sign in sign up
<<
Home , Cyanotype, John Dillwyn Llewelyn, Kirlian photography, Photographic plate

The Art of the Cameraless

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 have traditionally favoured -made pictures, almost always beginning with accounts of the Stark white against a blue background, the spindly plant, and with efforts to capture automatically a sprig of chamomile, strains upward, its flower pet- the images seen in it. Cameraless are treated als spread as though reaching for the sun (FIG. 1). It’s a as second-class citizens in such histories, with Nicéphore 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 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 , 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 , 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 itself. In other words, cameraless to in ’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 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. Similarly prepared and exposed pewter cloth, leather, or paper. Fulhame published her View to a plates were subsequently etched with acid to increase the New Art of Dying and Painting in 1794, recalling that some depth of the impression, allowing ink on paper positive fifteen years before, she had experimented with mak- prints to be pulled from this photographically inscribed ing patterns on cloth by utilizing the light sensitivity of metal matrix. One print that has survived, Cheval avec various metals.6 She now proposed making maps of rivers son conducteur (A Horse Being Led), dating from about formed from silver made dark by the action of light. Her July 1825, features a copy of a seventeenth-century Dutch

6 engraving by Dirck Stoop (PL. 1). Although Niépce also Geneva. This time, he had a friend make some drawings made experiments with images formed in a camera, the on sheets of varnished glass exposed to smoke, using an copying of existing pictures remained central to his work. engraver’s needle to scratch through this darkened sur- In September 1827, for example, Nicéphore visited London face. The procedure came to be known ascliché verre. As to see his sick brother, taking along several examples of Talbot later recalled, “when this is placed over a sheet of his (as he called it). According to Robert Hunt, prepared [photogenic drawing] paper, a very perfect copy writing in 1844, Niépce ended up leaving behind at least is obtained, every line which the needle has traced being seven photo-engraved metal plates, made using three represented by a dark line upon the paper” (PL. 25).13 One different processes, as well as two paper impressions of these drawings was a view of Geneva, as seen through printed in 1827 from yet another plate (a heliographic copy Talbot’s own window, but he also proposed to make pho- of a seventeenth-century engraving, Portrait of Cardinal tographic copies of handwriting in a similar fashion. Both d’Amboise, PL. 2).11 Six of those plates were engraved with the wonder and the limits of his achievement are well ex- copies of existing prints; that is, with cameraless repre- pressed in a letter he received from his sister-in-law, Laura sentations of what were already representations. Mundy, in December 1834. She thanks him for sending her Once again, however, the existence in London of “such beautiful shadows, the little drawing I think quite these pioneering photographs was lovely, that & the verses particularly soon forgotten. It was only in October excite my admiration. I had no idea the 1833 that the renowned English gen- art could be carried to such perfection. tleman scholar William Henry Fox I had grieved over the gradual dis- Talbot, attempting to make drawings appearance of those you gave me in with a camera lucida instrument while the summer & am delighted to have on his honeymoon in Italy, conceived these to supply their place in my of some experiments that might allow book.”14 It appeared that Talbot’s fix- “natural images to imprint themselves ing chemical—common salt—delayed durably, and remain fixed upon the but did not yet stop the development paper.”12 On his return to England in process entirely. 1834, Talbot drew on his knowledge of Unable to solve this problem and chemistry to brush sheets of writing frustrated by the relatively small and paper with common salt and then with indistinct images he had been able a solution of silver nitrate, resulting in to make in a camera obscura, in 1835 a substrate infused with particles of Talbot more or less put his photo- light-sensitive silver chloride. The first graphic experiments aside. Until, that images he made using this photoge- is, his attention was drawn to the an- nic drawing paper, as he later called nouncement in early January 1839 that it, were contact prints of pieces of lace a former business partner of Niépce, a (FIG. 2) or botanical specimens placed directly on the pa- French painter and designer by the name of Louis- per under a sheet of glass and then exposed to the sun Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, had invented his own photo- (PL. 4). A touchable object, like a scientific specimen, the graphic process. Named “” after himself, photograph was in the piece of paper but it also was the the process involved a complicated series of techniques piece of paper. One example is but a liquid smear of blue that resulted in a copper plate coated in a fragile but pho- fibres, the geometric pattern of the lace once imprinted in tosensitive amalgam of mercury and silver iodide. When them now barely discernible (PL. 3). As a primitive form of placed in the back of a camera and exposed to light, these printing-out paper, photogenic drawing images became plates were gradually transformed into sharp and detailed visible as Talbot watched. He could then stop their further pictures of whatever unmoving object the development with the addition of another solution of salt. camera was pointed at.15 With this news as a prompt, Talbot By this means, a shadowlike, reverse-toned photographic hastily arranged an exhibition of his photogenic drawings picture—what we would now call a —could be at the Royal Institution in London on January 25, 1839. produced and shared with others. Among them he included “pictures of flowers and leaves; Later that year, in August 1834, Talbot returned to a pattern of lace; figures taken from painted glass; a view Europe and continued his experiments during a stay in of Venice copied from an engraving,” as well as images

FIG. 2. William (England, 1800–1877), Lace, ca. 1834(?). Photogenic drawing negative, 8.9 × 6.2 cm (31⁄2 × 25⁄16 in.). Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

7 made using a solar microscope or a camera obscura.16 By early as April 1839. In that month, The Mirror of Literature, August, he was able to send a larger sample of photoge- Amusement, and Instruction published an engraved ver- nic drawings to a meeting of the British Association in sion of a photogenic drawing of three sprigs Birmingham that included sixty-four cameraless pictures of ferns on its cover, printed in rust tones to imitate the and twenty-one made with a camera obscura.17 look of the original photograph. According to the follow- The announcement of Talbot’s invention induced a ing issue, “the engraving gave a most accurate idea of the number of others to come forward with accounts of ear- photogenic picture, which represents the fern with such lier, if less resolved, experiments toward the same end. extreme fidelity that not only its veins, but the imperfec- For example, a Frenchman living in Brazil named Hercules tions, and accidental folding of the leaves of the specimen Florence claimed to have also pursued a photograph- are copied,—the greater opacity of the folded parts being ic process, having made contact stencil prints as early represented by the large white patches on our fac-simi- as 1829, before going on, in 1833, to make some pictures le.”20 On April 27, The Magazine of Science also devoted one with a camera obscura.18 No doubt he was one of many of its covers to wood-engraved “Fac-similes of Photogenic such pre-1839 experimenters, even if only a few put their Drawings,” two of botanical specimens and one of a con- names forward for posterity. Indeed, a story published tact print of a piece of lace (FIG. 3). This last image, in its in Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal on machine-made repetitions of geomet- October 19, 1839, is a reminder that ric patterns, was the very embodiment cameraless photographic images may of mass-production techniques, and well have been made for some time thus of industrial capitalism. The plant before photography was so named. specimens conjured nature, photog- raphy’s generative force, but also the We have ourselves a somewhat remarkable science of botany and its particular fact respecting photography to communicate representational demands. This, then, to the public. Since the subject came into is how most people in Britain first en- notice in Britain, a young Scotch barrister of our countered a photographic image. For acquaintance has brought to us a number of them, the original photograph was an specimens of the art, executed by himself and image at once cultural and natural, but his young companions, fifteen years ago, also an image made without a camera. when they were attending the grammar-school A botanist of international repute of Aberdeen. Photography, which has since himself, Talbot continued to make con- become the subject of so much interest and so tact prints of plants, with his photog- much discussion among grave men, was then raphy rendering them, as he wrote in and there practiced merely as one of the 1839, “with the utmost truth and fidel- ordinary amusements of the boys, a sheet of ity, exhibiting even the venation of the paper covered with nitrate of silver, and then leaves, the minute hairs that clothe held up to a sun-lit window with a leaf or feather or picture before it, the plant, etc.”21 As he pointed out, these prints also dem- being the whole mystery of the process. Our young friend has no onstrate photography’s capacity to save time and effort, recollection of its being considered as any thing either new or wonder- “for the object which would take the most skilful artist ful: it simply ranked amongst the other amusements which boys in a days or week of labour to trace or to copy, is effected by great school hand down from one to another. The specimens resemble the boundless powers of natural chemistry in the space those which have been exhibited during the last few months before of a few seconds.”22 By allying his invention with the auto- our scientific societies . . .19 mation of handcrafts, Talbot declares his contact prints to be a pictorial manifestation of an industrial process. It is The making of a photographic contact print, the well to keep this in mind when viewing his earliest exam- originary gesture for all photography, has its own origins ples; even the most seemingly innocent of Talbot’s imag- repeated to infinity, with no definitive beginning (and, es is animated by this larger context and its tumultuous as yet, no end either). The notion was reinforced by the consequences. earliest reproductions of photographic images. Wood- Many of his contact prints of plants simply involve engraved “fac-similes” of photogenic drawings made us- placing a specimen onto the middle of a piece of photoge- ing Talbot’s process were published in English journals as nic drawing paper and exposing both to light, as if to rep-

FIG. 3. Cover of The Magazine of Science, London, April 27, 1839: “Fac-similes of Photogenic Drawings.” 15.5 × 11.5 cm (61⁄8 × 41⁄2 in.). Turnbull Library, Wellington

8 licate the symmetrical exactitude of pre-photographic a significant choice at a time when the British textile in- botanical illustrations (PL. 5). Others have been composed dustry was being transformed by industrialization. But with their stems protruding from one edge of the pic- it also allowed him to demonstrate the exact, indexical ture, as though they have been photographed from side copying of intricate details that photography could pro- on, with a camera. But some, like a rendition of a cascade vide. On January 23, 1839—before he had even publicly of spruce needles, offer a new kind of image altogether. announced his invention—he sent a photogenic drawing The photograph makes it look as though the needles are of a piece of lace to Sir William Jackson Hooker to show to tumbling through space in front of a camera, falling from manufacturers in Glasgow. Hooker wrote back on March top to bottom of the picture plane, apparently caught in 20, 1839, to report that “your specimen of Photogenic an instant of light-sensitive exposure. But we have to re- drawing . . . has interested the Glasgow people very much, member that this is a contact print, produced when Talbot especially the Muslin Manufacturers—& also excited scattered some needles across his horizontal sheet of great attention at a Scientific Meeting.”26 In a paper deliv- prepared paper, so that they lay there statically in the sun ered on January 31, 1839, Talbot tells the story of showing long enough to leave an impression (PL. 6). Having given just such a photograph of lace to a group of friends and the play of chance full rein, he then fixed whatever image asking them whether it was a “good representation.” They happened to result, thereby reproducing photographi- replied that they were not so easily fooled, for it “was cally the unpredictable operations of nature’s own mode evidently no picture, but the piece of lace itself.”27 This of reproduction. Despite the slowness of his exposure gratifying story demonstrated that contact printing was times, Talbot here found a way to represent contingency, able to present the lace as a persuasive pictorial illusion eventually to be regarded as an essential characteristic of white lines on coloured paper. His photograph of lace of his medium. But a picture of this kind also collapses looked like the real thing. any distinction between figure and ground (as well as be- When Talbot included one of these lace negatives tween up and down), and its edge becomes an arbitrary in the December 1845 fascicle of The Pencil of Nature, a cut within a field of potentially infinite elements rather book of his photographs, his accompanying text careful- than a rational frame surrounding a discrete object. It’s a ly explained the difference between a contact print (“di- picture, in other words, that decisively breaks with all re- rectly taken from the lace itself”) and the positive copies ceived conventions of picture making. that could be taken from this first print (in which case, he At one point, Talbot imagined that his invention says, “the lace would be represented black upon a white would “enable poor authors to make facsimiles of their ground”) (PL. 8).28 He acknowledges, in other words, the works in their own handwriting.”23 As if to provide a exact reversal of tones that is such a distinctive aspect model of this procedure, in about April 1840 Talbot bor- of the contact print. Almost always a negative inversion rowed a page of a manuscript written by Lord Byron from of whatever it represents, a cameraless photograph can’t his neighbor, Byron’s biographer Thomas Moore. He then help but be an exercise in othering.29 Unperturbed, Talbot made at least three photogenic drawing contact prints goes on to suggest that a negative image of lace is per- of this page, the last stanza of Byron’s 1814 poem Ode to fectly acceptable, “black lace being as familiar to the eye Napoleon Buonaparte (PL. 7). Talbot even made positive as white lace, and the object being only to exhibit the prints from two of these negatives, proving that photog- pattern with accuracy.”30 So Talbot recognises from the raphy could indeed be capable of reproducing old texts outset that photography provides an indexical truth-to- in exact multiple copies.24 The final grandiloquent flourish presence, even if not necessarily a truth-to-appearance. on this particular page reinforces the idea that this is an A photograph, he reminds us, tells us that something was exact and automatic replica of a trace of the actual au- there, but not exactly what it looked like. Here, then, was thor’s hand. But photographic contact prints in fact con- a visual reiteration of yet another key idea about the na- fused precisely this kind of authorial certainty, at least for ture of the photographic medium. themselves. As Talbot described the operations of pho- The announcement of Talbot’s discoveries en- tography, “by means of this contrivance, it is not the art- couraged many others, in Britain and elsewhere, to ex- ist who makes the picture, but the picture which makes periment with the making of cameraless photographic ITSELF.”25 Here was a complication that many later pho- pictures. A photogenic drawing of a feather made in 1839 tographers would seek to exploit. by , the man who actually announced Lace was another of Talbot’s earliest and most fre- Talbot’s invention, has survived (FIG. 4). So has a contact quent photographic subjects. As we’ve heard, this was print of some leaves of grass made on March 21, 1839, by

9 Nicolaas Henneman, Talbot’s valet and photographic as- Exploiting this invention, Talbot’s colleague Anna sistant.31 Indeed, as Talbot busily sent examples to friends Atkins issued albums of cyanotype prints of seaweed and family members throughout 1839, as well as to col- and algae from 1843, and these are often regarded as the leagues overseas, we can imagine repeated versions earliest photographic books. Using William Harvey’s un- of the scene described by his cousin Charlotte Louisa illustrated Manual of British Algae of 1841 as her guide, Traherne, writing to Talbot on February 28, 1839: “I was Atkins tells us in her introduction to Part 1 of British charmed with the piece of lace you sent, it is much too Algae: Cyanotype Impressions that she was attempting pretty to have it again, John Llewelyn has been making a “systematic arrangement,” trying to photographically some paper according to your process and they are all represent “the Tribes and Species in their proper order.”35 busy trying little scraps of lace and ribbon one succeed- Atkins carefully composed each image, resulting in a ed very well this morning before breakfast but the day is symmetrical print in which the piece of seaweed floats in clouding over.”32 an appropriately blue sea of (PL. 19). This symmetry Those particular experiments are lost, but we can enhances her scientific ambitions with the aesthetic of still point to a picture of a shark egg case, one of six reasoned placement. Where necessary, specimens were photogenic drawing contact prints probably made in folded over onto themselves so that the whole plant could the summer of 1839 by Sarah Anne be pictured on a single sheet. Even Bright (PL. 10), and another made by Atkins’ accompanying text is a cyano- Talbot’s Welsh colleague Nevil Story- type contact print. Lacking any hint of Maskelyne of a lace cuff PL.( 9), as well periodicity, these look as as some leaves apparently recorded if they were made yesterday, offering by Sebastiano Tassinari in Italy (PL. a trace from the past that neverthe- 11) and a specimen of Circaea luteti- less always remains contemporary. ana imprinted photogenically by M. In the 1850s, Atkins collaborated Carey Lea in the United States (PL. 12). with Anne Dixon to produce at least On April 6, 1839, John Herschel even three presentation albums of cyano- brushed some silver chloride onto type contact prints, including Cyano- the bottom of a letter he sent to a types of British and Foreign Ferns botanist friend living in South Africa, (1853) and Cyanotypes of British and thus allowing him to add an actual Foreign Flowering Plants and Ferns photograph to his description of the (1854) (FIG. 5). British and Foreign process (PL. 13). Others had the same Ferns included examples from places idea: on April 15, another English- like Jamaica and Australia, allowing man, the artist George Tytler, sent a for a global, or at least an imperial, similarly imbibed letter to a Scottish perspective. The later albums also ex- friend, passing on several images hibit a more creative arrangement of he made directly on the same piece of paper.33 their plant forms, signaled by their cover designs, along Herschel’s scientific notebooks are full of his photo- with individual plates featuring loose decorative displays graphic experiments, with one from February 1839 stri- of peacock, emu, parrot, duck, and partridge feathers and ated with divided vertical columns filled in with chemical of pieces of lace (PL. 20). solutions, evidence of his sustained interest in the effects Early French photographers also explored the of different coloured light on a range of light-sensitive creative potential of cameraless photography. One of substances, including those derived from vegetables. A Daguerre’s rivals, Hippolyte Bayard, had invented his later example consists of four horizontal stripes of light- own direct positive paper-based photographic process sensitive solutions, again deployed to test their relative in early 1839.36 The first page of an album devoted to his reactions to different colours. The bottom stripe, with its photographic experiments consists of two segmented liquid intimations of blue and violet, is comprised of an iron sequences of coloured rectangles, a kind of test pattern compound (PL. 14). In a paper delivered to the Royal Society of light-sensitive chemistry (PL. 15). Although not record- on June 13, 1842, Herschel proposed a photographic pro- ing anything other than their own sensitivity to light, and cess involving a similar iron salt that resulted in Prussian thus failing to prove the efficacy of his process as a way blue images; he decided to call this “cyanotype.”34 of automatically making pictures, Bayard nevertheless

FIG. 4. Michael Faraday (England, 1791–1867), Feather, 1839. Photogenic drawing negative, 22.1 × 14.2 cm (83⁄8 × 53⁄8 in.). Courtesy of Hans P. Kraus Jr., New York

10 FIG. 5. Anna Atkins (England, 1799–1871), section title page from Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns, 1854. Cyanotype, 35.5 × 24.7 cm (14 × 93⁄4 in.). J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

11 kept and mounted these experiments. To him, they were Whether or not he ever heard this challenge direct all simply photographs. On his third page, we are shown from the ’s inventor, five years later, in March more complex examples, including some that are almost 1846, Claudet sought to meet it. Note that Claudet re- painterly in their curvilinear swathes of hues. These rect- peats a type of photograph—a contact print of a piece angular fields of colour are followed on subsequent pages of lace—that was among the first and most frequent of by contact prints of pieces of lace, botanical specimens, Talbot’s own photographs. and engravings, along with camera-made photographs of plaster statuettes and even of Bayard himself.37 The album SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERIES. The London correspondent of the therefore obeys a logical narrative, opening with photog- Boston Atlas, describing a scientific soiree, says: raphy’s self-portraits before proceeding to those of the What seems to cause the greatest astonishment, is an impression photographer. of black lace upon a daguerreotype plate, by the light of the stars! Bayard also experimented with the cyanotype pro- M. Claudet, in referring to this phenomenon, observed, that he consid- cess. One example from an album dated about 1842 has its ered it as proof of the chemical power of star-light. He said that unusually diverse array of components—leaves, flowers, he had prepared a plate in the usual manner, covered it with a piece three feathers, some lace, and a square of woven cloth— of black lace, and exposed it to the then brightest part of the sky, scattered haphazardly across the entire picture plane, the constellation Ursa Major, nearly at the zenith. It was left to the ignoring both symmetry and the implied order of taxon- influence of these, and the surrounding stars, for about fifteen omy in the interests of an over- minutes, which sufficed to impress all patterned effect (PL. 16). Art, the black lace upon the plate.40 rather than science, seems to be the guiding logic. Like Talbot’s Unfortunately, Claudet’s rendition of spruce needles, this star-powered daguerreotype kind of composition abandons of lace has not survived to the the perspectival focus provid- present. However, other da- ed by both the camera and a guerreotypists did find ways centralised referent. Instead, it to make striking images with- actively decentres the observer, out the use of a camera. The asking us to cast our eyes back pioneering American photog- and forth over the photograph rapher John William Draper, for by offering no singular resting example, produced a number of point, and thus no visual con- impressions of the solar spec- firmation of a stable position in trum as cast by a glass prism space and time. It offers, in other onto daguerreotype plates, words, a strikingly modern viewing experience. using a convex lens to focus each of the coloured rays Given the fragility of its surface, the daguerreo- in succession. On September 26, 1842, he sent a version type process did not lend itself to contact printing. But he had made in Virginia to Herschel, annotated both on this doesn’t mean that none were made. Talbot himself the plate and in its margins (PL. 17). Consisting of noth- talks about having made a contact print of lace on a sil- ing but a thin vertical line, only the addition of this coded vered plate as early as September 1839: “very pretty, & text—soon followed by competing interpretive essays by is different in effect than Daguerre’s.”38 In a later letter each man in the Philosophical Magazine—converted this to Herschel, dated July 1, 1841, he went on to issue an image from abstraction into science.41 In similar fashion, imaginary challenge to the French-born London-based in 1844 the French physicist Léon Foucault collaborated photographer Antoine Claudet regarding Talbot’s latest with physician Armand Hippolyte Fizeau to try and pho- invention, the calotype process: “It is a nice point to de- tograph light itself. To that end, they carefully exposed termine which is the most sensitive to light, my Calotype a silvered daguerreotype plate to three different kinds paper, or the Daguerreotype improved by Claudet’s pro- of light for different periods of time in an effort to mea- cess. I am sensitive to simple moonlight; he has not yet sure their respective intensities. These exposures were made the trial, which I throw out as a challenge to all recorded as a series of vertical stripes (PL. 18).42 The da- photographers of the present day: viz. that I grow dark in guerreotype, initially celebrated for its unprecedented moonlight before they do.”39 ability to capture minute details, is here reduced to a

FIG. 6. Blanche Shelley (England, 1841–1898), Daffodil and Ferns, April 18, 1854. Photogenic drawing negative, 17.1 × 20.4 cm (63⁄4 × 81⁄16 in.). Courtesy of Hans P. Kraus Jr., New York

12 graph, to a picture of nothing—of nothing, that is, but its his Talbotype process in 1841. On December 11, 1848, own capacity to represent anything. one of his associates, Thomas Malone, exposed a piece Most professional daguerreotype studios focused of sensitised calotype paper to the intense light of their efforts on the lucrative business of making por- some burning phosphorous as part of a lecture, “On traits or landscape views. Nevertheless, contact prints of the Chymical Action of Light on Paper,” he was con- botanical specimens continued to be made throughout ducting at the Western Literary & Scientific Institution the nineteenth century, especially by amateur photog- in London (PL. 23). The sign of success was the appear- raphers interested in exploring the patterns left on their ance in the middle of the picture plane of the word “tal- photographic papers by various flowers and leaves. This botype,” outlined by a stencil that had been laid upon gave such prints a distinctive class allegiance; the da- the paper.47 In this case, the name of the photograph is guerreotype was associated with those in trade, whereas the photograph. In about 1858, Talbot produced a sim- paper photographs tended to be made by those with lei- ilarly reflexive contact print of a French label for hypo- sure and independent means. sulfite of soda, highlighting the name of the substance Thus do we find the maker of the so-calledHatton that fixed or destroyed photographic images, depend- Fern Album in about 1850 juxtaposing a fern (a sample ing on its degree of concentration.48 Talbot’s print circu- of Paris arguta) with this same specimen’s cyanotype lated as a photoglyphic engraving, a photomechanical impression.43 An English album maker named Blanche process invented by him to supersede the uncertainties Shelley made a similarly delicate contact print using of calotype production by printing photographs in per- Talbot’s photogenic drawing process and a daffodil and manent ink on paper. One medium is recorded in another ferns as late as 1854 (FIG. 6).44 In about the same year, an- as a way of declaring that the first is now obsolescent, a other Englishwoman, Cecilia Glaisher, proposed the publi- palimpsest that allows both to be visible simultaneously. cation of an album of salted paper impressions to be titled An earlier version of this engraving process involved The British Ferns Represented in a Series of Photographs.45 the coating of a steel plate with a potassium bichromate– By then, new processes involving collodion on glass neg- sensitised , which hardened when ex- atives and salted paper albumen prints had been intro- posed to light. Once again Talbot described it in terms of duced. In 1875, for example, the French photographer an ability to make accurate photographic imprints with- P. E. Delarche produced an albumen photograph of a flow- out a camera: “The objects most easily and successfully ering specimen. Having carefully centred the specimen engraved are those which can be placed in contact with on his paper, he hand coloured the resulting image, re- the metallic plate,—such as the leaf of fern, the light feath- storing to it the illusion of life (PL. 21). This effort betrays ery flowers of a grass, a piece of lace, etc. In such cases a long-standing desire to move beyond monochromatic the engraving is precisely like the object; so that it would photography and record the world in full colour. In 1869, almost seem to any one, before the process was explained another Frenchman, Louis Ducos du Hauron, displayed a to him, as if the shadow of the object had itself corroded diversely coloured contact print of leaves and flowers to the metal,—so true is the engraving to the object.”49 After prove that he could indeed achieve such a result (PL. 22). the plate had been etched, multiple photographic images Using a sequence of green, orange, and violet filters, Ducos of these objects could be reproduced in ink on paper. To du Hauron printed on thin sheets of bichromated gelatin demonstrate this process, which he called photographic containing carbon pigments of red, blue, and yellow, thus engraving, Talbot printed two or more sheets of gauze allowing the production of “naturally” coloured photo- layered over each other at oblique angles, resulting in graphic images. In the same year as he made his camera- varying densities of tonality (PL. 24).50 The result is a half- less example, Ducos du Hauron described his results in Les tone image of a halftone image, as if we were looking into couleurs en photographie: Solution du problème (Colours a pair of confronting mirrors, “each seeing the other in it- in Photography: Solution to the Problem).46 Although a self, and itself in the other.”51 Talbot, having invented the commercially viable solution was in fact still some way off, negative-positive system of photography that dominat- its possibility could no longer be denied. ed the nineteenth century, had now introduced a version Other cameraless photographs from the 1840s of the photo-mechanical process of reproduction that and ’50s were of a more conceptual kind. Having con- would similarly dominate the twentieth. ceived of a new and quicker photographic formula bet- Although probably unaware of Talbot’s earlier ter able to compete with the daguerreotype, Talbot experiments with the cliché verre technique, a group had patented his calotype, or, as his mother preferred, of artists associated with the Barbizon movement in

13 France adopted this same practice in the 1850s, includ- Enslen, who, at the age of eighty, illustrated his com- ing Charles Daubigny, Jean-François Millet, and Jean- mitment to both nationalism and the study of nature by Baptiste-Camille Corot. An image was sketched with a surrounding an engraved portrait of Frederick the Great sharp instrument by scratching through a dried collodi- with impressions of butterflies, feathers, and botanical on layer applied to a sheet of glass. In the case of Corot, specimens.54 In September 1840, Talbot took receipt of a a salted paper photograph was then contact printed gift of three of Enslen’s photogenic drawing montages, in- from this glass sheet by one of his friends, either Eugène cluding one that superimposed a leaf over a photograph Cuvelier or Léandre Grandguillaume.52 The resulting pho- of an engraved head of Christ, a neat visual encapsulation tographs demonstrate the fluid, intimate gestures and of natural philosophy as a theological project (PL. 30). In rapid hatching Corot adopted for this process and the such montages, two images, each representing distinct consistently even tones that made moments in time and space, are brought together as a possible, along with this artist’s interest in capturing nos- single photographic surface, thus providing the experi- talgic, almost elegiac, scenes of a vanishing rural lifestyle ence of an otherwise impossible simultaneity of terms. or of classical themes set in a landscape (PL. 26). But it also Photography, so commonly associated with a faithful re- shows Corot’s interest in exploring new ways of making alism, is, from its very first year, shown to also be capa- multiple editions of his work, for he produced over sixty- ble of a strange kind of constructedness, even of pointed five individual cliché verre images during his career. commentary. These are photographs, then, that don’t so It is often forgotten that architectural , much affirm a belief in the truthfulness of photographs as being contact prints on cyanotype paper from a translu- invite us to suspend it. cent drawing, are also a form of cliché verre photograph. Sometimes these montages were made with an They first became commercially popular as a way of print- explicitly political purpose in mind. In about 1853, while ing cheap maps for the Klondike gold rush of the 1890s. he was in exile on the island of Jersey, off the coast of The ability to reproduce topographical drawings quickly Normandy, Victor Hugo collaborated with his son Charles and in large numbers had an obvious military utility and to produce photographs that could be sent back to re- thousands were produced during the First World War, al- publican supporters in France.55 One of them, a lowing the shifting boundaries and dangers of No Man’s from a collodion negative, shows Victor with his elbow Land to be identified on a frequent basis (PL. 27). Only in on some rocks, gazing wistfully toward home. At some the 1940s did blueprints come to be replaced by diazo point, this negative was artfully embellished with an add- (ammonia) prints, which generated drawings with blue/ ed of contact-printed leaves, along with the ex- violet lines against a whitish background. Interestingly, a ile’s name and location in capital letters, and then printed number of Australian artists, some working in Melbourne again (PL. 31). This strategic combination brings flatness and some in London, issued prints in the 1940s and early and depth together in the same picture plane, drawing ’50s using paper, perhaps because, during the our eye deep into the scene, to the soulful figure of Hugo, deprivations that attended the aftermath of the Second and then back to the surface of the print and its shadowy World War, it was a cheap and available material. James assemblage of leaves. It turns the photograph into a self- Cant, for example, an artist interested in both Surrealism conscious thing in the present rather than allowing it to and Australian Aboriginal art, brought the two togeth- remain simply a window onto the past. er in his designs for a portfolio titled Six Signed Artist’s A similar technique must have been used in about Prints that he issued in a print run of 150 in 1948 (PL. 28).53 1854 to make a portrait of the Welsh scientist Thereza Photographers quickly discovered one advantage Dillwyn Llewelyn looking through her microscope. In 1853, that contact printing had over camera-made pictures: the she herself had put together an album of twelve of her relative ease with which combinations of images could photogenic drawing contact prints of marine algae, be made. As early as February 26, 1839, Herschel was able gathered at Caswell.56 In her portrait, seemingly made by to superimpose a character over a leaf, fixing the result her father, Llewelyn is encircled by a wreath of contact- with hyposulfite of soda, his widely adopted solution to printed ferns, perhaps intended as an ocular metaphor the problem of stopping photographs from continuing that aptly reiterates her own act of enhanced seeing to develop (PL. 29). He thus initiated a practice of assem- (FIG. 7).57 The combination of camera-made and camera- blage that has been a strong presence in photographic less images is repeated in a portrait of Kate Dore work ever since. Similar combination prints were made, produced by Oscar Rejlander and Julia Margaret Cameron for example, by the German experimenter Johann Carl (PL. 32). There is at least one other contact print of

14 botanical specimens made by Cameron from around version of the bones of his hand became visible against a 1862.58 Could it be that the direct fragments of nature in fluorescent panel when he held that hand in front of the the combination print were Cameron’s contribution to tube’s light source. He thus discovered so-called x-rays this photographic expression of an ideal femininity, un- and the opacity of bone to these same rays. He immediate- dertaken while she was still learning the art for which she ly set about turning this phenomenon into a photographic is now so renowned? image, first taking a radiograph of his door (showing only Anna Atkins had proved the efficacy of the cyano- the metal handle and traces of lead-based paint). He then type process as a way of making accurate contact prints made a contact print of his wife Bertha’s left hand and its that could be bound into book form. A number of similar wedding ring resting on a , using an efforts appeared later in the nineteenth century. Charles exposure of about fifteen minutes. She reportedly shud- F. Himes, an American, published his Untitled (“Leaf Print dered at the sight, having, she said, “a vague premonition or Glimpses at Photography”) in 1868, including an al- of death” (PL. 35).61 Interestingly, in the craze for taking x- bumen contact print of such a leaf as his frontispiece. ray pictures that followed, a woman’s hand, with ring, was Herschel’s daughter Julia employed his invention to a popular choice of subject; a technology that allowed all illustrate A Handbook for Greek and Roman Lace Making, sexual identity to be dissolved nevertheless had it insis- which she self-published in 1869 tently reasserted through the in- with twenty-two cyanotype con- clusion of this wearable sign of the tact prints of both pieces of lace feminine. and hand-drawn ink copies of the Science had now demon- same (PL. 33).59 Herbert Dobbie, a strated that a completely invis- railway station master and ama- ible emanation could manifest its teur botanist who emigrated to presence on a photographic plate. New Zealand from England in 1875, Within a year of Röntgen’s discov- made cyanotype contact prints of ery, more than a thousand articles specimens of all 148 known spe- and almost fifty books had been cies of fern in his new country in published about it, and x-ray imag- 1880 and sold them in album form ery had become a global phenom- (PL. 34). Dobbie was responding to enon. Some photographers sought a local fashion for collecting and to emphasise the aesthetic poten- displaying ferns, a fashion driven tial of the new medium. In 1896, for in part by nostalgia for a pre- example, a duo of Austrian chem- modern style of life and in part by ists, Josef Maria Eder and Eduard incipient nationalism (“Fernland” Valenta, issued fifteen finely being an early colloquial name for printed photogravures under the New Zealand: the first Māori rugby title Versuche über Photographie team toured Britain in the same decade with a silhouett- mittelst der Röntgen’schen Strahlen (Experiments on ed fern emblazoned on their jerseys).60 The end result is a Photography by Means of Röntgen’s Rays), with each plate group of images that hover somewhere between science a carefully arranged disposition of a given specimen, from and art, between popular aesthetic enjoyment and com- a human hand to a pair of frogs to a beautifully articulated mercial profit. snake skeleton (PL. 36). The title of a particularly interest- ing plate can be translated as Table of the Permeability of The Wonders of Science Various Substances to Röntgen Rays, and consists of an Cameraless photography remained a relatively minor x-rayed array of designated items, from a piece of zinc to a practice during the later nineteenth century, with one sample of flint glass. The abstraction of this composition is notable exception: the field of science. On December 22, repeated in an album of albumen contact prints of x-rays 1895, medicine—in the figure of German-Dutch physicist issued by the Portuguese photographer Augusto Bobone, Wilhelm Röntgen—found a way to allow photography to also in 1896. Appearing, inevitably, beside an image go beneath the opacity of the skin and reveal hitherto un- of a woman’s left hand decorated with rings, plate 44 of known corporeal landscapes. Working in an enclosed room Bobone’s album compares the x-ray shadows left by a key with a cathode-ray tube, Röntgen noticed that a shadow- with those of various other, nonmedical items, just to see

FIG. 7. John Dillwyn Llewelyn (Wales, 1810–1882), Thereza Dillwyn Llewelyn with Her Microscope, ca. 1854. Salted paper photograph from collodion glass negative, 23.5 × 18.7 cm (91⁄4 × 73⁄8 in.). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1981.1229.5) 15 how they all might look when photographed in this way.62 ing crystallization (which he suspected might be capa- Röntgen was not the only scientist pushing photog- ble of being read like an ancient script) in paper contact raphy to new limits. French physicist Henri Becquerel had, prints. In 1893–94, while in Dornbach, Austria, he placed like Draper, managed to record aspects of the solar spec- some glass photographic plates on a windowsill or on the trum on a daguerreotype plate in 1848. Almost fifty years ground and exposed them to the nighttime sky, without later, on February 27, 1896, Becquerel was conducting ex- any further intervention. Photographs derived from these periments on the phenomenon of fluorescence, seeking to plates, his “celestographs,” were sent to the French as- expand on the discovery of x-rays. By chance he wrapped tronomer Camille Flammarion in Paris, helpfully inscribed his fluorescing crystals—a compound—in a on the reverse (“Stars. The Orion region”). Dark, almost black cloth bag, along with a copper Maltese cross and a earth-coloured, and now sometimes further marked by photographic plate. When he looked again several days ink or grease stains, these photographs are speckled with later, he was surprised to find a faint impression of the dots and other deformations, analogies, if not necessarily cross on the plate, apparently caused by some otherwise direct transcriptions, of a greater world of phenomena invisible radiation emitted by the uranium. After sev- (PL. 38). As Strindberg himself wrote, “nothing is more eral more deliberate experiments, using slitted screens pleasant than having your imagination in motion.”64 made from aluminium, he conclud- Inspired by Röntgen’s discover- ed that the uranium salt was indeed ies, other experimenters speculated the cause of the photographic im- about the possibility of photographi- ages he was creating, a property that cally recording equally phantasma- Marie and Pierre Curie came to call gorical radiations not yet recognised “radioactivity.” The photographic by official science. A retired French proofs of this property were images soldier named Louis Darget took to that looked like an emblematic ris- strapping unexposed photographic ing sun, the source of all life (PL. 37). plates to people’s foreheads, claiming This discovery led to others, result- the resulting photographs to have ing in the production of x-ray diffrac- captured evidence of “V-rays, hu- tion photographs of crystal lattices man radioactivity,” or, more direct- by Max von Laue and his team in 1912 ly, the visible impressions of dreams and of the double helix structure of or thoughts (FIG. 8).65 Conceived as DNA crystals by Rosalind Franklin scientific experiments, these pho- and R. G. Gosling in 1952. Like x-rays, tographs come with Darget’s hand- the patterns recorded in these sci- written inscriptions, describing his entific photographs, patterns that method and helpfully interpreting seemed to be traces of nature’s own the otherwise abstract imagery his eminently abstract tendencies, had process has produced (“Photograph a huge impact on the popular imagination. of Thought: Planet and Satellite”) (PL. 39). As in the concur- But these sorts of discoveries also transformed un- rently developing science of psychoanalysis, it might be derstandings of the photograph. Thanks to science, pho- said that the narrative derived from the image revealed tography was now as much about the invisible as the more about the desires of the photographer than about visible, apparently able to reveal the inner life of whatev- the thoughts of the subject who had been photographed. er or whoever it pictured. It was a small step to specula- Despite this danger, a number of studies were made of tion about the existence of electrical fluids and invisible the powers of , using photographs as evidence of vital forces (Röntgen himself had referred to an electri- their ability to channel similarly mysterious forces. In 1921, cal ether as the agent of his x-ray pictures). The Swedish the London-based Australian medium Madge Donohoe playwright August Strindberg, for example, decided that pressed photographic plates against her face, the re- he wanted to “imitate . . . nature’s way of creating,” and for sult being enigmatic images—apparently a visual code him this meant harnessing chance operations in the pur- sent from the spirit world—that came to be called “skoto- suit of artistic creation.63 Among other efforts, he placed graphs” (PL. 40).66 F. W. Warrick’s 1939 book Experiments in saline solutions directly onto his photographic plates Psychics: Practical Studies in Direct Writing, Supernormal and exposed them to heat and cold, recording the result- Photography and Other Phenomena, devoted a chapter to

FIG. 8. Louis Darget (France, 1847–1923), Photographie du Rêve: L’Aigle, June 25, 1896. Gelatin silver photograph (“Obtained by placing a photographic plate above the forehead of Mme Darget while she was asleep”), 9.0 × 6.5 cm (35⁄8 × 29⁄16 in.). Institut für Grenzgebiete 16 der Psychologie und Psychohygiene, Fribourg-en-Brisgau the skotographs he witnessed being made by a Mrs. Ada David Winter recorded the extraordinary results on a col- Deane between 1923 and 1928, reproducing numerous ex- lodion glass plate placed in that gap in about 1865 (PL. 41). amples of the “freakish results . . . the origin of which I can- Cameraless photography was now capable of capturing a not account for.”67 picture of nature—of life itself—at its most elemental and As early as 1861, the Austrian scientist Karl Ludwig unpredictable. An image very much like this one was cho- Freiherr von Reichenbach had conducted experiments sen by André Breton as one of the illustrations to his essay to photographically capture electromagnetic radiations “Beauty Will Be Convulsive,” published in the Surrealist emitted by the human body, which he called the “od.” He magazine Minotaure in 1934. Breton added a caption arranged to have various substances and objects succes- identifying his image as a product of , sively placed on an unexposed collodion plate, including thereby reimagining it as an exemplary art project.71 his own hand. The plate had been masked with geometri- In March 1896, the Russian scientist Jakob von cal shapes cut into a sheet of pasteboard, and the impres- Narkiewicz-Jodko sought to use another version of this sions of these that subsequently appeared on the plate instrument to prove the existence of a universal vital were ascribed to these otherwise invisible emissions.68 force or effluvia. A Ruhmkorff coil, a vacuum tube, and a The discovery of x-rays encouraged further experiments photographic plate were linked by wire, allowing the op- along these same lines. Henceforth, for some, photo- erator to put his hand on the plate in the dark and record graphic science became a kind of theology of the visual, the resulting electrical flow PL.( 42). According to one en- a spiritualist or magical art of the body and its secret or thusiast, the image that resulted “in every way resembled hidden emanations.69 In 1896, for example, the French the effluvia that sensitives see coming from the fingers of doctor Hippolyte Baraduc published a book, The Human a person in the normal state.”72 This kind of image came Soul: Its Movements, Its Lights, and the Iconography of the to be known as , associated by name Fluidic Invisible, in which he suggested the possibility of with the similar experiments conducted by the Russian a “spontaneous iconography” created by the luminous vi- electrical engineer Semyon Kirlian and his wife Valentina bration of one’s soul: “The invisible fluid manifests itself in 1939. Thanks to a coronal discharge, the body is shown by its own intimate, luminous, intrinsic force . . . In a word, as if flaring with an inner field, a field the Kirlians one must know how to induce the psycho-odo-fluid cur- imagined could offer an insight into the physical and rent which the plate records as it passes by.”70 He made emotional states of their subjects. Such images promise over 200 photographs of this “iconography” to illustrate to make visible what is otherwise beyond sight, to allow his thesis, including one extraordinary cyanotype im- photography to venture beyond its obstinate dedication pression of a burst of energy. It is worth noting that, in to the recording of surfaces and appearances and be- all these cases, a camera was regarded as an inhibiting or come, in its stead, the perfect medium. distorting instrument. For these images to have the force All of these examples call on the presumed truth val- of evidence, of reportage, they needed to be direct, unme- ues associated with the photograph, and especially with diated transcriptions of the vital fluids at work. the cameraless photograph, to provide proof in the face The question, of course, is what such images are evi- of a presumed skepticism. The same motivation can nev- dence of. As Darget’s work demonstrates, interpretation ertheless lead to the production of remarkably different is a crucial element of the evidentiary status of all sci- kinds of images. Georges Demenÿ and Edouard Quénu are entific photographs. Baraduc’s “electrophotographie” of thought to have been responsible for a series of contact the vital fluid whose existence he sought to prove looks prints on “smoked paper” of human feet, issued in 1889, remarkably similar to an equally stark cyanotype made each print numbered and annotated by an explanatory using an electrostatic generator capable of producing a handwritten text, signs of the systematic procedure of a spark of electricity at high voltage, operated by a now- scientific experiment. Designed to demonstrate the effects unknown French experimenter. Many different kinds of muscular atrophy, the experiment shows a left and right of machines were designed to generate such sparks. A foot before walking, the same feet after a four-kilometer German-born instrument maker named Heinrich Daniel walk, and then again standing on tiptoe (PL. 43).73 Compare Ruhmkorff patented his version of an induction coil in these modest indexical footprints to another cameraless Paris in 1851, producing a type of electrical transform- photograph, made in Belfast by E. E Fournier d’Albe on er that allowed sparks more than 30 centimeters long June 13, 1921, as an effort to prove or disprove the claims to jump across an air gap in the apparatus. Working in made by celebrated Irish medium Kate Goligher. The year Strasbourg, the veteran French photographer Charles before, Goligher, who insisted on operating in complete

17 darkness, had been photographed with a during a In this same spirit, American botanist and print- séance with what appeared to be an ectoplasmic “ maker Bertha E. Jaques demonstrated the cyanotype’s structure” issuing from between her legs. Keen to record capacity to leave accurate white shadows against its blue this phenomenon for himself, at a subsequent meeting background tones in an album of plant specimens she d’Albe laid some photographic paper on the floor under a assembled in 1906 (PL. 45). Produced at a time when indus- table, along with two light bulbs attached to a switch, and trial modernity threatened to wholly transform society, proceeded to make a contact print of the extruded ecto- a domestic handicraft object like this album represents a plasm. The resulting image looked remarkably like a piece nostalgia for a simpler way of life, a nostalgia fostered by of woven cloth (PL. 44). Indeed, d’Albe was able to exact- the concurrent Arts and Crafts movement and its efforts ly imitate the result by making a contact photograph of a to restore traditional crafts to the mainstream. Indeed, piece of muslin, leading him to conclude that Ms. Goligher most amateur photographs were stored in such albums, was a fraud.74 making this one of photography’s primary modes of pre- In both these cases, cameraless photography was sentation. Carefully annotated by its maker to record each proffered as incontrovertible evidence, allowing us to specimen’s Latin and vernacular names, as well as the date witness what could not otherwise be easily seen with the of each impression, Jaques’ album is a reminder that such unaided human eye. The directness of contact prints continued to be made the photography, the physical con- into the twentieth century, even if tact between light-sensitive paper out of public sight (PL. 46). But not, it and the phenomena being recorded, seems, out of mind. For cameraless gives these images—along with the photography was soon to move from claims being made for them—an oth- the vernacular to the avant-garde, erwise unobtainable plausibility. Or being taken up as a creative practice so their makers hoped. in the early 1920s by Christian Schad As we’ve already seen, the sim- in Switzerland, Man Ray in France, and plicity of the cyanotype process made László Moholy-Nagy in Germany, it a favourite with amateur photogra- and quickly becoming central to am- phers, who welcomed the absence of bitious artistic practice everywhere. a need for a , added chemi- cals, or sophisticated skills. Many The Avant-Garde manuals and handbooks for amateurs The event that triggered this renewed included sections on how to make interest in cameraless photography contact prints, using this or other on the part of artists was the First photographic processes. One such World War of 1914–18. For many, the book was Photographic Amusements, seemingly indiscriminate destruc- compiled by Frank Fraprie and Walter tion that accompanied the “war to Woodbury and issued in the United States in numerous end war,” as it was sometimes called, led to a prolonged editions from 1896 onward. The pages about making “Leaf questioning of the utopian promise of modern industrial Prints” trace a history for the practice back to Schulze progress. As John Berger has put it: “the scale of the waste and feature illustrations taken from an 1869 publica- and the irrationality and the degree to which men could tion by Thomas Gaffield entitled Photographic Leaf Prints be persuaded and forced to deny their own interests led (FIG. 9). But they also remind readers that “good pictures to the belief that there were incomprehensible and blind of leaf forms are used quite extensively for nature study forces at work.”77 Many artists responded by seeking to in school and camp.”75 A French handbook of this same abandon or overthrow prevailing conventions of reality, kind, La photographie récréative et fantaisiste, published conventions associated with bourgeois society and there- in Paris in 1908, even showcased a “photogram produced fore with the established social and political system. In with a glowworm.” Paul Lindner’s Photographie ohne other words, seeing itself became a political issue. Kamera, published in Berlin in 1920, was the first book de- Christian Schad, a German artist who in 1919 was liv- voted entirely to the making of cameraless photographs, ing in Geneva, is usually credited with being the first to featuring, among its other illustrations, a contact print of reinvent the cameraless photograph as an avant-garde a “hop tendril” and of “beer foam, eight seconds old.”76 practice. Schad had gone to Switzerland from his native

FIG. 9. Detail from Frank Fraprie and Walter Woodbury, Photographic Amusements (New York: Scovill & Adams, 1896). Illustrations taken from Thomas Gaffield, Photographic Leaf Prints, 1869

18 Germany to avoid having to fight in the war and joined quickly began making his own cameraless photographs, the anarchist Dada movement while there. In this context, both simple botanical contact prints and more complex Schad made a series of cameraless photographs by plac- compositions. Man Ray nevertheless claimed to have ing bits of detritus—often rubbish he found in the streets, rediscovered the technique himself as a consequence of including balls of dust and sheets of newspaper—under a darkroom accident in that same year. The claim that an glass on a sheet of light-sensitive paper and then leaving accident was the source of his interest is a Surrealist fairy- this ensemble of paper and objects to develop on the win- tale in itself, allowing chance to play a key role in the dowsill of his apartment (PL. 47). The gesture, a deliber- genesis of these photographs. Indeed, it might be said ately offensive abandonment of skill, precious material, or that, in cameraless photography, chance is the author meaningful subject matter, aimed to produce an art that and “reality” the medium. Certainly their mode of produc- was entirely anti-establishment, perhaps even anti-art. tion must have appealed to Man Ray, given his previous To that end, Schad, best known as a painter, used “print- association with Marcel Duchamp and the provocation ing out” paper, probably employing a batch of paper sold of the readymade. One of the first examples to be pub- for the making of homemade postcards. He thereby ap- lished, appearing in The Little Review in 1922, came with a propriated a vernacular, amateur practice to his artistic hand-inscribed title in mirror-writing, esoRRose sel à vie, ends. This meant that he could watch the image develop in that recalls Duchamp’s female alter ego, and a suitably sunlight as it happened; he would sim- enigmatic description, Rayograph, ply “stop” the image from developing that melds author and process into a further when it looked ready. He then single proper name.81 Unlike Schad’s placed the paper in a gold-tone fixative photographs, the ones produced by bath, eventually cutting the sheets of Man Ray were made using matt-toned exposed paper into abstract shapes in “developing out” paper, meaning that order, he said, to “free them from the he couldn’t see the image he had made convention of the square” (PL. 48).78 In until he developed the paper. It also a short time, Schad had made about means they were first composed in the thirty of these evocative yet enigmatic darkroom he had set up in his hotel abstractions, all of them quite small at room, under a red safe light, and then about 6 x 8 centimeters in size. exposed to artificial white light to ini- Schad relocated to Munich in tiate the photographic process.82 1920, leaving his photographs with his Chance is of course a relative friend Walter Serner. Serner then for- term. Even before he became a Sur- warded them to Dada theorist Tristan realist, Man Ray was interested in Tzara, who had expressed an interest expressing and soliciting desire, and in publishing them. Schad would nev- his images often have an explicit erot- er be in possession of them again; Tzara published one of ic content that is no accident. In one early example, two them—under the title Arp et Val Serner dans le crocodar- shadowy faces—belonging to Man Ray and his lover, Kiki ium royal de Londres—in March 1920 in Dada, no. 7, and of Montparnasse—kiss (PL. 49). Each face is imprinted another appeared in Dadaco in Berlin in the same year with a translucent hand, and yet the whole scene remains (FIG. 10).79 But none of them was ever returned to the as ethereal as a cloud. Part of the erotic content of such artist. In fact, unbeknownst to Schad, Tzara sent a num- images comes from the difficulty of working out exact- ber of these photographs to Alfred Barr at the Museum ly how they were made; they remain a mystery, clouded of Modern Art in New York in 1936, playfully calling by the unknown and perhaps even representing the un- them “schadographs” in his accompanying letter. They knowable. In this case, the artist seems to have made were then included in Barr’s influential 1936 exhibition three consecutive exposures, so that faces, hands, and Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism, reproduced in the two darkroom trays have each left their imprint in turn, catalogue, and purchased by the museum.80 This is how confusing any stable sense of depth and solidity. they became known in the greater art world. In a short essay in a 1922 issue of Vanity Fair titled Tzara met Man Ray when they lived in the same hotel “A New Method of Realizing the Artistic Possibilities of in Paris in 1921, and presumably showed him some of the Photography,” Jean Cocteau described these new kinds schadographs in his possession. The American-born artist of picture as follows: “[They are] meaningless masterpieces

FIG. 10. Christian Schad (Germany/Switzerland, 1894–1982), Arp et Val Serner dans le crocodarium royal de Londres, 1918, as reproduced in Dada, no. 7 (March 1920)

19 FIG. 11. Man Ray/Jean Cocteau, “A New Method of Realizing the Artistic Possibilities of Photography,” Vanity Fair, November 1922

20 in which are realised the most voluptuous velvets of the pleasure. . . . Is it a spiral of water or the tragic gleam of a aquafortist. There has never been anyone else who has revolver, an egg, a glistening arc or the floodgate of rea- been able to produce anything like this scale of blacks son, a keen ear attuned to a mineral hiss, or a turbine of sinking into each other, of shadows and half shadows? algebraic formulas?”86 The portfolio was reviewed by [sic] He has come to set painting free again. His mysteri- Karel Teige in the Czech magazine Zivot soon after it was ous groups are infinitely better than any of the ordinary issued: “Photography acquires here its own, self-deter- still-lifes which attempt to conquer the flat canvas and the mining, autonomous speech . . . Photography can never elusive mud of the ” (FIG. 11).83 The examples repro- leave reality, not even here, but it can become surrealis- duced with this little essay are sometimes quite simple tic.”87 Teige went on to reproduce one of these rayographs (“A Comb Entering the Gyroscope—a delicate and fine- in his 1925 book Film, as if to demonstrate the possibility ly patterned abstract study in white, gray and black”) of transforming everyday objects into a form of symbolic and sometimes more complex (“Composition of Objects abstraction.88 Selected with Both Eyes Closed. This suggests the modern Man Ray’s cameraless photographs often combine artistic passion for machinery”). identifiable and/or evocative things (a slinky, a hand, In 1923, after being asked at short notice to submit a spool of film) with entirely amorphous forms or with a film to a Dada soirée to be held at the Théâtre Michel splashes or wedges of light and dark, as if everything we in Paris on July 6, Man Ray extended his rayograph tech- see is suffused with, or is even composed of, water vapor nique to , sprinkling salt and pepper on one or smoke or perhaps a luminous ether. Some examples piece of unexposed film and pins on another, before il- coalesce into recognizable compositions (a face, its iden- luminating and developing each. He then added some tification as such aided by penciled-in eyes), but some camera-made footage to make up a three-minute film of remain indescribable, hovering between a vaguely hu- disassociated sequences, including hallucinatory images manoid abjection and complete abstraction (PLS. 52–54). of the nude torso of his model, Kiki of Montparnasse, illu- In line with Surrealist thinking, such works are intended minated in striped light against a window. Man Ray gave to induce a response before thought, an expression of this film, his first, the suitably provocative titleLe retour the viewer’s own unconscious desires and apprehen- à la raison (The Return of Reason). In the same year, he sions. To name what we see in a rayograph is to give up made a rayograph from a spool of this same film stock, something of oneself. allowing it to uncurl onto his horizontal paper so that The most influential of the various pioneering avant- occasional glimpses of Kiki’s body are made visible there, garde artists who took up cameraless photography in a mini-movie distilled in a single picture plane (PL. 50). the early twentieth century was the Hungarian-born It should be noted that Man Ray sometimes repho- polymath László Moholy-Nagy. Having moved to Berlin tographed his unique compositions in order to be able to in 1920, Moholy seemed to have first encountered ama- issue enlarged, multiple-print editions of these same im- teur photographers making botanical contact prints in ages; in other words, to make them no longer unique. In July–August of 1922 during a visit to a school in Loheland. 1922, for example, he produced a volume of twelve repho- Encouraged by his wife Lucia, Moholy-Nagy began work- tographed rayographs that he printed from negatives, ing with the process. Further impetus came from his issuing them as Champs Délicieux: Album de photogra- attendance in September 1922 of the Constructivist/ phies (Delicious Fields) in an edition of forty numbered Dadaist congress at Weimar, where Tristan Tzara showed copies (PL. 51).84 This allowed them to be relatively widely some rayographs by Man Ray. Inspired by these examples, distributed and sold. These photographs, in other words, Moholy conducted a series of systematic experiments, were the product of commerce, not of chance. The ti- beginning in late 1922. Among other procedures, he tle recalls Les champs magnétiques, or “the magnetic passed light through a variety of translucent substances, fields,” a set of automatic writings published by André such as fluids like water, oil, and acids, as well as through Breton and Philippe Soupault in 1920, thereby drawing crystal, metal, glass, and tissue, and then onto his light- a direct analogy between Man Ray’s use of cameraless sensitive paper to produce layered, abstract pictures. He techniques and Surrealist automatism.85 Tzara wrote a called these “.”89 preface for Champs Délicieux in this same spirit: “When One early photogram was produced on printing-out everything we call art had become thoroughly arthritic, postcard paper and is therefore sepia in tone and with spac- a photographer . . . invented a force that surpassed in im- es for an address and correspondence printed on the back portance all the constellations intended for our visual (PL. 55). It was published in the March 1923 issue of Broom:

21 UNVERKÄUFLICHE LESEPROBE

Geoffrey Batchen, Philomena Mariani Emanations The Art of the Cameraless Photograph

Gebundenes Buch mit Schutzumschlag, 200 Seiten, 25,0 x 29,0 cm 180 farbige Abbildungen ISBN: 978-3-7913-5504-7

Prestel

Erscheinungstermin: April 2016