Photography and Ontology

Unsettling Images

Donna West Brett, Natalya Lusty

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351187732
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art & Politics

This edited collection explores the complex ways in which photography is used and interpreted: as a record of evidence, as a form of communication, as a means of social and political provocation, as a mode of surveillance, as a narrative of the self, and as an art form. What makes photographic images unsettling and how do the re-uses and interpretations of photographic images unsettle the self-evident reality of the visual field? Taking up these themes, this book examines the role of photography as a revelatory medium underscored by its complex association with history, memory, experience and identity.

1Ontology or Metaphor?

Andrés Mario Zervigón

On January 7, 1839, the celebrity French astronomer Dominique Franç ois Arago rose before the assembled members of his country’s Academy of Science and announced the remarkable invention of artist and diorama impresario Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre. At first, Arago had trouble spitting out the words. Though an articulate man, he could not find the right terms to describe exactly what this new sort of picture process was. Rumors of Daguerre’s experiments had been circulating for years, even as early as 1835 when an article speculating on the procedure appeared in Journal des Artistes.¹ Arago therefore started his discourse by seeking to correct these “erroneous notions” and confirm what at least some of the rumors had conjectured, which is that Daguerre had managed to fix the projected image of the camera obscura on a light-sensitive plate. Thereafter the astronomer fell into a cascade of comparisons and metaphors aimed at describing the incomparable thing that Daguerre had named the daguerreotype two years earlier.² The image procedure, according to Arago’s outlines, left a “perfect impression” in black, white, and shades of gray. It resembled “a drawing with black pencil, an engraving, or better still (a more exact comparison), a mezzotint or an aquatint.” He then gave up on these analogies and simply settled on the term “drawing.”³ Arago’s primary task was to put this mysterious innovation into public discourse so that it could be evaluated for purchase by the French state and made available to all for free. But the terms with which he chose to identify it seemed inexact, inappropriate, or outright obscure. How many members of the Academy of Science, after all, were closely familiar with the mezzotint?

One might expect this challenge of terminology in the era of photography’s origins, before all but a few people had seen these images and before the near-universal word “photography” had been introduced into common usage.⁴ But even this well-worn term, which roughly translates from Greek as “drawing with light,” never conclusively described the process itself or the pictures that result from it. This was in large part because the technology and the expectations around photography changed dramatically over the 19th century and beyond. But the problem of terminology characterized the early years with particular force, most noticeably 1839–45. As this vexation suggests, the medium’s identity has been fluid from the start, never a solid and mutually agreed upon essence. The metaphors used to make the process and its images intelligible to large audiences changed accordingly, even as most of these locutions located photography’s identity in its basis as a photo-chemical or—more recently—­photo-electronic imprint.

This chapter takes a look over the longer arc of the medium’s history to investigate a number of the ever-changing arrays of metaphors and analogies that made this basis intelligible. It pays particular attention to the earlier, somewhat alien, tropes. Whether it be Arago’s “drawing” or other preliminary terms such as a sun picture, the pencil of nature, a mirror with a memory, and the object itself, or later coinages such as direct witness, the snapshot, the document, enhanced vision, a decal, a transfer, an index, or an embalming of time, all of these metaphors were historically embedded ways of describing photography’s essence that drew on commonly shared experiences of the world in general, and encounters with photographs in specific.⁵ Common to these early analogies and consistent throughout most of the medium’s history is the effort to describe photography through its generative process. Correspondingly, such metaphors regularly worked with the idea that the medium resulted from the direct agency of light alone. The photographic process was correspondingly seen to minimize human intervention in representation and, in turn, provide direct truth to appearance. Yet, photography’s many analogies have articulated these conceptions in vastly different terms. Moreover, they often performed just as much work to determine the ongoing refinement of photographic technology as to describe it. The present chapter asks why these metaphors proved so persuasive and determinative, particularly when the medium regularly failed to provide the pictorial truth that the tropes promised. I ultimately wish to suggest that the historically specific nature of these analogies and their ever-changing terms reveal that there is no ontology of the photograph. Instead, one finds an array of culturally constructed identities for the medium that have been deeply contingent on their context. Photographs, as has regularly been acknowledged across the medium’s history, maintain an unstable relationship with the reality they are made to represent. The logical corollary of this phenomenon is that the identity of photography is itself unsettled and, therefore, continually up for redefinition based on the experiences and associations made with it.

Metaphors They Photographed By

In 1979, the pioneering linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson proposed that we humans use metaphor not just as a device of the poetic imagination, but also as part of a conceptual system that governs our functioning. As they explained, “our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people.” Because this system is largely metaphorical, “the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor.” A classic example they provide is the metaphor of argumentation as war, which is reflected in linguistic conceits such as “He shot down all my arguments,” “His criticisms were right on target,” and “Your claims are indefensible.” Though debate is not actually war, this range of metaphors determines the combative experience of argumentation in Western culture, helping structure the actions we perform in disputation. As Lakoff and Johnson explain,

The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another. It is not that arguments are a subspecies of war. Arguments and wars are different kinds of things—verbal discourse and armed conflict—and the actions performed are different kinds of actions. But ARGUMENT is partially structured, understood, performed, and talked about in terms of war.⁶

Analogous metaphors have consistently emerged around photography and determined its experience. For example, beginning in the late 19th century in the West, particularly after the introduction of the Kodak camera in 1888, the increasingly ­common ­metaphor used for exposing a photographic negative to light was of hunting or even murder. The camera became a gun that the photographer would “shoot” to capture her image after first “loading” the device with film and “aiming” it at her target.⁷ This has long served as the metaphor we photograph by. How else could have audiences initially understood this new technology, which brought photography out of its customary home in the professional portrait studio and placed it into the hands of everyday “sharpshooters,” who then roamed about with a handheld device, charged with film and capable of arresting a fleeting moment? If, as Lakoff and Johnson maintain, such metaphors allow the “understanding and experiencing of one kind of thing in terms of another,” the analogy of the camera as a gun is particularly important, given that it helped make a new technology and its use intelligible. Through the metaphor of hunting, the experience of these new cameras both behind and in front of the lens made sense. Moreover, to a significant extent, this understanding even helped structure the act of photographing. Now one was expected to seek out and capture a prized instant, such as the crack of a smile, the perfect arrangement of figures, or the “decisive moment.” A non-photographic example of this conceptualizing of a new technology through an older one would be the automobile driven by an internal combustion engine, which in its early years was described as a horseless carriage.⁸

In addition to making the complex and new both intelligible and available to experience, metaphors such as these also tell us about the moment in which they arose. As historian of psychology Douwe Draaisma suggests, such analogies are constructs that reflect their age and express the activities and preoccupations of their authors. The 17th-century English natural philosopher Robert Hooke, for example, analogized human memory with phosphorus, proposing that the mind could absorb and retell visual experiences much like the element could absorb and then reemit light. This analogy reflects the great preoccupation with phosphorous in Hooke’s era. “In metaphors,” Draaisma explains, “we find preserved what the author saw around him when he was searching for powerful images for the hidden processes of memory. Metaphors are guide fossils, they help the reader to estimate the age of the text in which he finds them.”⁹ The tropes employed to make photography recognizable as a process, object, and experience can similarly tell us about the time in which they arose and, more specifically, the cultural climate that constructed the medium’s identity at any one time.

The Sun Picture

In the early years of photography, the many ways of understanding what a photograph was already concentrated on how this sort of picture came about. Notions from the era generally worked with the idea that the process bypassed the trained artist or draftsman in favor of light, the sun, or the depicted object itself. Early photography pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot leaned on this sort of analogy with particular force. A “Notice to the Reader” in his multi-volume publication The Pencil of Nature (June 1844–April 1846) explains the following: “The plates of the present work are impressed by the agency of Light alone, without any aid whatever from the artist’s pencil. They are the sun-pictures themselves, and not, as some persons have imagined, engravings in imitation.”¹⁰ In this case, Talbot wanted to assure subscribers to his volumes that the pictures were authentic products of his new process. He correspondingly produced a handy distillation of one of the metaphors that he had been constructing for the new object: a picture made by nature itself, using the pencil of light.

For Talbot, the most important characteristic of his images’ type was that it arose from a chemical response to light. But exactly what that suggested about the look of his pictures and the relationship to the world they depicted remained difficult to conceptualize for a general audience. Enter the artist’s pencil and the older medium of drawing, which—like the horseless carriage of the late 19th century—made this new technology recognizable through another that preceded it. Like the coach drawn by a new force of locomotion, Talbot’s drawings were sketched by an entirely different agent, the sun. Other pioneers and commentators fashioned similar metaphors for photography in these early years. By and large they relied on the same conceit of the sun as a drawing artist or engraver, thereby confirming the pattern—as photo historian Peter Geimer has it—“to identify the unique material link between object and image as the essence of photography.”¹¹ Despite that norm, however, these metaphors produced conceptions of the medium that were distinct from those which followed later in the 19th century, and that have since become historically alien. In most of these cases, the stress lay in the nearly sublime generation of the picture by non-human agents, and the resplendent details and pictorial effects that this hands-free process afforded.¹²

Strongly determining the shape of these allegories was the discourse of invention, novelty, and “natural magic” that would recede as greater numbers of people saw photographs and, better yet, appeared in them. This frisson clearly animated Arago’s various announcements of the process, as one might expect given that he was advocating for Daguerre’s invention with state purchase in mind. Such excitement quickly migrated to the discourse of other commentators, who often picked up on a particular line in the astronomer’s first public report: “In short, in Daguerre’s camera obscura, light itself reproduces the forms and proportions of external objects, with almost mathematical precision.”¹³ The art critic Jules Janin, one of the very few people who viewed examples of these objects in January 1839, expanded on the idea of light itself as the agent of pictor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Photography and Ontology
• 1 Ontology or Metaphor?
• 2 Unsettling the Archive: The Stasi, Photography, and Escape from the GDR
• 3 Dark Archive: The Afterlife of Forensic Photographs
• 4 Hard Looks: Faces, Bodies, Lives in Early Sydney Police Portrait Photography
• 5 Anticipatory Photographs: Sarah Pickering and An-My Lê
• 6 Eli Lotar’s Para-urban Visions
• 7 The Presence of Video: Making the Displaced and Disappeared Self Visible
• 8 Contemplating Life: Rinko Kawauchi’s Autobiography of Seeing
• 9 Suspending Productive Time: Some Photographs by Gabriel Orozco and Jacques Ranciè re’s Thinking of Modern Aesthetics
• 10 Photography as Indexical Data: Hans Eijkelboom and Pattern Recognition Algorithms
• 11 Afterword: Photography Against Ontology
• Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index