Photography and Imagination

Amos Morris-Reich, Margaret Olin, Amos Morris-Reich, Margaret Olin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429853425
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Historia de la fotografía

As the prototypical exemplar of modern visual technology, photography was once viewed as a way to enable vision to bypass imagination, producing more reliable representations of reality. But as an achievement of technological modernity, photography can also be seen as a way to realize a creation of the imagination more vividly than can painting or drawing. Photography and Imagination investigates, from diverse points of view focusing on both theory and practice, the relation between these two terms. The book explores their effect on photography's capacity, through various forms and modalities of imaginative investments and displacements, to affect even reality itself.

Part 1

Techniques of the Imagination

1 Cat in the Window?

A Closer Look at How People Try to Have a Closer Look

Steffen Siegel

I had some free time tonight and came across an article regarding the first known photograph of a human by Daguerre. Curiosity got the best of me, so I decided that I’d take a look and see if I encounter anyone else in the image. As I looked, I quickly realized that I would have to clean-up this image and make some further adjustments to reveal more detail. I figured that I was probably a perfect candidate for analysis as it relates to my line of work. What I ended up with was a colorized version of this Daguerreotype. I didn’t spend too much time refining the image—maybe a little over a hour tops. I’m certain I could spend days if I really wanted to get it just perfect, but for the purpose this suited it just fine.¹

Lunarlog—the website on which I have found these remarks—is an internet blog written by the artist and architectural illustrator Charles Leo. Living and working in Boston, he is the owner of LunarStudio Architectural Renderings. Given this professional background, it might be no surprise that he was interested in a photograph that takes its beholders back into the early decades of nineteenth-century Paris (See Figure 1.1). From an elevated point of view, we see the street of houses, shaping the slight curve of the boulevard du Temple. Destroyed in the course of the 1860s under Baron Haussmann’s remodeling of the French capital, this view gives us a marvelous impression of the old Northeastern corner of Paris. In the 1830s, when the photograph was taken, the boulevard was famous and infamous at the same time: well known for its plenitude of theaters, but somehow in ill-repute for the shoddy nail-biter plays that used to be its trademark and seduced the Parisian wit to baptize the area “boulevard du crime.”²

Figure 1.1 Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, “Le Boulevard du Temple, midi.” C. 1838, daguerreotype (reproduction from the early 20th century). Munich, Bayerisches Nationalmuseum.

As a graphic designer who specializes in architectural renderings, Leo’s interest was certainly caught by a photographic view full of visual information. Regarding a now lost historical urban setting, he (and we) can find various indications in order to imagine the popular theater district of the Pre-Haussmannian Paris.³ But it is obvious enough: Leo’s short remarks merely touch upon such historical findings. His personal interest in the photograph of the boulevard du Temple focuses on something else. Considering himself as a “perfect candidate for analysis as it relates to my line of work,” the graphic designer started treating his object of investigation in a quite unusual way—unusual as long as we take the scholarly attitudes of art historians as standard operation. After having provided a scan of the photograph to his readers (“Here is the original black and white image”), the opportunity for a high-res download included, Leo introduces the very same picture in several versions, which bear traces of profound editing (See Plate 1). First and foremost, the photograph is not black and white anymore. An intensely colored version aims to correct what the photographer missed capturing in the first place: The roofs shimmer between reddish and brownish tones, the blue sky indicates bright weather, whereas the time of the year—fall—is suggested by colorful trees. The technique of painting a photograph is common practice to photo history.⁴ But here, it serves as a tool for a more analytical or even critical approach.

Daguerre’s picture of the Boulevard du Temple is more than just an early example of street photography or—a more contemporary comparison comes to mind—a forerunner of surveillance photography. In Leo’s invasive meditation upon a silver plate the photograph serves as a starting point for a rigorous visual encounter. In contrast to earlier applications of colors to photographic imagery, Leo’s strategy of painting is driven by a phenomenological interest in details. Hence, he introduces the second and again downloadable version in the following words: “Here is the colorized version of this photograph which helped bring out the details for me.”⁵ But it is only a third version (See Plate 2)—“noting my findings”—that will entirely shed light on the purpose of this kind of astonishing treatment. We can decipher a certain number of inscriptions, sometimes aligned by small lines to different elements of the photograph. They introduce various observations (or “findings”) that seem to have slipped the attention of inspections undertaken before Leo’s.⁶ Indeed, nobody else noticed that the house in the background at right is falling apart or was, as Leo supposes, destroyed during an incendiary accident. Other observations might be even more surprising: On the left-hand side, Leo is able to point out “a carpet hanging from a balcony” and, just below it, several persons passing by.

It is one of the internet’s virtues to bring together people who share the same interest but come from distinct backgrounds. The Bostonian blogger apparently enjoys the attention of many remote readers who were attempting to engage themselves in a work that aims at combing through what Daguerre once captured. As a result of the ongoing discussion between Leo and his commentators, an updated version of the colored and annotated picture was put online in October 2010 (See Plate 3). In this “revision” Leo tries to develop his earlier observation, now altering the season from fall to spring, for instance. But even more important, a certain amount of further “findings” have been introduced; other details that had been detected acquired a more elaborate explanation. Just to the left of the house in the foreground, the blogger was able to decipher a “cart or stroller” and commented on it with a succinct hint: “this has two wheels.” In his revised edition, the blogger is much more generous with details: “Cart or stroller. This has two wheels. It appears that there are two people sitting on a bench here. Notice the arm on the right and the appearance of a face on the left.” It is a sharp eye that seems to be at work here. In the end, we might not marvel regarding a further observation: A circle highlights an angle of the upper-left window in the big house that occupies the picture’s foreground. It comes with an annotation of just four words: “Cat in the window?”

All over the surface of Leo’s adapted version, this is by far the shortest of all comments. But nevertheless, it is the most expressive one. It is quite fair to assume that even two centuries ago, cats loved to sit in windows in order to watch birds flying by. And indeed, we may wonder if the slightly opened curtain might support such an interpretation. On the other hand, there is more than just a four-word description. The concluding question mark should be regarded as a sign of some importance. Between two mutually exclusive possibilities—cat in the window/no cat in the window—this little moment of uncertainty introduces questions that go far beyond this particular picture. What kind of traces can be found and decoded on a photograph’s surface? How long and how far are we sure about our findings? At what point will doubt creep in?⁷ Asking this, we touch on pivotal questions: What do we see when we behold a photograph? What is nothing more than mere projection—brought to us by our imagination? Implicitly, Charles Leo knew about these questions and the related problem of uncertainty: “In the end, I think I may have identified some additional people within this scene. I think I may have also identified the time of day and season. I can’t be 100% certain. In an ideal situation, I’d like to get my hands on the original plate in order to accurately scan it. That may bring out a little more detail, but I would imagine it would be minimal at best.”⁸

Producing an Audience

The “ideal situation” could have taken place in the National Bavarian Museum in Munich. For a few years by now, Daguerre’s picture has found its permanent home there. This has happened after a long journey full of vicissitudes, starting in Paris at the end of the 1830s. At this time, the French theater entrepreneur Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre—he enjoyed fame far beyond Paris for his Diorama at the boulevard du Temple—was able to capture and to fix images that are projected inside a camera obscura. After the untimely death of Nicéphore Niépce to whom Daguerre was affiliated for some years, the inventor felt free to baptize this novel process of picture-making “the Daguerreotype.” In the course of 1838, Daguerre finally undertook the first determined steps toward its publication. Probably forged by the declining success of his Diorama,⁹ the businessman Daguerre embraced his invention as a financial opportunity.¹⁰ From the letters he wrote to Niépce’s son and heir Isidore we know that several options of launching the Daguerreotype were under discussion.¹¹ They all had one conviction in common: to attract people and especially their money would not be possible without a good set of samples that would convey an impression of this new technique. In fact, the different times of year played a crucial role not only for Leo’s colorful treatment of Daguerre’s plates but for the initial photographer himself. Good photographic results could be expected only under the precondition of a bright sun, i.e., between late spring and early fall.

Presumably in 1837 or in 1838 at the latest, Daguerre manufactured his photographic street scene, hereby using the view of the boulevard du Temple that could be gained from the roof or an upper floor of his Diorama theater. Since photography’s verbatim translation is “drawing with the use of light,” it doesn’t come as a surprise that a photo pioneer like Daguerre experimented with changing light conditions. His view from the Diorama building must have been produced several times in order to put to the proof the impact of variable light settings. Thus, we know of two slightly different versions, both showing the boulevard du Temple. The first one was taken at eight o’clock in the morning; this is the version that Charles Leo later ‘analyzed’ with his brush. The second one was taken at noon or, to put it differently, in broad daylight. Indications like that are more than loose speculation upon the visual data these photographs provide. The difference of daytimes and hence circumstances of production have been unfolded by the photographer himself. At some point, in the course of the summer of 1839, Daguerre was able to foresee that the attempts to raise a state pension for him and his business partner Isidore Niépce would turn out to be successful within weeks. This must have been the moment when Daguerre went to the frame-maker.

When it came to acknowledgments, one person Daguerre certainly had in mind was Dominique Francois Arago, who turned the entire publication process of the Daguerreotype to profit.¹² Daguerre presented Arago a selection of his early photographic specimens, cased in precious frameworks. Today they form part of the holdings of the Musée Hyacinthe-Rigaud in Perpignan, Arago’s hometown. But even beyond such personal bonding Daguerre seized the occasion to please. Several European monarchs—among them the Kings of Belgium and Prussia, the Tzar in Russia as well as the Austrian Emperor—received precious gifts from Daguerre, whereas Queen Victoria’s court refused such a present from a Frenchman.¹³ Even if we don’t know how the Bavarian king commented on the parcel that arrived from Paris in August 1839, his immediate reaction is telling ...