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Vision of the Gods: an Inquiry Into the Meaning of Photography

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Vision of the Gods: an Inquiry Into the Meaning of Photography Ali Hossaini Vision of the Gods: An Inquiry Into the Meaning of Photography by Ali Hossaini hotography is ubiquitous within global culture, but we hardly understand Pits meaning. And we have only a dim comprehension of its origin. Unlike cinema, which contains the complexities of motion and montage, the photograph is simple and, for the most part, brutally realistic. Perhaps the photograph has seemed too obvious to merit prolonged scholarly attention. Histories of the medium abound, but their authors follow a pattern exemplified by Alison and Helmut Gernsheim’s distinguished History of Photography, first published in 1955. By the standard account, the first inklings of photography appeared when a 5th century scholar noticed a camera-like phenomenon, and culminated in the 1820s, when Nicephore Niepce doped a pewter plate with light-sensitive chemicals and exposed it within a camera obscura. At their most comprehensive, standard histories include references to the mediaeval scientists who experimented with pinhole optics and ultimately invented the camera obscura. Though the standard account is correct in its details, it neglects the broader context of photography. Photography is an evolutionary phenomenon, not a fixed process, and it has drastically altered society at each stage of refinement. Starting with simple devices, the medium has branched into an enormous family of technologies that includes cinema, television and digital imagery. Individuals use cameras, but the medium is far more powerful in the hands of corporations and the state. Optical media entertain and inform, impress and oppress; they permeate everyday life, yet cultural theory does not approach this variety from a coherent base of understanding. What ties together snapshots and surveillance? Theorists perceive the social effects of mass media, which range from liberation to abject dehumanization, but the origin of these effects has not been outlined. We need a paradigm that captures the common thread of photographic technologies, one that matches the sophistication of contemporary engineering. Current theory of the photograph depends on the camera, but the physical device is insufficient to Logos 2.3 – Summer 2003 Ali Hossaini explain the evolution of the optical media, particularly as it progresses toward the dematerialized realm of digital imagery and virtual reality. Much has already been written about virtual reality. Though the medium is not yet viable, it has ample precedents ranging from Plato’s Cave Passage to nineteenth century dioramas. The strongest precedent, however, is the virtual experience offered by photography and cinema, both of which derive, like the examples I just gave, from reflection upon optics. Whether or not it comes to pass, the idea of a virtual environment should serve as a boundary condition for photographic theory, because it illustrates the profound impact of optics on society. For most of its existence humanity has experienced the world through natural faculties, but the introduction of optical media has reorganized perception and replaced subjectivity. As a consequence, individuals have become part of increasingly larger collectives where both thought and experience are defined by objective standards. The environment has become mediated, defined by surveillance and institutions, and, as Jean Baudrillard has poignantly described, experience is often equated with media. The central issues in photographic theory are defined by the history of optics. The study of vision and light has an ancient pedigree which scholars have only nodded toward when discussing photography. Scientific optics matured by the 3rd century BCE, when Euclid codified its principles alongside its parent discipline, geometry. Organized as a set of formal principles, Euclid’s Geometry describes the construction of forms in an abstract space, giving their appearance to an ideal intelligence. In contrast, his Optics described the behavior of light in relation to a situated viewer. Taken together, the two works present a theory of how the physical world is constituted in reality and appearance, with the latter describing how light transmits information from the physical, geometric realm to the eyes. Euclid’s optical study represents a high point of knowledge that remained almost unmatched until the scientist Ibn al-Haytham published his optical treatises in the 9th century.1 Building on the work of Euclid and his successor, Claudius Ptolemy, Al-Haytham founded physiological optics, which distinguished the functioning of the eye from the behavior of light. He also laid the groundwork for the camera obscura by accurately explaining the pinhole effect which underlies its mechanism. Several centuries later, well after al-Haytham’s Optics passed into Europe, the camera obscura emerged from the laboratory as a tool for artists, but it was not until the 1600s that Johannes Kepler discovered the proper operation of the eye. Much like a Logos 2.3 – Summer 2003 Ali Hossaini camera, human eyes augment the pinhole effect with a lens, bringing an inverted image to bear on a light-sensitive surface, the retina. (See Figure 1) Figure 1: The structure of the eye compared to the camera (Wald, 1953) Unlike those who followed, Kepler considered retinal inversion to be an important problem. But he despaired of solving it and left its resolution to later generations.2 Progress came slowly. Little was known about the nervous system until the nineteenth century, and only recently have scientists learned how to inspect thought in real time. Now we know how the brain apprehends the retinal image. But many questions still elude us. What effect does media have on perception? Has sharing images—sharing perceptions— affected individuality? Optical technologies permeate daily life, and, by bridging vast distances, they have changed the nature of vision. The personal has become institutional, mediated by cameras and computers, and we inhabit virtual bodies created by photography, the telephone and television. So our primary question might address how technology affects biology. Is technology a form of evolution? Has social evolution superseded biological evolution? Will governments and corporations completely subsume the individual, limiting choice to matters of consumption? In confronting these questions, optics is relevant to some of the most pressing issues in cultural theory and, for that matter, human existence. Logos 2.3 – Summer 2003 Ali Hossaini Photography represents the growing intimacy of humanity with machines. Tools originally amplified physical strength, but, with the advent of tools like the abacus, the compass and eyeglasses, they have been applied increasingly to mental faculties, giving us both modern media and digital computers. And recent advances in bioengineering are giving tools a quasi-organic status, merging them with our bodies. In 1950, biologist George Wald said photography was the product of convergent evolution: Of all the instruments made by man, none resembles a part of his body more than the camera does the eye. Yet this is not by design. A camera is no more a copy of an eye than the wing of a bird is a copy of that of an insect. Each is the product of an independent evolution; and if this has brought the camera and the eye together, it is not because one has mimicked the other, but because both have had to meet the same problems, and have frequently done so in the same way. This is the type of phenomenon that biologists call convergent evolution, yet peculiar in that one evolution is organic, the other technological.3 Wald then makes structural, mechanical and chemical comparisons between eyes and the photographic process. The similarities are numerous. Both use a lens to project an image within a dark chamber, both correct for aberrations in form and color, and both apprehend images through a grid of photosensitive receptors. As the capstone to his argument, Wald ends his essay with a discussion of optography, the art of making images with eyes. Willy Kuhne, a professor of physiology at the University of Heidelberg, invented optography in 1878. Kuhne was studying rhodopsin, the retinal pigment that changes state in response to light. During the course of his experiments, he realized that he might be able to take pictures with a living eye. He immobilized a rabbit and forced it to look at a window for three minutes. He then decapitated the animal, sliced open its eye, and soaked its retina in alum to fix the rhodopsin. The next day the dried retina revealed an image of the window. Two years later he repeated the process with the head of an executed criminal. The resulting optigram, which he reproduced in a drawing, is the only known picture taken with a human eye. Unfortunately, the scene it displayed was unidentifiable. (See Figures 2 and 3) Logos 2.3 – Summer 2003 Ali Hossaini Figure 2: The rabbit’s last view (Wald, 1953) Logos 2.3 – Summer 2003 Ali Hossaini Figure 3: A human optigram (Wald, 1953) Evolutionary convergence explains the utility of cameras and casts a revealing light on media theory, particularly the work of Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan’s descriptions of how media affect cognition seem hyperbolic, more metaphor than science, but if we accept Wald’s conclusions, then the spread of media has a biological basis. Photography is an auxiliary form of perception. It amplifies vision, takes it to extremes of size, distance and speed. It extends the human nervous system, particularly when coupled to electronic distribution. Visual media are among the cornerstones of modern civilization, found in the service of law, science and industry, as well as the arts and personal life. When we examine the category of photography as a whole, including cinema, video and digital imagery with paper and film, we find a medium that mimics vision, providing sensations that bridge space and time. Photographs are concrete perceptions that orient groups of people around a singular, objective experience. Along with social hierarchy, and other technologies of communication, photographic images constitute a body social that behaves according to common impulses.
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