Geoffrey Batchen
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The Art of the Cameraless Photograph Geoffrey Batchen DelMonico Books • Prestel Govett-Brewster Art Gallery munich london new york new plymouth, new zealand Emanations The Art of the Cameraless Photograph GEOFFREY BATCHEN 4 “The realists (of whom I am one) . do not take sentation and allowed instead to become a searing index the photograph for a ‘copy’ of reality, but for of its own operations, to become an art of the real. an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.” This freedom has sometimes come at a cost. Histories —ROLAND BARTHES1 of photography have traditionally favoured camera-made pictures, almost always beginning with accounts of the Stark white against a blue background, the spindly plant, camera obscura and with efforts to capture automatically a sprig of chamomile, strains upward, its flower pet- the images seen in it. Cameraless photographs are treated als spread as though reaching for the sun (FIG. 1). It’s a as second-class citizens in such histories, with Nicéphore cyanotype contact photograph of this plant, made by a Niépce’s view from his studio window regularly touted as now-unknown amateur naturalist in about 1900.2 It was the earliest extant photograph, despite the fact that there produced on postcard stock, with designated spaces for exist earlier photographic contact prints made by this correspondence and an address printed on the back, thus same inventor. In 1989, John Szarkowski stated this preju- allowing it to be sent to a friend or family member. The dice as a matter of fact: “the camera is central to our un- plant specimen would have been placed directly on the derstanding of photography . cameraless pictures . are cyanotype paper before both were exposed to daylight. of interest primarily as exercises that anticipate or further After an exposure of about fifteen -min explore discrete and partial aspects utes, an exact but ghostly impression of photography’s potentials. Outside of the stem, leaves, and flowers ap- the context of photography’s funda- peared, these opaque elements having mental agenda they would be less in- prevented light from activating the teresting than they are.”3 Szarkowski cyanotype’s chemistry. The plant was pushes cameraless photography to then removed and the card washed the margins, overlooking, perhaps, with water to eliminate any unex- that the margin of every photograph posed iron salts, rendering the paper is in fact already a photogram, a white insensitive to light and fixing the im- border created by the shadow of the age in place. The end result—part art, blade of an easel during the printing part science, and, let’s confess it, part process.4 Be that as it may, relatively magic—is a cameraless photograph. few cameraless photographs are in- Almost elemental in its simplici- cluded in overviews of photography’s ty, this kind of photograph is produced story, and a comprehensive history of through a direct contact between the the cameraless photograph has yet to world and a piece of light-sensitive be published. paper. Such photographs therefore Given its official status as a mere reduce photography to its most es- supplement to photography’s “funda- sential feature: the reaction of a given mental agenda,” it is striking just how surface to the absence and presence of light. Resulting in many ambitious photographers have chosen to make images that are both right up against the picture plane cameraless pictures. Could it be that putting the camera and floating in infinite depths, that are direct imprints of aside has allowed them to experiment in creative ways things but also disconcertingly stark abstractions, cam- with their medium that would not otherwise be possible? eraless photographs invite a consideration of the nature Can one in fact impart ideas or experiences in these kinds of photographic representation in general. Unmediated of photograph that can’t be expressed in other ways? by perspectival optics, photography is here presented as These questions seem worth pursuing. So do the origins something to be looked at, not through, and to be made, of the photographs themselves. Some of them, for exam- not taken. After all, a cameraless photograph is not just ple, have been generated by lightning or radioactivity, by of something; it is something. A reversed-tone inversion the warm touch of plants or the electrical field surround- of the natural order of things, such photographs even ing human fingertips, by the growth of bacteria or the en- appear to emit their own light, to emanate rather than ergy emitted by a cathode ray tube. Some faithfully trace record their images. Placed thus within the inverted com- the dirt and insects found squashed on a car windscreen mas of candid self-reflection, photography is freed from or the marks accidentally left on a blank piece of paper by its traditional subservient role as a realist mode of repre- a Xerox machine. Some document the imprint of botanical FIG. 1. Unidentified Artist u( nited StateS), Real Photo Postcard of botanical specimen, ca. 1900. Cyanotype postcard, 13.8 × 8.7 cm (53⁄8 × 37⁄16 in.). Collection of Geoffrey Batchen, Wellington 5 specimens or all the clothing from a single home. Others ideas were republished and cited in various magazines appear as chemical traces or deformations derived from over the following decades and were specifically referred photographic paper itself. In other words, cameraless to in John Herschel’s first paper on photography, deliv- photographic work is as varied in process, appearance, ered on March 14, 1839.7 However, these ideas seem to and meanings as any other body of photographs, and is have inspired few followers.8 just as deserving of our scrutiny. Wedgwood’s experiments were more substantial Much of this work has involved a unique, volatile, and, thanks to their publication by Humphry Davy in the and often unpredictable relationship of light and chem- Journals of the Royal Institution in June 1802, have left a re- istry, without recourse to the familiar conventions a sidual trace on the historical record. Titled “An Account of camera imposes on an image. No doubt this maverick a Method of Copying Paintings Upon Glass, and of Making potential is what has attracted the attention of so many Profiles, by the Agency of Light Upon Nitrate of Silver,” artists over the years, including a number not otherwise the article, jointly authored, notes various experiments committed to the practice of photography. But, as we’ve the two men had undertaken with white paper or leather already seen, the basic attributes of the cameraless pho- moistened with a solution of silver nitrate and exposed tograph are as evident in ordinary, vernacular examples to light.9 Despite their inability to make their images as in those produced by artists. And there have been lit- permanent, in the space of five short pages they describe erally countless cameraless photographs made over the an impressive range of photographic ideas and applica- past 200 years. After all, during the age of analog tech- tions. Wedgwood apparently began by attempting to cap- nology, contact prints were the first photographs anyone ture the image formed by the camera obscura and only ever made, shortly after being introduced to the mys- subsequently moved on to the problem of copying pre- teries of photographic chemistry. Pretty much everyone existing images. Of these, the two experimenters tried to who ever printed a photograph has made a cameraless copy paintings on glass (such as those used for projection one. In every sense, then, this is photography in its most devices) and “profiles of figures” (perhaps a reference to primal state. silhouette portraits). They also made contact prints using leaves and insect wings as well as engraved prints. Unable The Pioneers to prevent their light-sensitive solutions from continu- Indeed, history tells us that photography is by no means ing to develop and go black, none of these photographs dependent on the camera, for cameraless photographs survived for long. However, the essay was frequently were among the first to be produced and have often reprinted and its findings would have been familiar to any- been made in conjunction with camera pictures. Some one expert in chemistry in the early nineteenth century.10 scholars have suggested, for example, that the German The photographic experiments of a pair of French natural philosopher Johann Heinrich Schulze deserves to brothers, Claude and Nicéphore Niépce, were more suc- be included in the history of photography as the person cessful. These experiments—beginning with paper soaked who discovered, in 1727, the sensitivity to light of silver with chloride of silver and moving on to glass and metal salts. Independent of any camera, he demonstrated this plates coated with a light-sensitive solution of bitumen of capacity by pasting paper stencils of words and sentenc- Judea—were initiated in 1816 by the prospect of a grant es on a glass bottle containing a chalk and nitrous lime offered by the French government to improve the repro- mixture and then exposing them to light.5 According to ductive capacities of lithography. In keeping with this this account, then, the first photographic images were inducement, the earliest photographs made by the Niépce ephemeral traces of language, momentary inscriptions brothers were light-generated copies of engravings. In of culture in nature. Later that century, the earliest sus- 1822, for example, Nicéphore reported being able to make tained experiments with a photographic process, by an inverted copy of an oiled engraving of Pope Pius VII Elizabeth Fulhame and Thomas Wedgwood in England, placed directly on a glass plate coated in bitumen and ex- involved the making of images directly on photosensitive posed to sunlight.