Photography and Doubt

Sabine T. Kriebel, Andrés Zervigón, Sabine T. Kriebel, Andrés Mario Zervigón

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317427391
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Geschichte der Fotografie

Recent decades have seen photography's privileged relationship to the real come under question. Spurred by the postmodern critique of photography in the 1980s and the rise of digital technologies soon thereafter, scholars have been asking who and what built this understanding of the medium in the first place.

Photography and Doubt reflects on this interest in photography's referential power by discussing it in rigorously historical terms. How was the understanding of photographic realism cultivated in the first place? What do cases of staged and manipulated photography reveal about that realism's hold on audiences across the medium's history? Have doubts about photography's testimonial power stimulated as much knowledge as its realism?

Edited by Sabine T. Kriebel and Andrés Mario Zervigón, Photography and Doubt is the first multi-authored collection specifically designed to explore these questions. Its 13 original essays, illustrated with 73 color images, explore cases when the link between the photographic image and its referent was placed under stress, and when photography was as attuned to its myth-making capabilities as to its claims to authenticity.

Photography and Doubt will serve as a valuable resource for students and scholars in art history, visual and media studies, philosophy, and the history of science and technology.

Part I
Between facticity and fiction

1
No room for doubt?

Daguerre and his first critics

Steffen Siegel

When considered from a historical perspective, photography is the first reproductive medium to have anticipated its own critique and position against other media.¹ Before there were any discussions about the scientific purpose of photographic recording procedures, and even before debates over the artistic value of these images, one thing is remarkable: from its very beginning, the history of photography has been a matter of both images and texts. With respect to the first photographic procedures, from the moment of their disclosure, what can be shown and what we can see was formed by a discursive order that has been guided by a multiplicity of texts. And on this stage of media history, behind the scenes as it were, doubt plays a decisive role.

It would have been easy to criticize photographic images for their lack of color or their impracticably long exposure times. In contrast to these causes for skepticism, the earliest critics sang photography’s praises with striking emphasis. But as this chapter will suggest, the rhetoric of photographic truth that they often employed was not a mere end in itself but, instead, it betrayed other motivations. Among these was the economic. The potential for profit played an essential role in framing the aesthetic and epistemic functions of photography, even from the medium’s very origins. This concern managed to generate a curious paradox in the earliest photo criticism whereby the impulse to talk up the clarity of photographic images and dismiss any possible doubt about their reproductive capacity actually acknowledged this very doubt as a blind spot in early photographic discourse.

Adoption

Almost exactly a year after the daguerreotype first became a topic of public conversation in Paris, Alexander’s Weekly Messenger introduced the topic on January 15, 1840. In its small article, the Philadelphia weekly seemed to have come late in a peculiar manner. For the short text first merely detailed the technological foundations of the daguerreotype, details that would have been well known to the American readers by that time. Moreover, the unnamed author, in his very first sentence, insisted on refamiliarizing his audience with the correct spelling and pronunciation of the complicated name that Daguerre attached to his photographic procedure: “This word is properly spelt Daguerréotype, and pronounced as if written Dagairraioteep.”² This and similar articles from Alexander’s Weekly Messenger would have no doubt been lost to history had they not, some time ago, been attributed to none other but Edgar Allan Poe.³ As a regular contributor – if only for a brief period of time – to the Messenger, which had been founded by Charles W. Alexander, Poe added his journalistic voice to the polyphonic concert of press texts that had already started playing in January of 1839.⁴

Even before the address given by the Permanent Secretary of the Paris Academy of Sciences, Dominique François Arago, and – probably at Arago’s instigation – the French press, discussed what was finally officially introduced on January 7, 1839.⁵ Almost immediately, competing photographic procedures such as Daguerre’s own and Fox Talbot’s from England became a matter of public interest, stimulating a momentous interaction of camera and printing press.⁶ Poe named one of the causes of this news bubble right at the beginning of his miscellany, rehearsing a widely held opinion about the daguerreotype in specific: “The instrument itself must undoubtedly be regarded as the most important, and perhaps the most extraordinary triumph of modern science.”⁷ The scientist Arago had offered a similar conclusion just a year earlier when he spoke of the extraordinary importance of the new technology to his own academic discipline, astronomy, and to a range of others. The scientist promised nothing less than a new age of accuracy. With the daguerreotype, scientific research had been handed an instrument of measuring and presentation so exact that it would furnish a novel basis for the claim to precision.

It is striking how two characteristics were regularly emphasized about the daguerreotype: the mathematical correctness of its image as a whole and the precision of its depiction of details. Against this background, the remarks that Poe went on to make in his article after his technical explanation are all the more noteworthy: “All language must fall short of conveying any just idea of the truth.”⁸ There was, in other words, no discourse for the form of visibility that photography provided precisely because this discourse could not reach for any metaphors or analogs external to the images being discussed. For Poe, this was reason enough to follow his linguistic skepticism with a stab at describing the daguerreotype’s specific aesthetic: “Perhaps, if we imagine the distinctness with which an object is reflected in a positively perfect mirror, we come as near the reality as by any other means. For, in truth, the Daguerreotyped plate is infinitely (we use the term advisedly) is infinitely more accurate in its representation than any painting by human hands.”⁹

Comparing the daguerreotype to a mirror may have been an obvious choice, given that the silvery shiny surface was part of the procedure’s conspicuous singularity. But Poe’s comparison aims further and resorts to a fulsome rhetoric of superlatives. With these images, a “perfect mirror” comes into view, one that provides a representational capacity “infinitely more accurate” than an actual mirror. Although few used such extreme praise, Poe was not at all alone in his emphatic approval of the daguerreotype. With such terms, he gave renewed expression to an assessment of infinite precision that had already been introduced by Arago and many others. He had adopted a mode of photo criticism and enhanced it with exaggerated praise that reached quasi-religious heights. Given the daguerreotype’s very real shortcomings for which one could have had doubt, what would be the consequences of such emphatic acclaim for the “infinitely accurate” medium?

Backstage

On January 7, 1839, when Arago used the first regular session of the New Year to present the technological and aesthetic principles of the daguerreotype to the assembled members of the Academy of Science,¹⁰ he approached this enterprise under difficult conditions. He had, apparently just days before,¹¹ received a detailed introduction to the foundations of this photographic procedure from Daguerre. At the same time, he was also allowed to lay eyes on some of the first daguerreotype specimens. But, to his academy colleagues, he could present nothing more than words. None of the sample images that Daguerre had produced in the years before and that could now attest to the functioning and efficiency of his procedure were allowed to leave his atelier at Boulevard du Temple. Concrete rumors about Daguerre’s trials had been spreading for some time, to such an extent that the Journal des Artistes published a surprisingly well-informed article on his photographic experiments as early as September 1835.¹² Apparently, Daguerre personally told a select few of his contemporaries about his progress – among them the heir to the French imperial throne and his wife, who paid Daguerre a visit in late 1837. But even such high callers were denied a glance at the artist’s images; he feared having to gift the couple one of these pictures.¹³

In Daguerre’s commitment to the progress of the visual arts, aesthetic and economic interests intersected. As the owner of a theater stage that presented large-format diaphanous paintings, he was accustomed to capitalizing on the development of novel aesthetic effects for more than artistic purposes.¹⁴ The commercial speculation that Daguerre had developed over the years with his famous diorama was now a well-developed strategic calculation that he could deploy for the licensing of his photographic procedure. Regulating the visibility of his invention, controlling information about the novelty, helped secure the daguerreotype as a lucrative source of income. No other subject was discussed in as much detail between the two contractually linked business partners who developed the procedure, Daguerre and Isidore Niépce.¹⁵ But it was Arago’s offer to advocate for the invention and to put its disclosure on the solid footing of a public campaign that brought the breakthrough and, finally, the prospect of rather significant financial success.¹⁶ Indeed, Daguerre could not have wished for a better advocate: as a well-respected scientist, science politician, and, not least, politician, Arago commanded a remarkably comprehensive influence in several fields of knowledge and government.¹⁷

Daguerre was clearly aware of Arago’s attributes. The exclamation with which he opens a letter of January 2, 1839, to his collaborator Isidore Niépce is telling: “Enfin j’ai vu M. Arago!”—“Finally, I have seen Mr. Arago!”¹⁸ In the subsequent letter, Daguerre gives his partner only a sweeping impression of what exactly he discussed with this newfound “tutor and godfather.”¹⁹ But this much is clear: Arago proposed to drop the less-than-promising idea of a subscription to the daguerreotype procedure and, instead, to lobby in Parliament for a life annuity of an appreciable amount, to be paid both to Daguerre and to Niépce by the French state for the rest of their lives. It can be easily gathered from any compendium on the history of photography that Arago would, in the coming months, up until the act of Parliament in July, and finally with the publication of the daguerreotype procedure in August of 1839, pursue just this strategy with remarkable success. But the part that the inventor played in this financially lucrative contract remains curiously underexposed. This is no accident. Although we can do little more than speculate on his contribution, evidence suggests that an arrangement had been made between Daguerre and Arago: in return for promising not to make his own public appearances, the inventor gave the scientist complete liberty to advocate for the procedure in public and to pull strings backstage.

Daguerre’s fame as the inventor of that procedure, which he had named after himself, spread within no time, even well outside France. For instance, the poet Népomucène Lemercier, a member of the Académie Française since 1810, was commissioned to recite an homage to Daguerre on the occasion of the annual meeting of all five French Academies in May of 1839.²⁰ Its three hundred verses can scarcely be surpassed in poetic and rhetorical splendor. The honoree would not have been present at this event. Indeed, it is notable how persistently Daguerre avoided the public and maintained his commitment to remain silent beyond the confines of his atelier. A glance at the domestic and international press from the first half of 1839, however, shows that Daguerre was all but idle in the meantime. For while Arago was busy in the Parliament and the Academy, appearing on the publicly visible proscenium, so to speak,²¹ Daguerre cleverly advocated his procedure under the atelier roof and thus on the backstage of media history.

Audition

At the end of January of 1839, just three wee...