The Instant and Its Shadow

A Story of Photography

Jean-Christophe Bailly, Samuel E. Martin

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780823287468
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Photography

A compelling and innovative reflection on the way photography captures and condenses time Two photographs, connected by a ladder, separated by a century. First, William Henry Fox Talbot photographed a faithfully realistic image of a ladder against a haystack in the English countryside.One hundred years later, an anonymous photographer captured another ladder, "photographed" alongside an incinerated man by the blinding light of the atomic bomb. These two images underpin a poetic and theoretical reflection on the origins of photographic technique, the imaginative power of montage, and the relation of photography to time itself in Jean-Christophe Bailly's The Instant and Its Shadow, translated into English for the very first time.A rare find of intellectual caliber and theoretical rigor, The Instant and Its Shadow pursues a unique and powerful reflection on the first hundred years of photography's history and on the essence of the photographic art in general. Inspired by the unexpected coming together of these two iconic images, the book begins by retracing Talbot's invention of the photographic calotype in the early nineteenthcentury, highlighting the paradox that saw Talbot wishing to imitate the representative arts of painting and drawing while simultaneously liberating the image from any imitative paradigm. This analysis leads Bailly to elucidate photography's relation to material and visual reality. A meditation on photography's seeming ability to stop time follows, concluding with the photographs of Hiroshima and the photographic nature of the atomic bomb. Building on an inspired juxtaposition of The Haystack with the Hiroshima photographs, the book becomes a testament to the potency of photomontage, arguing that "the more singular an image, the greater its connective power." Bailly's book is at once a lyrical homage to some of the founding texts of photographic theory and a startling reminder of the uncanny power of photography itself. Part theoretical reflection, part lyrical reverie, The Instant and Its Shadow is packed with profound and stellar insights about the medium.

PART I

A Haystack in the Sun

It was thus in the form of a postcard, and not in a book, that Fox Talbot’s haystack loomed back up at me. Perhaps there is nothing peculiar in this, but I cannot help thinking, on the contrary, that the fact that it had become a physical object cut out in space must have counted for a great deal in this liberation of the image. In the vast world of reproducibility, postcards have a special status. The same work, reproduced in a book or seen on a computer screen, does not have the same mode of existence, the same image life, that it has when it is that stiff paper rectangle of more or less consistent dimensions, normally intended to furnish the medium for a written message, which in turn is intended to be sent through the mail. Even if, as we are well aware, for postcards representing paintings—or photographs—and sold in museums, this function is often replaced by a simple acquisitional reflex (one buys them for oneself), we would be unhappy if they became anything other than postcards—for instance, if on the back they were to lose the traditional layout of the caption and the credit line, the space reserved for the stamp, and the fine horizontal lines awaiting the address.

One way or another, we are dealing with a type of image that has a strong talismanic value. No matter what the quality of the reproduction (and it can be quite poor for paintings), there is a compensation, namely the sense of an object, the sense of a sliver blown away, and the very great flexibility of use it authorizes. A bookmark in a book that has nothing to do with what it shows, the postcard can also find itself pinned to the wall, placed on a library shelf or in the corner of a mirror, and each time it is as though the image’s power were being deferred, saved up. In any case, it took that singularity of the object, the effect of a cut-out where the image drifts alone in the three-dimensional space around it, for me to see the haystack properly, and for it to end up fascinating me, such as it is, stiller than anything and seemingly settled in a kind of intermediary state between weightiness and levitation.

All of which also amounts to saying that reproducibility, far from being solely capable of weakening the image (which it can do as well, of course), can, on the contrary, dilate it, remove it from its fixed role and invent another role for it, another network, a minor mode that is the space of a new unfurling. It is reproducibility, in any case—the very possibility of reproduction—to which Fox Talbot’s image of the haystack owes its existence. The advantage of the calotype, the method perfected by Talbot of printing onto paper from a negative, was precisely to allow the multiplication of proofs, whereas the daguerreotype, meanwhile, remained stuck to its solitary plate, unreproducible. One could say that the becoming-postcard of the haystack was inscribed in its genome. There is no divergence, nor does this image (short of considering the referent itself as an image, but that is another question) come from any primary, original image, any Urbild. Inscribed in the shot from the start is an imprint that is always already a matrix.

The Pencil of Nature. The book from which the image is taken, where it is the tenth plate (there are twenty-four in all), was devised by Talbot in order to present his method, and through it the brand-new art of photography. He gave it that splendid title (to which I’ll return) and delivered it in fascicles between June 1844 and April 1846. It is thought that 130 complete series were published in total (not very many, but the purchase price was quite high). Roughly thirty have survived.¹ The twenty-four plates were in fact actual prints obtained from a master negative. Given the technical means available at the time, the period of production was naturally increased, as was the cost of a venture that, on the commercial level, in fact ended in partial failure. Yet the affair that had begun was on an altogether different scale, and such as it is, The Pencil of Nature is well and truly the first photo-illustrated publication to have seen the light of day, as Talbot was obliged to point out in a foreword, both because what he was offering had no parallel and because it was necessary to distinguish his work from the daguerreotype-based engravings already in circulation.

This context of rivalry with the daguerreotype (which, let us recall, was revealed to the world in 1839) is of course present in the historical summary preceding the plates and their commentaries. There are even grounds for thinking that to the thundering revelation of Daguerre’s invention we owe the story of the other side of photography’s birth that is The Pencil of Nature. But here we will leave aside that aspect, which belongs to the history of photography, where it has been described and analyzed with considerable sensitivity. For in reestablishing (and perhaps slightly rearranging) the long genesis of his research, Talbot does indulge in a boldly assertive recapitulation in which he is concerned with proving his invention’s primacy, but he also does something far more consequential. He invents another foundation narrative; he tells another story: his book is the presentation, not of a particular procedure, but of an art—photography—considered in its full scope and seen throughout as something marvelous. The theoretical quality of The Pencil of Nature does not lie in the explanation of a series of technical differences, or in the programmatic demonstration of photography’s powers, even if the latter are exposed as fully as was possible in those days of pure beginning. It comes from a kind of exclamatory joy linked to a climate of absolute opening. We are at the source of a new art, and what The Pencil of Nature allows us to hear or grasp is indeed the sound of that source, at the place where it is wholly originated, if not regulated by some scheme of nature at work, functioning directly in the darkroom and in the fixing of the image on the paper.

In a way, even if Talbot’s empirical Romanticism does not exactly find us in the thought climate of the speculative Romanticism of Jena, it is Novalis’s “everything speaks” that speaks through the photographic as understood and transmitted by Talbot. This natural or solar conception of the photographic—a conception, as it were, of a self-portrait of nature—is also found in the remarks accompanying the birth of the daguerreotype² and throughout the discourse on the actual phenomenon of the optical-chemical formation of those new and yet long-imagined images, but with Talbot it takes an even clearer and more assertive turn. The plates that constitute the volume, he says, have all been “impressed by Nature’s hand” and “obtained by the mere action of Light upon sensitive paper.”³ He also refers to them as sun pictures, a term that would last a long time. Here I can at least mention David O. Hill, who, shortly after Talbot and following directly in his wake, signed his own calotypes with the phrase Sol fecit, which was at once to assign them to nature’s regime of self-production and to inscribe them, in somewhat arrogant and dandyesque fashion, within the pictorial tradition of the author’s trademark.

Yet the theoretical insistence on photography’s atechnical, nonhuman, natural quality is deposited (typo-graphed, we should say) in the very title of Talbot’s book. The pencil of nature means nature doing the drawing (of) itself. In a sense (and very specifically in the resonance of its own sense), the title merely draws, quite cleverly for that matter, on the semantic resources that photography was in the process of establishing, beginning with the choice of its name, which had only just been fixed in French as well as in English. Photography: as we know, drawing with light, or words of light, as Talbot wrote on one of the copies of The Pencil of Nature. For the graphein of photo-graphy, for its fully active dimension, it was necessary to look beyond the agent to find an implement; such would be the allegory of the pencil. But the possibility of that allegory depends on a history, a genesis, and that genesis is the subject of the main development in The Pencil of Nature’s opening text. The implement is placed by man in the hands of nature, restored to it—which also amounts to saying that man did away with it, was forced to do away with it. The story of just such an undoing plays a founding role in the genesis of photography as set out by Talbot. And here the narrative comes into step with autobiography: oddly enough, at the very moment when, in a sense, the subject is evacuated or put away, a subject speaks of his experience, and reveals what it was in that experience that led him to cease being an artist (a painter, a drawer) in order to become the one through whom the photographic sign could make its mark.

The “Brief Historical Sketch of the Invention of the Art,” which constitutes most of the introductory text, is the unfolding story of the interplay of scientific knowledge, more or less improvised experiments, intuitions, and reveries via which Talbot eventually perfected his procedure. The two paths at the foundation of photography—the optical path, with the camera obscura or its derivatives, and the chemical path, with the sensitivity of silver salts to light—are both present, but it is in the realm of travel (we are very much in the intellectual climate of the “grand tour,” in a world of enlightened amateurs) that curiosity is stirred. Talbot begins by evoking a stay “on the lovely shores of the Lake of Como” in October 1833, during which he tells of attempting to make landscape sketches with the help of a camera lucida (in reality a kind of prism mounted on a stand), only to find “that the faithless pencil [my emphasis] had only left traces on the paper melancholy to behold.” Deciding at that point to return to a simpler method that he had tried many years before, also in Italy, using a camera obscura “to throw the image of the objects on a piece of transparent tracing paper laid on a pane of glass,” Talbot merely reencountered the old difficulties and delays. Once again, the pencil struggled to bridge the gap between what it could trace and the kind of liquid film that appeared on the transparent screen sheet.

Yet immediately following the tale of that disappointing recourse to his former method, Talbot writes the passage that I find extraordinary. We join him in witnessing the birth, not of photography as such, but of the idea of photography, inspired by what is before his eyes, namely “the pictures of nature’s painting which the glass lens of the Camera throws upon the paper in its focus,” images of “inimitable beauty” or, as he goes on to say, “fairy-pictures, creations of a moment, and destined as rapidly to fade away.” The idea was precisely to capture those images, no longer with the “faithless pencil” but by another means—and here begins the truly chemical or photochemical path, which is thus (via numerous detours) at the very origin of photography on paper. There is admittedly something striking about Talbot’s utter lack of solemnity in announcing his idea. Although he is aware of the momentousness of his intuition—just before describing the researches that led him to perfect the procedure whose results he is presenting, he reiterates that they “cannot … admit of a comparison with the value of the first and original idea”—nevertheless, right after the mention of “fairy-pictures,” he presents that “original idea” in an almost impulsive way: “It was during these thoughts [the meditation on the nature and inimitable beauty of the projected image] that the idea occurred to me … how charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably, and remain fixed upon the paper!”

But this elegant and amazing lightness, in which there no doubt survives something of the not-so-distant Enlightenment’s climate of curiosity, should not mask the density of the narrative. What makes it valuable is the way Talbot attempts to characterize what he saw over the course of those landscape-sketching sessions, namely the projected images which are also a material made from different stuff than what can be drawn by hand with pencil or pen. It must be noted that he does not so much refer to them as a copy or a (faithful, exact) reproduction, not so much a double of the real as a production. Of those natural images whose beauty overwhelms him, he says they are inimitable. And so they are, in the strictest sense, inasmuch as no pencil, even held by an abler hand than his, could reproduce them. But they are also inimitable because they are not imitations. The prephotographic or quasi-photographic image obtained on this sort of paper screen is a world unto itself. As such, insofar as it belongs to the realm of fairies, it demands to be fixed, and fixes a goal for his research: the photographic image (already, in other words, what we have come to know commonly and colloquially as the “photo”) must be like the drawing made by nature, and not like nature directly. This amounts to saying that from the start, the quality of the image’s definition and the accuracy with which it points to the referent are not to be understood in terms of realism. A spectral signature accompanies the photographic image and inscribes itself in what that image ultimately is: a being without depth, a spectral surface.

For if the pencil of nature draws, and if the images obtained and then fixed by photographic research can be compared to drawings (a comparison made easier by the black and white, and not actually unique to Talbot—it is likewise found with the daguerreotype and throughout the various speeches celebrating the new invention),⁴ it is in a wholly different sense than the tradition of disegno. The latter was still quite lively at the time, and was even revived in multiple ways, if one thinks of the logic of lines the European neoclassical circles were then developing. When he signals the gap that opens up between the pencil’s means and the projected image, Talbot evidently runs into the problem of outline; he was endeavoring, he says, “to trace with [his] pencil the outlines of the scenery depicted on the paper.” But what he sees, with the fluctuating landscape of inimitable beauty, is a presence, a halo-like power that is not resolved in an outline’s grasp. The schematizing force and the very rapidity of the stroke go against the settled slowness of the specter-image, the protophotographic image.

There is in drawing, from the beginning, something of incision, of engraving—and also, concomitantly, a problem of sharpness and blurriness. In drawing’s manner of capture, there is a whole range of possibilities, from the firmest and crispest line to a desire for near-fading and erasure. Though it evidently depends on the artist’s temperament and decision, the type of rendering (firm or loose, crisp or “watery”) stems above all from the choice of tracing implement. Now, while the tradition of disegno, with its elements going back to antiquity, alternates among several types of implement (and rendering), it remains oriented primarily and in principle by a logic of the pure, clear stroke, which is also an ethics of the autonomous line. Moreover, this dynamic of a pure and rational linearity was transformed into a system of guarantees (the “probity” of which Ingres would later speak), which its proponents regularly set against the evanescences and dissolutions supposedly brought about by color. Drawing, in a Winckelmannian profile very present throughout Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century, including in England (I am thinking of the contours of Josiah Wedgwood’s ceramic workmanship,⁵ or, of course, the closely related and strangely spare drawing of John Flaxman’s engravings), was held to be the guarantor of form. Not getting carried away, staying within the purity of its concept, it was what condensed the essence of the pictorial gesture and structured its productions. And according to this profile, the pencil was evidently the implement par excellence, the energetic servant of the ideal tendency; yet it is this very pencil that Talbot finds “faithless,” not only because the person holding it has not learned the art of drawing, but primarily because the image to be traced onto the screen exceeds the implement’s means. The separation is complete between the stroke that touches a page to inscribe an outline and the pure impregnation of the photographic image announced by the projection.

To what is perhaps an overly clear-cut opposition, one should add the corrective of a divergence within the drawing world itself, one that, remarkably, concerns the implement, the pencil. Indeed, a history of line-drawing implements remains to be written,⁶ in which one would see an evolution from the hard, thin groove to a smoother, thicker stroke, better able to grasp the aspects of appearance that go beyond seemingly pure and simple outlines. In the history of art, which must include the determining role of architectural drawing, this can be seen from the liberating logic of sfumato and the efforts of maniera or baroque drawing to discover another line, a line that one would almost have to call nonlinear, winding, rubbed out, fleeting—but it also occurs with a change of implement, with the appearance of different pencils, infinitely more ductile. These pencils are all of mineral origin, whether one goes back to the appearance of black stone at the end of the quattrocento or looks instead to pencils resembling graphite (almost contemporary with Talbot) and those produced by Conté (who added to graphite a mixture of ferruginous clay and soot). All involve the mineral abandoning percussion and hardness in order to slide toward the ductile and the unctuous, toward the possibility of a blurred or mellow rendering. One can legitimately consider this transition, if not prephotographic, ...