-visualise the entire gamut of values that would appear in the final print. It is worth noting, given my earlier commentary on photography and racial difference, that the middle zones in this system are measured according to “average Caucasian skin” as seen against a northern sky, placing at its heart a very specific subject in a very specific place.10 The advantage of this system, according to Adams, was that, with guesswork and accident eliminated, the photographer could concentrate on composition and aesthetic or conceptual problems. The photograph, in other words, was to be preconceived as an imagined, abstract picture, as an arrangement of monochrome tones on a f lat surface. This means, of course, that the photographic image must come before the photograph. And that this image isn’t necessarily faithful to the scene being photographed. Adams himself pointed to the abstracting aspect of this process

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in his 1948 book The Negative. There, he described his own work, not as a form of realism, but as “departures from reality.”11 These departures were dependent first on the calculated exposure of the negative, and then on the art of printing from it. As John Szarkowski has written, when discussing the work of Adams, “a photographic negative generally contains much more information than a print made from it … A photographer chooses (with difficulty) which parts of his negative to reveal and which to submerge in the black and white ends of the paper print.”12 Getting the appropriate information on the negative in the first place can be compared, says Adams, “to the writing of a musical score,” leading to his description of the printing process as a type of performance of this score.13 The analogy has its uses, as well as its limits. Adams, for example, made at least 1,300 positive prints from his most famous negative, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico (an 8 × 10 inch negative first exposed on November 1, 1941, and then, because he was dissatisfied with its quality, redeveloped by Adams in 1948).14 Dodging and burning selected areas of the print allowed Adams to continually re-interpret (“perform”) his new negative over the 40 years during which he used it, dramatically changing its size, tonal emphases, and mood [Figure 8.2]. This, of course, raises a number of challenging questions. For example: which of these two negatives and hundreds of prints best represents the work known as Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico? The question again underlines the

FIGURE 8.2

James Alinder (USA), Ansel Adams with a Straight and a Fine Print of Moonrise, 1981 gelatin silver photograph

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difficulties that arise when you impose a singular identity on a medium devoted to multiplicity. And how about the two images titled Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake, Alaska, both printed by Adams from the same negative, but in 1949 and 1975, respectively? Szarkowski, long-time curator at the Museum of Modern Art, wrote that Adams’ later revisions “seem often to replace lyrical intensity with melodrama, and precision of feeling with extravagance … these late prints [are] the last testament of an artist whose view of the world and the future had darkened.”15 You would think that Adams’s abilities as a print maker would have improved over those 30 years or so, such that he would have been in a better position later in life to produce a print that matched his artistic aspirations. However, an art history of photography has a tendency to go back to the moment of origin, in this case to the “vintage” print of 1949, and privilege it as the “true” meaning of the picture. But this emphasis on origins and a single exemplary print is precisely the political economy disrupted by the introduction of the medium of photography into modern culture. Surely any history that wants to tell us something about photography—as opposed to those histories content to simply be a compendium of “great” photographs—will have to trace the journey of the images that it includes, showing how their meanings as well as their physical attributes have constantly changed over time. Musical scores can be performed by anyone (for a price), but the use of photographic negatives is usually strictly controlled, any performance of them confined to the photographer or his or her delegated surrogates. As early as November 1938, Edward Weston wrote to Beaumont Newhall, then a librarian at the Museum of Modern Art, about the quality of prints of his recently sent to the museum: “I naturally want you to have the best, and I am sure that some of my work sent to you was not my best … I have improved my printing so much the last two years that, with time, I would like to reprint for you all of the photographs you have of mine.”16 The impulse to return to negatives and reprint from them, to achieve a better quality of image or to make them larger, or even just to change the mood of the work, is a common aspect of artistic photographic practice. In later years, Brett and Cole Weston, the artist’s sons, made thousands of prints from Edward’s negatives, both under his supervision (when Edward discovered he had Parkinson’s Disease) and posthumously. Brett Weston recalled in 1975 that “Dad would approve the first master print; then he would say ‘Duplicate that’.”17 Some regard these duplicate prints to be of superior quality to Edward’s “originals” (although collectors, fixated on the illusory metaphysics of originality, nowadays prefer to buy those made by the progenitor; as Elton John has said, repeating an idea that is itself of recent vintage, “the vintage print captures that initial, original thought of the artist”).18 Ironically, Brett Weston came to believe that one shouldn’t print from another photographer’s negatives: “it’s just too personal,” he remarked.19 On December 16, 1991, his 80th birthday, he ritually burned about 1,500 of his own negatives in the company of family, friends, and members of the press. Only 62 negatives

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were saved, gifted as study objects to the Center for Creative Photography in Arizona, along with a plastic bag of ashes.20 The year before, the Dycam Model 1 was released onto the market, becoming the first digital camera to be put on sale. These ashes have therefore taken on a particular poignancy, representing not only an extreme fetishisation of the film negative (its transformation into a martyr’s relic) but also its imminent demise as an essential component of the photographic medium.

Notes 1 Sarah Kennel, In the Darkroom: An illustrated Guide to the Photographic Processes before the Digital Age (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2009), 43. 2 See this contact sheet (#1341) in Sandra Phillips ed., Diane Arbus: Revelations (New York: Random House, 2003), 164. 3 See a portion of this contact sheet in Amada Cruz and Elizabeth A.T. Smith eds., Cindy Sherman Retrospective (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1997), 58. The other woman, under the big hat, is fellow artist Nancy Dwyer. See Douglas Ecklund, The Pictures Generation 1974–1984 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009), 143. 4 Cindy Sherman, ‘The Making of Untitled,’ Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2003), 10. 5 See Anthony Lane, ‘Road Show. The Journey of Robert Frank’s The Americans,’ The New Yorker (September 14, 2009): www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/ 09/14/090914fa_fact_lane (accessed 16 September 16, 2009). 6 See Sarah Greenough ed., Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2009), Contact Sheet #44 and 473, and Jack Kerouac, ‘Introduction,’ in Robert Frank, The Americans (New York: Scalo, 1994), 9. 7 Edward Weston, as quoted in Kraus, L’Amour Fou, 91. Weston inherited a prejudice against the manipulation of negatives that had gathered support among ambitious art photographers in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. The English photographer Frederick H. Evans, for example, was taught by George Smith, who wrote as follows in 1886: “I am of the opinion that to dodge a negative in any way, except the spotting out of unavoidable mechanical defects, is not art, but a miserable confession of inability to treat photography as a true art.” George Smith, British Journal of Photography (1886), as quoted in Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1982), 147–150. 8 Edward Weston, c. 1926, in Nancy Newhall ed., The Daybooks of Edward Weston: Volume I Mexico (Millerton, NY: Aperture, 1973), 55. See also James L. Enyeart, ‘Clouds (1924): Edward Weston and the Essence of the Object’ (1982), in Beaumont Newhall and Nancy Conger eds., Edward Weston Omnibus: A Critical Anthology (Salt Lake City: Gibbs M. Smith Inc, 1984), 193–199. 9 “They were glorious negatives: full, luminous shadows and strong high values in which subtle passages of tone were preserved.” Ansel Adams, with Mary Street Alinder, Ansel Adams: An Autobiography (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1985), 109. 10 See Helen Grace, ‘To the Lighthouse,’ in Virginia Coventry ed., Critical Distance: Work with Photography/Politics/Writing (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1986), 119. 11 Ansel Adams, The Negative (Boston: Bullfinch, 1955), ix. 12 John Szarkowski, Ansel Adams at 100 (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2001), 21. 13 Adams, The Negative, ix–x. 14 For a detailed description of the making of this photograph, see Mary Street Alinder, ‘Moonrise,’ Ansel Adams: A Biography (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 157–172.

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15 “Toward the end of his career this reinterpretation seemed at times to amount almost to parody. The lyrical precision and perfect balance of his earlier work he reworked in his old age, too often replacing the elegance with melodrama, and the reverence with something approaching bombast. His consistent response to implicit queries about his radical recasting of his earlier work seems fundamentally an evasion: he said, ‘The negative is the score, and the print is the performance.’ Granted, but as a musician Adams had surely heard too many performances that had trespassed beyond the most elastic boundaries of the score’s meaning and f loundered into caricature. The change imposed on Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake thirty years later is not easy to understand. Why this radiant peak, a ref lection of our highest and purest aspirations, should have been transformed into a dirty snowdrift is a mystery to this viewer. And yet it was surely Adams’ right to make the change, and we should not be too swift, or too confident, in judging him wrong. It has been suggested that the change may have been caused by Adams’ faltering vision, but the explanation seems not wholly persuasive. And in fact, perhaps there is a kind of logic in the radical late prints: perhaps they describe the completion of a change of view that had been taking place for many years. Those who are committed to the idea of art as self-expression might value these late prints as the last testament of an artist whose view of the world and the future had darkened.” Szarkowski, Ansel Adams at 100, 47–50. 16 Edward Weston, November 1938, as quoted in Sarah Meister, ‘The History of Reprinting Photographs at MoMA’, a paper delivered at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on May 10, 2019. As her title suggests, Meister provides a fascinating overview of the practice of reprinting photographs at or for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 17 Brett Weston, in Paul Hill and Thomas Cooper, Dialogue with Photography (New York: Farrar/Straus/Giroux, 1979), 219. 18 Elton John, in ‘Sir Elton John in Conversation with Jane Jackson,’ The Radical Eye, 14. 19 Brett Weston, as quoted in Loengard, Celebrating the Negative, 111. 20 See Charles Hagen, ‘Critics’s Notebook: Just How Sacred Should Photo Negatives Be?’ New York Times (March 3, 1992): https://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/03/arts/ critic-s-notebook-just-how-sacred-should-photo-negatives-be.html (accessed 14 August 2018), and Suzanne Muchnic, ‘A Bonfire of the Vanities?: Admirers of Brett Weston Question Why He Destroyed a Lifetime’s Worth of Negatives,’ Los Angeles Times (December 19, 1991): http://articles.latimes.com/1991-12-19/entertainment/ ca-717_1_brett-weston (accessed August 14, 2018). Weston is not the only photographer to make this dramatic gesture. See, for example, Eugene Reznik, ‘Burned to Nothing: When Photographers Destroy Their Own Negatives,’ Time (August 13, 2013): http://time.com/3801493/burned-to-nothing-when-photographers-dest roy-their-own-negatives/ (accessed August 16, 2018). Alfred Stieglitz ruthlessly edited his earliest work out of his own archive. As Sarah Greenough tells us, in 1929, Stieglitz wrote to his friend Arthur Dove to tell him that he had spent “several weeks burning up books and papers—negatives and prints.” See Sarah Greenough, ‘Rewriting History: Alfred Stieglitz’s Sun Prints, 1895,’ National Gallery of Art Bulletin, #38 (Spring 2008), 2.

9 ELECTRICITY MADE VISIBLE

Digital photography is usually associated with the introduction of cameras containing arrays of electronic photodetectors that transform intensities of received light into data capable of being stored, processed, and, eventually, transmitted as a computer file. The prototype for such cameras is considered to be one developed by Eastman Kodak engineer Steven Sasson in 1975, a hybrid apparatus which allowed him to use electronic sensors to capture black-and-white images, in 23 seconds, on a digital cassette tape. The first photograph to be transformed by a drum scanner into digital code was produced a little earlier, in 1957, created from several scans of a snapshot of the baby son of the scanner’s inventor, Russell Kirsch.1 In both cases, the negative has been replaced by bundles of electronic information, information that can be transmitted from place to place before being transfigured into other forms, including ink-on-paper prints. As one Guide to Technical Terms puts it, “in digital photographic processes, the traditional negative has been replaced with a digital file that is neither negative nor positive, but simply a series of numbers.”2 This “simple” reconfiguration of the photographic medium has accelerated its capacity to generate a seemingly infinite number of reproductions of any image so made. But it has also necessitated a rethinking of the photograph itself. That photograph is now frequently an immaterial entity, or, if not that, at least an entity differently material than its chemically induced forebears. It’s a materiality that allows pixels to be manipulated or to have data embedded in them, data that can in turn be traced and dated, directed, and exchanged. Those pixels are made possible by a f lickering of ones and zeros, of the presence and absence of an electrical current. The constitution of the digital image is therefore based on the same oppositional logic, the same interplay of one and its other, that generated the analogue photograph.

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It would be a mistake to imagine that the digital conceptualisation of the photograph was an invention of the late twentieth century. On the contrary, the electrical dematerialisation and transmission of the photograph has a much longer history.3 Electric telegraphy, for example, was conceived by the American painter Samuel Morse in 1832, as a system that would harness electricity to transmit information along wires between any two points. He speculated that “if … the presence of electricity can be made visible … I see no reason why intelligence might not be instantaneously transmitted by electricity to any distance.”4 He imagined fulfilling this bold prophecy of a new media by translating the alphabet into a numerical code and then transmitting these numbers as breaks in the f low of electricity, as dots, spaces, and dashes. Having already attempted to invent a photographic process in 1821, at various moments Morse experimented with a telegraphic system in which the electricity would automatically leave a mark on some chemically prepared paper. But eventually he decided instead on an apparatus in which two electromagnets would work in concert to mechanically mark the paper with a pencil. Poverty and other discouragements delayed the building of this apparatus until 1837, when he was able to make a crude prototype in his studio in New York. As Morse recalled, this first instrument was comprised of, among other components, “an old picture or canvas frame fastened to a table” and “the wheels of an old wooden clock moved by a weight to carry the paper forward.”5 Time, painting, drawing, mathematics, and electricity are all combined to transmit and reconstitute images (but also sounds and textures) in coded numerical form, as a series of binary electrical pulses. Another key breakthrough came in July 1838, when the Englishman Edward Davy was granted a patent for an electric telegraph system in which a current being received is passed through a moving paper tape soaked in potassium iodide, thus leaving a coloured mark with each f low. Electricity was thereby turned into a legible image, moreover a kind of image produced very much like a photograph: automatically, as a chemical reaction to received energy. With this example in mind, in 1842 Alexander Bain, a Scotsman, devised a telegraphy system that could transmit simple line drawings as well as text, “an arrangement for taking copies of surfaces at distant places by means of electricity.” This primitive facsimile machine included an “endless silk ribbon,” which he saturated in printers’ ink and against which a metal rod would press to leave a mark on the paper beneath, apparently producing an image “in a series of small dots.”6 In 1867, the Frenchman Jean Lenoir proposed the telegraphic transmission of photographic images by first reducing them to stark contrasts of black and white, to a matter of presence and absence—that is, to a kind of digital image—and then by transferring them as electrical impulses between two matching selenium converters. Discovered in 1817, selenium is a chemical element that transmits an electric current proportional to the amount of light falling on its surface. By 1878, Alexander Graham Bell was suggesting in a lecture that it was possible to “hear a shadow” fall on a piece of selenium connected in circuit with his telephone; in a clear reference to Talbot’s “art of fixing a shadow,” he called his new invention

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the photophone. In the following year, Britain’s Punch magazine published a cartoon about Thomas Edison’s imagined Telephonoscope, picturing it as an “electric camera-obscura” which can apparently transmit light and sound in real time from the “Antipodes” (in fact, Ceylon) to England. The cartoon shows a tennis match in progress between some young English colonists, while one of their number speaks to her father back home in Wilton Place. In the left foreground a dark Ceylonese woman, seen sitting next to the family dog, nurses a white child. Much like photography, the Telephonoscope indiscriminately transmits whatever data comes within its scope, including the signs of class difference and racial hierarchy.7 By March 1881, an Englishman named Shelford Bidwell was able to demonstrate a new apparatus, called a Telephotograph Device, capable of transmitting any kind of picture, including photographs. Basically, he had come up with a method of scanning an image, breaking it up into series of parallel lines that could be transmitted as a linear stream of electrical impulses. Using the differential response of selenium to these impulses, they were then reassembled as a two-dimensional image. As Bidwell modestly speculated in a paper delivered to the Royal Institution in London in 1881, “I cannot but think that it is capable of indefinite development, and should there ever be a demand for telephotography, it may turn out to be a useful member of society.”8 He reported that the first “tele-photograph” that he produced, on January 5 of that year, consisted of an image of a gas-f lame. Nevertheless, Bidwell illustrated his report with what he called “pictures … of a very rudimentary character,” reproducing an abstract shape comprising a wavy white rhombus f loating on a black background [Figure 9.1]. This represented a stencil that he projected onto his transmitter, with the received image—“a monochromatic counterpart of that projected upon the transmitter”—appearing as a faint, “exceedingly evanescent” (it only lasted for two hours before disappearing) and horizontally striated image on a sheet of sensitised paper.9 Building on these advances, on October 17, 1906, a German scientist, Dr Arthur Korn, sent the first ever photograph successfully transmitted by wire from

FIGURE 9.1

Shelford Bidwell (England), Image Focused upon Transmitter + Image as Reproduced by Receiver, 1881 ink on paper [from Shelford Bidwell, ‘Selenium and its Application to the Photofone and Telephotography,’ Notices of the Proceedings at the Meeting of the Members of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, 11 March 1881, 12] 21.7 × 13.7 cm (publication)

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Berlin to Munich in 6 minutes, a portrait of Prinzregent Luitpold Karl Joseph Wilhelm Ludwig von Bayern. In 1907, the Daily Mirror in London received one of King Edward. This picture took about 12 minutes to transmit, although, by having a coarser scan and lines wider apart, the transmission of a full-sized picture could take place in 6 minutes.10 Even in the 1920s, the sending and receiving of a wire-picture required a similarly long duration, with the image coming into being in parallel strips of tone [Figure 9.2]. As a consequence of the technology, these pictures arrived at their destinations visibly scarred by time. Obviously, any kind of transmission was now conceivable. Like photographic wood engravings before it, electric photography soon became commonplace. Newspapers and magazines, in particular, made full use of the new technology. In September 1934, for example, Harper’s Bazaar published five pages of fashion images, including one photograph by Man Ray, “radioed from Paris.”11 Slightly more spectacular photographic images were transmitted across the world in 1937. The Hindenburg disaster took place on Thursday, May 6 of that year. The German passenger airship LZ 129 Hindenburg caught fire and was destroyed in about 30 seconds as it was attempting to dock with its mooring mast at the

FIGURE 9.2

Photographer unknown, Wire-photo of a Portrait of a Man, March 1923 gelatin silver photograph 10.3 × 10.4 cm

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Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey, on the east coast of the United States. The disaster was the subject of many photographs, spectacular newsreel coverage, and a recorded radio eyewitness report from the landing field. Also broadcast via electric telegraph was a photographic image of the burning airship, with that image appearing the very next day on the cover of the Los Angeles Times in California, on the other side of the country.12 Newspapers now had rooms set aside for transmitting and receiving machines designed to deliver such photographs. To send one, a positive print would be wrapped around a roller and rotated, while a white beam of light scanned the image in a slow spiral fashion. This data was transformed into electrical signals that were proportional to the shades and tones of the image. Transmitted over phone or telegraph lines, these electrical signals were deposited as equivalent tones on a similarly spinning sheet of either photographic paper or negative film, held in a light-tight cassette in the receiving machine. After being rephotographed through a patterned glass screen and transferred to a sheet of metal, the half-tone image would then be circulated as a photo-mechanical reproduction on newsprint paper. Wire-photos of this kind, dematerialised and rematerialised several times before reaching a public gaze, became a common component of newspapers throughout the twentieth century.13 The photographs that were made of the Moon in the 1960s represent yet another stage in the development of tele-photography. In fact, the Moon was one of the first subjects to be photographed after the daguerreotype process was announced by Louis Daguerre in January 1839. As the German scientist Alexander von Humboldt reported to a friend on February 7: “Even the disk of the Moon leaves its picture in Daguerre’s mysterious substance. On the morning of January 3, 1839, as I had left Paris, that ingenious man brought triumphantly to my friend Arago a picture of the Moon whose edges were somewhat blurred, because the camera obscura was not shifted so quickly as to be able to follow the movement of the Moon.”14 As Daguerre’s now-lost effort proved, the Moon is a difficult thing to photograph. Ref lecting only a relatively faint light and in constant motion through the sky, if you simply train a camera on it, you get no more than a luminous smear—or sequence of smears—in the sky. The way to solve this is to harness your camera to a machine that can track this body through the sky, turning the photographic apparatus into a clockwork mechanism—turning cameras into, as Barthes once put it, “clocks for seeing.”15 Thus, early photographs of the Moon appear to have captured this body at a fixed point in time but they are in fact multiple exposures; such photographs represent a visualisation of accumulated time and moving space. But even these durational images, shot through Earth’s hazy atmosphere, were unable to capture the details of the Moon’s surface. What were needed were photographs taken in outer space itself. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory inaugurated the Ranger Program in December 1959, stating that “the transmission of high resolution pictures of surface detail appears to be the most desirable” objective.16 This desirability was prompted by earlier Soviet successes along the

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same lines, such as one of the hidden side of the Moon sent back to Earth by the Soviet Lunik III module earlier in 1959. The Soviets had automatically processed 35-mm negatives on board their probe, converted them into electrical signals, and then sent these signals back to Earth to be transcribed onto magnetic tape and thence into photographic images. In fact, the Moon proved to be a difficult subject to photograph, this time because it has no atmosphere to diffuse light, resulting in extremely stark and high contrast pictures. As circulated by the Associated Press (AP), the Soviet photograph showed a grey misshapen mass surrounded by blackness, its surprisingly painterly features dotted with numerical and Roman notations to identify various craters and other elements of note. Given that no-one had previously seen this landscape, the AP caption that came with the photograph was suitably sceptical—“What Russia says is the hidden side of the moon”—and conditional—“further processing now taking place on received photo material”17 [Figure 9.3]. Still, the fact that the Soviets had managed to transmit photographic evidence of their achievement made such transmissions a mandatory outcome of all future ventures into space. After the failure of its initial six f lights, NASA obtained its first detailed images of the Moon’s near side in July 1964, and was able to capture the far side by the following year. The unmanned Ranger spacecraft, nine of which were launched between August 1961 and March 1965, were designed to crash onto the Moon’s surface. Each of them was outfitted with a video camera which would transmit pictures to Earth in bursts of radio signal—in effect, these pictures are digital images. They would then be reconstituted on the ground as a photographic mosaic of 512 lines of data received at set intervals. The Ranger IX lunar probe, for example, carried six separate television vidicon cameras in its truncated conical tower—two wide-angle and four narrow-angle—in order to ensure the production of high-resolution images. These were broadcast live on American TV up to the moment of impact, bringing the Moon into the curved confines of a television screen that only moments before may have been showing the nightly news or a sitcom. The telecommunications equipment on board the spacecraft converted the composite video signal from the cameras into a radiofrequency (RF) signal for subsequent transmission through the spacecraft’s high-gain antenna.18 Precisely 5,814 good contrast photographs were made during the final 19 minutes of f light of Ranger IX. Some of these were shown with an added caption, layered over the images as they were being broadcast: “Live from the Moon.” Like a one-line poem or the text accompanying a piece of conceptual art, these captions insisted on the “live” simultaneity of lunar and local time, and of celestial and domestic space.19 Journalists would photograph these TV monitors during broadcast and then circulate the resulting photograph. Other publicity pictures, often striated by lines indicating their means of production, would be sent by NASA via phone line or telegraphic signal to newspapers as press prints, thus transforming them into an electrical signal, and then back

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FIGURE 9.3

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Associated Press (USA), Wirephoto: Russia claims this is the hidden side of the moon as photographed by instruments in their Lunik III, 1959 gelatin silver photograph 25.4 × 206 cm

into a paper photograph, one more time. The captions that accompany these photographs are instructive. One such caption from a picture released to the Associated Press Wirephoto service in 1964 tells us, for example, that “the area at right is the result of the receiver noise pattern when the spacecraft was destroyed as it struck the moon.”20 In other words, this photograph, the last to be sent from the Ranger VII spacecraft before it crashed, is partly composed of static [Figure 9.4].

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FIGURE 9.4

NASA (USA), Associated Press Wire Photo:This is a recropped version of JPL5 of today to provide larger copy of the upper left-hand section, showing the last picture from the Ranger VII spacecraft, 1964 gelatin silver photograph 20.6 × 22.5 cm

Later spacecraft attempted to capture less images but of a higher quality. The five Lunar Orbiter space craft, for example, employed an unusual film-based system of photography. Housed in a heated, pressurised compartment, the Orbiter carried a camera with a wide-angle and telephoto lens, a film processor, a video scanner, and a transmitter. The camera was linked to an optical sensor which guided constant micro-adjustments to compensate for the craft’s movements. Once the high-resolution film was exposed, it was chemically processed on board

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and automatically passed before the electron beam scanner; these images were then transmitted back to Earth and recorded on magnetic tape, from which new photographic negatives were made. The system, which closely resembled terrestrial wire-photo systems, was successful, but some images reveal smudge marks that were left on the negatives in the space craft by the developing rollers.21 It also resulted in far fewer photographs. By way of comparison, Surveyor VII managed to send 21,038 photographic images to Earth, whereas Lunar Orbiter I, launched on August 10, 1966, transmitted only 207.22 One of those, recorded on August 23, showed a shadowed crescent of the Earth f loating above the Moon’s horizon (“as others see us,” according to the caption that accompanied its publication in the Milwaukee Journal on January 1, 1967). It was the first such picture to be made. The Surveyor programme, in contrast, involved seven soft landings of craft on the Moon’s surface (although, again, the Soviets got there first, in February 1966). A single video camera on board the Surveyor craft could capture objects as small as one millimetre. The camera’s zoom lens, controlled from Earth by radio signal, was mounted in a periscope-like construction that could rotate to scan a 360-degree horizon, using a moveable mirror. The tilting of the camera sometimes resulted in the appearance of wave patterns in the final photograph, distorting the image.23 It also meant that portions of the Surveyor craft or its shadow regularly appeared in the photographs it took. A problem with glare ensured that the details in many pictures were difficult to discern. Nevertheless, the Surveyor missions were able to take some photographs in colour for the first time. These were produced using three colour filters and three black-andwhite negatives, with a composite photograph the end result. The colour was calibrated according to a view of a standard colour disc attached to one of the Surveyor craft’s feet.24 However they were produced, these photographs of the Moon’s surface are often strange to look at, hovering between abstractions and documents, and requiring extensive captions to explain their otherwise puzzling appearance. These images also sometimes bear the visual traces of transmission noise, or a superimposed grid of cross-marks to aid their analysis, drawing attention to their complicated means of production and to their own existence as things (rather than just pictures of things). Their circulation in the press happened to coincide with Minimalism and Land Art, as if offering a vernacular version of those art movements. But they also recall expeditionary photographs taken in the American southwest in the nineteenth century.25 Tracing a history of human efforts to venture into space, these photographs simultaneously offer an important staging point in the development of digital imaging, and therefore in the history of photography itself. The Earth was also subjected to electric photography during this period. The first photograph of the Earth as a complete globe, dated to November 5, 1967, was produced by a NASA “spin cloud camera,” invented by Dr Verner Suomi. The photograph was composed from data provided by the American geostationary equatorial satellite ATS-III, positioned 22,300 miles above Brazil. This data was

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transmitted back to Earth via radio signal in 2,400 separate lines, each of them encompassing a slice of the planet of approximately two nautical miles. The final picture is a composite image made up of these accumulated slices.26 According to the British scientist and science fiction writer Fred Hoyle, the release of this carefully manufactured photographic image on November 18, 1967, had a profound effect on our sense of ourselves as a single global species, creating “a world-wide awareness of our planet as a unique and precious place.”27 Scientists continue to go to great efforts to produce photographs of space phenomena, as if the making visible of such phenomena in photographic form remains the most convincing evidence one can offer.28 On April 10, 2019, for example, a group of scientists released an image of a black hole, the first to have been so “captured” [Figure 9.5]. This picture resembles a photograph, not only in its appearance but also, as an indexical visualisation of received radiation, in its claim to represent objective evidentiary authority. At the same time, in picturing a gravitational vortex from which no light can escape, an image of a black hole is, in effect, the negation of the possibility of all photography. The image showed a fuzzy, donut-shaped ring of gas and dust f loating in a field of blackness. It was created using data gathered by the Event Horizon telescope, a network of eight radio telescopes spanning locations from Antarctica to Spain and Chile, in an effort that involved more than 200 scientists. As one of them put it, “We have seen what we thought was unseeable.” Radiation from the particles that make up the disc around the black hole was gathered from the eight different telescope sites on Earth using atomic clocks to ensure exact coordination. The signals picked up by these telescopes then had to be combined

FIGURE 9.5

Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, The first image of a black hole in galaxy Messier 87, released April 10, 2019

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and fed through a computer “to turn a mountain of incomprehensible blips into a visual picture.” This making comprehensible of the unseeable depended on the deployment of a new algorithm capable of both combining the data and filtering out visual noise created by factors like atmospheric humidity.29 This computergenerated composite image has been enhanced with false colour (radio telescopes don’t detect visible light), keyed to indicate radio emission differences. As with earlier space photographs, the image of a black hole is, among other things, a key publicity tool for science, enabling mathematicians to capture the attention of a distracted public for a crucial news cycle. It makes theoretical physics visible and therefore non-theoretical. As Ansel Adams was keen to emphasise in The Negative: “the key to the satisfactory application of visualization lies in getting the appropriate information on the negative.”30 In digital photography, that negative has been replaced by an electronic matrix. This matrix is no longer the visual other to a positive print, its exact tonal opposite, but something quite other: it is now nothing but information. Photography has thereby been transformed back into the idea of photography, with computer software having been designed to transfigure electronic data into an on-screen or ink-on-paper image that looks the way a photograph once looked. The binary opposition of analogue negative and positive has been erased, but its historical ghost nevertheless remains to haunt us still.

Notes 1 See Russell A. Kirsch, ‘SEAC and the Start of Image Processing at the National Bureau of Standards,’ IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 20: 2 (1998), 9–13. In making such a choice, Kirsch also invests his new technology with a familiar view of the photograph as a vehicle for parental memory and family values, a view long promoted by Eastman Kodak and its many sub-contractors. 2 Baldwin, Looking at Photographs, 63. 3 What follows is largely drawn from Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Electricity Made Visible,’ in Wendy Hui Kyong Chun & Thomas Keenan eds., New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006), 27–44. 4 Morse, writing to C.T. Jackson, September 18, 1837, as quoted in Carleton Mabee, The American Leonardo: A Life of Samuel F.B. Morse (New York: Alfred A. Knoff, 1944), 149. Morse later remembered the date of his first conception of an electric telegraph system as October 19, 1832. For a history of telegraphy before Morse, see the aptly titled book by Gerald J. Holzmann and Björn Pehrson, The Early History of Data Networks (Los Alamitos: IEEE Computer Society Press, 1995). On Morse’s own photographic experiments and their timing, see Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Some Experiments of Mine”: The Early Photographic Experiments of Samuel Morse, History of Photography, 15: 1 (Spring, 1991), 37–42. It should be noted that, contrary to most published accounts of the history of photography, there is no evidence that Morse undertook these experiments in 1812 while a student at Yale. 5 Morse, as quoted in Edward Lind Morse ed., Samuel F.B. Morse: His Letters and Journal, Vol. 2 (Boston: Houghton Miff lin Co., 1914), 38-39. 6 Alexander Bain, Electric Time Pieces and Telegraphs (London: George E. Eyre and William Spottiswoode, 1856). This publication describes and illustrates Bain’s 1843 specifications for what he claimed were “improvements in producing and regulating electric currents and improvements in timepieces and in electric printing and signal

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telegraphs.” By 1848, an Englishman named Frederick Bakewell had designed another facsimile system capable of transmitting handwriting and simple line drawings along telegraph wires, and this was followed in 1856 by Giovanni Caselli’s Pantelegraph system, which was able to transmit all kinds of information, drawings as well as text, across telegraph lines; in 1865, Paris was connected to other cities by this system. See Steven Lubar, Infoculture: The Smithsonian Book of Information Age Inventions (Boston: Houghton Miff lin Co., 1993), 244. Shelford Bidwell, ‘Tele-Photography,’ Nature (February 10, 1881), 344–346. Bidwell, ibid. See also Shelford Bidwell, ‘Selenium and its Application to the Photofone and Telephotography,’ Notices of the Proceedings at the Meeting of the Members of the Royal Institution of Great Britain (11 March 1881), 12. For a commentary on these developments, see T. Thorne Baker, ‘Photo-Telegraphy,’ The Photographic Journal, Vol. XLVIII, No. 4 (April 1908), 179–186. “Photo-Telegraphy is the term which has been accepted to signify the transmission of a photograph from one place to another by electrical means. Although the quality of the pictures telegraphed is by no means perfect at present, it is at the same time sufficiently good to admit of the use of the process for commercial journalistic purposes; the present time, moreover, will be a memorable one in the future history of photo-telegraphy, for the science is now on the verge of considerable development, and many improvements of a substantial kind may be looked for in the near future.” Baker reports that, depending on the system adopted, the transmission of photographs, including landscapes and portraits, takes only about 6 minutes, with the resulting scanning lines reproducing themselves at 4mm apart. He goes on to speculate that the results will soon be sufficiently good to be publishable. He also reports on the possible use of photo-telegraphy in criminal investigation: “I read only a week ago that the German police were proposing to have Korn instruments in various parts of the country as a means of assisting their detective force. I should imagine, however, that in the present condition of the system the adoption of such a plan would be likely to increase the possibilities of wrongful arrest.” Man Ray, ‘Fashion by Radio,’ Harper’s Bazaar (September 1934), 45. See Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, 242. I thank Colin Probst for information about the sending and receiving of wire-photos. Alexander von Humboldt (February 7, 1839), as quoted in Daniela Mrázková ed., Co Je Fotografie/What is Photography: 150 Let Fotografie/150 Years of Photography (Praha: VideoPress, 1989), 31. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 15. See Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Forever Dark,’ Dark Sky (Wellington: Adam Art Gallery, 2012), 4–39. Quoted from the caption that accompanies an American photograph issued by the Associated Press in 1959: Wirephoto: Russia claims this is the hidden side of the moon as photographed by instruments in their Lunik III. See Christopher Phillips, ‘”Magnificent Desolation”: The Moon Photographed,’ in Jean Clair ed., Cosmos: From Romanticism to the Avant-garde (Prestel), 19 ), 144– 149. For a survey of images in all media inspired by the Moon, see Quentin Bajac, Dans le champ des étoiles: Les photographes et le ciel 1850–2000 (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2000); Andreas Blühm, The Moon: “Houston, Tranquility Base Here. The Eagle Has Landed” (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2009); and Laerke Rydal Jorgensen and Marie Laurberg eds., The Moon: From Inner Worlds to Outer Space (Humlebaek: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2018). See Joy Sleeman, ‘Land Art and the Moon Landing,’ Journal of Visual Culture (May 11, 2010): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1470412909347669 (accessed April 21, 2019). This information comes from a press photograph distributed by NASA in 1964: Associated Press Wire Photo: This is a recropped version of JPL5 of today to provide larger

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21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29

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copy of the upper left-hand section, showing the last picture from the Ranger VII spacecraft. See Batchen, Dark Sky, 33. Jay Belloli, in Jay Belloli ed., 25 Years of Space Photography: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology (Pasadena: Baxter Art Gallery, 1985), 34. Ibid., 112. Ibid., 30. See Phillips, ‘”Magnificent Desolation,”’ Cosmos, 144–149. See Christopher Knight, ‘The Persistent Observer,’ in Belloli, 25 Years of Space Photography, 8–19. See Kris Belden-Adams, Photography, Temporality, Modernity: Time Warped (New York: Routledge, 2019), 129–130. Fred Hoyle, 1970, as quoted in Vicki Goldberg, The Power of Photography: How Photographs Changed Our Lives (New York: Abbeville Press, 1991), 52. According to a scholarly study published in the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review in 2012, people are more likely to believe something is true if a photograph, even a merely decorative photograph, appears alongside the story—or, as the title of the article puts it, “Nonprobative Photographs (or Words) Inf late Truthiness.” According to the five authors, “these effects add to a growing literature on how nonprobative information can inf late subjective feelings of truth.” Using various experiments designed to test what they call the “truthiness effect,” the five psychologists wanted to explore the hypothesis (partly derived from the work of Spinoza) that “photos should bootstrap the generation of thoughts and images that subjects may then be biased to construe as evidence that the claim in question is true.” Noting the average viewer’s propensity to generate what they call “pseudoevidence” in response to otherwise undemonstrative photographs, they conclude that, for example, “neuroscience claims need not be accompanied by neuroimages to seem more credible: a photo or description of the author might suffice.” See Eryn J. Newman et al., ‘Nonprobative Photographs (or Words) Inf late Truthiness,’ Psychonomic Bulletin & Review (2012). Hannah Devlin, ‘Black hole Picture Captured for First Time in Space Breakthrough,’ The Guardian (10 April 2019): https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/apr/10 /black-hole-picture-captured-for-first-time-in-space-breakthrough (accessed April 11, 2019). Ansel Adams, The Negative, ix.

10 AUTHORSHIP AND OWNERSHIP

As we’ve seen, the division between negatives and positive prints has sometimes allowed a certain amount of creative play with the photographic process. More importantly, it also divided the actual labour of photography, introducing a temporal and spatial displacement into the physical act of making photographs. After all, as we’ve also already seen, a negative could be taken at one time and printed at another, or be taken by one person and printed by another, much later and in a different place and according to different aesthetic and commercial values. This too is an aspect of photography’s story that has not often been addressed. The West Façade of Westminster Abbey, a salt print from a calotype negative, was published in April 1846 as one of three photographs to be issued with the sixth and final part of Talbot’s pioneering book The Pencil of Nature [Figure 10.1]. Talbot accompanied this photograph with a text that complained about the detrimental effects that London’s pollution was having on the appearance of historical buildings: “the façade of the building being strongly and somewhat capriciously darkened by the atmospheric inf luence.”1 The photograph was presented as evidence, not only of environmental degradation, but also of the ability of calotype-based photography to picture this degradation. Westminster Abbey is shown from a slight angle, so that the ornamented façade fills the picture plane almost entirely, leaving only a hint of the rest of the building receding into the distance on the left side of the print and cropping out the top of the building altogether. As Talbot recognised, we are forced by this point of view to focus on the unnaturally “swarthy hue” of the stone itself, and to marvel at the myriad of details (like a fence in the foreground) that photography encompasses within its undiscriminating and remorseless stare. Nowhere in his text or caption does Talbot mention that the negative from which this print was made had been taken two years before, and not by him but by his former valet, Nicolaas Henneman. This is not entirely Talbot’s fault; in fact,

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FIGURE 10.1

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Nicolaas Henneman (Netherlands/England), The West Façade of Westminster Abbey, exposed before May 1845, printed early 1846 salt print from calotype negative; plate XXII, The Pencil of Nature 16.2 × 18.3 cm (image)

we only know that the negative was exposed by Henneman because of a line in Talbot’s manuscript, deleted before typesetting, that reads “This picture was executed by Mr. N.H. of Reading.”2 Not often acknowledged as a photographer in his own right, Henneman, a Dutch-born immigrant, had left Talbot’s employ in 1843 and by early 1844 was running a photographic printing business in Reading, a town midway on the railway line between London and Lacock, Talbot’s home. This business, known in legal documents as the Reading Establishment, produced over 30,000 photographs from paper calotype negatives in its two years of operation, primarily for two of Talbot’s own publications (The Pencil of Nature and Sun Pictures in Scotland) but also for the Art-Union, a journal that issued 7,000 original photographs to its readers in June 1846, and for certain other clients.3 As it happens, we have a photograph showing the making of Henneman’s photograph, or at least of photographs very much like it. Now simply titled The Reading Establishment, this work comprises two salt prints made from calotype negatives, joined together to form a single panoramic diptych [Figure 10.2]. Once again, this diptych ref lects on the role of the negative in photographic practice, the business it promotes having been set up to exploit a distinguishing feature of Talbot’s calotype process: its capacity to allow multiple salt print positive copies to be made from a single matrix.

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FIGURE 10.2

Usually attributed to Nicolaas Henneman / William Henry Fox Talbot (England), The Reading Establishment, c. 1846 two salted-paper photographs from calotype negatives (right half of print intensified by Harold White in 1940s) 19.9 × 48.1 cm

Although this pair of images has often been reproduced, we know surprisingly little about it.4 We don’t know, for example, who took these two pictures, or the identities of many of the people featured in them, when they were made, or what their exact purpose was. And yet in many ways, this diptych offers a view of photography that is startlingly modern. The photograph shows nine figures, four in the left panel and five in the right, arrayed in the foreground like a sculptural frieze in front of a glass house and brick building. Each figure is engaged in a different activity related to the making of photographs for money, then a new kind of business enterprise. The Reading Establishment was intended to exploit Talbot’s patented discoveries, and especially his invention of this calotype process in 1841. As Talbot claimed in a letter to the Literary Gazette, dated February 13, 1841, “a better picture can now be obtained in a minute than by the former process in an hour.”5 Although, as we’ve heard, Talbot had already made positive prints from a negative using his earlier photogenic drawing process, the speed of the calotype made multiple reproductions from negatives a viable commercial proposition for the first time. Keen to make money from his invention, Talbot sold licenses for the use of the calotype to professional London-based photographers Henry Collen in 1841 and Antoine Claudet in 1844. Despite their inability to turn a profit from it, he also encouraged the formation of a photographic printing business by Henneman, the man in the diptych shown taking a photograph of a statuette. The calotype negatives from which this diptych was printed were made during this period, presumably as a way of promoting Henneman’s business. The negatives have survived, as have six sets of prints from these negatives, most of which have faded (the right-hand print in the best surviving version of the diptych was

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in fact intensified by Harold White in the 1940s, hence its unusually fine state of preservation).6 One set has even been hand-coloured. The fact that this picture is a panoramic composite print from two negatives (a joiner, as they were then called) and that at least one of them was hand-coloured, suggests the involvement of Calvert Richard Jones, a Welshman who was among the first to practice both of these genres and who knew Talbot and Henneman well.7 Jones was also very involved in the plans for the Reading Establishment, sending Henneman negatives to print from and suggesting ways to make a profit from them. Talbot even invited him to manage the business. However, Jones first visited the Reading Establishment only on about December 1, 1846, and makes no mention of taking this picture (in any case, the winter of 1846 was an unusually cold one and the scene in this diptych shows no snow or frost on the ground, making it unlikely it was shot in December). In fact, no-one mentions this picture in any surviving letters. It’s often said that the central figure, shown making a portrait of a seated man supported by a metal headrest, is Talbot himself (despite the profusion of hair on this man’s head, a surprise given that Talbot is shown to be quite bald in daguerreotypes made of him by the Richard Beard studio in 1841). It seems odd that Talbot would want to be seen taking a commercial portrait, something he never did in practice. Indeed, Talbot had carefully funded the Reading Establishment as a separate institution under Henneman’s control, precisely so that he would keep “trade” at a safe distance from himself, a landed gentleman. Why then would he want to associate himself with it so overtly here? In the 1850s, the Photographic Society of London, seeking to maintain a clear division between those “in trade” and those “in society,“ decided to ban from its exhibitions any photographs that had already been displayed in a shop window.8 Talbot would have been well aware of such class prejudices, and, as a member of the landed gentry, may well have shared them. Could the central figure operating the portrait camera in fact be Benjamin Cowderoy, a local Reading businessman whom Talbot had hired as a manager for his photography business in early 1846 (firing him in December of that same year)? Cowderoy busily set about promoting the Reading Establishment, and it is possible, as I’ve said, that this picture was meant as an advertisement to be placed in the windows of booksellers and other businesses that might also sell Henneman’s photographs. By the end of 1846, Cowderoy had succeeded in establishing such outlets in London, in 11 other English towns, and even in Malta, as well as at the local Reading bookshop. Talbot scholar Larry Schaaf says that “all known printed ephemera from the Reading Establishment can be traced to Cowderoy’s reign in 1846.”9 So he may have been responsible for this panorama too. According to Cowderoy’s own reminiscence, written in 1895 in Melbourne, Australia, where he had emigrated in 1853, he worked part-time for Talbot to conduct “all correspondence, issue licenses under the patents, and attend generally to the business of supervising the distribution and sale of the pictures.” In

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addition, he visited paper mills in Kent to ensure Henneman would receive “a paper specially manufactured for the purpose” of photographic printing.10 He also remarks that the “stock of pictures grew to inconvenient proportions in the hands of such a gentleman as Mr Talbot, occupying a high position in aristocratic society,” reminding his readers that “in those days” the “younger sons of dukes” did not “enter into mercantile offices.” Talbot was no duke’s son, but his family certainly aspired to that sort of social status. As a consequence, Cowderoy says, Talbot experienced “perplexity and embarrassment through the accumulation of merchantable products which the usages of society would not allow him personally to ‘liquidate.’”11 Hence Talbot’s employment of Cowderoy to do that dirty work for him. In short, Cowderoy reminds us that this is a picture both of work and of workers, and that it is also therefore a picture about class difference, and at a time when such differences really mattered. Whether or not he took the picture himself, or is indeed its central figure, Cowderoy and the conduct of “mercantile” labour are surely at its conceptual heart. Whatever the details of its making and makers, the image is clearly a tableaux vivant staged to demonstrate the range of activities being undertaken at the Reading Establishment; from the left, the reproduction of existing art works (as were made for an 1847 publication by Sir William Stirling titled Annals of the Artists of Spain, the fourth volume of which consisted of 67 prints from calotypes made by Henneman’s business); the preparation, in the glasshouse, of sensitised paper to be used by others; the taking of commercial portraits; the printing out, in the uncertain English sunlight, of photographs from negatives (we see at least 20 prints being made simultaneously, layered over their respective negatives); the photographic reproduction of a sculpture of the Three Graces from Talbot’s own collection (note the prominent clocks on the cameras to time the exposures); and the use of new-fangled technologies to judge exposure or focus, a device probably invented by Claudet.12 Beyond all that, the image reminds us—is insistent about—the collective nature of photographic labour, that making photographs is labour. We know the names of some of the workers who assisted Henneman during the three years of the Reading Establishment’s existence, even if we don’t know exactly who features in this promotional diptych—Nicholas Henneman and Charles Porter, both former servants of Talbot’s; Alfred Harrison and John Henderson, who had previously worked at Lovejoy’s bookstore in Reading; a man named Murray; Cowderoy; and Thomas Augustine Malone, a local chemist. Also included were two “boys” or “lads,” as they are referred to in the correspondence. In other words, they all (except, of course, for Talbot) represent the class aspirations of the petit bourgeoisie: shopkeepers and domestic staff leaving more traditional employment to join a start-up company in a new, risky high-tech industry with a view to eventually becoming middle-class business-owners themselves. And they are seen here engaged in a laborious hand-craft activity (Roger Taylor calculates that it took 72,000 discrete steps to manufacture 6,000 prints) that nevertheless aspired to meet the conditions of industrial production, with

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Henneman aiming to manufacture at least 400 prints per week.13 This included breaking down that production into some of the discrete steps represented here and instituting a strict division of labour in which some workers operated cameras, others prepared paper, others put exposed prints in frames, others did the selling, and so on. In 1856, Henneman recalled that the prints made for The Pencil of Nature were processed in batches of 25 and received three washings. The following year, Malone remembered that sheets of paper were brushed with a solution of silver nitrate to make them light sensitive. In subsequent accounts, Malone claimed that each print received only about half an hour’s washing, 25 prints at a time, in water “as hot as the hand could bear,” with each print washed for about ten minutes, in three successive pans of water. There is no record that Malone was officially employed at Reading, so perhaps, given his detailed reminiscences, he merely helped out on occasion. John Henderson, writing in 1898, said that “we [Harrison, Henderson and Malone] were all pretty frequent visitors to his [Henneman’s] Studio, used to constantly sit for our portraits, and help him in preparing his papers, arranging the Camera, a rather ponderous affair, and doing all we could to assist in the work.”14 Various aspects of this collective labour are laid out before our eyes in this panorama, itself probably a collective product (conceived by one party, shot by perhaps two different photographers, printed by at least some of these nine workers, and then distributed and displayed by yet further people). From this panorama, then, we might begin to tell a different kind of story about the development of photography in the nineteenth century, and beyond. As we’ve heard, another of Henneman’s customers was the Reverend Calvert Richard Jones, a Welshman who had first started experimenting with photography in 1839, shortly after Talbot had announced his invention. Inspired by The Pencil of Nature, Jones set out to master the calotype process, ordering alreadyiodised paper from Henneman’s business to use during a sight-seeing trip to the Mediterranean in November 1845. An image now titled House of Sallust, Pompei was taken on that trip, probably in the Spring of 1846. A man in coat and top hat leans nonchalantly against a ruined wall, with a group of broken columns filling in the background and Vesuvius looming dimly in the distance. The end result is a rather shallow composition, mimicking the frontal look of an architectural drawing. The man, perhaps Jones himself, must have stood there for the necessary 5–10 minutes to ensure a high-contrast negative. His presence provides a sense of scale but also ensures that the picture offers us this odd juxtaposition of the ancient and the modern, of a Roman villa destroyed by a cataclysm and a contemporary tourist casually taking pleasure in the same. There are a number of versions of this image, at least ten prints having been made from Jones’ calotype negative; these include a very faded salt print, another that is rich in tone (perhaps because it was intensified in the 1940s), and one that has been over-painted.15 Each of them was probably printed by Henneman’s

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team of workers in 1847, as Jones often sent his negatives to Reading to be fixed, developed, and printed. The variation in tone from one print to the next is a reminder of the unpredictable nature of calotype printing in the 1840s, a problem that eventually resulted in Henneman going out of business. Jones was especially concerned about the commercial potential of his pictures and very probably made this one with sales in mind, imagining its appeal to both antiquarian and Romantic taste. The painting of Jones’s photographs was similarly motivated. In this case, the watercolour and gouache additions to a deliberately faint print accentuate the shadows already in the photograph, but they also work to more strongly distinguish foreground from background. In particular, they allowed Jones to make Vesuvius a more prominent feature of the picture. The volcano is now seen as threateningly spewing smoke and ash into an otherwise blue and cloudy sky, reminding the viewer of how this ruin came to be there and again connecting past and present. One more thing about the Reading Establishment: when the work of Talbot is represented in histories of photography, it is usually accompanied by one or more of his most celebrated images, invariably a selection from his best surviving prints, richly toned and in pristine condition. But it could well be argued that a faded print is both more representative and certainly more historically significant than these. Take, for instance, One of the Towers of Orleans Cathedral, As Seen from the Opposite Tower, a salt print produced by the Reading Establishment.16 [Figure 10.3] Talbot exposed the calotype negative from which this print was made during an 1843 trip to France, intending to promote his process in that country. He also took the opportunity to shoot a considerable number of pictures. Among the places he visited was Orléans, about 110 kilometres south-west of Paris. Talbot’s travel diary records his movements on June 21 during that visit: “W. 21. visited ye Cathedral: & Botc. Garden at Sunset.”17 Having already shot the cathedral from a distance, while recording a view of the town square (or Place as he called it), Talbot also made at least two close-up photographs. Ascending one of the cathedral’s two towers, he made one exposure about a third of the way up, and another at the top of the tower, capturing a view in each case of the corresponding architecture of the other tower. As Larry Schaaf has pointed out, this architecture, although of ancient appearance to us, was in fact newly installed, part of a widespread programme in which historic buildings were being renovated, even partially transformed, all over France.18 Having captured views of the overall form of the building in other photographs, Talbot now offers us two severely truncated details. In both cases, he carefully positioned his camera so that the left edge of the tower is isolated against the sky and a distant glimpse of the town below. As a consequence, the other three edges of the picture are allowed to crop the building at abrupt and seemingly arbitrary intervals. The long-focus lens he has employed to capture the tracery of the ornate carving has also f lattened the perspective so that the resulting images look like unusually faithful sepia versions of architect’s renderings. This initial

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FIGURE 10.3

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William Henry Fox Talbot (England), View of One of the Towers of Orleans Cathedral, taken c. 5pm on June 21, 1843 salted paper photograph from calotype negative (printed by Nicolaas Henneman & Co. at the Reading Establishment in early 1846), as published in The Art-Union: Monthly Journal of the Fine Arts and the Arts, Decorative, Ornamental, Volume the Eighth. London: Printed by Palmer and Clayton, June 1846, page 143 19.2 × 15.5 cm (image)

impression is punctuated, however, by the glimpses we are allowed through the columns of the tower and out to the sky on the other side, unmistakable signs of the structure’s three-dimensionality. The viewer seems to be f loating in space, seeing this building as no ordinary parishioner would ever have seen it, not looking up from far below but hovering up close, like an angel or perhaps even a god. Photography is shown to be capable of dividing the world it pictures into discontinuous fragments, a kind of ruthlessly unharmonious vision later to be associated with Baudelaire’s poetry and Impressionist painting. This is, in other words, an entirely modern kind of picture. Talbot had at one point imagined putting together a book of photographs of cathedrals, but when that ambition went unfulfilled, he added two of his Orléans photographs, Orleans Cathedral and Orleans Place, to a list of additional plates for The Pencil of Nature. Unfortunately, these additions were never issued. Talbot nevertheless obviously admired the pictures he had taken there. In a letter to his mother dated January 30, 1844, he advised her “do not stick into the album the 3 views representing the Cathedral of Orleans; they are too faint, & I have now got much better ones.”19 He finally received an opportunity to release them to a public audience in 1846, when he agreed to provide thousands of salt print

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photographs to the editor of the Art-Union, to be published in the June issue. These photographs were produced in a rush by Henneman and his team of workers. In order to meet the required deadline, Henneman used every negative at his disposal, perhaps as many as 70, and this included at least 4 taken in Orléans, one of The principle Place in the city of Orleans, one titled Talbotype of Bridge of Orleans over the Loire, and two versions of One of the Towers of Orleans Cathedral, As Seen from the Opposite Tower. Henneman printed these titles on labels, along with the italicized words “From Nature” and the date of exposure, “1843,” which were then tipped in to some, but not all, of the copies of the Art-Union. Unfortunately for Talbot, the Art-Union project proved to be a promotional and financial disaster, with most of the photographs fading soon after publication. Pale and indistinct, their limitations as illustrations was made all the more apparent by their placement in the Art-Union, allowing a direct comparison with the many kinds of fine engravings and other reproductions to be found there. Prompted by the failure embodied in these particular photographs, Talbot spent the next 15 years experimenting with processes that would allow permanent inkon-paper photomechanical engravings to be made. In October 1852, he filed a patent for “Photographic Engraving.” In April 1858, perfecting a way to introduce an aquatint ground to the process, he filed another patent for an improved system of photogravure which he called “Photoglyphic Engraving.”20 To his credit, Talbot often used photographic images supplied by others as the basis of these engravings. Having invented negative-positive photography, the system of representation that dominated the nineteenth century, Talbot now introduced photomechanical reproduction, which would similarly dominate the twentieth. He therefore made possible a culture based on the mass reproduction and distribution of photographic images, the culture in which we all live today. Only by admitting “bad” prints into our histories of photography can we illustrate this important story, a story once again dependent on an acknowledgement of the relationship of negative and positive photographs and of the economy of mass production that drove it.

Notes 1 William Henry Fox Talbot, text opposite Plate XXII, The Pencil of Nature, April 1846, as reproduced in Mike Weaver ed., Henry Fox Talbot: Selected Texts and Bibliography (Oxford: Clio Press, 1992), 102. 2 William Henry Fox Talbot, as quoted in Larry Schaaf, Sun Pictures: Catalogue Fifteen, 56. 3 Larry Schaaf has sometimes cast doubt on whether “the Reading Establishment” was a term used at the time. Although neither Talbot nor Henneman used this designation in letters between them, in the Agreement drawn up on Talbot’s behalf that Henneman signed on June 6, 1846, the business is referred to as “the Reading Establishment” (see Arthur Gill, ‘Nicholas Henneman,’ History of Photography, 5: 1 [1981], 84-86) and henceforth as the “Establishment.” The document was drawn up and witnessed by Benjamin Cowderoy, but Henemann signed it, thus legally agreeing

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4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20

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to the use of that name. The name was already being referred to as “the Reading Establishment” on the Terms of Licenses issued by the business and dated December 15, 1845. Calvert Richard Jones wrote to Talbot about the business on September 2, 1846, telling him that “I am very anxious to see your Reading establishment.” By December 4, however, he refers to it as “your Reading Establishment.” See http:// foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk/letters/ (accessed July 5, 2018). What follows draws on Geoffrey Batchen, ‘The Labor of Photography,’ Victorian Literature and Culture 37:1 (2009), 292–296. But see also V.F. Snow and D.B. Thomas, ‘The Talbotype Establishment at Reading—1844 to 1847,’ The Photographic Journal (February 1966), 56–67, and Larry Schaaf, ‘The Reading Establishment’s “Hidden Mysteries”’ (December 9, 2016): https://talbot.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/2016/12/09/h idden-mysteries-connected-with-the-subject/ (accessed December 12, 2016). William Henry Fox Talbot, ‘Calotype (Photogenic) Drawing,’ Literary Gazette, 1160 (February 13, 1841), 235–236. See Larry Schaaf, Sun Pictures: Catalogue Three (New York: Hans Kraus Jr., 1987), 58. See Rollin Buckman, The Photographic Work of Calvert Richard Jones (London: Science Museum, 1990) and Larry Schaaf, ‘The Reverend Calvert R. Jones,’ Sun Pictures: Catalogue Five (New York: Hans P. Kraus, Jr., 1990). Roger Taylor, Impressed by Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives 1840–1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 19, 53. Larry Schaaf, ‘Introductory Volume,’, H. Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature Anniversary Facsimile (New York: Hans. P. Kraus., 1989), 33. Ibid., 26. Ibid., 33. See Hilary Macartney, ‘William Stirling and the Talbotype Volume of the Annals of the Artists of Spain,’ History of Photography 30.4 (2006), 291–308, and Hilary Macartney and José Manuel Matilla eds., Copied by the Sun: Talbotype Illustrations to the Annals of the Artists of Spain by Sir William Stirling Maxwell: Studies and Catalogue Raisonné (Madrid : Museo Nacional del Prado: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, 2016). Taylor, Impressed by Light, 19. Schaaf, ‘Introductory Volume,’ Pencil, 19. See Larry Schaaf, Sun Pictures: Catalogue Three (New York: Hans Kraus Jr., 1987), 58. What follows is drawn from Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Summer Pleasures: One of the Towers of Orleans Cathedral,’ Talbot Catalogue Raisonné blog post (Oxford University, August 2016): http://foxtalbot.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/summer-pleasures-one-of-the-towers-of -orleans-cathedral/ (accessed 10 September 2017). Talbot, 1843 Field Diary ( June 21, 1843), Fox Talbot Collection, The British Library, London: MS 88942/5/1/34. Schaaf, The Photographic Art of William Henry Fox Talbot, 164–165, 250. Talbot, letter to Lady Elisabeth Feilding ( January 30, 1844) Doc.# 4929: http:// foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk/letters/ (accessed September 25, 2018). For more on this aspect of Talbot’s career, see Larry Schaaf, Sun Pictures: Catalogue Twelve: Talbot and Photogravure (New York: Hans P. Kraus, Jr., 2003) and Larry Schaaf, ‘“The Caxton of Light”: Talbot’s Etchings of Light,’ in Mirjam Brusius, Katrina Dean, and Chitra Ramalingam eds., William Henry Fox Talbot: Beyond Photography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 161–189.

11 REFASHIONING A PAST

The previous case-study offered a detailed analysis of a single printing establishment in England, an establishment dedicated to turning the relationship of negative and positives into a business. But one could equally repeat a slightly later version of this story located in France. As we’ve seen, Henneman’s unsuccessful struggle to produce consistent prints from calotype negatives was a reminder of the limitations of Talbot’s process. On January 25, 1847, a French cloth merchant by the name of Louis-Désiré Blanquart-Evrard announced some significant improvements, using basically the same formula as Talbot but thoroughly impregnating the paper with their sensitive chemicals and rewetting it with an acidic solution of nitrate of silver before use.1 This meant that this solution and a dark-tent had to be carried to wherever one photographed, but exposure times were reduced by 75%. It was with these relatively revolutionary technical advances in hand (among the over 40 refinements of Talbot’s calotype process that were introduced in this period) that major photographic landscape projects could finally be undertaken. A version of the improved process was adopted by Maxime du Camp during his expedition to the Middle East. Having first been taught photography by Gustave Le Gray, Du Camp set off from France in the company of the novelist Gustave Flaubert, arriving in Egypt in November 1849 and staying eight months, during which time he undertook an extensive voyage up the Nile, photographing all the while.2 Despite his complaints about the difficulty of taking photographs in the heat and dust of Egypt, requiring exposure times as long as two minutes, he was able to produce at least 216 negatives, many of remarkable quality. As Flaubert unkindly put it in a letter home, “Max’s days are entirely absorbed and consumed by photography … really, if he doesn’t take things easier he’ll crack up.”3 Or, as Du Camp himself remarked, years later, “I lived in a fever of activity, dreaming only of palm trees, the desert, and ruined temples.”4

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Colossus of Rameses the Great at Ubu Simbel, Du Camp’s image of a gigantic statue of an ancient ruler, in many ways exemplifies his mission and photography’s role in it [Figure 11.1]. He has set up his camera directly in front of his subject, intent on capturing it without f lourish, as if to underline the objective, dispassionate recording capacities of both his medium and himself. He invites us to scrutinise this photograph for details, like a schematic drawing. Even its hieroglyphic inscriptions, running along the top of the picture, have been made discernible. Most of the statue lies buried under centuries of accumulated sand, so Du Camp has had some of it removed by his hired Egyptian workers. A head, impassive in its massive majesty, emerges again from the earth, staring sightlessly back into our eyes. The years of burial have protected the stone from weathering, leaving the face pale in contrast to its surroundings. It’s as if we’re now seeing the pallid complexion of actual f lesh, a mummified body on the verge of its resuscitation. A native Egyptian, a Nubian named Ishmael, sits incongruously, even disrespectfully, on top of this head, his feet dangling over the stone headdress.5

FIGURE 11.1

Maxime du Camp (France/Egypt), Westernmost Colossus, the Great Temple, Abu Simbel, 1850 salt print photograph from calotype negative (printed by firm of Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard in 1852) 22.7 × 16.2 cm

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It is striking that Ishmael’s face has been deliberately obscured, as if he, not the statue, is the mute effigy in this scene. The addition of this particular man as a convenient marker of scale is typical of many of Du Camp’s pictures. But it also served to remind his French audience of the historical, cultural, and even racial gulf between contemporary Egyptians and their ancient ancestors. Widely considered the now-decayed source of classical civilisation, Egypt was presented by Du Camp as a country of neglected ruins, as a country in ruins. After arriving back in France in 1851, Du Camp eventually issued an account of his travels, Egypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie, illustrated with 125 salted paper prints made from a selection of his paper negatives. These were printed, not by him, but by the photographic factory that Blanquart-Evrard had established in Loos-lès-Lille, the first to make photographs on a truly industrial basis. Employing as many as 40 women in a scientifically controlled mass production system, Blanquart-Evrard claimed to be able to generate 200–300 prints from a negative in a single day. Partially funded by individual and government subscriptions, Du Camp’s book was published in instalments by Gide & Baudry in 1852 to make up a lavish edition of 200 large leather-bound copies, with a lengthy introduction by the author.6 Individual photographs were also sold separately. The photographs produced by Blanquart-Evrard’s factory exhibit the steely grey tone that is typical of this firm’s prints, giving them a f lat, machine-made appearance. In all, Blanquart-Evrard’s establishment produced the prints for 24 albums of this kind in a concerted effort to establish a successful business model for paper-based photography. Nevertheless, the factory was forced to close in 1855, unable to compete with cheaper and more reliable lithographic printing presses. The separation of printing from photographing, the basis of both Henneman and Blanquard-Evrard’s businesses, as well as being central to the introduction of the Kodak system for amateur photographers later in the century, has become a commonplace aspect of the professional practice of photography. Nevertheless, some readers might already be surprised to learn quite how many iconic photographs have been printed by someone other than the photographer. Usually these prints were made shortly after the initial exposure and with the photographer’s approval. But sometimes there was more of a delay in this process. In the 1970s, for example, a large number of portfolios were issued by photographers like Brassaï, August Sander, W. Eugene Smith, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, György Kepes, Garry Winogrand, and André Kertész, in which new photographs were generated from old negatives by professional printers, often, although not always, under the photographer’s supervision.7 Sometimes these new prints were generated not from a negative but through the photographing of an existing print. In the case of Kepes, to take one example, a cameraless photograph created in 1938 was rephotographed in 1979 and then new prints were made from the resulting negative. These portfolios of restrikes (to use a printer’s term), or rephotographs, were generated to meet a new market demand, as collectors, and especially museums,

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began to actively acquire photographs for the first time. Interestingly, this nascent market placed more stock in these portfolio collections, where the prints were of uniformly excellent quality, than in vintage photographs, which can be more variable in appearance and more difficult to come by. Provincial museums were particularly attracted to these portfolios as it allowed them to come late to the market and yet still be able to afford photographs by canonical artists. A typical outcome of this new market was an exhibition of the photographs of the British artist Paul Nash, most of them taken in the 1930s (with Nash dying in 1946). It was mounted in the Western Australian Art Gallery in Perth in 1977, using “a new set of prints from the artist’s negatives” supplied by the Tate Gallery, who holds these negatives in its archive. The prints were then purchased by the gallery in Perth, “with the intention of keeping them in Australia.”8 Sometimes photography’s division of labour has resulted in some truly significant temporal gaps between the exposure of the negative and the making of a positive print. For example, gelatin silver prints were made in 1965 from some of Hippolyte Bayard’s paper negatives from the 1840s. They were then issued as a portfolio titled Bayard: XXV Calotypes 1842–1850 in an edition of 50. These prints can now be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and the National Gallery of Canada, among other museums. A similar series of gelatin silver prints was made in 1976 by Claudine Sudre, with examples now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Although different in appearance (and value) than the salted paper prints that Bayard made himself, these restrikes at least allow this important photographer to have a presence in museum collections today. In 1975 and 1976, similar restrikes, this time using the original salted paper chemistry, were made by Brian Coe from about 700 of William Henry Fox Talbot’s own calotype negatives, under the supervision of the Science Museum in London.9 After being exhibited, many of these modern prints were sent to photographic societies around the world. Again, the colour and tone of these prints bear little resemblance to those made by Talbot himself (or by Henneman and company at Reading). And yet these are still, surely, “Talbot” photographs, as much as are the ones printed by Henneman. Aren’t they10[Figure 11.2]? It is worth quickly mentioning a few other examples of this kind of rephotography, just to demonstrate its prevalence. In 2002, Mark Osterman made a modern albumen print from a unique and weathered vintage collodion glass negative exposed in the 1860s by two Japanese photographers, Shima Kakoku and his wife Shima Ryu. This would make this negative one of the earliest photographs to be made by a Japanese woman. The couple was renowned for their interest in Western culture, owning a collection of lithographs and photographic reproductions of European paintings, and also for being involved in the development of movable metal type.11 The negative in question, intended to be seen as an ambrotype positive (by having something black placed behind it), shows a very unusual portrait of Kakoku. Seen from the waist up, he has had himself depicted grinning with his mouth agape, while holding what appears to be a pumpkin in one hand

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FIGURE 11.2

William Henry Fox Talbot (England), Magnified Microscopic Specimen, c. 1842 salted paper photograph from calotype negative (printed by Brian Coe in 1976) 17.0 × 10.9 cm

and an open, calligraphy-adorned fan in the other. As Shima Kakoku was a man known for his calligraphy skills, it seems likely that these are being displayed to us on the fan, even if the inscription is now almost impossible to decipher. The pumpkin may also have personal significance, perhaps, like the exaggerated smile, representing Shima’s humble origins as a rural peasant. Osterman’s print from it, made for an exhibition held in 2003 at the Museum of Fine Art in Houston, has allowed this precious but enigmatic portrait to travel outside of Japan, to engage us here and now. In a very different context, Alexander Alland Sr made a series of gelatin silver prints in the mid-twentieth century from dry plate glass negatives originally produced by the Danish-American crusader Jacob Riis in the late 1880s. Waiting to be Let Out of the Mulberry Street Station, showing a group of poverty-stricken miscreants, was first published as a wood engraving in Riis’s famous 1890 book How the Other Half Lives.12 However, it wasn’t until the 1940s that 415 of Riis’s surviving 4 × 5-inch glass plate negatives, along with other material from his estate, were donated to the Museum of the City of New York. Alland was commissioned to print 50 of these for an exhibition at the museum in 1948, enlarging, cropping, burning, masking, and dodging to transform Riis’s poorly preserved negatives into richly toned, exhibition-worthy photographs.13 As a consequence of this exposure, U.S. Camera Annual published eight of Alland’s Riis prints in that same year, Beaumont Newhall included two pictures by Riis in his 1949

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book The History of Photography, and Edward Steichen included six of Alland’s Riis prints in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1949 exhibition The Exact Instant.14 As with the reprints of the Bayard, Talbot, and Shima images, the Alland-made versions of Riis’s photographs look nothing like vintage prints, but they are nevertheless important objects in the history of this photographer’s reception and appreciation. The same could be said for the work of the French photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue. This work was brought out of relative obscurity in the 1960s to bolster the aspirations of a much younger generation of photographers, curators, and dealers. Although he had been selling his photographs to magazines for some time, usually as nostalgic illustrations of a past era, Lartigue’s work was presented in terms of the child-like vision of a “true primitive” by John Szarkowski when he exhibited a selection of images by Lartigue, shot between 1906 and 1922, at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1963. Kevin Moore ably recounts the story in his 2004 book Jacques Henri Lartigue: The Invention of an Artist.15 While on vacation in the United States in 1962, Lartigue, then 69 years of age, showed some photographs (not all taken by him) to a New York photography agent, and they soon came to the attention of Szarkowski at MoMA, who offered to exhibit them. However, Szarkoswki also asked for higher-quality prints, eventually made by Pierre Gassmann in Paris, and had some of the images cropped. Still unhappy with the size and period toning of these Gassmann prints, Szarkoswki had another enlarged “exhibition” set made in New York, printed in high-contrast gelatin silver, matted, and placed in thin metal frames, making them look more contemporary in style. This, together with Szarkowski’s carefully calibrated hang, brought Lartigue’s work closer in look and spirit to that of Garry Winogrand and other street photographers then being championed by MoMA, giving the contemporary work a vernacular genealogy and implying that photography had certain innate formal qualities that could be found throughout the medium’s history.16 As Moore puts it, “[Szarkowski] refashioned a past to validate a present.”17 In the case of Lartigue, this refashioning (Moore elsewhere calls it a “transformation”) was both physical and rhetorical. And this is indeed often the case; favouring the moment of exposure over that of printing, and thus the private moment over the public, Szarkowski went on in 1988 to exhibit 25 photographic images chosen by him, Thomas Roma, and Tod Papageorge from the 2,500 rolls of film exposed but never developed by Winogrand before his death four years before.18This kind of interventionist curatorial practice is now disturbingly common. Revelations, the 2003 exhibition of the work of Diane Arbus, included several photographs never printed during Arbus’s own lifetime, as if the artist’s own choices are not to be trusted or adhered to.19 Indeed, the posthumous printing of Arbus’s negatives began early. The artist died in July 1971, but of the 112 prints included in her 1972 retrospective at MoMA, 40 were new prints made by Neil Selkirk for its curator, once again John Szarkowski, and all the images in the associated monograph were reproduced from Selkirk prints.20 In 2013, another survey of Winogrand’s work

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was mounted at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, this time featuring 100 photographs that had not previously been printed; these were chosen from what was reported to be 6,600 rolls of film left behind by the artist.21 But this kind of practice occurs even when the photographer is still alive. In 2016, for example, the National Portrait Gallery in London toured an exhibition titled William Eggleston: Portraits featuring a significant number of inkjet print versions of work originally issued by the artist in the 1970s as colour dye-transfer prints.22 The inference is that medium simply doesn’t matter, despite this artist being celebrated for the specific qualities of his colour prints from the 1970s. Also in 2016, an exhibition at the national art museum of New Zealand, supposedly devoted to its photography collection, featured numerous enlarged inkjet prints scanned from the over 320,000 glass-plate and film negatives in that collection, along with gelatin silver photographs printed by the curator from deceased artists’ negatives. Significantly, not a single one of those 320,000 negatives was included in the display.23 Many would consider the posthumous printing of photographs, when unauthorised by the photographer, to be unethical; it is certainly ahistorical. It displaces attention from the specificity of the production of photographs within certain economies of distribution and instead presents them as mere images, as pictures that f loat free from any of the particular technologies, political contexts, or aesthetic preferences evidenced in the photographer’s own working life. It privileges what a photograph is of, over what a photograph is (or was). But it also raises all sorts of difficult questions about the authorship of photographs and about the relationship between meaning and the photographic object. There’s no doubt that these are questions that deserve further ref lection.

Notes 1 See the entry on Blanquart-Evrard by Pierre-Lin Renié in John Hannavy ed., Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography (London: Routledge, 2008), 167–169. 2 The following is drawn from Geoffrey Batchen, ‘An Almost Unlimited Variety: Photography and Sculpture in the Nineteenth Century, in Roxana Marcoci ed., The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 20–26. 3 Gustave Flaubert, in a letter to his mother, written in Egypt and dated January 5, 1850. See Francis Steegmuller ed., The Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830–1857 (London: Faber & Faber, 1979), 109. 4 Maxime du Camp, Souvenirs littéraries (1882), as quoted in Kathleen Stewart Howe, Excursions along the Nile: The Photographic Discovery of Ancient Egypt (Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1993), 27. 5 See Julia Ballerini, ‘Rewriting the Nubian Figure in the Photograph: Maxime du Camp’s “Cultural Hypochondria”,’ in Eleanor M. Hight and Gary D. Sampson eds., Colonialist Photography: Imag(in)ing Race and Place (London: Routledge, 2002), 30–50. 6 See Parr and Badger, The Photobook, 23. 7 See Derek Bennett, ‘The Limited Edition Portfolio: A Special Report,’ Print Letter, 4: 3 (May/June 1979), 2–3. Bennett lists the names of 102 photographers who had limited edition portfolios of their work issued in the 1970s.

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8 See Bertram Whittle, ‘Foreword,’ Paul Nash: Photographer and Painter (Perth: Western Australian Art Gallery, 1977), 5. 9 See Brian W. Coe, ‘Printing Talbot’s Calotype Negatives,’ History of Photography, 1: 3 ( July 1977), 175–182. 10 The question of authorship is rendered even more complicated when contemporary artists make prints from antique negatives but claim the work as their own. Hiroshi Sugimoto, for example, owns a number of Talbot negatives, both photogenic drawings and calotypes, each of them exposed between 1834 and 1842. In 2009, Sugimoto mounted an exhibition of 14 toned gelatin silver prints he generated from these negatives. Dark and obscure, these prints, each of them titled Photogenic Drawing, are ten times the size of Talbot’s negatives and of course look nothing like Talbot’s own photographs. Sugimoto describes himself as “travelling back through time to once again portray in photographs an inner phenomena that painting cannot depict. Printing the precious negatives that Talbot bequeathed, I head back to the origins of photography, to the origins of painting, perhaps to the origins of consciousness, to the very earliest milestone of my being.” Hiroshi Sugimoto, ‘Photogenic Drawing,’ Nature of Light (Shizuoka: Izu Photo Museum, 2009), 37. The Japanese art critic Minoru Shimizu presents Sugimoto as an artist seeking “pure photography”: “pure photographs are four dimensional, and only exist as negatives.” The printing, and therefore reversal, of Talbot’s negatives, which Shimizu describes in terms of Sugimoto’s “plusminus-zero method,” is seen as a step towards achieving this purity, this eternity that “cannot be seen with the eyes.” Minoru Shimizu, ‘Fiction and Restoration of Eternity: Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Recent Photographs,’ Nature of Light, 135, 136. In 2018, the Victoria & Albert Museum commissioned the German artist Thomas Ruff to produce a new body of work based on the paper negatives made by Linnaeus Tripe in India and Burma in the 1850s. Drawn to the size, retouching, discolouration, and damage found in Tripe’s negatives, Ruff scanned both negatives and related positive prints and then manipulated the digital files to accentuate the blue tints that Tripe had such trouble capturing with the calotype process. The end result were large 80.0 × 140.0 cm chromogenic prints that emphasise the very means of production that Tripe once sought to suppress. The divided authorship of these prints is signalled by their title: Tripe | Ruff. See https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/tripe-ruff (accessed 7 January 2019). 11 See Kinoshita Naoyuki, ‘The Early Years of Japanese Photography,’ in Anne Wilkes Tucker et al., The History of Japanese Photography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 23. 12 For more details on the context of Riis’s work, see Dag Petersson ed., Jacob A. Riis (Copenhagen: The National Museum of Photography, 2008). 13 This information comes from Bonnie Yochelson, ‘The Masked Image: Recapturing the Work of Reformer Jacob Riis,’ Humanities, 19: 3 (May/June 1998), 16–21. But see also Alexander Alland Sr, ‘An Epilogue,’ Jacob A. Riis: Photographer and Citizen (London: Gordon Fraser, 1975), 43–48; and Bonnie Yochelson and Daniel Czitrom, Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-Of-The-Century New York (New York: The New Press, 2007). 14 See Tom Maloney ed., U.S. Camera Annual 1948 (US Camera Publishing, 1949), and Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography from 1839 to the Present Day (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1949), 168–169. The exhibition, titled The Exact Instant: 100 Years of News Photography and curated by Edward Steichen, was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, February 8–May 1, 1949. The six Riis photographs were shown in a section subtitled ‘Historical.’ 15 Kevin Moore, Jacques Henri Lartigue: The Invention of an Artist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). 16 For a critical commentary on Szarkowski’s historical perspective, see Abigail Solomon-Godeau, ‘Mandarin Modernism: “Photography Until Now”,’ Art in America (December 1990), 140–149, 183.

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17 Moore, Jacques Henry Lartigue, 177. 18 The exhibition, titled Garry Winogrand and curated by John Szarkowski, was presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, May 15–August 16, 1988. The first image on display, beneath the title graphics, was an enlargement of a Winogrand contact sheet. 19 Arbus photographs “first printed” by Neil Selkirk were indicated by an asterix on the label, and this is repeated in the catalogue. Sandra Phillips, Diane Arbus: Revelations (New York: Random House, 2003), 322. 20 Neil Selkirk, ‘In the Darkroom,’ ibid., 268. 21 Hilarie Sheets, ‘Garry Winogrand: Rolls of a Lifetime,’ ArtNews (March 27, 2013): http://www.artnews.com/2013/03/27/garry-winogrand-retrospective/ (accessed 10 August 2018) 22 The exhibition, William Eggleston: Portraits, was organised by the National Portrait Gallery in London ( July 23–October 23, 2016). 23 See Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Reproducing History: New Zealand Photography Collected,’ Art Monthly Australia, No. 295 (Summer 2016/17), 70–73.

12 RETURN OF THE REPRESSED

Some of the manipulations of a negative described so far were done in such a way that they could not be easily detected in the positive photograph. Other practitioners have gone out of their way to draw our attention to this repressed aspect of photography. To make Horizon Rib, one of about 100 prints from his Cancellations series of 1974–1981, the American artist Thomas Barrow scored an X through his negative with the jagged end of an unfolded paper clip, thereby visibly desecrating the fine print tradition imposed on American landscape photography by Ansel Adams and his followers1 [Figure 12.1]. At the same time, that X recalls the marks seen on many photographers’ contact sheets, when certain images have been deemed below standard and symbolically excised from the record. Barrow signals this same judgement, but on the negative itself. After some earlier experiments with 35mm film, during which Barrow found that the scale of scratch to image looked wrong, he had taken to using a medium-format camera and its 2 ¼ × 3 ¼-inch negative. With this larger celluloid surface, the cancellation lines seemed to work much more effectively. It’s a nice irony (not lost on Barrow himself ) that he then had to consult a book by Adams to work out how to print from a warped and damaged negative. Barrow’s action means that you are forced, when looking at Horizon Rib, to think of the negative as an active part of the photograph, almost as if you could look through the fissured edges of this scar in its glossy gelatin surface to catch a glimpse of it. As Max Kozloff wrote in 1980 about this series, “confronting such art, one is asked to judge, but cannot resolve, the conf lict between the ‘transparency’ of the photographic record and the way it has been undermined in such a fashion as to stress its object-like character.”2 In the 1960s, Richard Avedon also drew attention to the foundational role of the negative in his work by allowing its rebate to be visible as a framing device around his prints, along with any words (“Kodak Safety Film”) that

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FIGURE 12.1

Thomas Barrow (USA), Untitled (from the Cancellations series), 1975 toned gelatin silver photograph 27.94 × 35.56 cm

might appear in it. Sometimes, Avedon would instruct his printer to paint in a new border by hand, so as to improve the composition of his image. The sign of the photograph’s authenticity thereby became its most inauthentic element.3 In later work, the film holder plays a similar role, marking the edge of Avedon’s famously confrontational portraits with a distinctive black outline. The negative is signalled as absent but present, allowing the means of production to linger as an essential element of the photograph we now behold. Let’s keep this absent presence in mind while we examine the making of one particular photographic image, Ronald Fischer, Beekeeper, Davis, CA. The negative for this image was shot on May 9, 1981, as part of Avedon’s In the American West series.4 The photograph shows us a man from the waist up, bald, apparently naked, and covered in bees [Figure 12.2]. As is typical of Avedon’s portraits, the man stands against a stark white background, his body pressed right up against the picture plane. One can see every detail of that body with a disarming clarity, from the folds in his skin to the wings of the bees covering him. It seems as if we can see everything there is to see. And yet it is his face—calmly staring right into our eyes, despite the swarm of bees—that is the most striking element of the picture. We see everything, and yet what does the photograph tell us about this man? What can we know about any person from a photograph of them? Avedon once

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(USA), Ronald Fischer, beekeeper, Davis, California, May 9, 1981, 1981 gelation silver photograph 56 1/4 × 45 inches (image)

FIGURE 12.2 Richard Avedon

said, “my portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.”5 This is particularly true when these portraits are seen en masse, as part of a larger series of very similar photographs. Before we see anything else, we get to see “an Avedon” (or even, perhaps, if we take him at his word, we get to see “Avedon”). However, one of the peculiar things about looking at any photograph is that, in doing so, we are made to step into the photographer’s shoes; we get to see as they once saw (we get to become Avedon).

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The portraits shot for In the American West followed a set of conventions already well established by Avedon’s earlier work, so much so that it became his signature style. In August 1976, for example, Rolling Stone magazine published 69 of Avedon’s portraits under the title The Family.6 Shot against another fathomless white background, a seamless, as it is called in the business, Avedon’s subjects constituted a representative sample of the political, media, and corporate elite of the United States. They range from Cesar Chavez, a figure renowned for his activism on behalf of Hispanic farm workers, to Henry Kissinger, responsible for millions of deaths in South-East Asia. All are treated exactly the same. The white backdrop eliminates any distracting information about the specificity of time or place and gives each figure a stark profile, pushing that figure into the foreground, almost through the photographic membrane into our own space. Given few other clues (other than the genealogical implication of Avedon’s title), we are invited to assess the character of each of these people through our own knowledge of the 1970s, of dress and body language, and of the lived-in evidence of the faces in front of us. Reduced to a set of political motifs, as subjects they become whatever we bring to them (and especially now, decades after the photographs were taken). Made self-conscious by this displacement of self, our gaze is turned back onto ourselves, as if we are looking into a mirror, rather than through a window. And that gives us some leeway for action, some possibility of looking beyond the blinkered constraints of Avedon’s typological system. Roland Barthes, for example, picked out the portrait of Philip Randolph, one of only four African Americans in Avedon’s group, for special comment: “in the photograph, I read an air of goodness (no impulse of power: that is certain).” 7 Having allied himself with a presumed “goodness,” Barthes infers that “an impulse of power” can in fact be found in many of the other, accompanying portraits. What does that impulse look like? What does power look like? This is surely the central question being posed by Avedon’s project. And perhaps its inverse, the look of the powerless, or at least of the ordinary citizen, is the theme of In the American West. One of Avedon’s assistants, Laura Wilson, has left us with a detailed visual and written account of the making of the photograph of the man covered in bees.8 It seems that Avedon initiated the image with an advertisement in a beekeepers’ journal, asking for a volunteer to be photographed covered in bees. While waiting for the response to his ad, the photographer drew a quick sketch of what he ideally wanted to shoot. He eventually received about 40 snapshots of beekeepers in the mail and from them chose Ronald Fischer’s mug-shot as the one coming closest to the sketch he had already drawn before seeing any of them. Fischer was a Chicago banker and part-time beekeeper who was willing to come to California to pose for Avedon’s picture, thus making him legally “in the West” for the purposes of this project. Enlisting the aid of an entomologist from the University of California, who brought 120,000 bees and a bottle of queen-bee pheromone f luid to the site of the shoot, Avedon worked on Fischer for two days—May 9 and 10, 1981—painting

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his body with the f luid and using 121 sheets of film to record various configurations of bees. Both men suffered numerous stings in the process. After the shoot, the exposed film was sent back to New York, where negatives were processed and preliminary prints made. Nine days after the initial shoot, Avedon was able to receive by express mail some 16 × 20-inch test prints taken from some of these negatives by his studio assistants in New York. This gave the photographer an opportunity to make decisions about the best result while still on the road. After considering various options, Avedon came to prefer one exposure in particular, where Fischer seems oblivious to the stinging of the bees. As Avedon put it, “it speaks more directly to my understanding of how to endure, of how to prevail.”9 This, then, is the one he decided to have printed at large scale for exhibition. [Figure 12.3] So, what is the “photograph” here? Is it the negative, a positive print from that negative, all the positive prints ever taken from this negative, or should it be all this, plus the 121 exposures made during this shoot from which this one negative was ultimately chosen? Or is the “photograph,” in this particular case, the drawing Avedon produced before any exposures were made, representing in its purest form his idea of the photographic image that he went on to create? And what about the reception of this image that results from all this? How do you factor that in? Surely the way viewers respond to, or derive meaning from, an image is also part of its identity? In that case, something’s photographicness would be primarily determined by the beholder. If so, photography might be best thought of as a dynamic set of photographic meanings and expectations—a “mode of apprehension” if you like—brought by viewers to an image, irrespective of the exact technology of its making. In this schema, “photography” becomes an experience constituted by an evolving relationship involving all of these various elements and is therefore impossible to define in either singular or merely technical terms. This momentary focus on the work of Avedon is a salutary reminder of something else already touched on that often goes unmentioned in histories of photography—that photography is indeed a form of work.10 It’s a fact that I skipped over in my account of the making of this image. So, let’s tell the story of its reproduction again, but from a slightly different angle. Ronald Fisher was photographed as part of a series to be titled In the American West. Between 1979 and 1984, Avedon and his team of three assistants travelled around the American southwest looking for suitable subjects to photograph. During that period, the Avedon team photographed no less than 752 people in 17 Western states in a project underwritten by the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. Already then, we are made aware that a major project like this is a collective effort, involving not only Avedon but also a number of subsidiary workers. Those workers included Avedon’s two studio assistants back in New York, Ruedi Hofmann and David Liittschwager. Remember that Avedon and his camera team have made numerous exposures during each shoot while out on the road (amounting to about 17,000 negatives in total). These negatives were then sent

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FIGURE 12.3

John Loengard (USA), Richard Avedon Holding Negative for Ronald Fischer, Beekeeper, Davis, CA., 1981, 1993 gelatin silver photograph

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back to New York for processing. Hofmann and Littschwager printed a series of 16 × 20-inch test prints of the 124 negatives chosen by Avedon from the thousands exposed. These were then presented to Avedon for his approval. Unfortunately for them, he rejected all of them, asking his assistants to, in each case, “make the person more gentle,” or to “give the face more tension.” These qualities were apparently available within the range of decisions made during the printing process itself—work, you’ll remember, being done by people other than the photographer. After a few more tries by his assistants, Avedon finally approved a set of 16 × 20-inch model test prints. Avedon’s assistants then hired a studio with a mobile enlarger and made a number of 56 × 45-inch exhibition prints, dodging and burning each in an effort to induce those elusive emotional qualities described by their boss in his earlier review. We seldom think about the art or labour of printing, except of course when it goes badly wrong—as in the famous example of Robert Capa’s negatives from the beaches of Normandy that were, it’s said, overheated and almost destroyed by a darkroom technician.11 There’s a lot of legend shrouding what Capa actually did on the morning of June 6, 1944, when he landed with the first American troops on so-called “Omaha Beach” as part of the Allied invasion force. It seems he got on to the beach at about 7.20 am; as he tells us, “it was still very early and very gray for good pictures.” He took them anyway, shooting his camera as his companions shot their rif les, without proper aim but seeking to at least produce some kind of sound in response to the withering onslaught of the waiting German machine guns. In his later account of the experience, he claims it was the familiarity of those sounds, the bang of the rif le and the click of the camera shutter, that gave him the courage to move on.12 Blundering up the beach, camera in hand, Capa finds himself lying nose-tonose with a soldier he recognises. He asked me if I knew what he saw. I told him no and that I didn’t think he could see much beyond my head. “I’ll tell you what I see,” he whispered, “I see my ma on the front porch, waving my insurance policy.”13 The soldier sees nothing, nothing but projections (projections of his own death). Capa’s view is similarly circumscribed. Indeed, most of his account of that day is taken up with sensations other than sight, for his view of the battle itself is a fragmented and smoke-obscured haze. Three years after the event, in his notalways-reliable autobiography, all he can remember is his own fear and a certain abstract ugliness. Ironically, the photographs that were published in Life magazine 13 days later can do no more than repeat this tale of vision denied. It seems likely that Capa exposed only 11 frames of a single roll of film while he was on the beach. After getting back to England later that day, he gave the undeveloped film to a courier and then returned to Normandy. According to Capa, a darkroom technician in London dried the film too quickly and the excess heat melted the emulsion,

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suffusing his exposures with a translucent fog. Whether this accidental brûlage indeed occurred or whether the conditions of shooting simply resulted in poorly lit exposures, what we have left are just a few hallucinatory images that tell you little about the battle but a great deal about the experience of war.14 But these images also speak once again of the crucial role that the negative plays in the making of photographs, and thus highlights the recalcitrant materiality of the photographic medium. This materiality, the physical stuff that constitutes a piece of film and the paper prints generated from it, is often overlooked or even suppressed in histories of photography. True, curators, collectors, and conservators tend to place particular emphasis on the physical condition of the photograph. But historians and academic scholars—more interested in the public role of the image than in the condition of its substrate—tend to ignore it. I am arguing here that both aspects of photography need to be taken into account if we are to understand the peculiar nature of the photographic experience. We have to engage with the photograph as a thing with specific material attributes and with its image as a kind of apparition separate from that thing, both at the same time. What needs to be acknowledged, in other words, is yet another aspect of photography’s multiple personality disorder—the continual oscillation of materiality and immateriality that constitutes the identity of each and every photograph. Some discussions of Capa’s D-Day photographs choose to privilege a particular print—a single, worn gelatin silver photograph—as if such a thing is in fact the photograph taken on that day15[Figure 12.4]. The emphasis such an act of reproduction gives to the physicality of a single photograph fetishises the primacy that is still often granted to a vintage print. This is especially so when that print

FIGURE 12.4

Robert Capa (Hungary/USA/France), Untitled [American Troops Landing on D-Day, Omaha Beach, Normandy Coast, France], 1944 gelatin silver photograph 24.1 × 35.5 cm

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happens to be battered and bent, as if this photograph is itself a relic of the war or is at least an object that was at some point roughly handled by the photographer who made it. But, as we’ve just heard, all of Capa’s D-Day photographs were in fact developed and printed by others, far from the battle they depict, and then were issued as a multiplicity of press prints. The current condition of any particular one testifies not only to the hard labour that a press print does out there in the world of journalism, but also to the relative worthlessness of the actual photograph in that same world. That worth is to be found instead in its impact as the reproduction that appeared in Life magazine in June 1944 as part of a story about the Normandy invasion (where it is accompanied by a caption and other photographic images)16 [Figure 12.5]. In other words, this photograph is only important in the history of modern life, and indeed to a history of photography, in its incarnation as a virtual image capable of being transmitted to the various organs of the press in one state (either as a press print or as a telegraph signal) and then reproduced in another, as a hazy photo-mechanical ink impression on a piece of cheap newsprint paper. Presenting Capa’s work as single photographs in frames in a gallery, as if this indeed was what his work as a photographer was all about, is to completely distort the historical record; it is to erase the trafficking in mass-produced news images to which Capa dedicated his efforts on D-Day, and in the cause of which he ultimately gave his life. And yet, as soon as I detach the image from the photograph, I am required to reattach it. For the look and significance of Capa’s image is largely determined by the fate of its physical substrate, by the circumstances of the exposure of the negative on the beach and the compromised quality of the prints that could then be made from that negative. Neither the image nor the substrate of this photograph can be understood without some acknowledgement of the other. You might say then that the complexity of photography’s identity is to be found in the spacing that separates and yet joins the negative to the photograph, the photograph to its image, and photography’s material aspects to its immaterial ones. It’s a relationship, as I’ve said, that historians find difficult to deal with (and art museums even more so). And yet the idea that photographs have both a material and an immaterial element is absolutely central to their status in the legal system, to their value within a capitalist economy, and to their capacity to be trafficked. For example, if I wanted to reproduce a Capa photograph in a book, I would have to seek permission to do so from the owner of the copyright to the image—which happens to be the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York. Interestingly, the part of the photograph legally owned by the ICP, as the heir of Capa’s estate, the part referred to as “intellectual property,” is without material substance. In other words, the ICP owns, and exercises control over, precisely that conceptual space between the photograph and its reproduction as an image that I have been describing. Back to our story about the making of photographs for In the American West. Avedon closely examined each of the preliminary prints made by his assistants,

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FIGURE 12.5

Robert Capa (Hungary/USA/France), “The First Wave,’ Life magazine, 16: 25 (19 June 1944), 26 ink-on-paper photomechanical reproduction 35.6 × 26.3 cm

and these were then notated in detail with further printing instructions. In some cases, Avedon even cut out pieces from different test prints and created a collage of the final print that he wanted his studio assistants to achieve. As a consequence of all this, it often took from three to five days to make one ideal exhibition print, scaled to be life-sized. This ideal print then had to be reproduced a number

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of times as a limited edition of exhibition photographs. As you can imagine, all this required a lot of skilful and painstaking work. Only after all this was a print considered good enough to be signed by the photographer—good enough, that is, for Avedon to re-claim their authorship from all this collective labour with the unique trace of his own individual hand.17 In many ways, the approach taken by Avedon to the making of photographs seems entirely natural to us. And why not? After all, this model of artistic practice—featuring a master supervising the labour of uncredited apprentices or assistants—goes back to at least the Renaissance. Perhaps that’s why in our histories we so automatically ascribe photographic authorship entirely to the camera operator or director and almost never acknowledge the labour of printing that I’ve just described, or any of the other work or workers involved in the production of such photographs. In the case I have been describing, Avedon, who stopped printing his own photographs in about 1950, paid his two studio assistants with a set of 124 unsigned prints (made by them, of course). Since the photographer’s death, the Avedon Foundation has refused to authenticate these unsigned prints, making them unauthorised “bastards,” and thus unable to be sold in the market and therefore without monetary value.18 This story begins to explain again why negatives are repressed in our histories of photography. They are, after all, an unwelcome reminder of the act of reproduction. They speak of photography’s lack of singularity, of its capacity for multiple copies and therefore for multiple authorships and divided ownership. Negatives and the multiple prints made from them are the unwelcome evidence, in other words, of photography’s existence as a form of commerce.

Notes 1 See Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Cancellations,’ in Thomas Barrow, The Cancellations (New York: Powerpoint Books, 2012), 91–105. 2 Max Kozloff, ‘Where Have All the People Gone?: Contemporary American Photography’ (1980), The Privileged Eye: Essays on Photography (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987), 201. See also Henry Man Barendse, ‘Thomas Barrow’s Cancellations: The Contradictions between Doing and Undoing,’ Afterimage (October 1977), 7. 3 From a 2008 interview about Avedon’s black-and-white negatives with his former ‘retoucher,’ Bob Bishop, who first started working with him in 1945, as quoted in Mia Fineman, Faking It, 38. Another of Avedon’s printers, Gideon Lewin, has claimed that “Avedon never went into the darkroom. He hasn’t printed since 1950, probably.” Lewin, as quoted in Richard Woodward, ‘Avedon, Unsigned,’ New York Times ( July 1, 2016): https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/nyregion/richard-ave don-unsigned-prints.html (accessed June 20, 2019). 4 Richard Avedon, In the American West 1979–1984: Photographs (New York: Abrams, 1985). 5 Richard Avedon: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/r/richard_avedon.h tml (accessed March 15, 2015). 6 The following is drawn from Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Ordering Things,’ in Brian Wallis ed., The Order of Things: Photography from the Walther Collection (Steidl, 2015), 332–339. 7 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 110.

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8 Laura Wilson, Avedon at Work: In the American West (Austin: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, 2003). What follows is drawn from Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Apparitions: La matérialité de l’image photographique,’ Patrimoines, No. 11 (2015), 22–33. 9 Avedon, in Wilson, Avedon at Work, 47. 10 See Richard Bolton, ‘In the American East: Richard Avedon Incorporated’ (1987), in Richard Bolton ed., The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989), 261–282. 11 See Richard Whelan, Robert Capa Photographs (New York: Aperture, 1996), 101. The following is drawn from Geoffrey Batchen, ‘The Ugliest Beach in the Whole World: Back to the Front: Tourisms of War,’ Architectural Association Files, No. 28 (London, Autumn 1994), 90–91. 12 Robert Capa, Slightly Out of Focus (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1947/2001), 140. 13 Ibid., 141. 14 For a detailed chronology of Capa’s actions on D-Day, see Richard Whelan, This is War!: Robert Capa at Work: 1936–1945 (Steidl, 2007). But see also A.D. Coleman, ‘Alternate History: Robert Capa on D-Day’ (September 2013): http://www.near bycafe.com/artandphoto/photocritic/2014/06/10/alternate-history-robert-capa-on -d-day-1/ (accessed May 16, 2018). 15 See, for example, the vintage 1944 Capa press print in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, acquired in 2000 from the Ford Motor Company Collection: https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1987.1100 .501/ (accessed July 20, 2019). 16 See Robert Capa, ‘Beachheads of Normandy,’ Life ( June 19, 1944), 25–29. 17 See Richard B. Woodward, ‘Avedon, Unsigned,’ New York Times ( July 1, 2016): https ://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/nyregion/richard-avedon-unsigned-prints.html (accessed April 3, 2019). 18 Ibid.

13 PROPER NAMES

In most exhibitions or books about photographs, each image is presented as a singular act of personal expression, and therefore as artistic rather than capitalist in aspiration. Beholden to a masterpiece-driven form of narrative long since discredited in the academy, these kinds of representations of photography consistently suppress evidence of the economics of photographic practice (such as the collective labour involved in multiple reproduction), seeking to foster the illusion that art transcends such brute realities. The end result is a deeply conservative view of both past and present, denying viewers the possibility of an informed engagement with their own cultural history as well as with the actual practice of photography. The assignment to a single positive print of a single proper name—“Richard Avedon,” for example, or “William Henry Fox Talbot”—serves to displace all these complications from our attention. It condenses the collective work that made any particular photographic print possible into the name of an auteur, much as does the name “Frank Gehry” on a building or “Alfred Hitchcock” on a film. We repeat that obfuscation whenever we allow a proper name of this sort to rest undisturbed in our own historical accounts. To paraphrase Michel Foucault, the privileging of a singular author “marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning,” because it limits the ways in which we are allowed to think about the production of photographs as things in the world.1 In fact, authorship has always been a complicated matter when it comes to the making of photographs. And this is especially so because of the collaborative nature of the medium itself.2 In a letter to Talbot’s mother dated May 15, 1839, the English poet Thomas Moore had this to say after a visit to Lacock Abbey: “Both Talbot and his collaborateur, the Sun, were in high force & splendour, and I promised to write something about their joint doings, if I could but get paper sensitive enough for the purpose.”3 Talbot of course also had many human

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collaborators during the first few years after his invention of a photographic system, his wife Constance and his assistant Henneman prominent among them. Indeed, as we’ve seen, a number of images usually ascribed to his name were in fact made by others, or at least were produced as part of a team effort. The endeavour to decide who did what, to find the truth of the image by deciding to which individual it properly belongs, is a standard art-historical desire. Attributions of this kind make interpretation easier (meaning and biography are so quickly collapsed into each other) but also enhance a picture’s value in the marketplace (a Talbot being worth more than a Henneman, as is an Edward Weston print over one made by Brett or Cole). In an art history driven by connoisseurship alone, propriety and property have all too often found themselves in this kind of forced cohabitation. However, the history of photography is full of examples that trouble precisely this desire for a fixed attribution. The collective signature attached to the work of early operators such as Hill and Adamson or Southworth and Hawes speaks to the combined talents of chemists and painters, personifying the photographic image’s own apparent confusion of art and science. But these pairings also complicate our modern understanding of authorship, with its assumptions about individual creativity and personal inspiration. Who, in these sorts of partnerships, did what? Who took responsibility for what aspects of the photographic event (and of what does this event actually consist)? This last question was in fact addressed in the 1850s when the methods of industrial mass production were widely adopted by commercial photographers, and with it the division of the photographic process into a sequence of small, specialised tasks. Studios may have borne the names of Disdéri or Nadar, but these singular nomenclatures masked the labour of as many as 20 or 30 individuals, all of whom contributed something to the production of the final print. Attribution becomes even more complicated when we consider the studio output of such figures as Matthew Brady or Augustin Casasola. The photographs credited to these figures were often taken by others, by subcontractors labouring out there in the dangerous field of battle, with Brady or Casasola acting as editors, business managers and figureheads (as “authorities”) rather than as photographers. This too-brief survey of photographic collaboration, or of the questions raised by it, suggests that there is not much new about teams making photographs, even if Bernd and Hilla Becher (a married couple) and Mike and Doug Starn (twin brothers) have managed to add a familial and even genetic twist to the genre.4 Point of origin, and the value we continue to grant it, seems to be the key issue in every case. This is no doubt why the “illegal” collaborations staged by Sherrie Levine, in which she copied or simply reframed reproductions of the work of earlier photographers, struck such a chord in the 1980s, when themes of originality were much discussed; Levine seemed to be literally presenting her own creative work as nothing but a “tissue of quotations,” in Roland Barthes’ famously prescriptive words.5 A similar merger of past and present is evidenced in Andreas Müller-Pohle’s series of Digital Scores. First printed in 1995, each of them

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is constituted from a web of electronic code generated by Nicéphore Niépce’s supposed first photograph (the beginnings of photography is made to collaborate with a computer in order to signal the medium’s end)6 [Figure 13.1]. These last two examples foreground the economy of exchange which makes any collaboration possible (an economy deliberately obscured by some of these other pairs of operatives, who pretend to act as one). Any exchange, even when it is voluntary, involves a differential of power, an unavoidable negotiation of inequality. And this is what continues to make collaborative or collective image making a provocative activity; it is not because it subverts the marketplace (which long ago found a way to sell the work of the Bechers) but because it necessarily must engage the politics of exchange—first within the group, and then between the work and its (similarly collective) audience. But there is one further aspect of the collaborative act that is worthy of our consideration, an aspect signalled by the comment from Thomas Moore about Talbot and the sun. For he suggests there that collaboration of a fairly fundamental

FIGURE 13.1

Andreas Müller-Pohle (Germany), Digital Scores III (after Nicéphore Niépce), 1998 Iris giclée print on Aquarell Arches grain satiné. Production: Artificial Image, Berlin eight panels, 66.0 × 66.0 cm each.

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kind is at the heart of every photograph. Indeed, the apparent collaboration of the photographic camera (a cultural apparatus par excellence) and the light that inscribes the images within it (nature incarnate) continues to provide photography with its most compelling conundrum. To which sphere of life, nature or culture, does photography belong? Which of these entities determines photography’s identity, provides it with its essence, its “high force,” its “splendour”? Take away the camera, as Talbot did in many of his earliest photographs, and the question becomes even more stark. Think, for a moment, about what Talbot was doing when he made a contact print of, say, a piece of lace.7 To make such an imprint, the lace had to be placed directly on photographic paper, paper designed to register the presence and absence of light. Here object and image, reality and representation, come face to face, literally touching each other. The image is physically caused by the thing to which it will subsequently refer. The production of such a photograph requires real and representation to begin as a single merged entity, as inseparable as a mirror and its image, as one and its other. No wonder Talbot’s first word for his process was “sciagraphy” or “shadow drawing/ writing.”8 For the photograph has the same kind of relationship to its referent as a shadow has to the thing which casts it; they are simultaneously inseparable and autonomous. This returns us to what are by now familiar questions. Is a photographic contact print made by its object or by Talbot’s chemistry, or is it generated from the relationship between them (and what kind of relationship is it)? To repeat: is the photograph constituted by nature or by culture? Or could it be that photography is the visual side-effect of their dynamic and unprecedented interaction? And who is the image’s rightful author, Talbot or the lace itself? Talbot thought it was neither: “by means of this contrivance, it is not the artist who makes the picture, but the picture which makes ITSELF.”9 Here then is one more provocation: photography is produced by the collapse of the very binary economy that sustains it, coming into being as a continuous collaboration with itself. In this context, favouring the individual author in our histories, or claiming that there is in fact a single author rather than a collective mode of production, makes it possible to divide our historical focus between the look of the image (pictorial concerns) and the life of the artist/photographer (biographical concerns), and to ignore any of the wider social implications of photographic practice. This privileging also allows the history of photography, always an insecure discipline, to obediently emulate the histories of non-reproducible mediums, such as painting. But if we’re ever going to write a history that engages with the complex realities of photography, we need to acknowledge the actual means of production as part of an image’s authorship. By doing so, it might be possible to put photography’s history back into a language that is politically navigable. Far from making the biographies of artists unimportant, it contextualises them in a way that makes visible the larger political stakes at play in every individual photographic practice. It turns authorship into an economy that embodies the entire political and cultural context that produced the work.10

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Notes 1 Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’ (1969), in Donald F. Bouchard ed., Language, Counter-Memory, Practice [trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon] (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), 159. 2 What follows is drawn from Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Collective Signature,’ Fotograf, 2: 2 (Prague, 2003), 4–5. 3 Thomas Moore, in a letter to Elisabeth Fielding, May 15, 1839; see H.J.P. Arnold, William Henry Fox Talbot: Pioneer of Photography and Man of Science (London: Hutchinson Benham, 1977), 120, 334. 4 See also Daniel Palmer, Photography and Collaboration: From Conceptual Art to Crowdsourcing (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). 5 Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967), Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), 142–148. Craig Owens sees the appropriations by Levine in feminist terms: “is she simply dramatizing the diminished possibilities for creativity in an image-saturated culture … ? Or is not her refusal of authorship in fact a refusal of the role of creator as ‘father’ of [Evans’] work, of the paternal rights assigned to the author by law?” Craig Owens, ‘Sherrie Levine at A&M Artworks’ (1982), Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 115, 116. 6 See Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Da(r)ta,’ Each Wild Idea, 177–180. 7 See Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Dibujos de encaje’ (Patterns of Lace), in Catherine Coleman ed., Huellas de Luz: El Arte y los Experimentos de William Henry Fox Talbot (Traces of Light: The Art and Experiments of William Henry Fox Talbot) (exhibition catalogue, Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia/Aldeasa, 2001), 53–59, 354–357. 8 For a history of the naming of photography, see Geoffrey Batchen, ‘The Naming of Photography: A Mass of Metaphor,’ History of Photography, 17: 1 (Spring, 1993), 22–32. 9 William Henry Fox Talbot, ‘The New Art,’ The Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Lettres, Science and Art, 1150 (February 2, 1839), 73. 10 I have borrowed these thoughts from the MA thesis of Sarah R. Caylor, Marginalia: The Treatment of the Photography of Lily E. White, Sarah Hall Ladd and Maud Ainsworth (Art History, University of California, Riverside, 2003).

14 DOES SIZE MATTER?

So far, I’ve been talking as if the relationship between negative and positive print is one to one, as if a photograph is merely a contact print of a negative. But, of course, photographs ascribed to Avedon, Capa, Arbus, Sherman, and Frank are all in fact enlargements from a negative. Indeed, the capacity to appear in a variety of sizes, whether enlarged or reduced, is another of photography’s distinctive characteristics (distinguishing it from printmaking, despite both having a matrix from which multiple impressions are taken). Nevertheless, there has again been little written about it.1 Indeed, it’s a little dismaying to find that the most sustained meditation yet produced on the effects of photographic enlargement has come to us in a work of cinema, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up of 1966.2 As I say, insufficient attention has been paid in published histories of photography to the development of the enlarger, despite it being one of photography’s more crucial instruments.3 In fact, it was only with the introduction into the darkroom of this instrument in the late nineteenth century that enlarged photographs became a standard attribute of the medium. Nevertheless, enlargement has always been built into photography’s DNA. Tom Wedgwood and Humphry Davy, for example, employed a solar microscope in their earliest photographic experiments, as they tell us in their publication of 1802.4 This instrument allowed small scientific images to be projected onto a wall at large size, for close study or teaching purposes. Talbot also employed this device to produce enlarged photographic images of botanical and other scientific specimens, as well as a detail from some machine-made lace, magnified 100 times. But he also used his existing camera as a means of enlargement and reduction, rephotographing his prints at varying distances from his lens in order to either increase or decrease their original size. This method was widely employed in the first 50 years of photography, allowing even the reproduction of otherwise unique daguerreotype images.

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Indeed, there’s a whole other history to be written about the implications of this kind of rephotography. Like György Kepes a few years later, both László Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray, for example, regularly rephotographed their unique cameraless photographs and solarised prints in order to be able to issue enlarged, multiple print editions of these same images—in other words, to make them no longer unique. As a consequence, many pictures by an artist like Man Ray are not what they seem. An Untitled Rayograph from 1922, as found in Champs Délicieux: Album de Photographies, looks like the photographic equivalent of “the chance encounter between a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table,” the phrase adopted from the writings of Comte de Lautréamont to describe the ideal surrealist work.5 But this is in fact one print from a volume of 12 rephotographed rayographs, printed from negatives and issued by Man Ray in 1922 in an edition of 40 numbered copies. What we’re looking at is, in other words, the product of commerce, not of chance. As the artist himself wrote in 1973, “an original is a creation motivated by desire. Any reproduction of an original is motivated by necessity.”6 Moholy operated in a similar way. He made at least two untitled self-portraits in 1926 while working in Dessau, leaving a half-moon version of his profile on his light-sensitive paper after three exposures of both his head and a f lat circular shape. To make one of these self-portraits, Moholy pasted a piece of a different photogram onto the chin, erasing any sign of skin or stubble7 [Figure 14.1]. Presumably, he then rephotographed this collage to produce the final seamless product. These self-portraits were published several times, in some cases in inverted form. He called such reversed-tone images (he made as many as 33 of them) “revaluations,” a telling choice of word.8 Like Man Ray, Moholy issued a portfolio of his work in 1929 and had all ten photograms featured there enlarged from roughly 23 × 17 cm to 40 × 30 cm. He also exhibited enlarged photographs of his photograms in 1929 in Film und Foto and showed a much enlarged, at 97 × 68 cm, version of his half-moon self-portrait photogram in 1934 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. We’ve jumped ahead of ourselves here, for it was only in the mid-nineteenth century that there was a perceived need for a specialised instrument designed to produce large prints from small negatives. This kind of instrument, called a solar camera, was introduced in the 1850s. These massive instruments, in effect cameras for photographing other photographs, were designed to be pointed directly and continuously at the sun so that the image on the negative would be projected onto prepared paper through a second lens at a greatly enlarged size. This would sometimes require an exposure of several hours. But it wasn’t until more sensitive printing papers were introduced in the 1880s that smaller enlargers, eventually fitted with arc lamps, became standard pieces of darkroom equipment as well as part of the normal conceptual architecture of photography.9 This architecture has had all sorts of consequential effects on our experience of photographs. We are, after all, currently living through the era of the big photograph. Photographic billboards are now part of the visual experience of almost

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every city and highway. This vernacular practice is mimicked by art exhibitions, which today often feature gallery after gallery of enormous photographs, the size of nineteenth-century history paintings, or, to use a more recent and apt comparison, Abstract Expressionist canvases of the 1940s and 1950s. As we’ve already heard, in the case of the work of the German artist Andreas Gursky, these photographs fill your peripheral as well as your central vision, absorbing you into their intricate patterns and slick surfaces. He describes the images he seeks to create in terms of a “balance between great scale and a huge amount of detail.”10 The largeness of his prints forces you to stand back to take it all in (it’s no coincidence that modern gallery spaces long ago abandoned the domestic interior as their model and have adopted instead the scale and antiseptic aesthetic of the showroom or the warehouse). But when you step back the 10 or 15 paces required to see the picture as a whole, you lose the ability to make out the details that large photographs promise

FIGURE 14.1

László Moholy-Nagy (Hungary/Germany/USA),Self-portrait, 1926/1929 gelatin silver photograph, taken in 1929, of a photogram made in 1926 36.1 × 24.0 cm

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to provide. So, you come back in close, this time losing that sense of the overall picture but at least gaining, you hope, some insight into how they’ve been made. You scan a small section of Gursky’s 16 foot 8 inch-wide print of May Day IV (2000) to try and find some repetition in the bodies and gestures of the dancers featured there, as if to spot the digital seams, the cuts and pastes, that surely made this extended panorama of ravers possible. But this close viewing doesn’t get you very far. As with a Pollock painting, the details fascinate but they don’t tell you anything you didn’t already know from looking from a distance. In fact, the details in a Gursky photograph are kind of blurry; they certainly don’t involve you emotionally. That’s because Gursky’s photographs are about, in part, their own bigness (would they have any interest at all if they were small?), and to appreciate their grandly abstract renditions of the world, you have to abandon any desire for an intimate relationship with the photograph itself. In 2001, Clay Tomkins described the experience of confronting one of Gursky’s large works: The first time I saw photographs by Andreas Gursky … I had the disorienting sensation that something was happening—happening to me, I suppose, although it felt more generalized than that. Gursky’s huge, panoramic colour prints—some of them up to six feet high by ten feet long—had the presence, the formal power, and in several cases the majestic aura of nineteenth-century landscape paintings, without losing any of their meticulously detailed immediacy as photographs. Their subject matter was the contemporary world, seen dispassionately and from a distance.11 The perspective in many of Gursky’s photographs is drawn from an elevated vantage point. This position enables the viewer to encounter scenes, encompassing both centre and periphery, which are ordinarily beyond reach. He gives us the vision of a god. Visually, Gursky is drawn to large, anonymous, man-made spaces—high-rise facades at night, office lobbies, stock exchanges, dance parties, the interiors of big-box retailers. This is the photography of an omnivorous image industry—the slick illustrations of corporate advertising, the overabundant photography of magazines and newspapers, the ceaselessly roving eye of television. In this context, the size of Gursky’s prints does indeed matter. The sublimity of their scale in relation to the human body, the cold distance they maintain between us and them, even their towering ambition, all symbolically embody the globalisation that is this artist’s theme and model. But their scale is also representative of the recent history of international art photography, which has seen an exponential growth in the size of prints over the past few years. It wasn’t always like this, even for Gursky. His prints from the mid-1980s, for example, were only about 20 × 24 inches. It was in 1989 that he, along with other German photo-artists of his generation, began to order larger chromogenic colour prints from their lab in Düsseldorf (one important consequence of deciding on larger

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print sizes is that individual artists can no longer do the work themselves). Peter Galassi has suggested various reasons for this initial decision to “go big.” A desire to compete with painting, both on the walls of the gallery and in the market place (the bigger the picture, the bigger the price, or so artists and their dealers hope), coincided with improvements in printing technology, a financial ability to pay the lab fees, and a rivalry between photographers (when one of them printed large, they all wanted to).12 Galassi also argues that the larger size enhances, or even creates, the aesthetic effect of the work. At least, this is a point he tries to make about the photographs of Gursky’s peer, Thomas Ruff: “the enlargements [sometimes to 12 × 7 feet] transformed his portraits from a series of heads at more or less human scale into the monumental icons of blankness that were soon so widely admired.”13 Perhaps with this effect in mind, for his 2001 exhibition in the United States, Gursky had his earlier photographs reprinted to a somewhat larger size (“so as to unify the exhibition”), from about 20 × 24 inches to about 36 × 32 inches (thus also changing them from horizontal to vertical formats).14 These changes raise an interesting question: at what point in this process of reprinting does size come to matter? At what point does a photograph become one thing rather than another, induce this affect rather than that? Consider again the work of Cindy Sherman. Made between 1977 and 1980, Cindy Sherman’s celebrated Untitled Film Stills were originally printed as 10 × 8 inch gelatin silver prints. They were conceived and presented, in other words, as simulations of actual film stills (or, more accurately, of press prints shot on set and issued by a studio to promote a movie). But, a little later, the artist commissioned a further edition of three sets of these images that were printed at either 40 × 30 inches or 20 × 16 inches each. These bigger prints brought the Untitled Film Stills into step with Sherman’s colour work, which had become progressively larger with each new series.15 Rosalind Krauss associates the Untitled Film Stills with “the condition of being a copy without an original.”16 Perhaps this is why the Stills are reproduced at all sorts of different sizes throughout Krauss’s 1993 book on Sherman, some quite small and some spread over two pages, as if size simply doesn’t matter to our reception of this work.17 One can certainly understand why an artist would choose to cash in on her own fame and provide the market with what it apparently now wants: big pictures. But, in this case, there are actual “originals” to go by, a consistent, repetitiously sized series of 10 × 8-inch prints designed to conjure a specific referent, the genre of the film still. They don’t read as “film stills” when blown up to four times their original size. They read as “Shermans,” a fashionable art trophy bearing a signature style, a mere simulacrum of a once-abrasive postmodernism. Different sizes do indeed bear different meanings. It seems strange to be talking about an “original” when talking about postmodern art. Or, for that matter, when talking about photography, a medium now capable of being reproduced at almost any imaginable size. But, as I’ve been arguing throughout, if we are going to come up with an historical account

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of photography that emulates the peculiar qualities of this medium, the first thing we have to do is acknowledge the reproducibility of the photograph. And the way to do that is not to ignore the question of size, and the fact that there are sometimes many different positive versions derived from the same negative image, but to talk about it, as much as possible. As I’ve said, photographs can potentially be printed to almost any size, but in actuality they usually come to us with quite particular dimensions, for quite particular reasons (technical, commercial, aesthetic). It’s time that historians addressed themselves to these particularities and thereby once again dealt with the photograph as a physical thing as well as a more virtual “image.” The fate of the work of Malian photographer Seydou Keïta is instructive in this regard. After beginning his career as a professional photographer in Bamako in 1939, Keïta set up his own studio in 1949, then closed it to work for the Malian government in 1962 (in the criminal investigation department), before retiring in 1977. He first became prominent in the United States after an exhibition at the Museum of African Art in New York in the 1980s featured some of his portraits as background to an exhibition (without naming him as the photographer).18 As the legend goes, struck by those images, a man named André Magnin visited Bamako in 1992 and sought Këita out. Orchestrated by Magnin, Këita’s career in the West has boomed ever since, fuelled by the thousands of negatives that he had kept intact and by our own desire for a glimpse of exotic Africa.19 Keïta’s work was, for example, shown in 1996 as part of the exhibition In/ sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present, presented at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.20 Viewers were immediately impressed by the distinctive patterning of his photographs and their stark play of black and white tones, as well as by the formal pose of their dignified African subjects. The prints on display were provided by the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain in Paris, were vaguely dated 1949 or 1952–55, and were either 40 × 30 cm or 30 × 40 cm in size [Figure 14.2]. Other versions, as large as 77 × 60 cm, have been produced and shown, for example in 2001 at the Fogg Art Museum in Boston. Keïta himself saw these prints for the first time in Europe. “You can’t imagine what it was like for me the first time I saw prints of my negatives printed large-scale, no spots, clean and perfect. I knew then that my work was really, really good.”21 These large-scale prints were therefore obviously made with the photographer’s approval, and presumably to his financial benefit. Indeed, Keïta was acutely aware that negatives are capable of numerous, different, positive manifestations. “My wish is that my negatives will live on for a very long time … It is true, my negatives breathe like you and me.”22 So, no-one can complain about the production and dissemination of these large versions of Keïta’s photographs. Unless, of course, you actually care to consider their meanings and functions in Mali, where they were first taken. For Keïta tells us that he never used an enlarger during his own career, always selling his portraits as contact prints in a “postcard format” (created by putting a piece of cardboard over the lower half of the camera, allowing two images to be made

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FIGURE 14.2

Seydou Këita (Mali), Untitled [‘Odalisque’], 1956–57 gelatin silver photograph, printed in 1998 40.0 × 57.0 cm

on one sheet of film; apparently, this format “was all people ever asked for”).23 Sittings took as long as an hour, and Këita always made at least two negatives and three prints from each of these. He had an old, damaged camera, so he used to have to take the lens cap off by hand for his exposures and judge the light levels from experience. Vintage Keïta prints were printed on sheets of shiny paper, about 10.0 × 13.0 cm in size. Their tones are much warmer than their European big brothers and with much less dramatic contrast [Figure 14.3]. The smaller size made these photographs suitable for sending through the post or for display in a domestic interior, but also asks for a close inspection and therefore a physical intimacy between us and them. Only one person can peer into such a photograph at a time, thus creating a very private viewing experience (you can be with yourself as you look, if you know what I mean). All in all, it’s a very different experience from the one you get when they are printed at 77 × 60 cm or thereabouts and shown in a gallery. There they pose as “art” as we in the West understand it, something to be looked at and admired with the eyes but not necessarily felt in the heart. I’ve been speaking about some of the effects of photography’s reproduction, concentrating on the complications arising from a photograph’s divided identity as both a negative and positive prints. Enlargement is one such effect, but we could equally look at examples of reduction. As a commercially ambitious photographer working in the 1860s and 1870s, Julia Margaret Cameron, for example, made at least 18 prints from her collodion glass negative titled The Mountain

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FIGURE 14.3

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Seydou Këita (Mali), Untitled [Woman with Radio], 1950s vintage gelatin silver photograph 16.5 × 11.5 cm

Nymph Sweet Liberty, shot in June 1866. But you never would have known that if you had seen the 2002 survey exhibition of her career shown at the National Media Museum in Bradford and at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.24 The exhibition showed us only what its curators imagined was the “best” print made from each of her negatives. To reproduce or exhibit only one of these prints (inevitably, the largest, “exhibition-scale,” one) is to propose that Cameron’s art was about the production of singular “images,” not actual photographs. It is to pretend that she is the equivalent of a painter. It is, in short, to deliberately repress her history as a practicing photographer making commodities for sale within a capitalist economy. You would have also been hard pressed to deduce that Cameron issued fully one fifth of her prints in a reduced carte de visite or cabinet card size.25 How does that fact change the way we should think about her work? For one thing, this reduction in size significantly alters our potential experience of her photographs.

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Does size matter?

There is surely a difference between viewing a print on a wall and a carte in the hand or in an album. The meaning of the two perceptual experiences is not the same, and therefore the two photographs (although ultimately derived from the same negative) are also not the same. We have to be able to find a way to represent that difference in our histories too. Of course, caught in the grip of art history and art museum conventions, these institutions wanted to show us the finest prints they could, in order to make the strongest possible case for photography as an art form. But do we really need that case to be made any more? And who cares which print is “best” anyway, apart from connoisseurs and collectors (that is, the kind of people who give money or masterpieces to art museums)? Surely what we need now (we people interested in the history of photography) is an approach to our subject that can provide a better representation of its complexity, and that can explicate in a more nuanced fashion something of photography’s importance to modern life and culture. The problem we face is that, for various reasons, art museums are where photography is most powerfully re-presented to the public as history. Given their own self-interests, we can’t expect such institutions to address themselves with any rigour to the historical realities of photography. This makes it all the more imperative that we do it ourselves whenever and wherever we have the chance. And the first step in that direction involves an acknowledgement of the role that reproduction has played in the practice of photography, not only the production and reproduction of material objects but also the production and reproduction of meaning, in both the past and the present. And this could well start with a greater focus on the role played by the negative in photography’s distinctive economy of being.

Notes 1 The following is drawn from Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Does Size Matter?,’ Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts 30: 2 (Fall/Winter 2003), 6–9. 2 See Michelangelo Antonioni, Blow-Up (London: Lorrimer Publishing, 1971). 3 Exceptions include Helmut Gernsheim, with Alison Gernsheim, ‘Mammoth and Miniature Photographs,’ The History of Photography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969), 311–321, and Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography, from 1839 to the Present (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1982), 62. See also Oliver Lugon, ‘Photography and Scale: Projection, Exhibition, Collection,’ Art History, 38: 2 (April 2015), 386–403. 4 See Thomas Wedgwood and Humphry Davy, ‘An Account of a Method Of Copying Paintings upon Glass, and of Making Profiles, by Agency of Light upon Nitrate of Silver’ (1802), in Newhall, Photography: Essays and Images, 15–16. To put this essay in context, see Geoffrey Batchen, ‘The Photographic Experiments of Tom Wedgwood and Humphry Davy: An Account of a Method,” History of Photography, 17: 2 (Summer 1993), 172–183. 5 The phrase was first used by Comte de Lautréamont (the pseudonym of Isidore Lucien Decasse) in his Maldoror (1869), but was then taken up in the 1930s by Surrealists like André Breton and Max Ernst. For more details on Man Ray’s Champs Délicieux: Album de Photographies, see the Sotheby’s Photographs auction catalogue for April 8, 2008, pages 90–93.

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6 Man Ray, ‘Originals Graphics Multiples’ (1973), in Jennifer Mundy ed., Man Ray: Writings on Art, 442. It is well to remember that, from 1923 onwards, Man Ray rarely printed from his own negatives, leaving that work to assistants. See ‘Interview with Lucien Treillard,’ in Emmanuelle de l’Ecotais and Alain Sayag eds., Man Ray: Photography and its Double (Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 1998), 240–245. Motivated by the necessity he mentions, Man Ray continued to rephotograph his rayographs throughout his life, frequently issuing them in multiple copies from newly made negatives printed by others. See Herbert Molderings, ‘Rayographs: Unique Originals, Editions and Reproductions,’ in Claudia Schubert ed., Man Ray and L. Fritz Gruber: Years of Friendship 1956–1976 (Köln: Steidl, 2008), 192–194. 7 Renate Heyne and Floris M. Neusüss eds., Moholy-Nagy: The Photograms Catalogue Raisonné (Ostildern: Hatje Cantz, 2009), 146–149. This self-portrait was issued in various versions a number of times, in 1926 and 1973, and then in enlarged versions printed at an unknown date. 8 See Sylvie Pénichon, Krista Lough and Paul Messier, ‘An Objective Revaluation of Photograms by László Moholy-Nagy,’ Leonardo, 50: 3 (2017), 294. 9 See Eugene Ostroff, ‘Photographic Enlarging: A History,’ Photographic Science and Engineering, 28 (1984), 54–89. 10 Andreas Gursky, as quoted in Dale Berning Sawa, ‘Andreas Gursky on the Photograph that Changed Everything: “It was Pure Intuition”,’ The Guardian ( January 18, 2018): https://ww w.theguardian.com/ar tanddesign/2018/jan/18/andreas-gursky-each -photograph-is-a-world-of-its-own-best-photograph-salerno-harbour (accessed January 20, 2018). 11 Calvin Tomkins, ‘The Big Picture,’ The New Yorker ( January 22, 2001), 62. 12 Galassi, Andreas Gursky, 27. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 184. 15 Sherman’s 1980 “rear-projection” series of Untitled colour prints, for example, were printed at 20 × 24 inches, the 1981 “centerfold” pictures were presented at 24 × 48 inches, the “pink robe” pictures of 1982 were printed at 45 × 30 inches, the “civil war” images of 1991 came in at 47 × 70 inches, and the “sex pictures” of 1992 topped out at 75 × 60 inches. 16 Rosalind Krauss, Cindy Sherman 1975–1993 (New York: Rizzoli, 1993), 17. 17 Books devoted to the history of photography rarely make much of an effort to reproduce pictures at their original size, or even at a scale relative to each other. Larry Schaaf ’s 2000 book The Photographic Art of William Henry Fox Talbot is an exception in this regard, scrupulously reproducing each print as a one-to-one copy. 18 A detail of a photograph by Keïta even appears on the cover of Susan Vogel’s catalogue, Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art (New York: The Center for African Art, 1991). It is interesting to note that this catalogue also included reproductions of similarly uncredited photographs from Senegal, Togo, and Côte d’Ivoire. However, their photographers have remained anonymous. 19 The story is ably told in Elizabeth Bigham, ‘Issues of Authorship in the Portrait Photographs of Seydou Keïta,’ African Arts (Spring 1999): 56–67, 94–95. For a discussion of some of its consequences, see Candace M. Keller, ‘Framed and Hidden Histories: West African Photography from Local to Global Contexts,’ African Arts 47: 4 (Winter 2014), 14–25. 20 Clare Bell, Okwui Enwezor, Danielle Tilkin, and Octavio Zaya, eds., In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1996). 21 Seydou Keïta, interviewed in Bamako, Mali, on November 15, 2000, by Michelle Lamunière, in Michelle Lamunière, You Look Beautiful Like That: The Portrait Photographs of Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé (Cambridge: Harvard Art Museums, 2001), 47. 22 Seydou Keïta, as quoted by Alioune Bâ , In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present, 268.

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23 Seydou Keïta, in Lamunière, You Look Beautiful Like That, 47. See also Seydou Keïta, from an interview with André Magnin, 1995–96, in Gerald Matt and Thomas MieBgang eds., Flash Afrique! Photography from West Africa (Vienna: Kunsthalle Wien, 2002), 67. For the possible local meanings of Keïta’s work, see Candace M. Keller’s discussion of the way Keïta’s portraits embody the local Malian concepts of fadenya and badenya. Candace M. Keller, ‘Visual Griots: Identity, Aesthetics, and the Social Roles of Portrait Photographers in Mali,’ in John Peffer and Elisabeth L. Cameron, eds., Portraiture and Photography in Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 364–67. See also Allison Moore, ‘Toward an Ontology of African Studio Portraiture,’ in Kris Belden-Adams, Photography and Failure: One Medium’s Entanglement with Flops, Underdogs, and Disappointments (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 95–105. 24 The exhibition was organised by the National Portrait Gallery in London in collaboration with the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford. Titled Julia Margaret Cameron, Photographer, it was presented at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles from October 21, 2003 until January 11, 2004. 25 See Philippa Wright, ‘Little Pictures: Julia Margaret Cameron and Small-Format Photography,’ in Julian Cox and Colin Ford eds., Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2003), 81–93.

15 ORDERING THINGS

Any acknowledgment of the role of the negative in the making of photographs opens up the history of that medium to many new avenues of investigation. As we’ve seen, it raises questions about authorship, value, and identity, highlighting the malleability of the photograph and the creative capacities of the practice of photography. Above all, a focus on the negative establishes reproduction as one of photography’s most basic operations, and with it a complex play of repetition and difference. Those repetitions take many forms, the copying of many photographs from a single negative being only one. We have already touched on the return of processes and visual gestures from the past in the work of contemporary artists. But we could pursue this issue in much more detail. Indeed, another important issue neglected in many histories of photography is the repetition of certain types of photograph, and indeed the popularity of typology itself as a mode of photographic practice.1 The photographic art of the German couple Bernd and Hilla Becher is usually taken as the epitome of this typological urge.2 Devoted to a taxonomic recording of particular architectural edifices, the Bechers meticulously avoided any signs of contingency or subjectivity in their pictures, offering instead a grid of depopulated buildings always seen from the same distance in even light and against cloudless skies, printed at uniform sizes in implacable tones of black and grey. All this helps to displace their exemplars of industrial architecture from the history of capitalism and from the lives of the workers who once laboured there (for the Bechers, these buildings are just convenient “shapes” or “basic forms”).3 “The idea,” the Bechers once said, “is to make families of objects,” or, in a later change of words, “to create families of motifs.”4 Isolated from context and freed from all social or political associations, these abstracted pictures invite a comparative gaze rather than an interpretive one. One notes the small disparities between one f lattened structure and the next, but these minor details

176 Ordering things

are quickly subsumed to a mesmeric absorption of the grid as a generic mode of perception [Figure 15.1]. The system of conventions and procedural rules that has produced this work is the work, resulting in a typological rhetoric emptied of any functional motivation. As a result, we learn little from looking at this work other than about our own act of looking. Its pleasures stem from an optical immersion in typology as an aesthetic experience projected to be valuable in its own right.

FIGURE 15.1

Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher (Germany), Kugel-Gasbehälter (Spheric Gas Tanks), 1963–1983 nine gelatin silver photographs 173.0 × 143.0 cm

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It has often been remarked that the work of the Bechers refers to a specifically German photographic genealogy, building on the modernist tradition established by such figures as Karl Blossfeldt, Albert Renger-Patzsch, and August Sander in the decade or so before the Second World War.5 The genealogy is instructive, but only if one adopts an attention to sameness and difference equivalent to that exercised by the Bechers in their own oeuvre. Blossfeldt, for example, was in fact a kind of found artist, a vernacular historical readymade adopted with much fanfare by a younger avant-garde (much as was Eugéne Atget at around the same time in France). Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Blossfeldt photographed thousands of specially prepared plant specimens against a white or grey cardboard background. Chosen as demonstrations of an innate structure, and sometimes altered to enhance this impression, these plants were photographed on glass plates and then used in magnified form as slides for the teaching of industrial design.6 In 1925, the same year that the term Neue Sachlichkeit was coined, a banker and gallerist named Karl Nierendorf encountered examples of these photographs and began to distribute them. Appealing to a newly fashionable industrial vision, they appeared in periodicals devoted to architectural and design theory; by 1928 they had been published to great acclaim under the title Urformen der Kunst [Art Forms in Nature] and from that point on were frequently exhibited (in, for example, Film und Foto in 1929). Walter Benjamin was among those who saw Blossfeldt’s work as demonstrating the unique capacities of the photographic medium, being able, through their enlargement, “to reveal a completely unexpected wealth of analogies and forms in the natural world.” 7 To the delighted bewilderment of Blossfeldt, who died in 1932, he had suddenly become a celebrated contemporary artist. In all these aspects, there are interesting parallels to be drawn with the career of the Bechers. The Bechers almost always photographed their buildings from front on, without any embellishment or obvious artistic affectation. The same might be said for the photographer (or photographers) who systematically documented the facades of businesses located along Sixth Avenue in New York in 1937. Once forgotten, or at least ignored, vernacular photographs of this kind are now avidly collected. And this collecting is inspired, in a self-fulfilling typological loop, by the photography of the Bechers. As Artur Walther, one of the world’s most significant private collectors, has admitted: “It was their encyclopedic approach, their interest in form, object, and function, that attracted me and started my collecting.”8 So, as well as numerous photographs by the Bechers, there are 58 photographs of New York facades by unknown photographers in the Artur Walther Collection. Obviously, collecting is itself a typological exercise, or can be. For example, Walther also owns 600 photographs of petrol stations, shot from the 1930s through the 1950s and faithfully gathered in an album, three to a page. These collections within his Collection usefully remind us that, historically, the series or the inventory or the album is actually the more prominent organisational or conceptual model for photography, rather than the single image.9

178 Ordering things

But it also reminds us of the effects of the act of collecting. These vernacular photographs, which once had a commercial, institutional, or perhaps entirely personal purpose, have been gathered together by Walther with some of the twentieth century’s most celebrated art photographs, a conjunction that necessarily transforms their meaning and function. How can one now see these modest photographs if not through the lens of the Bechers’ version of systems art or in the wake of Ed Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations, issued in 1963 as his first artist’s book?10 In short, collecting does things to the items collected. It imposes an order on those items. Meanings are implied, sometimes even insisted on. And these meanings are often produced by showing things side by side, or under the same thematic heading. Collecting matters, and so does the way one curates and exhibits a collection. So, what meanings are being generated by the mix of photographs—Western, Asian, and African, fine art and vernacular—offered in the Walther Collection, to take just this example? For a start, we are being told that the previously unloved photographs of Sixth Avenue facades are worth looking at for their own sake, that they should be looked at with the same close attention we accord acknowledged art works, like those made by the Bechers. And there is indeed something compelling about both the lustrous tonal range and the obdurate impassivity of the look that the vernacular photographs accord their subjects. The front windows of the businesses between 1281 and 1287 Sixth Avenue (information provided in white ink on the face of the print, along with the date it was taken, February 19, 1937) are full of intriguing not-quite-identifiable commodities, along with a plethora of competing signage and two shop owners or customers lingering in doorways. Above them ascend rows of blank apartment windows and periodic fire-escape balconies. There is much information that could be derived from a close study of such pictures, as no doubt there was at the time of their making. But that information is not really the source of their value in this new context. Now they provide evidence that the taxonomic urge is to be found everywhere we look, from high art to vernacular practice, from New York to Bamako, from council records to spectacular private collections of photographs. These kinds of photograph could of course be used to generate other meanings as well. But to do that, they would have to be directed to systems outside of themselves, or be placed within an interconnected network of such systems. Consider, for example, the equally deadpan style of photography employed by Hans Haacke in his notorious installation, Shapolsky et al., Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, May 1, 1971, first shown in that same year [Figure 5.2]. This “curatorial” project brought together two maps and 142 silver gelatin photographs accompanied by type-written data sheets and diagrams detailing information gathered from public records (in the New York Public Library) about the ownership of the buildings. It showed how one extended family company had constructed an empire of slum dwellings, making the structure of these holdings into a visible object. Like the work of the Bechers, Haacke’s

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FIGURE 15.2

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Hans Haacke (Germany/USA), detail from Shapolsky et al., Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, May 1, 1971, 1971 9 photostats, 142 gelatin silver photographs, and 142 photocopies dimensions variable

photography was studiously neutral and vernacular in style, making every effort to eschew subjective interpretation and to present itself as “just the facts.” But the proposed placement of Haacke’s hybrid combination of photographs and texts in the space of the Guggenheim Museum brought various social systems into revealing confrontation—the privileged space of the museum and the destitute space of the slum dwelling, the subjective expressions of high art and the expressionless documentation of commerce, the visual conventions of taxonomy and the ruthless political economy of capitalism. As a consequence, Haacke’s exhibition was cancelled, and his reputation for speaking truth to power was firmly established.11 American artist Martha Rosler took this approach another step in her 1975 sequence of images and texts known as The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems. Most people first encountered this work in her 1981 book 3 Works, where it appeared in printed form framed by two essays, one on the dire situation in Chile in 1976, and the other a trenchant critique of a certain type of humanist liberal documentary photography.12 The combination of artwork and essays threw out a challenge to documentary photography that every practitioner since then has had to negotiate as a matter of survival. There isn’t space here to analyse all the formal nuances of the art work at its centre—its 21 graphic black-and-white images of Bowery facades and stoops (but no drunken bums) and its thesaurus of 23 sets of words related to drunkenness, its shifting at about the half-way point from adjectives to nouns, and from vernacular to dictionary-derived expressions, its narrative f low from inebriation to death, its strategic reversals of text and image, its variable grid formation, its self-declaration as both a system and inadequate, and so on.13 Most striking is its provocative shotgun marriage of the systematic repetitions and semiotic concerns of conceptual art and a pictorial conjuring of the ghost of Walker Evans’ brand

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of 1930s documentary photography. This branding is identified with a deadpan, undemonstrative point of view; frontal and dispassionate, showing nothing of particular importance, camera lens parallel to the picture plane, made seemingly without subjective input from the photographer. This type of photography again has a long history, going back to the medium’s beginnings and Talbot and Daguerre’s efforts to imitate the pictorial conventions of scientific illustration and thereby sell their inventions to a particular sector of the image-making market. But it was only in the 1860s that what I’m calling the deadpan approach was equated with art; or, more precisely, with everything that was the opposite of art. Henry Peach Robinson’s Pictorial Effect in Photography suggested that photographers aspiring to art should avoid at all costs the mechanical look of the document—with its intimations of an unskilled, unthinking, working-class aesthetic—and should seek instead to incorporate the ruling-class, value-added angles of the picturesque view.14 It was precisely this picturesque view, and these ideological values, that both Evans and Rosler sought to displace with their appeal to the deadpan photograph as document. In the case of Rosler, her refusal to take a moral position on the subject of drunkenness forces viewers to look at—and not just through—her other subject: documentary photography itself. The work’s structure implicates us in the production of both of these subjects—drunkenness and its transformation into picturesque documentary pictures or equally picturesque everyday language. Her photography proffers transparency, the visual promise of liberal democracy, but then renders it opaque, and thus available for political critique. In pointing to, but then refusing to represent others directly, in speaking both with and about photography, in simultaneously looking out at the world and inwards at that looking, she produced a self-ref lexive documentary practice that has been difficult to get beyond. Without this added frisson, without these kinds of contrived clashes between aesthetics and politics, we are left to ponder taxonomy as an entirely self-referential system of classification, whether embodied in the work of the Bechers or in the obedient repetitions of form that modulate the set of photographs depicting Sixth Avenue. As Sol LeWitt put it in 1969, The system is the work of art; the visual work of art is the proof of the system. The visual aspect can’t be understood without understanding the system. It isn’t what it looks like but what it is that is of basic importance.15 Taxonomy is a system of classification that juxtaposes many observations of a particular type of object in order to eliminate individual variations and identify common elements. It’s a system dedicated to normalisation, linking an apparently neutral gathering of visual information to the insidious exercise of disciplinary power that is such a distinctive feature of modern life.16 A taxonomic system depends on the serial repetition of a standardised form of representation, making photography its perfect mechanism. When stripped of context, we have

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the opportunity to ponder this system as a system. We get to see its repeated formal conventions as conventions. We get to marvel at the relentless commitment of the photographers who have contributed to it and at photography’s capacity to endlessly replicate its own pictorial grammar. And we get to wonder at this slide from vernacular to high art, this adoption of a deliberately banal mode of working by fine artists. As we’ve seen, in the nineteenth century, photographs that offered no more than a symmetrical front elevation of an object were considered to be unskilled, unartistic, and vulgar, precisely because they represented an unthinking and mechanical perspective on the world. The co-option of the cool and detached deadpan photograph by artists like Ruscha and the Bechers in the 1960s was a deliberate riposte to the documentary and Subjective Photography movements that preceded them, a privileging of form over content that shifted the responsibility of creative interpretation from the artist to the viewer. This shift was in keeping with the phenomenological concerns of Minimalist art, as were the tropes of repetition, seriality, and industrial precision.17 The central importance accorded to the choice of subject is declared dead by the adoption of such tropes, along with the subjectivity of the artist, a declaration that has its own satisfyingly emotive aesthetic possibilities. As one commentator on a similarly deadpan nineteenth-century photograph put it, such work was “almost sublime by its very monotony.”18 A sublimity of this kind appealed to many artists in the 1960s and has since proven popular with collectors, who have eagerly snapped up both Ruscha’s books and the Bechers’ photographs. They have also acquired groups of mug shots of criminals. The Walther Collection, for example, includes an album of 600 examples and others presented as sets of 50 or 100. It’s in this context that we get to study a parade of carefully unexpressive faces, almost all of them belonging to working-class men in the hands of the police. We now become those police. We look over these damningly inscribed cards as they once did, but without the weight of the criminal justice system behind us or with any first-hand knowledge of the personal histories of these individuals, which almost certainly included poverty, prosecution, and incarceration. We just get to look for looking’s sake, the ultimate sign of power. When seen in such numbers, attention is once again drawn to the common conventions of these photographic objects, rather than to any one individual example. These conventions were derived from the work of a Paris police official named Alphonse Bertillon, who in 1879 devised a clerical method of classification for criminals as an aid to police work.19 His system involved the combination of photo-portraits and measurements in a single archive. The Bertillon system took 11 body measurements and two photos (front and profile), recorded remarks on distinguishing body features (the shape of the ear was of particular fascination), and filed them in a retrievable system. The object of this system was to allow recidivists to be easily identified when caught for a second time. To be effective, the system demanded the taking of a consistent, aesthetically neutral

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standard of photograph, involving a single focal length, a fixed distance between camera and the sitter, and even lighting, all against a white background. The sitter becomes an exemplary specimen, a type, a “criminal.” The standardised, cropped, narrow image space, concentrating on the face; the subjection of the sitter to an unreturnable gaze (the gaze of the state, in the person of its designated officers); the clarity of features and sharpness of focus; the addition of names, numbers, and identifying information: these are the visible traces of disciplinary power.20 This power is exercised here to produce both the good, obedient citizen and that citizen’s other, the recalcitrant deviant. Once again, then, a system of repetitious taxonomic photography becomes a mirror into which we peer in order to see ourselves (by seeing a sample of those whom we imagine we are not). Photo-portraits such as these have become the markers, not only of our identity, but also of our presumed adherence to or deviance from an unspoken social norm. We all now carry such portraits wherever we go, in the form of ID cards of one sort or another. We are all participants in, and subject to, this particular taxonomic system. It’s important, then, for us, and for any study of the politics of taxonomic art, to recognise the contradictions reproduced within it. For Bertillon’s system identifies us as individuals only by subsuming that individuality to typology. The signs of our individuality (photographic portraits, dimensions, identifying marks, criminal history) are relentlessly gathered precisely because it is that same individuality which is erased by the gathering system itself. As we’ve heard, almost every commentator mentions the work of August Sander as a key touchstone for the taxonomic urge so evident in contemporary art practice. “Photography is like a mosaic that becomes a synthesis only when it is presented en masse,” declared Sander.21 Producing thousands of likenesses between 1924 and 1933, Sander planned a comprehensive social register of the German people, to be titled Citizens of the Twentieth Century: A Cultural History in Photographs. At one point he proposed organising it under seven sections, arranged by cities, comprising about 45 portfolios, each of which would contain 12 photographs. This imposed order is what gave his otherwise varied images the heft of a social science; as Benjamin puts it: “one will have to get used to being looked at in terms of one’s provenance. … Sander’s work is more than a picture book. It is a training manual.”22 There are a few things worth noting about this never-completed project. For a start, the photographs are entirely unlike those taken by the Bechers. Some are taken indoors and some outside, and the lighting, setting, pose, and distance between camera and sitter varies enormously from photograph to photograph. There is, in other words, no effort by Sander to impose a consistent taxonomic order on his subjects at the level of the photographing itself. Another thing to note is the status granted to fiction in Sander’s project. The people depicted by him are named as generic social identities (“The Master Tiler,” “Beggar,” “Society Lady,” “The Artist”) and placed in his taxonomy to represent this identity, rather than themselves. These photographs are not portraits. One consequence is that

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the same person can fill different taxonomic categories; the Dada artist provocateur Raoul Haussman, for example, appears in a number of different guises in different sections23 [Figure 15.3]. Sander reduces even himself to a type, “The Photographer,” methodically making pictures that eschew any single artistic personality or style, aiming, as he put it, “to see things as they are and not as they should or might be.”24 Each individual in Sander’s archive only takes on meaning in relation to the entire taxonomy, thus calling any distinction between the individual and their social milieu into question. Kept constantly in motion, difference and sameness are shown to be entirely dependent on one another. Simultaneously, the taxonomy itself is made visible as “something artificial, posed,” as something ideological, not natural or uncontestable. It was the lack of idealism in Sander’s

FIGURE 15.3

August Sander (Germany), Raoul Hausmann als Tänzer [Raoul Hausmann as Dancer], 1929 gelatin silver photograph (modern print by Gerd Sander) 26.0 × 18.8 cm

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taxonomy, his insistence on including criminals, communists, Jews, and the insane, as well as Nazis and prosperous members of the bourgeoisie, that resulted in the project being shut down by the Third Reich. It turns out there is nothing more dangerous, more frightening, than “things as they are.” A taxonomy that includes the imperfect is a threat to order itself. This insight should send us back to those projects that we thought we knew, to look again, to seek out those moments where a given typology falters and reveals its inherent contradictions. I earlier described taxonomy as a system designed to eliminate individual variations in order to identify common elements. The Bechers, however, see taxonomy as operating in exactly the opposite way, arguing that the “uniformity of presentation” of their photographs “both established a type and drew attention to the small differences among examples of the type.”25 And some observers also prefer to see their work in that way. To look through a Becher book is to take a lesson in vernacular aesthetics; it is to learn to read differences in composition, rhythm, and formal solutions where an ordinarily distracted eye would see only indifference and standardization; it is to derive intense pleasure from your own capacity of discrimination; it is to suffer from your inability to back it up by a technical vocabulary that would make it possible for you to detail a gasometer’s architecture as if it were a cathedral.26 And indeed, this is the kind of experience also promised by any selection of photographs framed by the organising principles of taxonomy and typology. Beyond its various aesthetic pleasures, such a framing gives us an opportunity to really look at what taxonomy does and how it does it. It also invites us to consider how taxonomies are constructed and deployed, and to what ends. For example, it becomes clear from an examination of their methods that the Bechers have, like Sander, invented each type they appear to merely document, carefully eliminating from their photographic taxonomies any structures that don’t comply with a prescribed set of aesthetic desires. Some early examples of their work, such as a taxonomy prepared as a gift for sculptor Carl Andre, accidentally compares completely different constructions.27 An exception like this one points to the rule, in the sense that it declares its own constructedness, its own artifice. It exposes, in other words, taxonomy’s worst-kept secret, the fact that it is a system of order (a uniformity of presentation) imposed by the act of representation, not a faithful trace of the world as it is. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that taxonomic systems, as exercises of power, simultaneously record and produce their types, oscillating insecurely between activity and passivity, fact and fiction, sameness and difference. Some taxonomies involve a delicate balancing of these opposing forces, seeking to suspend the tension between them in the presumed naturalness of the photograph. Others seek to create new ways of apprehending or even disputing this established (European) system of aligning knowledge with power. This is where a critical reading must intervene and upset any sense of balance, tipping the scale towards difference where sameness is favoured and towards sameness where difference is the privileged term. The important thing is to keep the system

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in motion and therefore visible as a system, to make it open to questioning. Anything but neutral, photographic taxonomies do things in and to the world. And this makes it all the more important that we continue to interrogate the politics of such arrangements, in the art gallery and without.

Notes 1 What follows is drawn from Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Ordering Things,’ in Wallis ed., The Order of Things, 332–339. 2 The Bechers’ first book, published in Düsseldorf in 1970, was titled Anonyme Skulpturen: Eine Typologie Technicher Bauten (Anonymous Sculptures and a Typology of Technical Constructions), and contained seven chapters, each looking at a different industrial architectural type. 3 The Bechers, as quoted in Blake Stimson, ‘The Photographic Comportment of Bernd and Hilla Becher’ (London: Tate Modern, 2004): http://www.tate.org.uk/researc h/publications/tate-papers/photographic-comportment-ber nd-and-hilla-becher (accessed March 15, 2015). 4 The Bechers, as quoted in ibid., 2. 5 As Blake Stimson would have it, among their “prewar inf luences was the systematic, pseudo-scientific studies of Karl Blossfeldt, Albert Renger-Patzsch, and, particularly, August Sander whose life-project making sociological portraits of Germans from all classes and occupations provided the methodological and affective structure for the Bechers’ own typological procedure.” Ibid., 1. But see also Gabriele Conrath-Scholl et al., Vergleichende Konzeptionen: August Sander, Karl Blossfeldt, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Bernd und Hilla Becher (Schirmer/Mosel, 1997). 6 See Rolf Sachsse, Karl Blossfeldt: Photographs 1865–1932 (Köln: Taschen, 1996). 7 Walter Benjamin’s first essay about photography comprised a short review of Blossfeldt’s book. In it he argues that “the person who created this collection of plant photos … has done more than his share of that great stock-taking of the inventory of human perception that will alter our image of the world.” See his ‘News about Flowers’ (November 1928), as translated in Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, eds. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 271, 272. 8 Artur Walther, speaking in Okwui Enwezor, ed., Contemporary African Photography from the Walther Collection: Events of the Self: Portraiture and Social Identity (Göttingen: Steidl, and New York: The Walther Collection, 2010), 15. 9 I thank Brian Wallis for sharing this insight. 10 Ed Ruscha, Twentysix Gasoline Stations (Alhambra, CA: The Cunningham Press, 1963). As it happens, this was the same year that saw the Bechers’ first exhibition of photographs, in a bookstore called the Galerie Ruth Nohl in Siegen, West Germany. See the interview between the Bechers and Ulf Erdmann Ziegler in ‘The Bechers’ Industrial Lexicon,’ Art in America, 90 ( June 2002), 98. 11 See Brian Wallis, ed., Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1986). 12 Martha Rosler, 3 Works (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1981). 13 This summary is synthesised from far more extensive discussions found in Philip Glahn, Estrangement and Politicization: Bertolt Brecht and American Art 1967–1979 (PhD dissertation, Graduate Center of the City University of New York, October 2007); Steve Edwards, Martha Rosler: The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (London: Afterall Books, 2012); and Katherine Bussard, Unfamiliar Streets: The Photographs of Richard Avedon, Charles Moore, Martha Rosler, and Philip-Lorca DiCorcia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).

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14 See the discussion in Steve Edwards, The Making of English Photography: Allegories (University Park, Pa.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 241–44. 15 Sol LeWitt, ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art,’ 0 to 9 (New York, January 1969): 3–5. 16 The work of Michel Foucault provides a history of this feature, beginning in 1966 in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon, 1970). 17 The Bechers displayed their photographs of blast furnaces and water towers in grids on the wall, offering a vertical analogue to the arrays of f lat sheets of metal arranged on the f loor by sculptors like Carl Andre (who went on to write an appreciation of their work in Artforum in 1972). See Carl Andre, ‘A Note on Bernhard and Hilla Becher,’ Artforum, 11: 4 (December 1972), 59-61. Aron Vinegar offers a brief overview of efforts to identify a politics for Ed Ruscha’s work in ‘Ed Ruscha, Heidegger, and Deadpan Photography,’ in Diarmuid Costello and Margaret Iversen, eds., Photography after Conceptual Art (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 28–49. Vinegar mentions that Ruscha was one of the first artists to have the word “deadpan” attached to his photographs, the term appearing in commentaries about his books as early as 1970. 18 The speaker, comparing such photographs to a “corpse,” is W.H. Davies in 1862, as quoted in Edwards, The Making of English Photography, 244. 19 For overviews of Bertillon’s work, see Michel Frizot et al., Identités de Disderi au photomaton (Paris: Centre National de la Photographie, 1985) and Allan Sekula, ‘The Body and the Archive’ (1986) in Bolton, The Contest of Meaning, 342–388. 20 I am here channelling the words of John Tagg in The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (London: Macmillan Education, 1988). 21 August Sander (1951), as quoted in Graham Clarke, ‘Public Faces, Private Lives: August Sander and the Social Typology of the Portrait Photograph,’ in Graham Clarke, ed., The Portrait in Photography (London: Reaktion Books, 1992), 72. 22 Walter Benjamin, ‘Little History of Photography’ (1931), in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, 287. 23 “Armed with a letter of recommendation from Franz Wilhelm Seiwert—one of the chief initiators of the progressive artists circle who had been a friend of the photographer since the early 1920s—Sander approached the Dadaist painter Raoul Hausmann in Berlin and took several portraits of him. He assigned these photographs to various portfolios of his work People of the 20th Century. Hausmann is included in Group VI, “The City,” in the pose of a dancer, whereas in Group III, in the ‘Woman and Man’ portfolio, he is pictured with his wife and girlfriend (Hedwig Mankiewitz and Vera Broido). A third photograph, which August Sander assigned to Portfolio 12, ‘The Technician and Inventor,’ portrays him as ‘Inventor and Dadaist.’ This portrait differs from the others in that they predominantly embody the classic type of the engineer or related occupations.” See Susanne Lange and Gabriele Conrath-Scholl, August Sander’s People of the 20th Century: II The Skilled Tradesman (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2002), 16–18. Thanks go to Cory Rice and Gabriele Conrath-Scholl for their assistance with this commentary on Sander. A version of it previously appeared in Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Revenant,’ in Taryn Simon, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII (London: Tate Modern and Mack, 2011), 739–53. For a more recent reappraisal of Sander’s politics, see Rose-Carol Ashton Long, ‘August Sander’s Portraits of Persecuted Jews,’ Tate Papers, 19 (April 2013): http://www.tate.org.uk/re search/publications/tate-papers/august-sanders-portraits-persecuted-jews (accessed March 16, 2015). 24 August Sander (1927), as reproduced in Christopher Phillips, ed., Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913–1940 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1989), 107.

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25 The Bechers, speaking to Ulf Erdmann Ziegler in ‘The Bechers’ Industrial Lexicon,’ Art in America, 98. On page 100, Ziegler suggests that “the more similar the constructions, the more convincing the typologies?” and Bernd Becher replies “Exactly. That was what we always strove for.” 26 Thierry de Duve, ‘Bernd and Hilla Becher or Monumental Photography,’ in Gabriele Schor, ed., Held Together With Water: Art from the Sammlung Verbund (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2007), 293. 27 See ‘The Bechers’ Industrial Lexicon,’ Art in America, 100.

16 POSES AND SETTINGS

As we have already seen, a consideration of that relationship of negative and positive is necessarily a ref lection on reproduction and its consequences, a ref lection on the multiplicity of identities that can be hidden in a reiteration of the same. A negative-derived history is therefore not itself confined to negatives. It is a history concerned with otherness and with photographic reproductions wherever they may be found; that is, with any acts of replication, emulation, copying, or repetition associated with the practice of photography. In that context, it needs to be acknowledged that the vast majority of photographs feature a banal repetition of certain stock poses and settings. This is particularly so when the subject is a person or persons. Here, then, is yet another aspect of photography’s reproducibility that we will need to account for—the reiteration of certain gestures and looks on the part of their subjects, giving most photographs a predictable and comforting sameness. By repeating these gestures for the camera, we allow photography to certify that we are part of a community for whom such gestures matter. We perform a ritual—for which the camera is often an essential witness—of class declaration and belonging. As historians, then, we are going to have to deal with this kind of reproducibility too, with the fact that most photographs are produced within an economy of conformist individuality in which we expect to be depicted as ourselves, looking as much as possible like everyone else. This conformist economy was established very early on, with commercial daguerreotype studios dependent for their success on an ability to produce an already established type of portrait image, drawn from prototypes found in oil paintings, engravings, and painted miniatures. Among other things, the advent of daguerreotypy allowed members of the upper middle class to both mimic their betters and invent, perform, buy, display, and exchange pictures of the self and of others. Daguerreotype portraits thereby turned subjectivity into both

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a matter of representation and a commodity form, into a thing that could be bought and sold. Many early daguerreotype portraits have an endearingly primitive quality, generated as much by slow exposure times, unsophisticated technology, and impromptu studio settings as by photographers and clientele still not quite sure how one should properly pose in front of a camera. Anxious to do the right thing, the subjects of these photographs adopt looks that are already familiar to them. Familiar, but also newly acquired and not yet quite natural— hence the stiff and studied quality of the poses that result. These are portraits of people still learning how to look like themselves. As a genre of portraiture, these images show the struggles of particular individuals to conform to the social expectations, and visual tropes, of their sex and social class—everyone simultaneously wants to look like themselves and like everyone else, to be the same but (ever so slightly) different. To search for the “real” subject, the inner man or woman, or to lament the absence of self-expression or overt individuality, is therefore to misunderstand the nature of this kind of photography, which is all about the semiotics of typology and the sublimation of the individual to the mass. As John Tagg has suggested, a portrait “is also a commodity, a luxury, an adornment, ownership of which itself confers status.”1 Daguerreotype portraits, as displacements of the traditional painted image, are above all signs of social mobility, representing an alignment of their upwardly aspiring patrons with the latest manifestation of industrial progress. The addition of painted backdrops, an innovation introduced into the photographic studio in December 1841, enhanced this illusion of social mobility.2 A painted backdrop of a landscape adds a sheen of culture (a purported familiarity with the tropes of the picturesque) to otherwise repetitive portrait images. But each sitter also claims this landscape as his or her own personal property, if not in fact, then at least in aspiration. Everyone, whatever their actual social or financial standing, could now pretend to be a member of the landed gentry. The pose and setting again gesture back to an established aristocratic painted portrait tradition, but the picture’s obvious artifice—the clear shift in visual register between the sitter and the backdrop— implies that, having been superseded, such codes were now available for the plundering. Photography had turned class into a visual commodity, into a set of poses and appearances—into an act. We can see this act being faithfully performed in countless daguerreotypes from the 1840s and 1850s. Take, for example, the entirely ordinary portrait taken by an unnamed photographer of Mrs Charles A. Buckeley in New York in about 18503 [Figure 16.1]. It features a seated woman posing with her children, Charles J., John N., and Julia N. Buckeley. The mother is f lanked by her two sons, while her youngest child Julia—looking almost doll-like—is perched stiff ly on her left knee. The photographer has sought to indicate the intimacy of their connection, and also to get as much of them as he can into the picture, by having the boys stand quite close to their mother, such that their legs are partially hidden behind her voluminous dress.

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FIGURE 16.1

Photographer unknown (USA), Mrs Charles A. Buckeley and Three Children, c. 1850 daguerreotype 12.0 × 15.2 cm (open)

The spatial compression of the group allows for an exchange of touches that physically links each of these bodies to all the others. Charles Jr. has one hand on his hip and the other resting on his mother’s upper thigh, giving him a look of self-possession that is striking even now, almost 170 years later. The older boy, John, has lifted his right hand to an awkward height, up behind his sister’s head, trying to hold it steady. His mother also holds tightly onto Julia’s waist, hoping to

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keep her still during the relatively long exposure time they must endure, perhaps as long as ten seconds. Nevertheless, Julia’s right foot is blurred, evidence that this part of her body has escaped all these efforts and moved during exposure. Only she wears a light-coloured dress, allowing her figure to stand out from the picture, along with everyone’s white collars and the vertical rows of buttons on the boys’ tops. Placed in a compressed space, without props or backdrop, and arranged in a f lat composition like a sculptural frieze, all four of these people face straight out at us, obediently looking into the camera, their faces absent of further expression. There are already things to be said here about the relationship of this pose to the technical demands of daguerreotypy, and thus to the exigencies of time, camera, and chemistry. But first we must again note the obvious: this photograph depicts four individuals but subsumes any sense of their individuality to a greater purpose—their self-declaration as a nuclear family unit. And this declaration, the real subject and purpose of this picture, underlines what is most noticeably absent from it—the presumed head of the family unit, Mr. Charles A. Buckeley, the husband and father whose name they all bear. Already then, this otherwise unprepossessing picture invites a speculative, imaginative reading. Where is Mr. Buckeley? Has he—terrible thought—died young and left behind these surviving family members, joined here in pictorial unity by a further invisible bond—their shared grief and mourning? Mrs. Buckeley doesn’t seem to be wearing mourning clothes, a social necessity for a widow in the mid-nineteenth century, so perhaps Mr. Buckeley is merely absent from the family for this particular portrait sitting. If this is the case, it suggests the prosperity of this family, for having a daguerreotype portrait taken in 1850 was still a relatively infrequent luxury. Mrs. Buckeley was no doubt handed her finished, cased daguerreotype just before she left the studio, processed while she and her family rested in the waiting room. What would she have made of it? She could have taken a magnifying glass to the picture and been gratified to see even more detail than she could see with her naked eye, a quality that distinguished this photograph from prints or drawings. Like we do with our own photographs today, she no doubt searched this plate for evidence of her likeness and found it wanting. Not inclined to be photogenic at the best of times, she may have found her reversed appearance, dour countenance and the stiff expressions of her children to be not particularly true to life. But perhaps she also appreciated that truth to appearance, although desirable, was not the most important attribute of this picture anyway. For, as typical and ordinary as this portrait is, there is also something quite extraordinary about it. As far as Mrs. Buckeley was concerned, it must have represented the very embodiment of modernity; it was an object that could be taken as proof of American ingenuity and economic progress, allowing her to stake a claim in that progress. And, as a sign of her bourgeois social standing, it located her in a larger network of class relations, a group dynamic that was to transform the very nature of nineteenth-century life.

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It is difficult, looking back at this daguerreotype portrait—completely unexceptional, just one more example of the hundreds being produced every week— to recall quite how remarkable such an object was, and indeed still is. We look at such objects today, from a safe distance, as pictures that can be made to exemplify a certain kind of history. But to do them justice, we also have to look beyond the banality of what can be seen in the daguerreotype itself and imagine what cannot be seen—such as the yearning of these subjects to transcend a mortal body and haunt the future as memory, to remember and be remembered. We have to look, in other words, as historians, but also as fellow servants of modernity, acknowledging their yearning as but one small way of exorcising our own. The same might be said of the typical carte-de-visite photograph.4 Manufactured according to a system patented by Frenchman André AdolpheEugène Disdéri on November 27, 1854, the carte de visite was a truly global phenomenon, being produced in huge numbers on every continent from the mid-1850s through to the early decades of the twentieth century. Although he was not the first to canvas the idea, Disdéri enthusiastically adopted the carte-devisite format as a kind of promotional gimmick. In doing so he sought to capitalise on collodion photography’s intrinsic technical capabilities, abandoning any attempt to imitate the scale of established art forms like painting or engravings and stressing instead this kind of photograph’s detail, inexpensiveness, reproducibility, and f lexibility as a representational medium. He and his many competitors offered their customers albumen paper prints from collodion glass negatives, mounted on a card of about 11.4 × 6.4 cm, the size of a formal printed visiting card of this period (hence the name). Exposure times for such photographs were about two seconds or less, resulting in precise and detailed pictures even at this small scale. But the real innovation in carte-de-visite photography was the use of a special multi-lens camera and a moving plate holder that allowed as many as eight images to be made during one brief sitting. It meant that a photography studio could take the time and expense needed to make one portrait and divide it by many prints, reducing the cost of each unit. Further savings were made since retouching was not needed, most defects being unnoticeable at this small scale. At least one scholar has suggested that the carte-de-visite camera was inspired by an instrument developed by Antoine Claudet in London. As early as 1845, Claudet was exhibiting items like his “Series of Portraits shewing the face in various positions taken upon the same plate in successive sittings.”5 By the time of the Great Exhibition of 1851, he was able to display a Multiplying Camera Obscura to represent on the same surface a number of different pictures, or the same in various aspects, the portraits of several persons, &c. The novelty consists in moving the prepared plate by means of racks and pinions in a vertical and horizontal direction, thus making several parts of the surface pass alternately before an opening placed at the focus of the lens.6

Poses and settings

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In 1853, Disdéri filed a patent in Paris to cover his “multiple slide frame,” an innovation that allowed the photographer to make a number of different exposures on the same glass plate.7 According to Helmut and Alison Gernsheim— repeating a claim made in the British press in 1859—Disdéri “originally worked with a single-lens camera based on Claudet’s multiplicator.” A little later, the Gernsheims claim, “Claudet’s camera was adopted by the camera manufacturer Routledge of London, to take twelve carte portraits on one plate, with only one lens.”8 Nevertheless, most carte-de-visite cameras consisted of a four-lens apparatus with a sliding plate holder. This apparatus allowed the photographer to make eight single portraits on the same glass plate or four pairs of near-identical portraits, or combinations of these options. To produce cartes rapidly and in large numbers, the owner of a studio had to break the act of photography down into discrete tasks and assign each of them to a separate worker. This in turn required a division of labour to be instituted within the studio, which, as Nadar once suggested, had been turned into the equivalent of a factory.9 Much of the actual processing, such as developing, printing, cutting, and mounting the finished prints, could be performed by relatively unskilled (and therefore cheap) labour. With this system in place, a designated operative could then concentrate on the portrait taking itself. By adopting mass production as its model, the carte de visite completed the transformation of photography from a craft into an industry. This industrial outlook was translated into visual terms in the carte itself, through the “mechanical” standardisation of pose, format, and print quality. It is this standardisation, as much as the business practices within which they were produced, that marks the carte de visite’s innovation as a visual agent of capitalism. By 1859, cartes de visite were a huge success, driven by their relative cheapness and clarity as photographs, by the prevailing fashion for democratic rhetoric and conspicuous consumption, by Disdéri’s own insatiable appetite for publicity and f lamboyance, and by an era in which the representation of one’s self and family was regarded as a sign of financial and social success and of moral and intellectual character. The more successful studios ran over two f loors and included reception areas (in which previous work was displayed) as well as the actual shooting room, offices, and rooms for the production and mounting of the photographs. The public rooms tended to be exotically decorated and offered a variety of painted backdrops and props for customers to choose from. All this paraphernalia made having one’s picture taken an event that was out of the ordinary. Suitably inspired, a customer could act out, within a standard format, a number of different poses (usually full-length body) and then choose the one he or she preferred. Compared to earlier processes such as the daguerreotype, this vastly increased the degree of theatricality and control that the customer had over his or her final image. Thus mobilised, this customer could appear as eight different people, or as eight different versions of themselves, all during the one sitting. As a consequence, the power of creation was transferred from the photographer, who was often no more than an operator behind a fixed

194 Poses and settings

camera, to the subject, who got to make all sorts of choices about how they wished to appear. More accurately, the authorship of carte portraits came to be a f luid affair in which both photographer and subject had an active part. The subject was able to “choose an attitude beforehand,” as one contemporary put it, but these choices were in large part limited to a system of established conventions and constraints—some technical, some cultural, and some social—which were firmly conveyed to the client by the actions and advice of the photographer.10 That clients didn’t always take this advice is evidenced by the sign that hung in the studio of London-based photographer John Edwin Mayall: “sitters are requested to place themselves as much as possible in the hands of the artist.”11 Given the relatively perfunctory time dedicated to the sitting, the taking of a serviceable portrait represented a particular challenge for this artist. According to Disdéri, “one must be able to deduce who the subject is, to deduce spontaneously his character, his intimate life, his habits; the photographer must do more than photograph, he must ‘biographe’.” Disdéri’s various self-promotional publications stressed the need for the photographer to capture “the language of the physiognomy, the expression of the look,” encouraging the subject to take on the contradictory challenge of a “natural pose.”12 Cornelius Jabez Hughes defined his own priorities more narrowly in a 1859 book, The Principles and Practice of Photography. The primary object should be to produce a characteristic likeness, and the second one to render it as pleasing as possible by judicious selection of the view of the face and the pose of the figure, so as, without sacrificing character, to bring out the good points and conceal the less favourable ones.13 Let us look at one or two of these portraits more closely. A man dressed in white trousers and a handsome frock coat stands in a confined space, eyes and body turned slightly away from the camera. His left hand rests on the back of an ornate chair while his right holds a black top hat to his side. A sumptuously patterned curtain cascades down the left side of the picture, gathering behind the man’s feet in a billow of excessive folds (perhaps in order to hide the base of a metal stand designed to keep his head steady) [Figure 16.2]. The man, who is unnamed, has placed his well-shod feet at right angles to each other, giving this otherwise static pose some sense of dynamic torque. This subject’s whole body is shown, and the camera-operator—Bingham of Paris, according to the printing on the front and back of the card—has positioned him in the dead centre of the picture plane. The photographer has also given this man about five times as much space over his head as under his feet, so that he appears properly grounded in the frame. Although only 8.9 × 5.6 cm in size, the tones of the photograph are rich, with the light carefully calibrated to ensure the man’s face is fully and evenly lit while the upper reaches of the picture are cast in suggestive darkness. Looking at

Poses and settings

FIGURE 16.2

195

Bingham studio (Paris), Portrait of a Standing Man, c. 1865 albumen photograph from collodion glass negative (carte de visite) 10.3 × 6.3 cm

once self-assured and prosperous, this man presents himself as an ideal citizen, as enjoying a suitably elevated social and financial status. His appearance is in almost every detail identical to that seen in a portrait of Napoléon III, Emperor of France, made by Disdéri in 1858. Napoléon stands directly facing the camera, with his body slightly turned and his feet again placed at right angles to each other. Dressed in a long frock coat, rather than in royal regalia, he has hooked the thumb of his left hand into his buttoned waistcoat, from where a watch chain decoratively loops across his torso [Figure 16.3]. This chain declares him to be a slave to time, just like any other modern businessman. He is accompanied by some common studio props—a high-backed chair, a table with two books resting on its surface, and, behind him, a stream of light-dappled

196 Poses and settings

FIGURE 16.3

Disdéri studio (Paris), Portrait of Emperor Napoléon III, c. 1860 albumen photograph from collodion glass negative (carte de visite) 10.5 × 6.1 cm

curtain f lowing from the upper left corner down onto the carpeted f loor. If you did not know any better, you would think this was just one more prosperous French citizen having his picture taken. In fact, as Anne McCauley has suggested, this carte was deliberately organised to leave this impression. “The nature and style of imperial carte portraiture may also ref lect a conscious effort by Napoléon III to portray himself and his family as unaffected middle-class citizens who just happened to be monarchs.”14 Like Queen Victoria, who arranged for herself to be portrayed in cartes as an ordinary wife and mother, Napoléon f lattered his middle-class subjects by pretending to be one of them. Collapsing the distinction between ruler and ruled, such pictures

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197

propose a synthesis of national and popular sovereignty; however, beneath their subterfuge of apparent pandering, these images in fact signify the political victory of the bourgeoisie.15 The two images may look very much the same, but they mean quite different things. One is a personal portrait, taken primarily for distribution to friends and family. The other is a calculated piece of propaganda, intended for large-scale public distribution in the interests of fostering celebrity and preserving political power. For us today, one of these subjects has a name and the other does not, but it is the unnamed man who has now taken on the greater power—representing a generic bourgeois subject, he is the one who induces fear and loathing in photography’s historians (who tend to condemn cartes de visite for being banal, repetitive, and conservative, both pictorially and politically).16 Part of the power of this photograph derives from its blank indifference to the singularity that most of these historians hold so dear; it steadfastly refuses to comply with their monotonous art-historical discourse on meaning, origin, and the intending constituent subject, themes which, as Michel Foucault puts it, “guarantee in history the inexhaustible presence of a Logos, the sovereignty of a pure subject.”17 The man in this photograph is instead content to look just like everyone else, proudly impure, a copy of what is already a copy and nothing more. He is all surface and no depth. Not for him the Romantic pretence of individuality and intimacy found in Nadar’s salt print portraits of bohemian literati (a pose as conformist in its way as that demonstrated by all these men leaning obediently on their fake columns).18 In this sense, the carte-de-visite portrait is a rejection of Nadar’s liberalism just as much as it is a refutation of sovereign power. This is a politics of a kind, even if its lack of conscious intention makes it a difficult politics to describe. There is certainly no sign in carte pictures of the strategies of opposition, negation, or denunciation we associate with avant-garde art and political subversion (unless a refusal to denounce is itself taken as a critical strategy).19 Notice how the man in the Bingham photograph once again pretends the camera isn’t present, gazing off into space over our heads as if into infinity. As we’ve already noted, the pose is impudently borrowed from a century of aristocratic paintings, signalling that, having been superseded, such codes were now available for the plundering. Many cartes de visite similarly repeat the iconography of high art (the tumbling curtain, the classical column, the receding landscape) but always as emptied signs, hollow signifiers of a cultural economy now dead and gone, or at least safely commodified. In both subject-matter and form, then, the carte de visite embodies the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie and its systems of social and economic life. The question still to be resolved is whether it also represents a complete lack of imagination, as some historians have claimed. The body language of the man in the Bingham photograph implies a relaxed self-assurance. Equally resolute is the look on the face of one of the Beard studio’s notable customers, the German political economist Karl Marx. Marx was photographed by the studio in May 1861, when he was 43 years of age [Figure 16.4].

198 Poses and settings

FIGURE 16.4

Richard Beard studio (London), Karl Marx, May 1861 albumen photograph from collodion glass negative (carte de visite) 10.5 × 6.2 cm

Although he had been living in London since 1849, it is the earliest known photograph of him. He stands in the centre of the picture against a plain wall with his hands on the back of a chair, on which a white hat has been carelessly tossed (or so it seems). A f loral-patterned curtain, also seen in other cartes by Beard, falls down one side to his left. On the other, the chair has been cropped at one corner. This cropping, the pose, and the casualness of the hat’s placement are all unusual, but the portrait remains otherwise ordinary, allowing Marx to feign respectability within a culture he was of course studiously seeking to transform. Businessman, emperor, revolutionary: the carte de visite reduces everyone to a visual equivalence.

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In the same year in which this photograph was taken, Marx wrote for what was to become Capital, his magisterial analysis of the capitalist economy, about new “fields of labour” based on mechanisation. Although he regarded these new fields as relatively minor contributions to the English economy, it is nevertheless interesting that he includes photography among them: “The chief industries of this kind are, at present, gas-works, telegraphs, photography, steam navigation, and railways.”20 He goes on to quote the census for 1861 for England and Wales as listing 2,366 persons working in the photography industry, compared to 2,399 working in telegraphy and 70,599 in railways. Photography may have been a peripheral player in terms of sheer numbers of workers, but almost all the basic characteristics that Marx identifies with capitalism could equally be drawn from a study of the carte de visite: the emergence of a global economy in which both production and consumption become increasingly international, the displacement of individual artisans by mass production, the accentuation of class consciousness, the constant revolutionising of the means of production, the subjugation of all social conditions and relationships to the needs of capital. With cartes de visite (unlike the daguerreotype it superseded), any one image could potentially be printed as identical albumen copies in the thousands. But even the most humble carte de visite was printed a number of times (reproducibility was, after all, its primary selling-point as a form of photography). Marx, for example, immediately sent copies of his cartede-visite portrait by the Beard studio to various friends and acquaintances, both in England and elsewhere in Europe, thereby linking photography’s multiplicity to its new capacity for mobility. On May 10, 1861, he wrote to Friedrich Engels, including a carte de visite with the letter and promising more copies, saying that “I had the thing done, partly for my cousin in Rotterdam, partly in exchange for the photographs I had been given in Germany and Holland.”21 Ironically, Marx was thereby entering into a pre-capitalist system of barter, in which one item is given in the expectation of receiving an item of identical value (in this case, an equivalent item, another carte) in return. Cartes were valued above all as exchange objects of this kind, establishing a reciprocal image economy now rampant on social media sites.22 As we’ve seen, all cartes de visite are multiples; the very genre declares the photograph to be a copy for which there is no original (a fact promoted in a claim frequently printed on the back of a carte: “negative kept,” a promise usually accompanied by a number to facilitate re-ordering). It was reported, for example, that 70,000 copies of a Mayall portrait of Prince Albert were sold in the weeks after Albert’s unexpected death from typhoid in December 1861.23 John Jabez Edwin Mayall, although born in Manchester, Lancashire, began his professional photographic career in Philadelphia in 1842, returning to London only in June 1846. After working for a short time in one of Claudet’s studios, Mayall opened his own at 433 West Strand in April 1847. To attract passers-by into this studio, Mayall reportedly hung two daguerreotypes at his door intended to satirise the contemporary obsession with railway stocks. One apparently depicted

200

Poses and settings

“a Stock Exchange man, radiant at shares being at a premium.” The other showed “the same man in maniacal despair” as the financial bubble burst and the shares became worthless. Among the works he exhibited inside was a series of views of Niagara Falls and ten daguerreotypes he had made in Philadelphia illustrating each commandment in the Lord’s Prayer, with female figures featuring “some of the most beautiful and talented ladies of Philadelphia.”24 In 1852, Mayall advertised a second establishment in London, situated at 224 Regent Street on the corner of Argyll Place, which Mayall claimed had “the finest situation for light in London.”25 So this was a self-consciously creative photographer. Nevertheless, by the 1860s, he was renowned as one of London’s premier makers of carte-de-visite portraits, famous for having received royal patronage. His Royal Album consisted of 14 cartes of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and was said to have netted him £35,000 in sales. The portrait of Albert that achieved such popularity shows the prince consort sitting in profile in a chair. His legs are crossed, with his left hand in his lap and his right poised to write something with a pen in an open book resting on a small table. Despite this gesture, Albert looks up and away from his book, gazing stolidly beyond the left edge of the picture, thus allowing us to appreciate his noble profile and intelligent brow. He is wearing a bow tie and a luxurious frock coat, its satin lining ref lecting light from its folds [Figure 16.5a]. On many of the prints of this image (although not on all), Mayall included an inscription,

FIGURE 16.5

John Mayall studio (London), HRH The Prince Consort, 1861 albumen photograph from collodion glass negative (carte de visite) 10.3 × 6.2 cm; John Mayall studio (London), Prince Albert, 1861 albumen photograph from collodion glass negative (carte de visite), inscribed in pencil: “late Prince Consort” 10.4 × 6.2 cm; John Mayall studio (London & Brighton), Prince Albert, 1861 albumen photograph from collodion glass negative (carte de visite), with advertisement on verso for “J.L. Houghton, Stationer,” printed after 1864 10.3 × 6.2 cm; John Mayall studio (London), Prince Albert, 1861 albumen photograph from collodion glass negative (carte de visite), with tax stamp on verso for “E. & H. Anthony, New York”, printed 1863–65 10.1 × 6.1 cm

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appearing in white against the sepia of the albumen, insisting on his copyright: “Mayall Fecit. Dec 1st 1861.” We might well speculate that such prints were issued after the August 1862 legislation that granted photographers copyright over their images.26 When included, this inscription usually appeared just to the right of the prince’s chair, at seat height. But sometimes it was printed, more clumsily, a little lower or higher than that. Already, then, one is made aware that there are many small variations from print to print. What might well be an earlier print, indicated by a pencilled addition to the front from its purchaser, saying “late Prince Consort,” has only “Mayall 224 Regent Street” printed on the bottom of the card, along with “Photographed from Life by Mayall, 224 Regent Street, London” on the back [Figure 16.5b]. This card also bears an imprint on the verso testifying that it has been published (“wholesale only”) by “A. Marion Son & Co” at 23 Soho Square, this being the largest retailer of cartes de visite in London. Other examples have the words “HRH The Prince Consort” printed in capitals right below the image, in case there was any doubt [Figure 16.5c]. Mayall obviously kept printing from this negative for years, with some cards carrying his address in Brighton (where he had moved in July 1864) along with his London one (which was now being operated by his son). One carries a printed rendition on the back of various medals won at expositions, including one from Paris in 1867. The density and variation of tones is also very different from print to print, as is the orientation of the image itself, with the amount of space above the Prince’s head constantly shifting from card to card. Some prints, invariably of poor quality, have no inscription of any sort, and one can see a sort of blur where Mayall’s copyright claim has been erased. These, presumably, are pirated copies, photographed from one of Mayall’s authorised cards and then issued illegally by another studio. One particularly dark print bears the printed insignia of ‘E & HT Anthony of New York’ on the back, along with a tax stamp indicating it was issued during the American Civil War between 1863 and 1865 [Figure 16.5d]. In short, although all derived from the same 1861 negative, every one of these copies of the portrait of Prince Albert is a distinct entity, with its own peculiar aesthetic qualities and added texts. Although placid in appearance, cartes de visite like that of Prince Albert could be said to represent a fissure within capitalism’s facade of self-assurance. On the one hand, the carte de visite confirmed the existing political order by conforming to its visual prescriptions. On the other, by eschewing any claims to authenticity, individuality, creativity, genius, eternal value, or mystery, and by overtly presenting itself as a reproducible commodity form, the carte de visite undermined the ideological illusions of that same order—it might be said to have embraced capitalism to fatal excess. According to Marx, when that embrace squeezes too tight, “men are at last forced to face with sober senses the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men.”27 Marshall Berman’s discussion of Marx’s thinking suggests yet another way of looking at the self-imposed banality of the carte-de-visite portrait: “these bourgeois have

202 Poses and settings

alienated themselves from their own creativity because they cannot bear to look into the moral, social and psychic abyss that their creativity opens up.”28 Marx’s description of the processes of commodification seems especially pertinent to the carte de visite. A commodity is a product made by a person that is exchanged for money so that another person can use or consume it. As a consequence of this system, the social relations embodied in the process of production are subsumed to the logic of the market, resulting in a kind of commodity fetishism: “a definite social relation between men … assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things.”29 This form is “fantastic” because the commodity comes to be invested with unearthly powers beyond its capacity to deliver. As Paul Wood explains the process: the commodity becomes a power in society. Rather than a use value for people it assumes a power over people, becoming a kind of god to be worshipped, sought after, and possessed. And in a reverse movement, as the commodity, the thing, becomes personified, so relations between people become objectified and thinglike.30 The carte de visite is a particularly distinctive commodity form because what is being exchanged are, mostly, pictures of people. The person being photographed is turned into a thing, a picture, and then this thing is sold, exchanged, and consumed. As American scholar Oliver Wendell Holmes observed in 1862, “card portraits have become the social currency, the ‘green-backs’ of civilisation.”31 One of Queen Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting, the Honourable Eleanor Stanley, confirmed this equation with her disrespectful remark of 1860: “I have been writing to all the fine ladies in London for their husband’s photographs, for the Queen. I believe the Queen could be bought and sold, for a photograph.”32 An object of desire within the economy of cartomania, Victoria was apparently also subject to this neurosis herself. Within the self-perpetuating logic of commodity fetishism, consumption, as we all know, offers a comforting, if short-lived, experience of power and control. But it also provides an anchor against the disturbing loss of anything else sacred or stable, of any fixed standard within contemporary life. In the midst of the rapid changes of the mid-nineteenth century, the predictable conformity of the carte-de-visite portrait made it all the more alluring. Having said as much, one nevertheless needs to recognise that the carte-devisite format did spawn some distinctive creative genres of its own. Disdéri and others, for example, produced composite images consisting of overlapping circular portraits or even a dense collage of shaped photographs that allowed collective entities such as the International Postal Committee or the extended Royal family to be portrayed on a single carte. On April 21, 1863, he patented this type of composite, calling it a “Mosaique.”33 Between 1881 and 1898, Canadian photographer Hannah Maynard exploited the process to produce her Gems of British Columbia, annual photomontages featuring clusters of colonial babies. As historian Carol Williams has argued, these particular “Mosaiques” “deserve special

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203

attention as their ideological motives match settler sentiment about racial superiority and nation building.”34 Similar novelties were periodically announced by other photographers, such as the Diamond Cameo Portrait introduced by F.R. Window in London in October 1864. This system produced four small portraits on a single carte, each showing a different view of the same sitter’s head [Figure 16.6]. These sorts of practices, all dependent on the f lexible use of collodion negatives to make a final print, were quickly taken up by other studios around the globe. Some photographers offered yet another innovation, so-called “siamese” portraits. These exploited photography’s capacity for multiple exposure by showing two views of the same person montaged together in a single scene. Australian photographer Bernard Goode, for example, produced cartes de visite of a man and his double

FIGURE 16.6

Post Office Photographic Studio (Melbourne), Portrait of a Man, c. 1870 albumen photograph from collodion glass negatives (diamond cameo carte de visite) 9.9 × 6.2 cm

204 Poses and settings

shaking hands, and even circulated one showing three versions of himself, two seated on either side of a table (in one of these self-portraits he has a camera on his lap) and the third standing behind it, pointing to a carte de visite in his hand (could it possibly be a fourth self-portrait?).35 Defying time and space, these novelties merely underlined the artifice that suffused all carte-de-visite portraits. The dissemination of the carte de visite had a number of further effects. The notion of photographic “authorship” was, for example, significantly complicated by the division of labour described above, and with it any simple understanding of ownership, property, and propriety. Take the case of the Mayer and Pierson studio. In 1855, Pierre-Louis Pierson entered into a partnership with Léopold Ernest and Louis Frédéric Mayer, who, like Pierson, had previously run a daguerreotype studio. Although the studios remained at separate addresses, Pierson and the Mayers began to distribute their images under the joint title “Mayer et Pierson,” and together they became the leading society photographers in Paris. Pierson and Léopold Mayer soon opened another studio in Brussels, Belgium, and began photographing European royalty. After Mayer’s retirement in 1878, Pierson went into business with his son-in-law Gaston Braun.36 “Mayer et Pierson” therefore signifies several studios and many different photographers, as well as a host of supplementary workers. The name “Nadar” represents an equally complex identity. A carte might have that name printed in red on its back in a suitably f lorid script, but this didn’t necessarily mean that Nadar himself took the photograph or was even present in the studio that day. In fact, Nadar was forced to advertise that he ran his cartede-visite establishment in Paris on a “personal and daily” basis, precisely because of the constant complaints that he did not.37 Within the economy of the carte, the names of photographers had become trademarks rather than embodied presences, and these trademarks could be bought and sold like any other commodity. For example, the studio known as Sociedad Fotográfica Maunoruy y Ca, operated in Lima, Peru, by Eugenio Maunoury, advertised that it enjoyed a special “correspondency” with Nadar, first mentioning their association on December 30, 1862, and prominently displaying the famous red initial and signature on both sides of the firm’s cartes, alongside Maunoury’s own name and address. This deal also included the exchange of photographs, so that one finds the same image published under different studio imprints.38 Later cartes from Nadar’s Paris studio listed a number of similar correspondents, including studios in Vienna, Liège, Rome, Florence, Turin, and Jersey. A history organised around proper names and great individual photographers is obviously going to have trouble coping with the divided and multiplied identities of carte-de-visite studios. The reproducibility of the carte de visite had a number of other important effects. It resulted, for example, in the uncontrolled distribution of images that might otherwise have remained private. This in turn led to public scandals and contentious litigation over who “owned” an image, the photographer or its subject. The situation was exacerbated by the fact that some photographers paid certain celebrities either a fee or a percentage of the profits for the right to take

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and distribute their image (the ex-slave Sojourner Truth lived on the proceeds: “I’ll sell the Shadow to support the Substance,” she announced).39 An image, independent of its manifestation as a physical photograph, had become a recognised commodity, a thing in itself (as far as capitalism was concerned, shadow and substance were, in fact, no longer distinguishable). As we’ve seen, the pirating of popular images also became common, so that a portrait taken by Mayall or Brady might turn up under the name of several other studios, further complicating the question of their authorship. But the commercial distribution of cartes de visite also meant that images from many different sources—family, friends, the theatre, politics, from home and from abroad—might all be brought together in one place, allowing strange conjunctions that confused all accepted distinctions. Cartes were not only bought and exchanged; they were also consumed in other ways. Celebrity portraits from the political or entertainment world were collected in albums just like, or even interspersed among, cartes of family members, to be shared and f launted, perused and discussed at gatherings. Albums of cartes allowed one to recreate kinship structures in visual terms, and to form imaginary worlds that overcame time and space, class and gender. As image, an otherwise ordinary person could consort with royalty or with a notorious actress, or they could maintain an emotional connection with a distant loved one. Photography is a marvelous [sic] thing; … it is very pleasing to have one’s relatives and acquaintances reunited in an album. You open the book and f lip through it: you see your brother who is in the army in Syria or China, your sister who is fifty leagues from Paris. You converse with them, it seems as if they were there beside you.40 It hardly need be said that cartes de visite that look the same don’t necessarily mean the same thing. What, for example, are we to make of cartes taken in Africa, India, Japan, or New Zealand? Do all these cartes, with or without their small traces of regional specificity, mean the same thing in their places of production as their equivalents did in Europe? Could having your carte-de-visite portrait taken in such places say something telling about a desired relationship to Europe and European culture? And what of cartes made in Europe that made their way to these distant colonies? Australian historian Anne-Marie Willis makes a special case for English cartes found in her country. In the mid-nineteenth century, before the development of Australian nationalism, photographs of, and from, the “old country” had a special force of meaning. They were substitutes for the absent culture to which colonists aspired and they contributed to a process in which everyday life was lived through constant reference to somewhere else.41 Sometimes the imaginary conversation induced by cartes de visite had tragic overtones, as in the case of an image of a seated woman in mourning clothes shown glancing up from an open album featuring a carte de visite of her deceased husband (or so it would seem) [Figure 16.7]. But, as an oil painting from 1884

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Poses and settings

FIGURE 16.7

J.C. Moutton studio (Fitchburg, MA, USA), Portrait of a Seated Woman Holding an Open Carte-de-Visite Album, c. 1865 albumen photograph from collodion glass negative (carte de visite) 9.5 × 6.2 cm

demonstrates, the carte was not always experienced alone or in silence. The painting, by British artist Solomon Joseph Solomon, shows a typical uppermiddle-class interior, complete with servants, ornate furnishings, statuettes, framed photographs, a piano, and four figures gathered after dinner for music and conversation. The scene focuses on a man and woman sitting in the foreground, she gazing up at him with an open album in her lap as he concentrates on a carte de visite in his hand that has been taken from it.42 The carte is the social tissue that connects them, an excuse for f lirtation, argument, narrative, recollection, and invention. Cartes weren’t just objects; they were also excuses for f lights of fancy and expressions of sentiment, as well as prompts for oral exchange.

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Sentiment is an aspect of the carte-de-visite experience that tends to be overlooked. Barthes’s Camera Lucida, on the other hand, opens with his own sentimental response to a photographic image that may well have been taken by Disdéri. One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of Napoleon’s youngest brother, Jerome, taken in 1852. And I realized then, with an amazement I have not been able to lessen since: “I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor.”43 It’s a reminder that this amazement can be induced by even the most ordinary and predictable of photographs, precisely because of the distinctively physical nature of photography’s indexical connection to its subject. The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here … a sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze.44 Barthes’ emotive account of the photographic experience is in accord with that offered by American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. An index is, Peirce says, in dynamical (including spatial) connection both with the individual object, on the one hand, and with the senses of memory of the person for whom it serves as a sign, on the other … Psychologically, the action of indices depends upon association by contiguity.45 Interestingly, cartes de visite are often about their own reception, as if to underline the psychological or emotional experience that their viewing entails. Many pictures show people holding open photograph albums or simply feature people looking at another carte. It is a reminder that cartes were scaled to be viewed in the hand rather than on a wall; they were meant to be touched as well as seen. In one example, a woman taken by a Canadian photographer named Reeves looks straight out at us, one hand against her cheek and the other clutching a cartede-visite portrait of a man.46She doesn’t seem to see us staring back, as if she is looking only inwards, eyes open but mind elsewhere, recalling her missing lover. She poses for the camera to make visible an otherwise abstract experience, the pang of longing, the act of remembrance, the stretching of the imagination. It’s as though she wants to draw our attention, not just to the particular image she holds, but also to the comforting solidity of photography’s contiguous memorial function. In touching her photograph, she recalls that it too was touched, by that umbilical cord of light that once caressed her loved one and then shone through the negative that generated this image in her hand. In touching this print, she

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returns the photographic experience to the realm of the body and to the intimacy of reverie. At the same time, she invites us to respond to her photograph as she is to his. Hers is a performance that demands its own repetition. An examination of such pictures initiates a history of the carte de visite that concentrates on their reception as much as their production. Such a history will necessarily displace the emphasis given to innovation, masterpieces, and individual acts of creativity in most prevailing accounts of photography, acknowledging instead the creative role played by the viewer of photographs. After all, anyone looking at a carte-de-visite photograph in the 1860s or 1870s would have known what we know now—that these figures are posing for a camera, pretending to be somewhere they aren’t, standing next to a studio prop in front of a painted backdrop. Indeed, in cartes, you can often see the edges of the painted backdrop and the base of the head stand, as if revealing the means of production won’t make any difference to the viewing experience. Photography’s realism is thereby openly declared to be an artifice, a matter of conventions. For an emotional connection to be established with the subject, a viewer is forced to look beyond these conventions, beyond the surface of the picture and the world it represents. To put it another way, the very banality of the carte-de-visite portrait, the lack of imagination evidenced in the actual picture, is precisely what shifts the burden of imaginative thought from the artist to the viewer. It is an open invitation to see more than meets the eye. This might lead us to the following paradoxical proposition: the more banal the photograph, the greater its capacity to induce us to exercise our imaginations.47 A tribute to the small dreams and anxieties of ordinary life, a more comprehensive examination of the carte de visite would also have to incorporate a host of similar (and similarly neglected) studio practices that continue to be the bread-and-butter work of commercial photographers, from commissioned portraits of babies to formulaic wedding pictures. To take such images seriously, we must develop a critical history of both the bourgeois imagination and the processes and effects of photographic reproduction. In short, if cartes are ever to be properly encompassed within the history of photography, that history will itself have to be completely re-imagined.

Notes 1 Tagg, ‘A Democracy of the Image: Photographic Portraiture and Commodity Production’ (1984), The Burden of Representation, 37. 2 Painted backdrops were introduced into photography studios by Antoine Jean François Claudet (London), through his Royal Letters Patent No. 9193, issued on December 18, 1841. 3 The following is drawn from Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Individualism and Conformity: Photographic Portraiture in the Nineteenth Century,’ New York Journal of American History (Spring/Summer 2006), 10–27. 4 The following is drawn from Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Dreams of Ordinary Life: Cartes de Visite and the Bourgeois Imagination,’ in J.J. Long, Andrea Noble and Edward Welch eds., Photography: Theoretical Snapshots (Routledge, 2009), 80–97. The most detailed

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5 6 7 8 9

10

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account of the carte de visite remains Elizabeth Anne McCauley, A.A.E. Disdéri and the Carte-de-Visite Portrait Photograph (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1985). For other surveys of the genre, see Helmut Gernsheim, ‘The Carte-de-Visite Period,’ The Rise of Photography 1850–1880: The Age of Collodion (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), 189–203; Dan Younger, Cartes de Visite: Precedents and Social Influences (Riverside: California Museum of Photography Bulletin, 1987); Robin and Carol Wichard, Victorian Cartes de Visite (Princes Risborough: Shire Publications, 1999); Andrea Volpe, ‘Cartes De Visite Portrait Photographs and the Culture of Class Formation’ in Burton Bledstein and Robert Johnston eds., The Middling Sorts: Explorations in the History of the American Middle Class (New York: Routledge, 2001), 157–169; and Luke Gartlan, ‘Shimizu Tōkoku and the Japanese Carte de Visite: Circumscriptions of Yokohama Photography,’ in Luke Gartlan and Roberta Wue eds., Portraiture and Early Studio Photography in China and Japan (New York: Routledge, 2017), 17–40. My commentary concentrates almost entirely on the typical carte-devisite portrait. However, it is well to remember that the carte format was adopted to almost every conceivable genre of photography, including head-shots, occupationals, celebrities, ethnographic types, criminals, freaks, landscape, urban scenes, architecture, reproductions of paintings and sculptures, novelty scenes, genre scenes, animals, nudes, pornography, scientific studies, and so on. High art was the only genre not readily adaptable to the carte de visite—and even here there are exceptions; as mentioned elsewhere, Cameron issued fully one-fifth of her images in a reduced-size carte-de-visite or cabinet card format. This kind of photography is therefore hardly marginal; on the contrary, it is at the very centre of photographic production in the later nineteenth century. See Antoine Claudet, British Association, Cambridge, 1845, in Roger Taylor, Photographic Exhibitions in Britain 1839–1865: http://peib.dmu.ac.uk/ (accessed July 18, 2018). See Antoine Claudet, Great Exhibition, 1851, in ibid. Disderi, 1853, as discussed in Frizot, A New History of Photography, 110. Gernsheim, The History of Photography, 302, referring to the Whitby Gazette (September 1859), 10. See André Rouillé, ‘When I Was a Photographer: The Anatomy of a Myth,’ in Hambourg, Nadar, 113. In fact, Nadar himself built a large new establishment devoted to carte-de-visite photography on the fashionable Boulevard des Capucines in the summer of 1860, taking 15 months and spending 230,000 francs, all borrowed. “The majority of photographers have two or three different positions to which they submit all their models, whether tall, short, long, or small. Moreover, nearly everybody, before having a photograph, studies and chooses an attitude beforehand, by the aid of a mirror, which, in many cases, is quite contrary to their natural bearing; a lady, for instance, of doubtful age, will take the free attitude of a young girl; a small, quiet-looking man, has an ambition to appear proud and bellicose. The result of this is, that a great many portraits appear studied and stiff, of which the least fault is a perfect failure in resemblance, and generally in beauty.” Unknown, ‘The Aesthetics of Photography,’ Humphrey’s Journal, September 1863, as quoted in Younger, Cartesde-Visite, 21. Mayall, as quoted in Wichard, Victorian Cartes de Visite, 26. Disdéri, Manuel, 1855, as quoted in McCauley, A.A.E. Disdéri, 41. Hughes, as quoted in Wichard, Victorian Cartes de Visite, 22. McCauley, A.A.E. Disdéri, 83. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 105. Beaumont Newhall, for example, says they have “little aesthetic value” even if, “as documents of an era, they are often of great charm and interest.” Newhall, The History of Photography, 64–66. Mary Warner Marien’s 2002 survey history devotes barely a column to the carte de visite as a genre, claiming not to be able to understand

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its appeal or success. Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, 84–85. Faced with what Jean Sagne has called their “conformist tyranny,” Naomi Rosenblum, in her World History, concludes that “carte portraits offered little compass for an imaginative approach to pose and lighting as a means of evoking character.” Jean Sagne, in Frizot, A New History of Photography, 114. Naomi Rosenblum, A World History of Photography (New York: Abbeville, 1997), 63. Sylvie Aubenas similarly talks about the “banality” of this kind of photography. “The carte de visite certainly represented everything with which Le Gray did not wish to compromise himself, everything that was detrimental to the new art he defended.” Sylvie Aubenas, in Aubenas, Gustave Le Gray 1820–1884, 48. Ulrich Keller is similarly unf lattering in his assessment of what he calls “the bland conventionality of Nadar’s cartes de visite of the 1860s.”: “Nadar’s embrace of the carte-de-visite fashion spelled aesthetic decline … a bland, stereotyped portrait approach emerges which relies on conventional dress and body language, f lat lighting, and traditional studio props.” Keller in Maria Morris Hambourg et al., Nadar (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1995), 80, 86, 90. Michel Foucault, ‘Politics and the Study of Discourse’ (May 1968), in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 64. Seeking to contrast his work with that produced by a typical carte-de-visite studio, Nadar claimed to be able to “render, not an indifferent plastic reproduction that could be made by the lowliest laboratory worker, commonplace and accidental, but the resemblance that is most familiar and most favourable, the intimate resemblance.” Nadar, 1856, as quoted in Hambourg, Nadar, 25. See, for example, Alison M. Gingeras’s response to a letter from Gregory Sholette in Artforum, XLII: No. 10 (Summer 2004), 16. They are arguing over an earlier essay by Gingeras, ‘hobbypopMUSEUM,’ Artforum, XLIII: No. 7 (March 2004), 174–175, where she claims that this eponymous German collective of artists “make political art, but not in the conventional understanding of the term.” She has made a similar argument about the work of Maurizio Cattelan, claiming that “critics cannot locate critique in Cattelan’s practice because there is no search for truth or claims for legitimacy that underlie his actions.” She sees this “indifference” as a “subversive scenario.” Cattelan’s work, she says, involves the “relentless reinforcement of the theatrical roles assigned to him and the actors who surround him” but without “any type of judgement … In lieu of a superficial rehearsal of institutional critique, where prescriptive and ultimately stable interpretations of the world are given, Cattelan points towards the f lux of values that motivate the everyday performance of the self.” See Alison Gingeras, ‘A Sociology Without Truth,’ Parkett, 59 (2000), 50–53. Karl Marx, 1861, as quoted in Steve Edwards, The Making of English Photography, 1. See https://marx200.org/en/fotografien (accessed June 26, 2019). On this topic, see Annie Rudd, ‘Victorians Living in Public: Cartes de Visite as 19thcentury Social Media,’ Photography & Culture, 9: 3 (November 2016), 195–217. The figure is reported in A. Wynter, ‘Cartes-de-Visite,’ The Photographic News (February 28, 1862), 104. See Léonie Reynolds and Arthur Gill, ‘The Mayall Story,’ History of Photography, 9: 2 (1985), 89–107. See ibid. and http://spartacus-educational.com/DSmayall.htm (accessed June 26, 2019). For more details on this legislation, see Anne McCauley, ‘“Merely Mechanical”: On the Origins of Photographic Copyright in France and England,’ Art History, 31: 1 (February 2008), 57–78. See also Taylor, Impressed by Light, 139, 412; Unknown, ‘Copyright in Photographic Portraits,’ Photographic News, 8 (November 18, 1862), 554; and Julian Cox and Colin Ford, ‘Appendix A: Copyright Registers,’ Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs, 496–497.

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27 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), as quoted in Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1988), 95. 28 Marshall Berman, ibid., 100–101. 29 Karl Marx, as quoted in Paul Wood, ‘Commodity,’ in Robert Nelson and Richard Shiff eds., Critical Terms for Art History (Chicago, University of Chicago Press,1996), 263. For an illuminating history of Marx’s use of the word “fetishism,” see William Pietz, ‘Fetishism and Materialism: The Limits of Theory in Marx,’ in Emily Apter and William Pietz eds., Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1993), 119–151. 30 Wood, ibid., 263–264. 31 Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Atlantic Monthly, 1862, in Wichard, Victorian Cartes de Visite, 33. 32 Eleanor Stanley, 1860, as quoted in Colin Ford ed., Happy and Glorious: Six Reigns of Royal Photography (New York: Macmillan, 1977), 27. 33 See McCauley, A.A.E. Disdéri, 94. 34 See Carol Williams, Framing the West: Race, Gender, and the Photographic Frontier in the Pacific Northwest (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 125. 35 See the entry on this picture in Alan Davies and Peter Stanbury, The Mechanical Eye in Australia: Photography 1841–1900 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985), 56–57, and Helen Ennis ed., Mirror with a Memory: Photographic Portraiture in Australia (Canberra: National Portrait Gallery, 2000), 30. 36 The information on Mayer and Pierson comes from http://www.getty.edu/art/colle ction/artists/1925/pierre-louis-pierson-french-1822-1913/ (accessed June 30,2018). 37 See Hambourg, Nadar, 81. 38 See Douglas Keith McElroy, The History of Photography in Peru in the Nineteenth Century, 1839–1876 (PhD Dissertation, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, May 1977), 545–550. 39 See Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Enduring Truths: Sojourner Truth’s Shadows and Substance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 40 A French journalist, c. 1860, as quoted in McCauley, A.A.E. Disdéri, 48. 41 Anne-Marie Willis, Picturing Australia: A History of Photography (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1988), 47. Cartes were exchanged back and forth as a way of maintaining relations between metropolitan centres and colonial peripheries. But they could also be used as objects of exchange within a specific community. Jill Haley, for example, has analysed a carte-de-visite album owned by an indigenous Māori family in Otago in New Zealand. She situates the album within a Māori exchange system (te takoha), such that “carte culture perhaps offered late nineteenth-century Maori another means of expressing it.” On this basis, Haley offers a persuasive generalisation: “aspects such as orality and exchange were part of nineteenth-century album culture that complemented a pre-contact Māori world … the album provides an example of the surging tide of modernity that reshaped Māori lives and created a new identity in the nineteenth century.” See Jill Haley, The Colonial Family Album: Photography and Identity in Otago 1848–1890, PhD thesis (Art History, University of Otago, Dunedin, 2017), 190, 203. 42 The painting is Solomon Joseph Solomon’s A Conversation Piece, 1884 (Leighton House, London). See Christopher Wood, Victorian Panorama: Paintings of Victorian Life (London: Faber and Faber, 1976), 34. 43 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 3. 44 Ibid., 80–81. 45 See Charles Sanders Peirce, ‘Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs’ (c.1897–1910), in Robert Innis ed., Semiotics: An Introductory Anthology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 8, 13. 46 See Geoffrey Batchen, Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (exhibition catalogue, Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum & Princeton Architectural Press, 2004).

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47 This paradox perhaps helps to explain why such creative writers as Walter Benjamin (who favoured the work of commercial photographer Jean-Eugène-Auguste Atget), Roland Barthes (who illustrated Camera Lucida with strikingly middle-brow pictures), Jorge Luis Borges (who illustrated a book with the most banal photographs ever produced by his countryman Horacio Coppola), and W.G. Sebald (who was notorious for choosing unexceptional illustrations for his books) all picked relatively unimaginative photographs to accompany their texts.

17 HIDDEN MOTHERS

Any re-imagining of photography’s history must necessarily entail a closer examination of particular poses and genres of pose, especially those that are repeated over and over again. What is the nature of their appeal? What does the dissemination of any particular configuration of bodies and things mean for the culture at large, and for the objects being so configured? Why do we find certain poses being endlessly repeated in photographs? Take this pose for instance: a shrouded figure holds a child, who, despite the close proximity of this frightening ghoul, seems perfectly content.1 And why not? Although at first glance a potential threat, the figure’s posture—compliantly allowing itself to become a seat on which the child can sit—and its rustic adornment—being cloaked by a homely striped blanket with ragged edges—signals that this is a parent, not a ghost. Suddenly, all becomes clear: the child’s parent has become a part of the picture in order to allow the picturing itself to take place, in order to hold the child steady in front of the camera [Figure 17.1]. One finds such figures lurking in the background of photographs of children surprisingly often, especially in nineteenth-century photographs, when exposure times were relatively slow. A 2013 installation by the Italian artist Linda Fregni Nagler, titled The Hidden Mother, presented 1,000 such pictures, each of them repeating some variant of this same gesture.2 Here, the parents are always hidden, always effacing themselves in the interests of the legibility of the child. Nagler’s installation is obviously about this effacement. It proposes that the gesture says something profound about the nature of parenting. But it also identifies this gesture with the practice of photography in general, as if to take a photograph is necessarily to enact a palimpsest, to put in motion an endless reciprocation of the visible and the invisible. This particular reciprocation begins from a table, a tabula rasa whose blank surface has been covered by photographs—daguerreotypes, tintypes, ambrotypes,

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FIGURE 17.1

Unknown photographer (USA), Child sitting on Lap of ‘Hidden Mother,’ 1870s tintype (collodion negative on enamelled iron sheet)

cartes de visite, cabinet cards, snapshots—most of them made in the United States by now-unknown photographers. The majority of these photographs (the tintypes and ambrotypes) are therefore actually negatives, effacing themselves in order to pose as positives; in these instances, in other words, the negative has become the photograph’s own hidden mother. Many of these photographs may well have been taken by a photographer crouching over a camera while covered in a dark cloth. For a moment, artist and mother exactly mimicked each other, both hiding themselves in the interests of a making visible of another. In Nagler’s installation, any differences in medium have been subsumed to a single subject matter, with her collection of photographs arrayed before us like so many scientific specimens. We are thus invited to compare one to the next, noticing their common traits as well as their small distinctions. In some cases, a mother really does hide, ducking down behind her child so that one figure is directly transposed over the other. In these pictures, the child comes before the

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adult, a strange reversal of their biological order. Sometimes a single hand, a phantom limb, appears out of nowhere to hold the child steady, displaying him or her like a puppet or a ventriloquist’s doll. In a few examples, the supporting figure has been literally erased or covered over. But in most examples, that figure is still in the picture, only covered with a piece of cloth, becoming a piece of living furniture that holds the child gently but firmly in place. The repetition of this procedure across 100 years of examples suggests it was widely perceived to be an effective solution to an equally widely acknowledged problem. In some ways, the shrouding of a parent was a matter of convenience, part of an ongoing effort to defeat time and motion that began almost at photography’s beginnings. As Daguerre himself once confessed: “the unsteadiness of the model presents, it is true, some difficulties in order [for photography] to succeed completely.”3 These figures valiantly attempting to combat this unsteadiness replace with themselves what was once an uncomfortable iron armature dubbed a “daguerreotrappe” by cartoonists. The imposition of this armature on the body of the sitter was a way of insisting that, if this sitter wanted to look lifelike in the finished photograph, they first had to pose stock still, as if dead. This was a particular problem when children were the intended subject, not only because they were notoriously reluctant to hold a pose without moving, but also because posthumous portraits of children were very common, a photographic outgrowth of the high infant mortality rate. The presence of a cloth-covered parent behind the child therefore signalled at least one important thing to any viewer: this child is still alive. What is the function of a portrait of a young boy or girl, as yet without identifiable physical features or personality and lacking any distinction other than the triumph of having reached childhood itself? A portrait of such a child affirms before all else the fertility of its parents, but it is also a sign of those parents’ anxiety at the possibility of loss, first of the child, and then of a memory of that child. One might well say that this schizophrenic combination of affirmation and fear inhabits every photograph, but it is especially acute if the photograph happens to depict one’s own offspring, the focal point of every dream, and every nightmare, a parent can muster. In other words, even though these particular parents are studiously trying to absent themselves from the picture, such pictures are really all about them. This is especially so because these shrouded figures are hiding in plain sight, made all the more visible to us today by their efforts to make themselves invisible back then [Figure 7.2]. As Derrida might put it, they enact “an erasure that allows what it obliterates to be read.”4 The figure is there, a muff led visual presence, but he or she is not exactly seeable, or at least not identifiable; these parents have made themselves forever anonymous through a willed transfiguration from person into object. They are both there and not there, both opaque and an apparition, all at the same time. It is striking, in this context, that many of these figures have covered themselves in patterned blankets, rather than in black cloth, as might be expected of someone truly wanting to disappear from sight. The

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FIGURE 17.2

Unknown photographer (USA), Child sitting on Lap of ‘Hidden Mother’ Covered in Striped Blanket, 1870s tintype (collodion negative on enamelled iron sheet)

resulting picture therefore actively invites a f lickering of our eyes back and forth between background and foreground, immediately collapsing that distinction, along with many others. First and foremost, then, these pictures take for granted our ability “not to see” things when it suits us. This kind of looking—“turning a blind eye” is the vernacular expression for it—demands a suspension of disbelief on our part. We have to be prepared to enter into the spirit of the thing and act accordingly, to bend the truth. As it happens, this is a demand in accordance with most nineteenth-century photographs, where we are invariably asked to not notice the incongruity of fake balustrades standing on carpets or the artificiality of painted backdrops and other obvious props. Such photographs call on the viewer to exercise a heightened degree of imaginative perception, requiring us to project on

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to these otherwise banal pictures a quality—creativity—we nowadays tend to regard as the proper province of the artist. In gifting to us this exercising of creativity, Nagler aligns her art making with a hallowed genealogy that includes Francis Alÿs’s Fabiola, Joachim Schmid’s Archiv, Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules, Gerhard Richter’s Atlas, Marcel Broodthaers’s Départment des Aigles, Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyn, and a host of other projects that have involved the gathering of otherwise nondescript images and objects into a single meaningful archive. In each of these examples, the sum seen in the mind’s eye of the viewer adds up to more than the individual parts, and so it is here too. In many ways, this will to archive is the preeminent artistic impulse of our time, an effort not only to bring order to the chaos of modern life but also to acknowledge the systems of power that inform such ordering, whether these are manifested in that shoe box at home or in the vast algorithms of digital capitalism.5 In this case, the advent of internet auction sites has made it possible to find and obtain one particular kind of photograph, isolating these from the infinity of other examples that are equally available for such plunder. In so isolating them, Nagler has created a genre out of what might otherwise have just remained unconnected individual oddities.6 This displacement of photographs from the individual to the collective, and from the private to a public realm, has certain consequences. The original viewer, an intimate of the subject (probably the very parent hiding in the picture), has been replaced by us, no more than curious strangers, who now see each of these photographs as subsumed to a mass of other, very similar ones—1,000 or more, laid out on an angled table for our convenience and delectation. All this happens as a result of the work of Nagler, who thereby merges the personae of collector, curator and artist into a single entrepreneurial figure. Like the shrouded parents and most of the photographers—and like photography itself, a medium valued above all for its self-effacement—this figure is an absent presence, responsible for the presentation of this gathering of photographs but not for their production. That figure of course also happens to be a woman, surely making Nagler the ultimate subject, the hidden mother, of her own installation. In creating a genre through this act of collection, a gathering together that is also a process of exclusion, Nagler turns this kind of image into a cliché, a “stereotyped expression, a commonplace phrase,” as the Oxford English Dictionary describes such repetitions. Lynn Berger has pointed out that the word cliché derives from the same point of origin as does the snapshot—the printing workshops of nineteenth-century France, where a cliché was a metal plate or mould employed in the printing press for reproduction purposes. Berger cleverly traces a conceptual arc for the cliché that takes it back to storytelling, to the repetition of set expressions necessary to the passing on of traditions within any oral culture. The cliché, she says, “was an important mnemonic device” in oral cultures, just as photographs are in our own.7 The formulaic repetitions of pose and gesture that we find in most photographs, and especially in these “hidden mother” examples, thus link them to this ancient pre-photographic phenomenon. As I’ve

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already suggested, they not only reveal otherwise unspoken, even unspeakable, anxieties and commitments but also reproduce and maintain these as cultural truths, in an endless cycle of copying and emulation. In the case of these particular photographs, this emulation involves an appeal to the viewer not to see what is before their eyes. This, too, is an appeal that can be traced back to the complicated manoeuvres required for the maintenance of a vital oral culture. As anthropologist Eric Michaels has recorded, the Aboriginal inhabitants of the Yuendumu community on the edge of Australia’s Tanami Desert face the problem of dealing with the circulation of photographic images of deceased elders who, according to their traditions of 40,000 years, cannot be directly named or otherwise represented after death. One 1967 film of a sacred Fire Ceremony featured a number of older men with a specialised knowledge of the ceremony (hence the need for its recording). When these men died, a discussion had to be held within the community as to what should be done with the footage, given all these circumstances. After much debate, which included some dissension, it was decided that all the people in the film who had died were henceforth to be regarded as “in the background,” thereby allowing the film to be shown and learned from. The community agreed, in other words, that certain figures would simply no longer be seen as themselves, even though it was precisely those figures that were being looked at for guidance as to how the ceremony should be properly reproduced.8 This is surely the same kind of agreement we are being asked to enter into with those parents who have clumsily hidden themselves beneath those blankets and shrouds in order to better showcase their children. Interestingly, although these supporting figures are sometimes indisputably male, they are invariably referred to as “hidden mother” images in vernacular circles (and even in the title of Nagler’s installation), as if the erasure of self that is enacted in such pictures is a manifestly feminine subject position, even a specifically maternal one. We are asked to witness an act of modesty and selfeffacement on the part of each of these figures, but also to examine a picture of women’s place in a patriarchal society, where she is inevitably figured as without an identity of her own, a mere passage, a vehicle of reproduction, a conduit between a man and his child. Ironically, in making herself invisible at the time of the photograph’s initial exposure, a hidden mother makes the inequity of her subject position all the more visible to us today, and therefore available for our recognition and critique. But this dynamic, in which suppression and propulsion are equally manifest, also points to her place in each viewer’s unconscious. As psychoanalysis would have it, the mother is the original object of desire, always to be repressed and replaced by substitutes who stand in for what we really want—a reunion with the (m)other figure of our dreams.9 In this fashion, a hidden mother continually haunts the economy of our desires, a homemade phantom who can never be acknowledged, except surreptitiously, through inadequate proxies. But what does she want, this hidden mother? How does she see the world, and her role in it, from the other side of her self-imposed shroud? All portraits

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of a mother holding her offspring recall, sometimes consciously, the Christian iconography of Madonna and child, the ideal emblem of maternal performance. Think, for example, of Raphael’s theatrical painting of a Sistine Madonna (c.1513–14), where the baby Jesus is tenderly cradled in the voluminous robes of his unnaturally serene mother, simultaneously celebrating a birth that has just occurred and a redemptive death that is still to come. According to Hegel, love of the kind represented here is an emotion in which one finds oneself, fulfils one’s own potentialities, precisely because it involves totally sacrificing oneself for another human being. Showing us love in its perfect form, as a power that can hold life and death in suspension, Raphael’s composition therefore proposes the possibility of a divine presence in humanity in general.10 In photographs of children in which parents have placed themselves in the picture, even while visibly erasing his or her presence, we are asked to witness that same sacrifice and that same desire for a divine fulfilment—to witness it, and perhaps to aspire to achieve the same. Nagler’s installation dares to bring these very ordinary photographs, along with their quite extraordinary aspirations, into the space of the avant-garde, complicating our normal expectations of both. In this aspect, as in so many others, The Hidden Mother asks us to enter a dizzying oscillation of opposites, as if it is only within the impossible experience offered by such a maelstrom that we can at last come out of hiding and truly find ourselves.

Notes 1 The following is drawn from Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Hiding in Plain Sight,’ in Linda Fregni Nagler, The Hidden Mother (Mack/Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, 2013), 4–8. 2 Titled The Hidden Mother 2006–13, Nagler’s installation was included in The Encyclopedic Palace, 55th Venice Biennale, International Art Exhibition, 2013. See http://www.domusweb.it/en/art/2013/06/17/the_hidden_mother.html (accessed November 20, 2018). 3 Louis Daguerre (1838), as quoted in Helmut Gernsheim and Alison Gernsheim, L. J. M. Daguerre: The History of the Diorama and the Daguerreotype (New York: Dover, 1968), 81. 4 Derrida, Positions, 6. This enabling erasure also has a racial implication. As Tanya Sheehan has pointed out, portraits of babies being held by a black servant, common in the US in the 1850s and 1860s, provide a colour contrast that allows the children to “perform their whiteness.” Sheehan follows her discussion with a reproduction of a “hidden mother” portrait, as if to imply that the black servant in the previous example was similarly seen by contemporary viewers as “not there,” as an otherwise invisible prop present in the portrait merely to steady the child. See Tanya Sheehan, Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), 100–102. 5 The best overview of this impulse is provided by Ingrid Schaffner and Matthias Winzen eds., Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing and Archiving Art (Munich: Prestel, 1998). But see also, for example, Charles Merewether, The Archive (Documents of Contemporary Art) (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006); Sven Spieker, The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008); and Okwui Enwezor, Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art (Steidl, 2009).

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6 There have been few published discussions of this kind of picture as a genre unto itself. One of them occurs in a small dealer’s catalogue devoted only to tintypes: Lee Marks and John DePrez, The Hidden Presence (Paris: Librairie Planteaux, 2005). In that context, see also Laura Larson, Hidden Mother (Baltimore: Saint Lucy Books, 2016). There has been a lot of interest shown in “hidden mother” photographs online. See, for example, Laura Shill’s ‘Hidden Mother, Image of Absence’: http://www.laur aleeshill.com/hidden-mother-image-of-absence/ (accessed 3 July 2013); Retronaut’s ‘The Invisible Mother’: http://www.retronaut.com/2011/10/the-invisible-mother -1800s/ (accessed July 3, 2013); Flickr’s ‘Hidden Mother: Tintypes and Cabinets’: http://www.f lickr.com/groups/1264520@N21/; Real Life is Elsewhere: http://rea llifeiselsewhere.blogspot.co.nz/2012/08/the-hidden-mother.html (accessed July 3, 2013), to name only a few such sites. 7 Lynn Berger, ‘Snapshots, or: Visual Culture’s Clichés,’ Photographies, 4: 2 (September 2011), 179, 182. 8 Eric Michaels, ‘For a Cultural Future: Francis Jupurrurla Makes TV at Yuendumu’ (1987), Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media, and Technological Horizons (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 118. 9 See Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (Routledge, 1990). 10 See Michael Hatt and Charlotte Klonk, ‘Hegel and the Birth of Art History,’ in Art History: A Critical Introduction to Its Methods (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 34. In 1972, Hubert Damisch described Raphael’s painting in terms of a Renaissance tradition in which religious scenes were staged as tableaux vivant in a town square, with painted clouds used as props to elevate the actress playing the Virgin above the earthly realm. According to Damisch, Raphael’s Sistine Madonna refers to this kind of theatrical performance. See Hubert Damisch, A Theory of / Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 61–68. I thank Olena Chervonik for drawing this account to my attention.

18 COLLECTING THINGS

In Linda Fregni Nagler’s practice, the things she has collected become an art work. For other artists, such as the New Zealand–born Patrick Pound, the collecting itself is transformed into a creative activity, an activity that ultimately offers a critical ref lection on its own economy of being.1 It has been said that collecting things is a way of imposing order on a world otherwise too vast and unruly to comprehend. Through this particular act of consumption, one makes a claim on that world, buying a moment of reassurance as well as a thing. But like all attempts to suppress anxiety, this one is indeed no more than momentary. For there are a million more things where that first thing came from; one act of consumption merely prompts the need for another, and then another. Of course, most of us try and impose some limits on our therapeutic shopping. Not so Patrick Pound. He has happily given in to the impulse and made that surrender, that neurotic desire to acquire things, into a phenomenon we can all share. Share and contemplate, for Pound’s arrangements of his found things puts collecting itself into quotation marks, allowing us to see collecting as a thing in itself. Through his act of arranging and displaying (as opposed to simply hoarding) these things, he choreographs a tricky tension between order and excess, reason and madness, classification and idiosyncrasy. That tension is where the art lies, where the questions can be asked, where viewers get to collect Patrick Pound in their turn. That possibility was made readily available in a vast installation Pound orchestrated in 2017 for the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in Melbourne. Ironically titled The Great Exhibition, this installation was designed as an immersive experience, a mini-museum, a museum fiction if you like, an artwork posing as a museum or a museum that has been turned into an artwork (the confusion of these two options is one of Pound’s singular achievements).2 Confronted with a profusion of objects, visitors were also challenged to make

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sense of their mode of presentation. The meaning of each thing we saw was mediated, even if not entirely determined, by its relationship to the thing on either side of it, and even by the logic of its placement (or not) within a particular category. Each section of the installation was therefore a kind of taxonomic puzzle, inviting us to identify the visual connections that gave it shape or a reason for being. Sometimes this was easy, but not always. For Pound wilfully played with taxonomy itself, disrupting the usual way an art museum categorises something (say, a valuable Old Master drawing of a reclining body) by pointing to its pictorial similarity to other, not-so-valuable things (to a snapshot of a reclining body). A carved ancestor figure from the Highlands of Papua New Guinea joined a giltbronze Buddha from Thailand in both being seen from behind. A painting by Australian artist John Brack and a publicity photograph from the United States just happened to both feature people seen in a passing car. Origins, cost, rarity, quality, intention, date, cultural tradition, and technique are all subsumed to a (sometimes absurd) system of meaning imposed by Pound. Even medium, it seems, didn’t matter. Except that it did. For the vast majority of Patrick Pound’s found things in The Great Exhibition were photographs, and vernacular photographs at that: snapshots, press prints, publicity shots, postcards. And why not? Photographing is another way of collecting things, just as collecting can be a way of photographing (if, like Pound, one obsessively collects photographs of things). In a classic case of wish fulfilment, Pound collects everyday photographs to establish the existence of genres he invents through his collecting. Only when seen en masse does the genre cohere as a genre. It therefore matters that his found photographs are grouped together, for, as in Nagler’s tabula rasa, each reinforces the identity and significance of the other. Pound showed just a few of those groupings in The Great Exhibition, but still, some might say it was more than enough: visitors were shown photographs containing the photographer’s shadow; photographs of people reading; photographs of air; photographs of model planes (in the air and on the ground, and with some full-sized planes mixed in); photographs of lamps; photographs of people listening to music; photographs of children being held by mothers whom we can’t see; photographs marred by the intrusion of the photographer’s thumb (or by the camera case, or by a scratched surface, or by poor framing on the part of the photographer, or by unsteadiness on the part of the subject); photographs of people holding photographs, or of people holding cameras; photographs of actors dressed as Nazis (along with some actual Nazis); photographs of people on TV; photographs of pairs of things, or of twins, or featuring double exposures, or of two people in conversation; photographs of people who like to photograph themselves; photographs of spheres or circles; photographs of people in tears; photographs of things that are falling (of a water fall, or of two people falling in love); photographs of holes; photographs of people with outstretched arms; photographs of people on the telephone; and on and on and on [Figure 18.1].

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FIGURE 18.1

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Patrick Pound (New Zealand/Australia), Photography and Air, 2012 assemblage of snapshot photographs dimensions vary

Disturbingly, the taxonomic possibilities, like the collecting, seemed endless. If this was a way of imposing order, it was one that verged on disorder. The calm rationality of the museum, that depository charged with protecting our cultural heritage from loss or damage, was invaded by a manic archiving of photographic debris, an archiving apparently without limits or coherent rationale. The invader was the artist Patrick Pound, but he was merely an emissary of photography itself. Among its other attributes, his exhibition was a reminder of the sheer numbers of photographs that have been taken since the announcement of the medium’s invention in 1839. Ever since then, nothing has escaped being photographed, no matter how trivial. Even now, millions of photographs are being taken every minute. One could reasonably say, then, that Pound’s mania for collecting things through photographs is merely a small, exemplary manifestation of our own. As a society, we photograph as if on auto-pilot, as if photographing things is a need, rather than a choice. Why should that be so? What need is being answered when we photograph something? What indeed? Every photograph, not matter what its subject, no matter how poorly it has been taken, is an indexical trace of some past moment in space and time. It’s a trace of the past that we witness now, in the present. Every photograph, before it signifies anything else, therefore testifies to the gap between then and now. And in telling us that time inexorably passes, photographs, and especially personal photographs like snapshots, also remind us that we too will pass on, at some as-yet-unknown future moment. Speaking always of the catastrophe of death, photographs are objects haunted by our greatest fear3 [Figure 18.2]. The irony is that we take photographs precisely in order to allay that same fear. We take photographs, compulsively, impulsively, in order to confirm the reality of our existence, of our presence in space and time; we take photographs in order to deny the prospect of death and to declare “I am here,” as if the simple

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FIGURE 18.2

Patrick Pound (New Zealand/Australia), detail from Photography and Air, 2012 gelatin silver snapshot (dated March 1938)

act of photographing is a magical talisman against our own erasure from history. In the midst of an increasingly secular world, photographing is a declaration of faith in the possibility of an afterlife. And so too with collecting and archiving; this (whether personal or institutional) is another fever driven by a desire to stave off death and destruction, even as it reverberates with the prospect of that very same outcome.4 Of course, Pound’s art-as-collecting is part of a much larger matrix of similar practices. We have already examined the work of Linda Nagler. But we could equally acknowledge the efforts of several other artists who collect and then re-present vernacular photographs. In 2000, for example, the Polish artist Piotr Uklański mounted a display of photographs of actors pretending to be Nazis, a theme also canvassed by Pound. On opening night, one photograph in Uklański’s

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display was angrily slashed by a sword wielded by the actor so portrayed.5 This series has since been shown in some of the world’s leading art museums. Between 1986 and 1999, to take another example, the German artist Joachim Schmid gathered groups of vernacular photographs in a series of 725 framed vignettes under the collective title Archiv. These groupings included one devoted to snapshots obscured by the thumb of the photographer, another to different coloured postcards of the same scenic view, and yet another to a grid of 36 photographs of glorious sunsets.6 Archiv features the kind of photographs that were once ignored by scholars and museums. But by now even the Museum of Modern Art in New York has mounted a display of snapshots featuring the photographer’s shadow, all acquired from a single collector.7 All these examples are a reminder that the sort of practice pursued by Pound is now found all over the globe. For reasons worthy of further speculation, collecting-as-art seems to have come into fashion.8 Of course, in The Great Exhibition the torrent of photographs collected by Pound was frequently joined by other, non-photographic items, many of them drawn from the voluminous collections of the National Gallery of Victoria. But these other things, these intruders onto this photographic universe, primarily served to accentuate a particular genre category, to underline the action or composition or object Pound had already chosen as his organising category. By a happy accident, though, the intruders also brought to our attention the amazing depths of this museum’s collections, making space for bits of those collections that rarely get seen outside of their storage box or their disciplinary specialty. The major interaction between Pound’s own collection and that of the NGV occurred under the rubric of an installation titled The Museum of There/Not There, a gathering of things that together explored the pictorial interaction of absence and presence. Some of these individual explorations were moving, some amusing, some sufficiently baff ling to test the viewer’s capacity to make the connection to the theme. This capacity depended on a willingness to think tangentially. After all, every act of representation is about conjuring the presence of something otherwise absent; some of these acts also seek to absent something that is already present (such as in a photograph where someone’s face has been scratched out or painted over). Thus Pound’s confounding assemblage of stuff—from an Indian miniature painting with a figure dressed in a translucent garment to a porcelain Japanese mask, from a photograph of a car’s skid marks to the sole of a shoe, from a painting of an unfinished bridge to an unfinished painting, from a photograph of a truant kid to a photograph of a ghost, from Jasper John’s obscured map of the United States to Christo’s wrapped Australian coastline—gave presence to what is usually absent from our consciousness: the conceptual infrastructure of representation as a general human impulse. Perhaps this example helps to focus attention on what is important and distinctive about Pound’s art work: not the individual components (fascinating though some of them undoubtedly are) but the systems that connect them. First, there is the system of commonalities that links each object in a given group to its peers. Then, as in The Museum of There/Not There, we had a system of intersection

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points which link Pound’s own collection to that of the NGV, allowing for their interaction. Finally, there was the pattern of overlapping elements that allowed Pound to link one sequence of objects with another, quite different one, creating a striated display that had both horizontal and vertical axes. Pound, for example, once sought out a postcard of the Cliff House in California he knew had been collected and then published with a 1962 article by the American photographer Walker Evans.9 This purchase led Pound to begin to collect other postcard views of the Cliff House, until he had accumulated over 200 of them. In The Great Exhibition, his row of postcards of the Cliff House was joined by a vertical sequence of photographs of supine bodies (“people who look dead but probably aren’t”), a link consummated by a single card that belonged in both categories, showing people lying on the beach with the Cliff House behind them. Or a photograph of a car door with bullet holes in it (category: “holes”) similarly cross-pollinated with a wire-photo showing a bullet-riddled school bus filled with hostages (category: “terror”). These intersections again bear on the nature of language, with each item appearing in its designated category only because another element of the picture had been deemed of less importance, had been suppressed by its categorisation as this rather than that. As with the sign in linguistics and a bank note in a monetary system, Pound declared that the significance of a photograph is simultaneously arbitrary and systematic.10 The same could be said for the manner in which these photographs have been acquired. It is striking that the vast majority of Pound’s own collection consists of analogue photographs, bought on the internet auction site eBay (“when I click the BUY button on eBay it is the equivalent of me releasing the camera shutter and taking a photograph”).11 His installation of hundreds of these photographs was therefore an exercise in remembrance, along with all its other possible meanings. He showcased a form of photography that is now obsolescent, as if only in their antique, “dead” state can we finally look closely at snapshots and postcards in an art museum. Where once they were virtually worthless, such photographs apparently now have value, both monetary and historical.12 That value is manifest in their sheer physicality (an attribute eschewed by most of today’s evanescent electronic images). These photographs visibly bore the marks of their passage through space and time, the dents and bends and added inscriptions that come with movement and rough handling, with use, with function, with life. They didn’t, in other words, look like the kind of pristine (lifeless?) photograph one normally sees in an art museum. How then did they come to be collected by Pound? First, he entered a word or group of words (“Cliff House postcard”) into eBay’s search engine and then he looked at whatever came up for sale under that classification. His work therefore begins from a potent, if sometimes awkward, interaction of word and image. Further refinements in the word search—the addition of a date, for example— might lead to more specific images. Sometimes eBay will entice him by sending other kinds of images that it thinks he might like, based on his existing buying preferences (his “taste profile,” as the company calls it). And indeed, Pound

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might then be induced to buy a photograph only vaguely related to the Cliff House series, and from that construct a collection based on another category of image altogether. It turns out that eBay uses some sophisticated algorithms to infer such correlations and predict what a particular customer is going to like. Based on what mathematicians call a Markov Chain, this algorithm produces a probability distribution of the available products in its data base and from this a “taste graph” which enables eBay to make continuously updated recommendations tailored to Pound’s presumed interests. It knows his desires, and it knows how to exploit them (and, perhaps, even how to create them). Ironically, one of the software packages that drives this process is named after Cassandra, the priestess whose prophecies no-one in ancient Troy would heed, hence the city’s destruction at the hands of the invading Greeks.13 Back to Patrick Pound: hunched over his computer, he looked on eBay for Cliff House postcards he didn’t already have, aiming to build a sequence that, in this case, allowed him to imply an unexpected narrative of images, a movement of those images through virtual time and real space. The earliest card with a visible date was marked “1902.” As we moved along the sequence, we got to see the same image morph into different cards, sometimes with new figures, captions, or hand-written texts. Or we saw the same building photographed from a quite different point of view, and from a progressively closer angle. Occasionally the cards are “real” photographs, but most of them are garishly printed photo-mechanical reproductions. Somewhere in the sequence we came across the postcard that had once caught the attention of Evans, a card posted in 1909 according to Evans’s own magazine caption.14 But then, all of a sudden—on September 7, 1907, to be exact—we witness the building catch fire and be consumed by f lames (some of which seem to have been painted on, for added dramatic effect). Later cards in the sequence showed a new, more modest Cliff House building on the same site. By 1931, the cards seem more interested in the seals on the rock just offshore than in the building. But the most recent versions returned to regard the Cliff House itself, celebrating the bland features of an expanded structure, complete with an added gift store and a room-sized camera obscura outside. This mini-movie starring the Cliff House (director: Patrick Pound) is interrupted by its intersection with a vertical line of photographs of people sleeping or lying dead or pretending to sleep or be dead (the permeability of reality and illusion is another abiding theme of Pound’s compositions). A horizontal sequence then crosses this new one in an extension of the same theme. But the vertical line of sleepers/corpses is also soon crossed by another horizontal sequence of pictures, this time of the victims of terrorism, and then this is further subtended by a vertical array of photographs of people crying (sometimes simulations by actors, sometimes actual tears caught on a candid camera). The end result of all this is a tapestry of connectivity, a tapestry that in fact models the algorithmic logic of Pound’s own collecting habits. We’re back to a co-dependency of presence and absence: although seeming to be devoted to the analogue era, Pound’s

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exhibition is in fact all about the internet, and is thus a sardonic meditation on the orchestration of consumer habits within contemporary capitalism. Our journey through The Great Exhibition has taken us some distance and nowhere at all. It began with an array of figures with their backs turned, seen as we don’t usually see them, their reverse sides made visible at the cost of that other, more familiar point of view. It ended with photographs and other pictures that perform that same reversal of the figure, some from the NGV’s collection and some from Pound’s. In between, we were allowed a glimpse of a hitherto invisible algorithm, a glimpse afforded by our exposure to its effects, a cornucopia of found objects made available to their purchaser by the mysterious workings of that same algorithm. A similar cornucopia was on offer to visitors to the Great Exhibition of 1851, the Crystal Palace being full to the brim with the fruits of the British Empire and the enticing manufactured products made possible by the industrial revolution. Indeed, the fetishisation of the commodity was that Great Exhibition’s most celebrated attraction and most long-lasting effect.15 Patrick Pound’s version is about this same fetishisation, about collecting as a form of consumerism and about desire as a means of entrapment. The Great Exhibition was therefore all about the present, and, despite the relative antiquity of many of its components, was very much a work of contemporary art.

Notes 1 The following is drawn from Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Keepers: Patrick Pound and the Art of Collecting,’ in Maggie Finch ed., Patrick Pound: The Great Exhibition (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2017), 32–45. 2 Patrick Pound: The Great Exhibition was shown at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, March 31 to July 30, 2017. 3 This paragraph channels the inf luential thinking of Barthes’s Camera Lucida. To put this book and its ideas in context, see Geoffrey Batchen ed., Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009). 4 The reference here is to the arguments of Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 5 See the account of this incident in Daniel Baumann, ‘Art as a Second Language,’ in Donna Wingate and Marc Joseph Berg eds., Second Languages: Reading Piotr Uklański (Miami Beach: Bass Museum of Art and Hatje Cantz, 2014), 14–17. This group of photographs was subsequently put on display at, among other venues, Tate Modern in London in 2009 and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2015. On this issue, see Susan Sontag, ‘Fascinating Fascism’ (1975), Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Vintage, 1980), 73–105. 6 See Rolf Sachsse, ‘Joachim Schmid’s Archiv,’ History of Photography, 24: 3 (Autumn 2000), 255–261, and Gordon MacDonald and John S. Weber eds., Joachim Schmid: Photoworks 1982–2007 (Steidl, 2007). 7 The Museum of Modern Art’s display of snapshots appeared in the midst of an exhibition of its permanent collection. These snapshots were acquired, as a complete collection, from Jeffrey Fraenkel, a prominent dealer with a gallery in San Francisco who had already published a book on them. See Jeffrey Fraenkel, The Book of Shadows (San Francisco: Fraenkel Gallery, 2007). A display of 100 snapshots that include the photographer’s shadow, framed by art photographs by Lee Friedlander and Daido

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9

10

11 12

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Moriyama that feature the same trope, was also included in an exhibition mounted at the Izu Photo Museum in Shizuoko, Japan, in 2010. See the essay by Yoshiaki Kai, ‘The Shadows of Snapshots,’ in Suspending Time, 172–191. For one overview that includes the collecting work of Hans-Peter Feldmann, Peter Piller, Joachim Schmid, Alessandro Spranzi, and Franco Vaccari, see Simone Menegoi ed., Lumpenfotografie: Towards a Photography Without Vainglory (Bologna: Galleria P420, 2013). In recent years, a number of artists have made significant work from the collecting of photographic images on the internet. These include Joachim Schmid, Joan Fontcuberta, Erik Kessels, and Penelope Umbrico. For overviews, see Erik Kessels et al., From Here On: Postphotography in the Age of Internet and the Mobile Phone (Barcelona: Arts Santa Mònica, 2013) and Kate Palmer Albers, ‘Abundant Images and the Collective Sublime,’ Exposure 46:2 (Fall 2013), 4–14. In 2016, the New Museum in New York mounted an exhibition called The Keeper devoted to eccentric collections of various kinds, including one amassed by arts patron Ydessa Hendeles consisting of 3,000 photographs of people with Teddy bears. For one especially anxious response, see Jonathan Jones, ‘Hoarders or Collectors? Our Frightened Society Has Forgotten the Difference,’ The Guardian ( July 27, 2016): https://www.theguardian .com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2016/jul/27/the-keeper-new-york-museum -collecting-hoarding (accessed July 30, 2016). See Jeff Rosenheim, Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard (Göttingen: Steidl/ Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009). For an account of his interest in the postcard collection of Walker Evans (which amounted to 9,000 separate cards), see Patrick Pound, Documentary Intersect (Wellington: Adam Art Gallery, 2016). For parallel propositions, see Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966) and Vicki Kirby, ‘Corporeal Complexity: The Matter of the Sign,’ Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal (New York: Routledge, 1997), 7–49, 163–169. Patrick Pound, Documentary Intersect, np. A history for this re-evaluation of vernacular photographs is traced in Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Vernacular Photographies,’ History of Photography, 24: 3 (Autumn 2000), 262–271, and then again in Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Snapshots: Art History and the Ethnographic Turn,’ Photographies 1: 2 (London, September 2008), 121–142. See https://www.hakkalabs.co/articles/tom-pickney-discusses-ebays-recommendationengine (accessed November 21, 2016). See Walker Evans, ‘“Come on Down”,’ Architectural Forum ( July 1962), as reproduced in David Campany, Walker Evans: The Magazine Work (Göttingen: Steidl, 2014), np. See Steve Edwards, ‘Photography, Allegory, and Labor,’ Art Journal, 55: 2 (Summer 1996), 38–44.

19 STILL LIFE

The repetition of form, the obsessive reiteration of a particular pose or set of conventions, that Patrick Pound and so many other collector-artists bring to our attention has always been a central aspect of photographic practice. It is precisely the lack of innovation that matters to these photographs and gives them a social and cultural weight. As we’ve seen, for example, hidden-mother photographs use this repetition to celebrate new life. But one finds the same effect being harnessed in genres that address themselves to death, or, more accurately, to its transcendence in an after-life. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, it was common for a certain kind of cabinet card to be produced as a memorial for people who had recently died.1 A professional photographer would be hired as part of the funeral ceremonies to shoot a collodion glass negative of a still life (a nature morte, as it is called in French) comprised of the various f lower arrangements displayed at the funeral itself. The resulting photograph would then be reproduced many times in the form of an albumen print pasted onto a cabinet card and sent to all those who had been at the funeral, or even to those who had sent f lowers but not been otherwise present. This photograph would long outlive both the f lowers and the ceremony, offering its owners a permanent prompt to memory and reverie. The term still life, already a curious conjunction of words, is a literal translation from the Dutch word stilleven. But leven could also be taken to mean “model,” and there is often a sense in still life pictures that what we see are substitutes for more intangible things not otherwise present. It is as if the picture is in fact an allegory or parable, an instructive narrative for which the assembled elements are but an end point (or perhaps a beginning). The still life is therefore often a model of an ideal, or at least an arrangement of things with a specific message in mind. One might say that the still life picture is designed to propose a series of relationships between its constituent elements and then between that collectivity

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of relationships and the presumed viewer, the consumer of this other thing, of the picture itself.2 From the evidence of these particular pictures, it seems as though funeral bouquets were often taken back to the photographer’s studio and re-arranged and shot there. The f lower arrangements were themselves commercial products, shaped into familiar Christian symbols such as wreaths, harps, or anchors, to signify faith in the belief that the soul of the departed would now enjoy an eternal existence in heaven (you won’t be surprised to hear that, in these pictures, noone is going to hell). Frequently a photograph of the deceased, taken while still alive, perhaps even many years before, would be included in this still life, resting incongruously among the f lowers [Figure 19.1]. This practice was especially common in the Midwest of the United States, in places like Michigan, Iowa, and Wisconsin. In fact, it seems to have been an exclusively American practice. There must have been something particular about both American mourning rituals and American attitudes to photography that made this practice possible and necessary.3 No-one has written much of substance about these kinds of photographs, of course, given that they are vernacular, cheap, sentimental, and extraordinarily common (thousands and thousands of very similar examples were produced).4 And yet, like many vernacular photographic practices, they reward closer scrutiny. The images that resulted from this practice are, for example, sometimes quite striking. Particularly interesting is the way they present themselves as simultaneously a deadpan documentary record of these f lower arrangements and an abstract composition full of symbolic meanings beyond the capacity of any document to record. This abstractness is accentuated by the f latness of these compositions, a compression of space made necessary by the limited depth of field of the cameras, usually employed for studio portraits, that were here being used for this other purpose. This f lattened pictorial space has necessitated some creative design on the part of the photographer, with the added photographic portraits perched in all sorts of odd places within the still life. As a result of this focal limitation, many of these pictures show their constituent f lowers stacked vertically, supported by cloth-covered shelves that have become a symbolically charged architecture of memory. In Victorian times, particular f lowers symbolised particular qualities, with rosemary signifying fidelity, the calla lily innocence and purity, and so on. But f lowers of any kind connote fertility and growth, implying a permanent springtime and thus the equally eternal life to be enjoyed by the now-deceased loved one being commemorated. This message was further accentuated by the shapes in which the f lowers are arranged, such as wreaths (derived from victory garlands and again signifying eternal life through their endless circular shapes), anchors (representing salvation and hope), lyres and harps (to be played by angels in heaven), or gates (to heaven, of course) [Figure 19.2]. It is instructive to compare those cards that include a photograph within the photograph to those that are content to feature only f lower arrangements.

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FIGURE 19.1

Roehm & Montgomery studio (Eaton Rapids, Michigan), Floral Tributes with Ribbons, Vases and a Photograph, c. 1890s albumen photograph from collodion glass negative (cabinet card) 16.5 × 10.8 cm

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FIGURE 19.2

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George Waterhouse studio (St. Johnsbury, Vermont), Floral Tribute with Photograph of Woman (“Mother”), c. 1890s albumen photograph from collodion glass negative (cabinet card) 16.5 × 10.8 cm

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A picture of funeral f lowers serves once again to certify the fact of a person’s death. Like all photographs they tell us “this has been.” A person has died and a funeral has occurred; here is the evidence. But something more is surely implied when you add a photograph of that same person taken when they were still alive, and then photograph this photograph again as part of a still life. Now the cabinet card declares that this person is dead but also that they were once alive, and even that they will live again, that there is indeed an afterlife. In these photographs, the subjects are both dead and alive; “this has been” and “this will be” are forged into an impossible “past future“ tense that transcends our usual understanding of time. By forcing photography to ref lect on itself, the genre of the still life is transformed into a nature vive. Of course, life is always stilled in a photograph, especially when that life is caught in motion. Take, for example, a genre of photography so ordinary that most histories of photography completely ignore it.5 I’m talking about “street photography,” a term that has in recent years been co-opted as a kind of art category but which traditionally has been used to refer to a genre of commercial photographic practice where people walking in a public space, usually the street, are photographed and are then offered the opportunity to buy a copy of that photograph. In the 1930s, you couldn’t have walked down a major street in any Western city and not be snapped by such a photographer. Even today you can experience this sort of practice, if, for example, you visit the Central Park Zoo in New York or Sugar Loaf Mountain in Rio de Janeiro, to name just two places where I have experienced it myself. In those two cases, as in some documentation of the practice from 1930 by Walker Evans, the subject agrees to stand still for a camera set up for that purpose.6 The Evans photographs, a group of six frames from a contact sheet shot in New York, show us a street photographer at work.7 The tripod legs of his camera rest literally in the street, while his camera body is decorated with samples of his work. We see a dapper gentleman in a suit and white hat engaging in conversation with the more casually dressed photographer, who is accompanied at first by a young boy and then, as the shoot begins, by a small crowd of interested children. The man in the hat remains on the sidewalk, posing for his impromptu portrait, while the photographer moves his camera back further into the street to get a better shot. The relationship between subject and photographer is therefore constructed to be much like that between Evans and most of his own portrait subjects—static, sharply focused, eye-to-eye, consensual, collaborative, cooperative, and, therefore, at least potentially, empathetic. The American painter Jacob Lawrence also documented this practice, in his case in a painting titled The Photographer and dated 1942. The painting shows an African-American street photographer at work in Harlem in New York, surrounded by other urban workers. A bag of chemicals lies open at his feet. Hidden under his dark cloth, his camera festooned with eight examples of earlier work, this photographer is shown capturing a formal portrait of three African-American

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customers, two adults and a child.8 That capture is represented by a jagged f lash of white, a dynamic abstraction emanating, not from a f lash bulb, but from the camera lens itself. Lawrence visually equates street photography with modernity, and even with modernism, presenting the camera as emitting light rather than simply receiving it. The photographer illuminates what he captures on his film. One of the interesting things about this kind of photographic practice is how international it is—and how enduring. A photograph taken in about June 1990 by Vicente Revilla near the Catedral del Cusco in Peru shows another street photographer working in almost exactly the same manner as the one captured by Evans 60 years before in New York. In this case, the customer is a boy. He has been seated on a wooden stool with his back against the cathedral wall. A man in a skull cap is holding a small white sheet behind his upper body to ensure that the portrait will be unencumbered by extraneous background details. Perhaps this portrait was meant to function as part of an identity card?9 The photographer’s camera rests firmly on its tripod and is again festooned with examples of his work, including a number of horizontal group portraits. Once the image has been exposed, it will be developed and printed inside the camera body, which is therefore also a mini-darkroom (making it truly a camera obscura). This allows the customer to take away their print right there and then. Photographers of this kind can still be found today throughout Latin America as well as in many parts of India and Africa.10 They continue a nineteenth-century photographic tradition, and with it the idea of the portrait photograph as a formal exercise in picture making, as if the street is just an outdoor studio. However, I’ve also seen many street photographs where the taking of the picture is not as formal. The subjects in these pictures are in motion, often, but not always, aware of the photographer, even smiling for him—as one automatically does in the presence of a camera—but not fully in compliance with his wishes, not yet party to a financial transaction or even to a conversation with the photographer.11 This conversation is what is about to happen in each of these photographs. The photographer, or his assistant, is about to offer these people the opportunity to purchase a copy of the exposure that has just been made. The camera they are looking at is again festooned with such photographs, acting as a convenient advertisement of its own capabilities. This kind of photography is dependent on certain technological developments, in particular rapid exposure times and direct positive paper that allows for instant development. You might have thought that focus would be a problem if the subject is moving, but this problem could be solved if the camera is placed at a set position and the shutter pressed just as each group of subjects reaches a particular mark on the pavement. An experienced photographer could set his focus for that distance and take many sharp exposures by that means, without having to constantly adjust the camera. Such exposures were often taken in threes, to ensure at least one good shot, resulting in a cinematic stop-motion strip of people moving through pictorial space [Figure 19.3].

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unknown (USA), Woman Walking in the Street, Summer 1937 gelatin silver photograph 7.5 × 17.3 cm

FIGURE 19.3  Photographer

The Belgian contemporary artist Francis Alÿss, someone who has an eye for visual practices beneath the contempt of respectable art history, has gathered a collection of these kinds of street photographs that were taken in Mexico City in the 1940s.12 But it’s very difficult to find much information about this practice. William Main has written two books in which he brief ly discusses the development of the practice in New Zealand. He says that a franchised company called Filmograph established street photography in all of that country’s major cities and towns by the late 1920s (although the earliest street photograph he has seen dates to March 1937). The camera used by these street photographers was a DeVry, which produced a short length of film holding three exposures. These “movie post cards,” as they were called, were presented to customers in a folded cardboard wallet.13 By the 1950s, the printed word “postcard” on the back of such photographs had been replaced by a rubber stamp for firms like Leicagraph Studios, another franchise. Main, who was himself captured in two such photographs in 1938, tells us that cards were sold for as much as three shillings each, or five shillings for two prints. In order to make their selection, customers would be invited to visit the studio and look at contact sheets through a large magnifying glass chained to the counter.14 A slightly more extensive historical account about street photography was published in Australia in 1983 by a well-known local photographer named John Williams.15 The essay includes a street photograph taken in Sydney of Williams with his family in 1949. He says such photographs were made in that city from about 1930 to about 1950, when these kinds of photographers were finally banned from the streets by the city council as unwanted pests. For a small amount of money, a customer got what Williams describes as “a sloppily printed and generally poorly fixed and washed print which rarely looked all that much better than the average family snap.” He dates the practice from the Great Depression,

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suggesting that “street photographer” was not a desirable profession except in times of mass unemployment. The implication of this last observation is that the photographer and his subjects came from different class stratifications, such that street photography of this period involves a working-class photographer capturing a candid image of middle-class subjects, an exact reversal of the situation for, say, Evans and most of his sitters. Buying a street photograph therefore involved a quite particular kind of transaction between one class and another. As with so many other acts of consumption, one of the things a customer gets for his or her money is an affirmation of their class status, via a confirmation of class difference. In Sydney, these street photographers were usually hired by established studios, who would rent them a camera and give them a day’s supply of film and then set them loose in the street. Photographers would stake out a territory and basically photograph everyone who walked by. After each shot, a potential customer would be handed a business card on which was marked the number of the film, the place where the contact prints from the film might be viewed (usually a booth in a city arcade) and the time when such contacts might be viewed. Prints cost roughly the same as a glass of beer (a very Australian way of measuring value). One American example, taken in Chicago in 1934 outside a movie theatre, offered two additional copies for 40c, six for a dollar, and twelve for $1.50. Street photographers worked on commission and so were entirely dependent on making a sale for their income. It was, in other words, a tough business to be in and hard to make a living from. Williams estimates that Australian photographers of this sort might have taken about 14,500 snapshots of passers-by per day, resulting in about 4.5 million portraits a year in Sydney alone, a city of about one million inhabitants at that time. He guesses that perhaps only about 5% of these photographs were ever actually bought. What’s interesting, of course, is that people did actually stop and buy these kinds of photographs, despite their relatively poor aesthetic values. All the ones I have seen suggest they obeyed some remarkably consistent pictorial principles. They are almost invariably in a vertical format, showing people relatively well dressed and prosperous looking (there would be no point in photographing someone who obviously could not afford to buy a print; in any case, in those days, people got dressed up to go into the city), usually shot from slightly below but without spatial distortions (which again might preclude a sale), with the subjects more or less centred in the picture plane and looking either ahead or in the direction of the camera, surrounded by a partial view of the street and its architecture. The repetitious nature of these pictorial values and the banality of the images themselves makes them typical of the vast majority of vernacular photographs. It also explains why they have remained invisible to the history of photography, why they have hitherto defied historical interpretation as photographs. For these kinds of photograph—authorless, commercial, uncreative, cheap, available everywhere from New York to Mexico City to Sydney—refuse to make themselves

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available to three of the central organizing principles of photo-history as an official discourse: innovation, biography, and nationalism. They refuse, in other words, to adhere to the demands of an art history of photography, the mode of historical evaluation that, even now, continues to dominate accounts of the medium. There are, of course, other ways in which such photographs might be discussed. Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer have written about a group of street photographs taken in Czernowitz, now situated in the Ukraine.16 The photographs document the presence of the city’s Jews in the 1940s, compulsorily marked by the wearing of a yellow star. Such photographs were made wherever the Nazis exerted control over occupied populations; one also finds them being taken in Paris, for example. The difference for Hirsch and Spitzer is that some of the people photographed in Czernowitz were the authors’ own family members. Like other photographs of their kind, these images tell us what middle-class urban dwellers in Czernowitz wore in the 1930s and 1940s, how they walked, the decorum of touches between couples, what a typical sidewalk and façade looked like, and so on. But they also point to what they don’t show: the imminent destruction of this same community. The effort taken by Hirsch and Spitzer to speak to this history is signalled in part by the shifts in delivery they adopt throughout their writing, at one point sounding academic and sure of themselves and at another intensely personal and very unsure indeed (embodied in image form by one photographic detail they have blown up and blurred beyond recognition). The story they tell about street photographs taken in Czernowitz in the late 1930s and early 1940s therefore comes to us in suspension, caught in a movement of rhetorical hesitation between history and memory, evidence and speculation, the private and the public, desire and loss, the first person and the third. The photographs they describe are unashamedly ordinary, but they bring them to life by placing them in the hands of their surviving owners. Touch, voice, sentiment, emotion, reminiscence: these are the sensations such photographs induce in those depicted in them. But what of our interlocutors, two scholars confined to the second-degree experience of what Hirsch has elsewhere called “postmemory”?17 They speak of the “oscillating look” these photographs elicit in them and seek to replicate that oscillation in their own mode of interpretation. They point to the contradictions embodied in the images they are examining and to some extent reproduce those contradictions in their own account of them. These oscillations and contradictions tell us a lot about the complexity of photography as a vehicle for historical interpretation, and even of its resistance to such interpretation. The first thing Hirsch and Spitzer do is place what I’ve been describing as a generic, international practice in a specific historical context—the advent of the Holocaust in the town of Czernowitz. What strikes them as incongruous is the continuity of the practice of street photography in this town before and after 1941, the date when two-thirds of the Jewish population was deported and the remainder was forced to wear yellow stars and adhere to curfews. Here are

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people wearing yellow stars, walking in the street, holding hands, smiling at the camera. Why, they ask, “could their [ Jewish] subjects walk down the street during this terrible time with such apparent ease and freedom”? And why would those same subjects stop to buy a photo that recorded them in the midst of such a humiliation? [Figure 19.4] Hirsch and Spitzer warn themselves to beware of “backshadowing,” of looking back with too much knowledge of what is to come. But how could they not? As descendants of these same Jews, they search these photographs for signs of the devastation of the Holocaust and are disturbed to find something else. Actually, they’re disturbed to find nothing, nothing untoward that is. These images of Jews walking confidently in the streets after 1941 support a survivor’s surprising contention that “it was actually not an unhappy time for her,” in spite of everything that we know now. Life went on, these photographs contend: people kept walking and talking, unexceptional photographs kept getting made and kept getting bought.

FIGURE 19.4

Photographer unknown (Czernowitz), Ilana Shmueli and Her Mother, Czernowitz, c. 1943 gelatin silver photograph

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Finding no obvious signs of the Holocaust in the attitudes of the walkers or in the pictorial decisions made by the photographers, Hirsch and Spitzer channel their terrible retrospective knowledge into the presence of an actual sign, the yellow star Jews were forced to wear on their lapels. When seen in an otherwise ordinary street photograph, this sign, they tell us, “arrests and confounds our look.” It’s a detail, they say, that “once perceived, annihilates the rest of the image.” What really surprises them, though, is not the entirely expected appearance of yellow stars on the lapels of the Jewish inhabitants of Czernowitz in 1941; it is the entirely unexpected normalcy of everything else. It is the obstinate banality of these images that shocks the contemporary observer, not the baleful appearance of a sign of the Holocaust. More precisely, it is the oscillation between banality and something else (between the banality of vernacular photography and the banality of evil) that lacerates the eye. Roland Barthes described photography’s impossible character in similar terms, as something partaking equally of life and death and refusing to rest with either, as producing for himself a “distortion between certainty and oblivion.” This gives him, he says, a kind of “vertigo”: “something of a ‘detective’ anguish” follows.18 The reference he gives is Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow-Up, in which a sceptical young photographer named Thomas seeks to prove to himself that he has inadvertently captured a murder in one of his pictures. Hirsch and Spitzer soon find themselves replicating that detective anguish in their own obsessive investigation of a street photograph of Marianne’s parents, Carl and Lotte Hirsch, walking along the street in 1942. No star is visible, they tell us, until, that is, they scan and enlarge the image, “blowing it up several times” and searching for “what might not be visible to the naked eye.” In Antonioni’s film, Thomas searched for the photographic trace left by a dead body, seeking evidence of a murder he suspects he saw without seeing. Hirsch and Spitzer search for a yellow star that signifies, not a single murder (for these people survived) but a genocide. Their efforts faithfully adhere to Antonioni’s script, and to its end result. “We played,” they tell us, “with the enlargement’s resolution on the computer in Photoshop. This must be the yellow star, we concluded … We blew the picture up even more, then again, and even more—yes, of course, it had the shape of the Jew star.” Barthes sympathises with the desperation of this search, and with the desire for truth at its heart. But he also cautions us to discount the end results of any such inquiry. I want to enlarge this face in order to see it better, to understand it better, to know its truth … I believe that by enlarging the detail “in series” (each shot engendering smaller details than at the preceding stage), I will finally reach my mother’s very being … The Photograph justifies this desire, even if it does not satisfy it: I can have the fond hope of discovering truth only because Photography’s noeme is precisely that-has-been, and because I live in the illusion that it suffices to clean the surface of the image in order to

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accede to what is behind: to scrutinize means to turn the photograph over, to enter into the paper’s depth, to reach its other side (what is hidden is for us Westerners more “true” than what is visible). Alas, however hard I look, I discover nothing: If I enlarge, I see nothing but the grain of the paper: I undo the image for the sake of its substance … Such is the Photograph: it cannot say what it lets us see.19 Here, then, are we brought up against the limitations of photographs as sources of historical knowledge: “the photograph cannot say what it lets us see.” And equally, we might now add, it cannot always let us see what we want it to say. Hirsch and Spitzer want to see the Holocaust in their chosen photographs, and of course they do so, with a little effort and a lot of distortion. But this is not the only story to be found in these particular images. It’s not that the Holocaust is not the truth of these photographs. We know, from other evidence, that it is. It’s that this particular truth turns out not to be what they’d like it to be—a revelation of unremitting evil. “It was actually not an unhappy time,” says both Marianne’s mother Lotte and her street photographs, thereby forever complicating the postmemory of her daughter, and indeed of all future historians of this period. Hirsch and Spitzer’s essay bravely faces up to this complication by reminding us that our fascination with photographs is based not on truth, but on desire (our own desire to transcend death) and on faith (in photography’s ability to deliver this end, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary). As they confess, “perhaps, ultimately, [these street photographs] tell us more about what we want and need from the past, than about the past itself.” Their account of street photography in Czernowitz thereby amounts to an interpretation of photographs as dynamic modes of apprehension rather than as static things set in the past. It is precisely this aspect of photographs that makes them such unusually complicated, ambiguous, and incongruous historical objects.

Notes 1 The following is drawn from Batchen, ‘Life and Death, Suspending Time, 28–129. 2 See Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Desiring Still Life,’ in Vanessa Rocco ed., Letinsky + Marcuse: Sticky Sweet (Manchester, NH: McIninch Art Gallery, Southern New Hampshire University, 2016), 2–4, and Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Pronk Photography,’ in Sarah Hamill and Megan R. Luke eds., Photography and Sculpture: The Art Object in Reproduction (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2017), 252–260. 3 For elements of the history of American mourning rituals, see Pike and Janice Gray Armstrong, A Time to Mourn: Expressions of Grief in Nineteenth Century America (Stony Brook, NY: The Museums at Stony Brook, 1980); Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1995); and Gary Laderman, The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Toward Death, 1799–1883 (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1996). 4 See Batchen, ‘Life and Death,’ Suspending Time, 109–111. Cabinet cards of funeral f lowers are, however, also brief ly mentioned in Dan Meinwald, Memento Mori: Death in Nineteenth Century Photography (Riverside: California Museum of Photography Bulletin, 1990), 17 and Jay Ruby, Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1995), 136–141. See also Amy

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Worthen, Death and Flowers, exhibition brochure (Des Moines: Des Moines Art Center, 2002). 5 The following is derived from Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Seeing and Saying: A Response to “Incongruous Images”,’ History and Theory, 48: 4 (December 2009), 26–33. Most of the standard histories of photography don’t mention street photography. Even a history supposedly dedicated to it mentions the vernacular, commercial version of the practice in a single sentence in the Introduction, and then only in order to distance itself from it. See Colin Westerbeck and Joel Meyerowitz, Bystander: A History of Street Photography (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), 34. I thank Kate Bussard for her help with my research. 6 See Jerry L. Thompson, Walker Evans at Work (Thames and Hudson, 1984), 46. Evans had made street photographs himself around this same time, using a small Leica camera. He did so again for his series titled Chicago and Labor Anonymous, both made in 1946 using a tripod camera. See, for example, Jeff Rosenheim and Douglas Ekland, Unclassified: A Walker Evans Anthology (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000), 186–191. 7 Similar records of street photographers at work were also made by Russell Lee, Ben Shahn, and others in the mid-1930s. See Tanya Sheehan, ‘Confronting Taboo: Photography and the Art of Jacob Lawrence,’ American Art, 28: 3 (Fall 2014), 35. 8 For a broader context, see Sheehan, ‘Confronting Taboo,’ American Art, 28–51. 9 Between 1992 and 2002, for example, the German artist Joachim Schmid collected discarded negatives he found in the streets of Bela Horizonte in Brazil, tossed aside by street photographers immediately after they had sold a portrait print to a client. He then printed from the negatives and exhibited them. The portraits were all of a uniform size and proportion, as befits an ID photo. See Gordon MacDonald and John S. Webber eds., Joachim Schmid: Photoworks 1982–2007 (Brighton: Photoworks, 2007), 226–241. 10 In parts of India, for example, one can find a practice called ruh khitch, in which photographic portraits are taken on the street and developed in the camera on the spot. Sometimes these portraits are taken against painted backdrops provided for the purpose. See Hammad Nassar, ‘From “Spirit Pulling” to “Thinking” Photography,’ Where Three Dreams Cross: 150 Years of Photography from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2010), 16. Malcolm Hutcheson, a Scottish photographer teaching in Lahore, describes the practice as follows: “Ruh Khitch, literally translated as ‘Spirit Pulling’, refers to the way the photographer puts his hand inside the camera and pulls out the photograph. The secret of this magical process is inside the camera which is just large enough to contain two trays of chemicals. This mini darkroom on legs allows an image to be shot and processed within two minutes. The first step produces a negative on photographic paper. This is then re-photographed to create a positive likeness.” See http:​/​/mal​​colmh​​utche​​son​.c​​om​/po​​r tfol​​​io​- co​​py/ (accessed August 7, 2019). 11 The idea that one should smile for a camera has its own history; in other words, it’s a convention. It was not considered proper to smile for the camera in the nineteenth century, and relatively slow exposure times discouraged it anyway. It was only in the early twentieth century that Kodak sought to associate snapshot photography with happiness and thus with smiling. See Nancy Martha West, Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia (Charlottesville and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2000); Christina Kotchemidova, ‘Why We Say ‘Cheese’: Producing the Smile in Snapshot Photography’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 22: 1 (March 2005), 2–25; and Tanya Sheehan, ‘Looking Pleasant, Feeling White: The Social Politics of the Photographic Smile,’ in Feeling Photography, ed. Elspeth Brown and Thy Phu (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 127–157. 12 See Francis Alÿs, Instantáneas, 1994–2006, comprising a group of 140 photographs, in various formats and sizes, taken by street photographers in Mexico City from the 1940s to the 1960s and found by Alÿs in Mexico City f lea markets, as reproduced in

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Katherine Bussard, Frazer Ward, and Lydia Yee, Street Art, Street Life: From the 1950s to Now (New York: Bronx Museum and Aperture, 2009), 70–71. William Main, Picture Post: Real-Photo Postcards from the William Main Collection (Wellington: Exposures, 2013), 18–19. William Main, Facing an Era: Postcard Portraits from a Century Ago (Wellington: Exposures, 2006), 83–86. See John Williams, ‘Double-take on Street Photography,’ Photofile (Sydney, Winter 1983), 1, 5–6. Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, ‘Incongruous Images: “Before, During, and After” the Holocaust,’ History and Theory, 48: 4 (December 2009), 9–15. See Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 85. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 99–100.

20 REPETITION AND DIFFERENCE

It is important to note that none of the examples already discussed is particularly exceptional. Each of them is, in fact, content to be merely typical of its genre, repeating, with small variations, tropes, and attitudes also found in thousands of other, very similar examples. This, as I have been arguing, could be said about so many types of photograph, from the ones canvassed here to wedding pictures and scientific illustrations and so many more. But nowhere are the effects of this economy of repetition and difference more evident than in the production of the family snapshot. Snapshot cameras were derived from so-called “detective” cameras, a form of hand-held, often hidden, camera introduced in the late nineteenth century to facilitate the surreptitious taking of photographs.1 In 1888, George Eastman introduced a variant of this device under the corporate entity known as the Eastman Kodak Company. The device was a small box camera, 3¼ × 3¾ × 16½ inches in size, pre-loaded at Eastman’s factory with a roll of paper coated with gelatino-bromide emulsion. This allowed for 100 circular exposures, each 2½ inches in diameter. The images were round because the inexpensive wideangle lens had poor resolution on the outer parts of a rectangular exposure, so it was masked during the printing process. The camera, which was initially quite expensive, had no viewfinder—just a V inscribed on the top of the camera itself, along which one was supposed to sight the lens.2 After making all these exposures, the user sent the whole camera back to the factory, where the roll of negatives was developed and its emulsion transferred from paper to glass, after which it was dried and then contact-printed onto a gilt-edged card. For $10, the prints and a reloaded camera were then sent back to the owner. Famously, Kodak sold this displacement of skill and control with an appealing slogan: “You press the button, we do the rest.”3

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The Kodak Camera renders possible the Kodak system whereby the mere mechanical act of taking a picture, which anybody can perform, is divorced from all the chemical manipulations of preparing and finishing pictures which only experts can perform. There is no jugglery about it; photography has simply been brought down to a point where the mechanical work can be entirely separated from the chemical work.4 With the introduction of one product, Eastman had transformed photography from a practice into a “system,” using methods of standardisation, mass manufacture, and mass marketing that eventually brought the medium into the hands of people in their millions. The taking and making of personal photographs had been divided and separated, with the exposed negative henceforth to be confined to a professional darkroom, which itself had now become a factory. By 1891, Kodak had, as already noted, substituted transparent nitro-cellulose film for paper, making the development process easier and allowing amateurs to develop their own film if they wished. Any artistic pretension was abandoned in favour of the joys of commerce; where once photography promoted itself as a skill (therefore as something more than the mere mechanical reproduction of nature), now it was being promoted on the grounds that it required no skill at all. For the first time, everyone is made a potential maker of photographs. The end result was the amateur, mobile, informal, and varied snapshot-type image with which we are all so familiar today. Kodak photographers quickly established certain conventions that are still associated with amateur photography: the experimentation, deliberate or otherwise, with framing; the self-parodic humour of the posers; the interest in the sentimental banality of domestic life; the concentration on people; the frequent repetition of a symmetry and formal stance borrowed from professional studio portraiture. Eastman was important also for the way he aggressively marketed photography as a product and as a practice, especially to women, suggesting that it was not just a luxury or artistic affectation but an essential part of everyday life. The company’s ads for the first time explicitly identified photography with the family and especially with women, the striped-dressed “Kodak Girl” coming to personify the whole of the Kodak enterprise. Women were exhorted to become the family historian, to make records of their homemaking and their child-rearing activities and successes, of holidays and other family activities, to carry round their camera as they would their purse.5 And so has it continued, right up to the present. The family and photography each symbiotically reproduce the other, through any number of refinements in the available technology, including the introduction of colour film in the mid1930s and, in 1963, of Kodak’s “Instamatic” range (of which 60 million were sold) and now by means of electronic cameras and web sites. It’s been said that Americans alone take about 550 snapshots per second, a statistic that, however it has been concocted, suggests that the taking of such photographs might best

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be regarded as a neurosis rather than a pleasure. Most of these snapshots have been taken of friends and family members by amateur photographers with relatively cheap, hand-held cameras for the express purpose of producing a personal memento. The subject (almost always a person or persons) is usually placed firmly in the centre of the picture plane, looking directly at the camera, well aware that they are posing for posterity’s sake. Reproducing the look of everyone else’s snapshots, this visual conformity makes these sorts of photographs comfortingly familiar. They stitch both photographer and subject into a larger community of shared values and aspirations. Once again, snapshots work to reconcile personal and mass identity. But this doesn’t mean they’re not of interest. A woman stands in front of a brick wall smiling at a friend, or at least at the camera that friend holds to his or her face (the two, the camera instrument and the photographer’s body, are here presented as a single image-making apparatus). In one of those peculiar acts of transference, this means she is also now smiling at me too, a stranger whom she cannot see. The picture therefore insists on an oscillating viewing position in which camera, photographer, and spectator eternally stand in for each other, all impossibly occupying the same space at the same time.6 As it happens, this woman is not alone, for accompanying her in the space of the picture is the shadow of the photographer [Figure 20.1]. This shadow stretches out from the centre of the bottom edge of the picture to touch the edge of her foot, joining inside and outside, photographer, viewer and subject, in a single, continuous graphic trace. A shadow, a ghostly residue of the photographer, is a presence that also marks the camera person’s absence from the photograph itself. The photographer and the act of photographing, the very things that are usually absented from discussions of the snapshot, haunt these kinds of photographs. And so too does the spectre of the negative, the dark inverted other to the light-filled photograph. Here, light and shade, negative and positive, face each other, inseparably joined and declared necessary to each other’s existence. One of these figures is obviously a portrait, but the other functions as an allegory of photography, its identity implied but also erased, as if emptied of form and substance. Posing as a lost soul, divided from the subject who cast it, the appearance of this shadow adds the binary of life and death to this photograph’s already dense array of possible meanings. The shadow haunts this picture, but it is also haunted by photography’s own genealogy, from Talbot’s initial experiments with skiagraphy (“shadow writing”) in 1835 to the making of silhouettes in the eighteenth century, and even further back to the legendary origin of all acts of representation, the tracing of a departing lover’s shadow by the daughter of Butades, as recounted by Pliny in the first century AD.7 This single photographic gesture, then, recalls the whole anxious economy of desire and fear of loss that motivates all image making. Fittingly, the introduction into the picture of this shadow also disorients its spatial relationships, confusing up and down, in and out, horizontal and vertical. Even without a shadow, the picture offers the odd sensation of a wall rushing

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FIGURE 20.1

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Photographer unknown (USA), Mary V. Castlebury, Aged 16, with Photographer’s Shadow, November 1942 gelatin silver photograph 12.9 × 9.9 cm

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back into space, providing a two-dimensional piece of paper with the illusion of recession and motion, an illusion against which this woman stands stoically, the only stable element in the scene. But then this shadow, attached, we know, to the photographer standing outside the picture, enters this scene, puncturing its illusions and reminding us of, insisting upon, this photograph’s particular means of production. It’s a type of picture peculiar to the snapshot (and rarely seen in nineteenthcentury photographs, with their large-format cameras handled by professional photographers). In fact, the photographer’s shadow is ubiquitous in personal snapshots; virtually everyone who has taken a snapshot has left their shadowy evidence in a few photographs [Figure 20.2]. There are thousands, perhaps even millions of examples, produced wherever snapshot photography has found itself—which is to say, everywhere. You could almost say that it is a genre preordained by Eastman Kodak and its “you press the button and we do the rest” style of camera, a camera sold, as we’ve heard, to the masses as an instrument able to be operated without skill. We’ve been anxious to prove them right ever since. These shadows, in other words, have been cast by consumer capitalism itself. Among other issues, a focus on this particular genre of snapshot allows us to engage in a kind of sociological study of the act of photographing. In these pictures, we actually get to see this act taking place. In fact, photographing and being photographed is what this kind of picture is of and about, whatever its other nominal subjects. An analysis of a large number of such pictures might tell us all sorts of things about the act of photographing; about, for example, a certain necessary body language, about the gender of the photographer, even about the make of camera being used (some shadows hold the camera up to the face, while others look down into a viewfinder). We even sometimes see who else is present at the shoot, standing along with the photographer (and us) on this side of the picture. It would be easy to see these traces as mistakes, evidence of the ineptitude of the amateur behind the camera. But one could equally see these shadows as deliberate additions to the picture, turning them into group portraits in which both subject and object are figured in eternal union. Indeed, in some cases the shadow is so prominent, entirely filling the foreground, that it is hard to imagine that the photographer did not see it before depressing the shutter. Surely, it’s meant to be there. Or, at least, it doesn’t change the function of the picture if it is there. Frequently, as we’ve already seen, that shadow touches the subject of the photograph, literally joining the inside and outside of the picture, and the bodies of the photographer and the person being depicted. Remember that this is your shadow too, the observer and the photographer being interchangeable entities in front of such photographs. You too are reaching out and touching this woman or this man, into perpetuity. Among all their other messages, these photographs might well be regarded as a declaration of faith in the midst of an increasingly secular world. Like every photograph, the snapshot is an indexical trace of the presence of its subject, a

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FIGURE 20.2

249

Photographer unknown (USA), Seated Woman, with Photographer’s Shadow, c. 1940s gelatin silver photograph (on verso: “This was taken out front, boo the shadow”) 13.6 × 8.5 cm

trace that both confirms the reality of existence and remembers it, potentially surviving as a fragile talisman of that existence even after its subject has passed on. As I have already suggested, when speaking of Patrick Pound’s collecting, it is the need to provide witness to this existence—to declare “I was here!” in visual terms—that surely drives us to keep on photographing, rather than the intrinsic qualities of the picture that results. Certainly, many snapshots are entirely banal

250 Repetition and difference

in content and aesthetic quality. But this is beside the point. Photographs of this calibre are about photographing, rather than about what is being photographed. And this is especially so with snapshots, an intimate type of photograph that is only rarely looked at, even by its owners, and then usually in the most private and domestic of circumstances, almost always framed by inventive reminiscence. To repeat: photographers take snapshots to allay their own fears about forgetting and being forgotten. It’s the act that matters, not the photograph. This is why this act is endlessly repeated, even when we never intend to print the results. What do we see when we look at any particular residue of this anxious act? We see how a person looked then, but also how we look at that person now. That looking is inscribed here in a shade of black, as if I, by peering in, have only just now blocked out the sun. Present and past are shown in permanent communion, much like the photographer and the subject, and this photograph and myself. As I have already argued, what snapshots self-ref lexively remind us is that we primarily take photographs in order to deny the possibility of death, to stop time in its tracks and us with it. But that very same photograph, by placing us indisputably in the past, is a kind of mini-death sentence, a prediction of our ultimate demise at some future time. Every snapshot, no matter what its subject matter, embodies this same paradoxical message, speaking simultaneously of life and death even while suspending us somewhere in between. The addition of the photographer’s shadow works to make this message a visible rather than a subliminal one, and poses the question of whether this suspension of time is in fact the ultimate subject of all photography. Snapshots are of course now made with digital cameras, usually embodied in mobile phones. As a consequence, everyone concedes that photography has become a medium of exchange as much as a mode of documentation. Able to be instantly disseminated around the globe, a digital snapshot initially functions as a message in the present (“Hey, I’m here right now, looking at this”) rather than only as a record of some past moment. This kind of photograph is meant primarily as a means of communication, and the images being sent are almost as ephemeral as speech, so rarely are they printed and made physical. As Michael Kimmelman once put it in the New York Times, photographing has become “the visual equivalent of cellphone chatter.”8 That chatter demands a different kind of body language than in the past, with arm outstretched and photographer looking at, rather than through, the camera. Contemporary photographers gaze at a little video screen and decide when to still (or not) the moving f low of potential images seen there. In operating that camera, they enact a sort of cultural convergence, in which the distinction between production and reception, and between moving and still images, has clouded. Danish scholar Mette Sandbye has proposed we consider this convergence a “signaletic” one, such that the “that-hasbeen” temporality of photography once described by Roland Barthes has been replaced with a “what-is-going-on,” a sharing of an immediacy of presence.9 The advent of digital technologies was at first regarded as an existential threat to photography but is by now recognised as the trigger for yet one more of this

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medium’s periodic transformations. Once the embodiment of industrial modernity, photography has similarly become the epitome of a new digital world order, as evidenced on a daily level in the merger of computing, communication, and representational technologies that is the contemporary mobile phone. Most photographs today are generated by these devices, devices designed in the United States and manufactured in 24-hour factories in China, using rare earths and toxic minerals extracted from the Third World. Having infiltrated every aspect of life, the digital is an economic, social, and political challenge as much as a technological one. It is the name we ascribe to a consumer fetishism dependent on the new empire of global capitalism, an empire built on economic and social exploitations as toxic as any of its environmental ones. Indeed, in the digital age, it is no longer possible, if it ever was, to divide nature from culture. Consider, for example, the earthquake and tsunami that swept over eastern Japan in March 2011. This disaster is by no means over. Three nuclear power plants went into meltdown after the tsunami breached their defences, with as yet unknown consequences. Even years later, highly radioactive water has continued to leak into the sea from these damaged plants. These events left a potent metaphor in their wake: 750,000 damaged snapshots whose ghostly surfaces evoke the erasure of both the people depicted and the means of their depiction.10 First and foremost, these photographs are a testimony to a disaster, a natural disaster that was in this case exacerbated by short-sighted human decisions (not just by failures of government, but also by our modern society’s voracious appetite for housing and electricity). Lost by their owners, they now come to us weathered and scoured, many of them with their images almost completely obliterated. Occasionally faces or portions of bodies peep through the wreckage, offering glimpses of ordinariness made all the more heartrending by their banality [Figure 20.3] We see people smiling at someone whose place we have usurped. In accepting that smile, we intrude on their privacy, yet further evidence of the catastrophe that has overtaken these people. But the greater metaphor for this catastrophe is conjured by the look of the photographs themselves, with the image on each piece of paper seemingly eaten away, as if by a fungus or disease. One can’t help but feel that the f lesh of photography itself is under attack here, as though these few damaged remnants are all that survive of a mode of representation that once bestrode the world like a behemoth. Kodak’s decision in January 2012 to declare itself bankrupt only adds to the sense that photography as we once knew it is no more, swept away by a digital, rather than an oceanic, tsunami. Once again, the theme of ruination asserts itself, here as a phenomenon at once ecological and photographic, such that a Japanese disaster soon becomes a surrogate for another, American, one. And yet, amateur, snapshot photography goes on, unabated, like a phoenix that only gets stronger with each exhumation. Nowadays, we are most likely to encounter this phoenix on social media sites. However, the sheer number of photographic images being loaded onto such sites makes any analysis of the phenomenon difficult. Facebook has reported that several hundred million photographs

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FIGURE 20.3

Photographer unknown (Japan), Snapshot, c. 2011 damaged chromogenic photograph

are uploaded onto their site every day, meaning that the site currently hosts more than a hundred billion images and counting. That makes Facebook about 30 times more photographic than Flickr, the next largest depository. Established in February 2004 by a Vancouver-based company, Flickr at one point claimed to be gaining about 4,500 new photographs every minute (so nearly 6.5 million a day), mostly gathered into the electronic equivalent of personal photo-albums. Nevertheless, even the White House once released its official photographs there. And it’s just one of a number of such sites around the world (the oldest, South Korea’s Cyworld, has boasted that at one stage, 37% of the South Korean population had an account). Leaving aside the question of their accuracy, these figures simply overwhelm in their ever-expanding numeracy, becoming meaningless except as a sign of the infinite, a contemporary version of the mathematical sublime. It seems the world has never been more awash with images than today. In response, in 2013, the Dutch artist Erik Kessels organised to print out all of the free and accessible images uploaded to the Flickr web site in a single 24-hour period—about one million images. And then he made a sculptural installation out of them. What we actually saw in the gallery was about 350,000 of those images, arranged over a wooden armature so as to physically represent what would be the volume of the total download. It’s a bit of a gimmick, but at least

Repetition and difference

FIGURE 20.4

253

Erik Kessels (Netherlands), Installation view of 24HRS in Photos, 2011

this kind of installation helps to make palpable the sheer scale of contemporary photography today [Figure 20.4]. Given the statistics already cited, a number of commentators have recently expressed concern about what they call “massification,” referring to the effects of the overwhelming number of photographic images being made and distributed. The Spanish artist and scholar Joan Fontcuberta, for example, claims that this massification has substantially transformed both photography and our relationship to it—and not for the better. As he has written: In a recent article entitled “Buried by Images” the philosopher Xavier Antich points out that an estimated 800 million images are uploaded to Snapchat every day, together with 350 million to Facebook and 80 million to Instagram. If you were to devote one second to each of these images, it would take you more than 39 years to look at them all. And we’re talking about just three platforms, not all of them. We shouldn’t play down the brutality of these data: a level of photographic inf lation far beyond all precedent, an asphyxiating visual pollution and a hyper-capitalism of images. This rampant excess radically transforms our relationship with images, which are our primary means of engaging with the world, and therefore also changes our relationship with the world. Hence its inescapable political repercussions.11 Fontcuberta claims that memory is one of the things at stake in this transformation, along with the capacity of any particular photograph to persuade and

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move a public audience. Of course, one might point out that, for any individual observer, a billion photographic images a day is no more or less overwhelming than the millions produced during the analogue era. As Roland Barthes commented in 1979, “I see photographs everywhere, like everyone else, nowadays; they come from the world to me, without my asking; they are only ‘images,’ their mode of appearance is heterogeneous.”12 Referring in 1960 to the weekly proliferation of photographic images seen in illustrated magazines, Siegfried Kracauer worried that “the f lood of photos sweeps away the dams of memory.” He went on to argue that “the assault of this mass of images is so powerful that it threatens to destroy the potentially existing awareness of crucial traits … In the illustrated magazines, people see the very world that the illustrated magazines prevent them from perceiving.”13 So massification is not a new or exclusively digital phenomenon. It arrived with the advent of photo-mechanical reproduction and mass advertising in the early twentieth century and has been with us ever since. No doubt the ever-expanding production and circulation of photographic images has indeed changed the way we experience both the photograph and the world around us. But those changes are a matter of degree rather than of substance. Any individual observer only encounters a tiny fraction of the world’s daily production of photographs, usually just enough to recognise that both personal and commercial photography have always been driven by that economy of repetition and difference to which this book is dedicated. Nevertheless, it is certainly true that the proliferation of contemporary photographs poses a particular problem for historians of photography. How can anyone examine a representative sample of contemporary photographic practice in the face of all the overwhelming statistics already cited? As it happens, for several years, Joachim Schmid spent six hours a day perusing and grabbing images from Flickr, using them to illustrate his own artist’s books under the title Other People’s Photographs. When I once asked him why, he told me: “I do it so that you don’t have to.”14 In the process of generously saving me the trouble, he has also provided a kind of anecdotal, surrealist ethnography of global photography today. Indeed, Schmid takes an economy of exchange (a kind of stock exchange for photographs) and treats it as a depository, as an archive. Again, it has become a truism to remark on the refashioning of privacy in our digital age, with social media stretching the word “friend” to include a vast array of relative strangers. Schmid’s unauthorised publication of Flickr photographs merely extends this array to comprise discriminating denizens of the art and book-collecting world. His website discusses Other People’s Photographs as follows: Assembled between 2008 and 2011, this series of ninety-six books explores the themes presented by contemporary amateur photographers. Images found on photo sharing sites such as Flickr have been gathered and ordered in a way to form a library of contemporary vernacular photography in the age of digital technology and online photo hosting. Each book is comprised

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of images that focus on a specific photographic event or idea, the grouping of photographs revealing recurring patterns in modern popular photography. The approach is encyclopedic, and the number of volumes is virtually endless but arbitrarily limited. The selection of themes is neither systematic nor does it follow any established criteria—the project’s structure mirrors the multifaceted, contradictory and chaotic practice of modern photography itself, based exclusively on the motto “You can observe a lot by watching.”15 For one such book, Schmid first gathered some ten thousand images of “currywurst,” the local fast food of his hometown of Berlin, lovingly photographed by those unlucky souls about to consume it (he tells me that, over his many earlier years spent gathering discarded analogue photos, he found only a handful of such images). People visiting Berlin apparently want to remember the food they are about to eat, or at least to share the experience of that want with others. Even within the apparent global homogeneity of Flickr, we can thus find viral traces of the local asserting themselves—if, that is, we care to look for them. In fact, it is only Schmid’s looking that turned this otherwise international genre of food photography into a regional, even an autobiographical, focal point. Indeed, it might be said that a collapsing of the global into the personal is at the heart of his practice, making it true to the character of social media itself. Sitting at his computer screen, he downloaded certain subjects and motifs that seemed to recur in the constant stream of photographs he saw on Flickr’s “Most Recent Uploads” page, which he refreshed once a second. Of course, there are now sites that set out to facilitate this same sort of distillation process, such as Pinterest, a social-media website launched in 2010, on which its twelve million users compile collections of pictures they find on the internet. But Schmid brought both a distinctively ironic eye and the play of chance to this process (he found his images rather than searched for them), thus allowing us to take note of exhibitionist desires that might otherwise remain scattered and lost in the infinity of digital space. In short, each of the 32-page samplers in Other People’s Photographs imposed a thematic unity on an otherwise unruly universe of images. A diverse group, these samplers include the titillating f lash of Cleavage, the deadpan documentation of Mugshots, the concrete poetry of Fridge Doors, and the more literally concrete jungle of Parking Lots (surely a choice of category inspired by Ed Ruscha), to name only a few of his titles. Among other things, Schmid recognised the sudden popularity of previously unknown genres of image, such as the proliferation on Flickr of photographs of camera boxes, apparently now the first thing everyone takes with their new camera—takes, and then shares online. In a similar vein, one of his books comprises nothing but photographs of the photographer’s shadow. Some things, it seems, never change. Or maybe they do; what’s interesting about this digital genre is that all these shadow-pictures seem to have been deliberately made, a significant shift in an amateur practice in which clumsy accident once ruled the pictorial

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roost. Here on Flickr, through the mediating agency of Schmid’s hunting and gathering, we get to see the art world, which once upon a time mimicked this aspect of the so-called snapshot aesthetic, now having that mimicry copied and reabsorbed back into vernacular practice. It seems the analogue snapshot is indeed remembered in digital form, but only via a historic artistic mediator. Another frequent image appearing on Flickr is the selfie, a self-portrait made with camera in hand, arm outstretched, a type of photograph facilitated by the advent of lightweight digital cameras. Schmid’s book on this genre implies that there are many more young photographers doing this than those over 30, and more women than men [Figure 20.5]. His selection also leaves the impression that this practice is more popular in Japan than in other countries (although, as he admits, this could be because Japanese teenagers upload their files onto Flickr as he started work in Germany, whereas American members uploaded while he was asleep). In Korea, this kind of photograph has its own name: selca (self-camera). Korean scholar Jung Joon Lee reports that many young women who practice selca adopt specific angles and facial expressions that are designed to give them bigger eyes, a higher nose bridge, and a smaller face.16 But this kind of specificity, and a critical engagement with the Orientalism it internalises, is subsumed in Schmid’s book to the startling conformity of the genre, to a blithe repetition of form that appears to obey no identifiable cultural imperative beyond narcissism. Here, then, is the challenge his project lays before us—not just to make sense of contemporary photography, but to find ways to creatively intervene within it; not just to wonder at its numbing sameness, but also to exacerbate into visibility the abrasive political economy of difference.

FIGURE 20.5

Joachim Schmid (Germany), pages from Self (in the Other People’s Photographs series), 2008 printed book 17.6 × 37.0 cm (open)

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Notes 1 See, for example, Roy Flukinger, Larry Schaaf, and Standish Meacham, Paul Martin: Victorian Photographer (London: Gordon Fraser, 1978). 2 See, for example, Michel Frizot, ‘The New Truths of the Snapshot,’ in Elizabeth Easton ed., Snapshot: Painters and Photography, Bonnard to Vuillard (Yale University Press, 2011), 23–35. 3 The slogan appeared as part of advertisements for the Kodak camera appearing in November 1889 in the first issue of The Photographic Herald and Amateur Sportsman. For a history of the snapshot photograph, see Sarah Greenough and Diane Waggoner, The Art of the American Snapshot 1888–1978 (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2007) and Geoffrey Batchen, ‘From Infinity to Zero,’ in Marvin Heiferman ed., Now is Then: Snapshots from the Maresca Collection (The Newark Museum/Princeton Architectural Press, 2008), 120–130. 4 George Eastman, c. 1888, as quoted in Douglas Collins, The Story of Kodak (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), 60. 5 On this topic, see, for example, Nancy Martha West, Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000). 6 See Batchen, ‘Life and Death,’ Suspending Time, 122–129. 7 For a discussion of both skiagraphy and the representation of the daughter of Butades, see Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1997). For a broader discussion of the history of shadows in art, see Victor I. Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow (London: Reaktion Books, 1997). 8 Michael Kimmelman, ‘Abu Ghraib Photos Return, This Time as Art,’ New York Times (October 10, 2004): https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/arts/design/abu -ghraib-photos-return-this-time-as-art.html (accessed October 20, 2004). 9 See Mette Sandbye, ‘It Has Not Been—It Is: The Signaletic Transformation of Photography,’ in Joanna Zylinska ed., Photomediations: A Reader (London: Open Humanities Press, 2016), 95–108. 10 The following is drawn from Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Reverie: Lost and Found,’ in Munemasa Takahashi ed., 津波、写真, それから Tsunami, Photographs, and Then: Lost & Found Project; Family Photographs Swept Away by 3.11 East Japan Tsunami (Kyoto: Akaaka Art Publishing, 2014), 139–143. 11 Joan Fontcuberta, from ‘Correspondence: Four Blog Exchanges between Joan Fontcuberta and Geoffrey Batchen (October–December 2016): http://correspo ndencias.fotocolectania.org/en/ (accessed February 10, 2017). 12 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 16. The following is drawn from Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Creative Obsolescence,’ in Robert Leonard ed., John Stezaker: Lost World (City Gallery Wellington/Ridinghouse, 2017), 25–32. 13 Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Photography’ (1960), in Thomas Y. Levin ed., The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1995), 58. 14 The following is drawn from Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Observing by Watching: Joachim Schmid and the Art of Exchange,’ Aperture , No. 210 (Spring 2013), 46–49. 15 Joachim Schmid, ‘Other People’s Photographs’: https://otherpeoplesphotographs .wordpress.com/ (accessed October 25, 2019). 16 Jung Joon Lee, as cited in Batchen, ‘Observing by Watching,‘ 49.

21 NEGATIVE/POSITIVE

Making visible the abrasive political economy of difference: that is the challenge this book has chosen to take on. The fact that a relationship of negative and positive has animated photography for so much of its history reminds us that any identity is necessarily fractured by an inherent structural difference as much as it is by forces external to itself. The history of photography is a history of such fractures. It is the story of repetitions and the differences they generate. This becomes particularly apparent when that story is made to encompass not only the act of printing from negatives, but also all sorts of other acts of reproduction, repetition, and emulation that together constitute the photographic experience. This attention necessarily began with the binary opposition of negative and positive, the opposition that current histories refuse to acknowledge or discuss. Steeped in pejorative language and metaphysical prejudice, the negative is feared as the source of photography’s reproducibility and, therefore, of its potential for promiscuity and impurity. But this is precisely its fascination. A study of the negative is an engagement with multiplicity and complexity, with the potency of otherness, and with photography as a mode of work and commerce. As we’ve seen, a photographic print is both itself—apparently whole and complete—but also a tonally inverted and probably enlarged copy of something else (and therefore necessarily incomplete and not at all itself ). The something else, the negative, remains invisible, hidden away, without public presence, until such time as a print is generated from it. That print is, strangely, a copy of an origin point that it does not resemble, a copy that is an othering of the negative image from which it is derived. Very probably it is one of many such copies, all of them identical or near-identical to each other. This structure also divides the timing of any act of photography into many segments, often spread out over decades and involving many authors. All of this makes the search for the original print, or the privileging of the singular photograph or moment of exposure, a mission that is

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both illusory and ahistorical. But this doesn’t make that search, or the suppression of the role of the negative that often accompanies it, any less consequential. As Jacques Derrida has pointed out, the search for origins is “not just one metaphysical gesture among others, it is the metaphysical exigency, that which has been the most constant, most profound and most potent.”1 In that sense, the quest for the origins of photography, or for any particular photograph, is but one more instance of Western culture’s perennial search for origins of all kinds. It is part of an ongoing effort to get to the essence of things, to experience essence in itself. It is, in other words, tantamount to a search for God. Derrida’s own work endlessly reiterated the dangers of this effort, seeing the establishment of an uncontested origin as the basis of a hierarchy that always wants to privilege the first term over all subsequent ones. The quest for origins is a metaphysical gesture, he therefore insists, but also a politicised one.2 This brings us back to where we began, with photography as the embodiment of a binary opposition in which each part is continually dependent on, and yet separated from, its other. Such a structure means that the photograph is neither singular nor static but is instead always in a state of becoming, always in the process of differing from itself, always in motion. Any history that arrests this motion by confining itself to a procession of single photographic prints, that repeats the illusion described above in narrative form, also reproduces the politics of privilege that Derrida has identified. It privileges, in other words, white over black, male over female, original over copy, singularity over multiplicity, simplicity over complexity, illusion over truth. If we are ever to contest such a privileging, and with it the logic of patriarchy, racism, colonialism, and similar inequalities, then we need to recognise our own role in their perpetuation. It hardly needs to be said that the writing of history is itself an exercise of power, with its own patterns of conscious and unconscious repressions and valorisations. The least we can do is ref lect on these patterns and seek to challenge their naturalism and self-certainty. The least a photo-historian can do is critically analyse those aspects of photography declared to be off-limits or not proper, those aspects considered to be at or beyond the boundaries of the discipline; this study of the negative is just such an effort. As that study has sought to demonstrate, even the most cursory examination of any particular photograph reveals the complexity of that photograph’s identity, the schizophrenic turmoil hidden beneath its placid surface. What we need now are historians willing to acknowledge this state of being and to trace its consequences without fear or favour. Negative/Positive is no more than a first step in that direction.

Notes 1 Jacques Derrida, ‘Limited Inc a b c …,’ Limited Inc (Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 93. 2 See Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Origins without End,’ in Tanya Sheehan and Andrés Zervigón eds., Photography and Its Origins (New York: Routledge, 2014), 67–81.

INDEX

Abbott, Berenice 14 Adams, Ansel 52, 110–113, 125, 140, 147 Alberro, Alex 92 Albert (Prince) 199–201 Alland Sr, Alexander 142–143 Alÿs, Francis 217, 236 The Amateur Photographer and Cinematographer 63 American Exodus 51, 54 Amici, Mayola 1–3 Andre, Carl 184 Anthony of New York, E. & H.T. 201 Antich, Xavier 253 Antonioni, Michelangelo 164, 240 Arago, François 94 Arbus, Diane 108, 109, 143, 164 Archer, Fred 110 Archer, Frederick Scott 95 Arndt, Gertrud 11 Art et Decoration 12 Art-Union 129, 135–136 Atget, Eugéne 177 Atkins, Anna 22 Aubenas, Sylvie 210 Aubert, François 101 Auden, W.H. 39–41 The Australasian Photo-Review 63 The Australian Photographic Review 63 Australia: National Journal 64 Australian Women’s Weekly 61 Avedon, Richard 147–153, 155–157, 159, 164

Bacon, Francis 53 Bain, Alexander 116, 125 Baker, Josephine 12 Baker, T. Thorne 126 Baldus, Édouard 47, 69, 73 de Balzac, Honoré 41–42 Bank Notes 63 Barrow, Thomas 147, 148 Barrymore, Drew 84 Barthes, Roland 3, 5, 102, 119, 150, 160, 207, 240–241, 250, 254 Baule people 12 Bayard, Hippolyte 56, 69, 141, 143 Bear, Jordan 73 Beard, Richard 7–9, 131, 197–199 Beato Felice 72 Beaverbrook, Lord 82 Becher, Bernd and Hilla 160, 161, 175–178, 180, 181, 184 Bell, Alexander Graham 116 Bender, Albert M. 52 Benjamin, Walter 7, 177, 182, 185 Berger, Lynn 217 Berman, Marshall 201–202 Bertillon, Alphonse 181–182 Beshty, Walead 102 Bidwell, Shelford 117 Bilder-Courier 11 Bingham of Paris 194–195, 197 Blanquart-Evrard, Louis-Désiré 139, 140 Blossfeldt, Karl 177 Boiffard, Jacques-André 14 Bonaparte, Jerome 207

262 Index

Brack, John 222 Brady, Matthew 160, 205 Brâncuși, Constantin 12 Brassaï (Gyula Halász) 140 Braun, Gaston 204 Brigman, Anne 78 The British Journal of Photography 75 Broodthaers, Marcel 217 Buckeley, Charles J. 189–190 Buckeley, John N. 189–190 Buckeley, Julia N. 189–191 Buckeley, Mr Charles A. 191 Buckeley, Mrs Charles A. 189–192 Burson, Nancy 84 Burton Brothers 72–73 Butades 246 Cameron, Julia Margaret 27–30, 170–171 Capa, Robert 153–155, 164 Casasola, Augustin 160 Cassandra 227 Castle, Ivor 82 Castlebury, Mary V. 247 Cattelan, Maurizio 210 Cauchi, Ben 101–104 Cazneaux, Harold 61–67 Cazneaux, Harold Ramsay 61, 65 Cazneaux, Winifred 61 César Chavez 150 Chance, George 78 The Chemist 95 Chervonik, Olena 104 Chevalier, Charles 94 Choiselat, Marie Charles Isidore 69, 71 Christo (Christo Vladimirov Javacheff ) 225 Claudet, Antoine 93–94, 104, 130, 132, 192–193, 199 Coe, Brian 141, 142 Collen, Henry 130 Cook, John Jay 72 Cornelius, Robert 101 Corot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille 38 Coster, Gordon 11 Cowderoy, Benjamin 131–132 Crémière, Léon 69–70 Crimp, Douglas 11 Cruikshank, George 38 Cuvelier, Adalbert 38 Daguerre, Louis-Jacques-Mandé 22, 119, 180, 215 Daily Mirror 118 Damisch, Hubert 220

Dangin, Pascal 84 Daubigny, Charles-François 38, 39 Davis & Co, Boston 96 Davy, Edward 116 Davy, Humphry 44, 164 Degas, Edgar 10–11 de Lautréamont, Comte 165 Demachy, Robert 78 de Rothschild, Baron James 47 Derrida, Jacques 37, 40, 43, 215, 259 Dickens, Charles 9 Didi-Huberman, Georges 42–43 Dinius, Marcy J. 17 Disdéri, André-Adolphe-Eugène 160, 192–194, 202, 207 Douglass, Frederick 17 du Camp, Maxime 138–140 Dupain, Max 59–61 Eastman, George 107, 244, 245 Edison, Thomas 117 Edward, King 118 Edwards, Steve 89–90 Eggleston, William 144 Emerson, Peter Henry 76–78, 90 Engels, Friedrich 199 Evans, Walker 179, 226, 227, 234, 237 Fischer, Ronald 149–152 Flaubert, Gustave 138 Fontcuberta, Joan 253 Foucault, Michel 159, 197 Frank, Robert 5, 108–109, 164 Freud, Sigmund 13, 19, 41 Frizot, Michel 3 Fry, Peter Wickens 38–39 Galassi, Peter 168 Galton, Francis 84 Gartlan, Luke 88 Gassmann, Pierre 143 Gehry, Frank 159 Geimer, Peter 9 Gernsheim, Helmut and Alison 193 Gingeras, Alison M. 210 Goode, Bernard 203–204 Goodwin, Hannibal 107 Greene, John Beasley 25–26 Griswold, Victor 100 Gursky, Andreas 84–88, 166–168 Haacke, Hans 178–179 Hadjithomas, Joana 32 Haley, Jill 211

Index

Harding, James Duffield 33 Hargesheimer (Chargesheimer), Karl-Heinz 30 Harper’s Bazaar 118 Harrison, Alfred 132, 133 Hart, William P. 73 Hau’ofa, Epeli 87 Haussman, Raoul 183 Haworth-Booth, Mark 80 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 219 Henderson, John 132, 133 Henneman, Nicolaas 9, 25, 129–136, 138, 140, 141 Herschel, John 7, 9, 16, 18, 33 Hill and Adamson 160 Hiroshige, Utagawae 70 Hirsch, Carl and Lotte 240, 241 Hirsch, Marianne 238, 240, 241 Hitchcock, Alfred 159 Hofmann, Ruedi 151–153, 157 Holmes, Oliver Wendell 4, 5, 202 The Home Annual 62 Household Words 9 Howe, Graham 67 Hoyle, Fred 124 Hughes, Cornelius Jabez 194 Hunt, George 61 Hurley, Frank 82–83 Hutcheson, Malcolm 242 Ishmael 139–140 Jenkins, Reese 100 Jesus Christ 10, 219 John, Elton 14, 20, 112 Johns, Jasper 225 Jones, Calvert Richard 25, 131, 133–134, 137 Joreige, Khalit 32 Journal of the Photographic Society 46 Kakoku, Shima 141–143 Kanicki, Witold 18 Keïta, Seydou 169–171 Keith’s of Liverpool 96 Keller, Ulrich 210 Kepes, György 140, 165 Kerouac, Jack 108 Kertész, André 140 Kessels, Erik 252–253 Kilburn, William Edward 94–95 Kimbei, Kusakabe 70–72 Kimmelman, Michael 250 Kirsch, Russell 115

263

Kissinger, Henry 150 Kolářová, Běla 31 Korn, Arthur 117–118 Kozloff, Max 147 Kracauer, Siegfried 254 Krauss, Rosalind 4, 11–12, 168 Lacan, Ernest 69 Lakin, Shaune 61 Lange, Dorothea 48–55 Lartigue, Jacques Henri 143 Lawrence, Jacob 234–235 Lee, Jung Joon 256 Lee, Pamela 86 Le Gray, Gustave 25, 26, 46–47, 73, 79 Lenoir, Jean 116 Levine, Sherrie 160 Lewin, Gideon 157 LeWitt, Sol 180 Life magazine 1, 155 Liittschwager, David 151–153, 157 Literary Gazette 130 Loengard, John 152 Los Angeles Times 119 Lye, Len 39–41 Maar, Dora 39 Magnin, André 169 Main, William 236 Malone, Thomas Augustine 132, 133 Manford, Steven 20 Marien, Mary Warner 3 Markov Chain 227 Martin, Adolphe-Alexandre 100 Marx, Karl 197–199, 201–202 Maunoury, Eugenio 204 Mayall, John Edwin 194, 199–201, 205 Mayer and Pierson 204 Maynard, Hannah 202–203 McCauley, Anne 196 The Mechanic and Chemist 21, 23 Meisel, Steven 84 Meister, Sarah 57 Michaels, Eric 218 Midweek Pictorial 50 Miller, Wayne 5 Millet, Jean-François 38 Milwaukee Journal 123 Moholy, Lucia 11 Moholy-Nagy 11, 102, 106, 165, 166 de Molard, Louis-Adolphe Humbert 27 Moore, Kevin 143 Moore, Thomas 159, 161 Moriyama, Daido 32

264 Index

Morse, Samuel 116 Moutarde, Félix 80 Moutton, J.C. 206 Muir & Moodie 73 Müller-Pohle, Andreas 160–161 Murray 132 Murray, John 27, 29 Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) 41–42, 101, 160, 193, 197, 204, 210 Naef, Andreas 80 Nagler, Linda Fregni 213–219, 221, 222, 224 Nakahira, Takuma 32 Napoléon III 195–196 Nash, Paul 141 Neff, Peter 100 Nègre, Charles 27 Newhall, Beaumont 52, 112, 142, 209 Newman, Eryn 127 The New York Times 50 Niépce, Nicéphore 161 Nierendorf, Karl 177 Nilsson, Lennart 1–2, 16 Novak, Daniel 89 Onishi, Shigeru 31–32 Osterman, Mark 141, 142 Owens, Craig 163 Papageorge, Tod 143 Parry, Eugenia 25, 56 Peirce, Charles Sanders 207 Pencil of Nature 22–24, 128, 129, 133 Photograms of the Year 63 The Photographic Journal 63 Pia, Secondo 9–10 Picasso, Pablo 39 Pictorial Effect in Photography 74, 180 Pictures of East Anglian Life 77 Pierson, Pierre-Louis 204 Piot, Eugène 27, 28 Pliny 246 Pollock, Jackson 167 Porter, Charles 132 Pound, Patrick 221–228, 230, 249 Prin, Alice (Kiki de Montparnasse) 12–14 The Principles and Practice of Photography 194 Punch magazine 117 Randolph, Philip 150 Raphael 219

Ray, Man 11–15, 39, 118, 165 Reeves 207 Rejlander, Oscar 73, 74, 78, 80 Renger-Patzsch, Albert 177 Revilla, Vicente 235 Richter, Gerhard 217 Riis, Jacob 142–143 Robinson, Henry Peach 74–76, 80, 180 Roh, Franz 11 Rolling Stone magazine 150 Roma, Thomas 143 Rosenblum, Naomi 210 Rösler Jaroslav 11 Rosler, Martha 179–180 Ruff, Thomas 145, 168 Ruge, Willi 11 Ruscha, Ed 178, 181, 255 Ryu, Shima 141 Sabattier, Armand 11 Sakier, George 12 Samaras, Lucas 32 Sandbye, Mette 250 Sander, August 140, 177, 182–184 San Francisco News 49 Sasson, Steven 115 Schaaf, Larry 4, 22, 131, 134 Schmid, Joachim 217, 225, 242, 254–256 Schwabs, Bronislaw 30–31 Scott, Jill 60 Selkirk, Neil 143 Sheehan, Tanya 219 Sherborn, Ann Holgate 7 Sherman, Cindy 108, 164, 168 Shimizu, Minoru 145 Shmueli, Ilana 239 Shroud of Turin 9–10 Siegel, Katy 92 Silvy, Camille 79–81 Slous, Frederick Lokes (aka Selous) 7 Smith, George 113 Smith, Hamilton 100 Smith, W. Eugene 140 Solomon, Solomon Joseph 206 Southworth and Hawes 101, 160 Spitzer, Leo 238, 240, 241 Stanley, Eleanor 202 Starn, Mike and Doug 160 Steichen, Edward 54, 56, 78, 84, 91, 143 Stein, Sally 53 Stieglitz, Alfred 110 Stimson, Blake 185 Stirling, William 132

Index

Stott, William 54 Strand, Paul 52, 78, 110 Stryker, Roy 48–49, 51–54, 57, 58 Sudre, Claudine 141 Sugimoto, Hiroshi 145 Sun Pictures in Scotland 129 Suomi, Verner 123 Survey Graphic 50 Sydney Morning Herald 35 Szarkowski, John 111, 112, 114, 143 Tabard, Maurice 11 Taber, Isaiah 72 Tagg, John 189 Talbot, Constance 160 Talbot, William Henry Fox 4, 21–26, 38, 116, 129–136, 138, 141–143, 159, 161–162, 164, 180 Taylor, Paul 51 Taylor, Roger 33, 132 Time magazine 84 Tomkins, Clay 167 Tripe, Linnaeus 33, 145 Truth, Sojourner 205 Turner, Benjamin Brecknell 26–27 Tylor, James 94–96 Ubac, Raoul 29 Uklański, Piotr 224–225 US Camera magazine 50, 51

265

Varga, Justine 35–38, 40–41 Variétés 12 Victoria (Queen) 47, 94–95, 196, 200, 202 Vogue magazine 12, 13, 84 von Bayern, Luitpold Karl Joseph Wilhelm Ludwig (Prinzregent) 118 von Humboldt, Alexander 119 von Stillfried, Raimund (Baron) 70–72 Wakita Mio 71, 88 Waldeck, Wera 11 Walker, Captain Jonathan 101 Walther, Artur 177–178 Warburg, Aby 217 Warhol, Andy 217 Watkins, Carleton 72 Wedgwood, Tom 44, 164 Welcher, Irwin 54 Weston, Brett 112, 160 Weston, Cole 112, 160 Weston, Edward 110, 112, 140, 160 White, Harold 131 Wilde, Oscar 80 Williams, Carol 202–203 Williams, John 236–237 Willis, Anne-Marie 205 Wilson, Laura 150 Window, F.R. 203 Winogrand, Garry 140, 143–144 Wood, Paul 202