Darryl Bowes
__________________________________________________________________________________________
It is not that the past casts its light on the present or that the present casts its light on the past; rather, an image is that in which the Then [das Gewesne] and the Now [das Jetzt] come together into a constellation like a flash of lightning. In other words, an image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of the Then to the Now is dialectical: not temporal in nature but imagistic.
Walter Benjamin, Konvolut N, Passagen-Werk, 1927-1940
__________________________________________________________________________________________
ONE / The late American comedian Mitch Hedberg famously recalled someone handing him a photograph, saying: ‘This is a picture of me when I was younger,’ to which Hedberg quipped, ‘Man, every picture is of you when you were younger.’
The practice of photography has always been vexed by human emotion and complex anxieties. All photographs presume to interfere with the temporal stream, and even the most innocuous of snapshots are attended by a Thanatotic presence. Whether people use cameras or phones to document newborn babies, birthday parties, best friends, vacations, debutante balls, school concerts, pets, family gatherings, wedding days, secret bedroom antics, or just another pouting selfie, all are engaged in the imagined vouchsafing of singular moments, by which they thereby seek to short-circuit the incessant march of time.
Photographing each other, we create memento mori (Latin. memento: remember + mori: death.) The phrase is usually translated into English as the pithy remember-you-are-going-to-die, and while this function constitutes an inescapable clause of the photographic contract, it speaks little – if at all – to the facility of the photographic image. Photographs do not short-circuit the temporal stream, nor are they points of collapse into it: the forever-Now is, by definition, a moving target. And while our tendency is to affix a point in historical time to a given photographic image - something we are socially conditioned to do - we overlook the fact that doing so in no way guarantees the historicity of the image.
Yes, some images are inevitably synchronic with historic time. But Walter Benjamin alerts us to the machinations of the potential latencies within any given image, and the action he called Lesbarkeit, or the moment of ‘entering into legibility,’ of becoming not just accessible, but comprehensible to the viewer. To recognize and engage the Lesbarkeit (which in my personal argot ignites the forever-Now-moment) is to participate in a powerful imagistic dialectic unique to photography per se, but in which the Daguerreotype is most deeply invested. (Note that none of this discourse refers to those photographic practices that do not utilize lenses, such as photograms, in which objects are placed directly onto a light-sensitive material and exposed. Such ‘images’ are, of course, purely indexical to the subject.)
I have long argued that all photography is trick-photography, and that by and large, what we think we see – either in the real world or in photographic accounts of it - is not what we are seeing. Our primal fealty to vision over the other senses has always been its own point of rupture: it is the dizzy and slightly nauseous Narcissus marveling at his own beautiful face spinning above a drain. People only see what they want to see, and more often than not, we fail to see the subject of a photograph except as a backlit nimb that slips from behind the caesura that inevitably situates itself between the subject and the moment of entering into legibility.
In the absence of the Lesbarkeit, the forever-Now-moment, it is this caesura – the opacity of the experience that the photograph presumes to present – that becomes the substance of our experience of its re-presentation. A photograph is never framed by its own meaning, but it is in our attempts to memorialize living moments via this medium that we are allowed to meaningfully engage with the unthinkable: our own inevitable mortality.
The first viable method for fixing images directly from nature was the Daguerreotype process. On 7 January 1839, Louis Daguerre set up his equipment before members of both the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Word had gotten out, and other spectators filled doorways and halls, while those who could not get inside peered through windows from the courtyard. Monsieur Daguerre proceeded to demonstrate a process that would change the world forever. Just as Tim Berners-Lee would make his novel invention – the internet – free to the world 150 years later, the French government purchased the patent rights from Daguerre and made the Daguerreotype photographic process free to every country in the world…except England. Some historical animosities can’t be so simply put aside, and one imagines the French took some measure of satisfaction by making England purchase a license to make use of their new technology.
In England, meanwhile, Henry Fox Talbot had successfully created a photographic process that he called Photogenic drawing concurrent to the period of Daguerre’s experimentation. Other processes quickly followed: Calotypes, Cyanotypes, wet collodion, Tintypes, Ambrotypes. The development of the photomechanical Woodburytype process in 1864 allowed photographs to be reproduced in books for the first time. During the 1870’s, Richard Leach-Maddox consolidated the silver-gelatin processes, which would become the mainstay of photographic practices around the world for over 100 years.
But among all these what we would now call analogue or wet photographic processes, and even digital photography, the Daguerreotype remains exceptional. While all photographs of human subjects are indexically tethered to nature, it is the Daguerreotype that asserts the purest indexical fidelity to its subject.
What Daguerre had refined was a singular direct-positive process, which is to say that every exposure is its own authorial original, an unmediated one-off image. By comparison, the silver gelatin process in which I was trained as a young man and practiced for many years, involves making an exposure onto silver halide coated film, which when developed and fixed leaves you a negative image. The film negative is allowed to dry and is loaded into an enlarger, the image focused through another lens, and a secondary exposure is made onto silver halide coated paper. When the latent image on the paper is developed, fixed, and allowed to dry, we have a photograph. We can also now print as many positive paper copies of that image as we wish, from the gelatin negative. This means that the click of the camera’s shutter begins a process of mediation that involves stepping away from - and diluting indexicality to - the subject: a positive image in nature is rendered a latent image that becomes a negative image, before being manipulated back into as many secondary-positive image copies as desired over an indefinite period. Should I desire, I can take a thirty-year-old negative from my files today and print a fresh positive image.
With the Daguerreotype process, however, this was never an option. In this photographic practice a highly polished iodine-coated copper plate gets loaded into the camera, and an exposure is made. The plate is removed at once in absolute darkness and held over a bowl of heated mercury, the rising fumes of which manifest a positive image. That is the entirety of the act: the copper plate is the photograph, and it cannot be used to make further copies.
The process did come with certain caveats. Firstly, the image visible on the surface of the plate will always remain very fragile: it is delicate enough that it can be disturbed by your fingertips. To address this, common practice saw Daguerreotypes sealed under glass, and stored inside a closed, velvet-lined case. This eliminated the possibility of the image being touched by accident and minimized further exposure to light and oxygen. Another issue is one that would certainly be given consideration by anyone revisiting the process today: mercury is wickedly toxic. Breathing its fumes might expose an individual to irreversible damage of the nervous and immune systems.
TWO / In 2009 I was living in Glenbrook NSW, when a collector friend kindly lent me a Daguerreotype dated to 1848. At the time I was commuting to the University of Newcastle every week, where I was lecturing on the history of photography. While I was familiar with reproductions of Daguerreotypes in books and online, it remained that I had never experienced one at first-hand, something which I would subsequently recommend to anyone with an interest in photography. But I wanted to have the thing on my desk a few days, to be with and have time to think about it, and then write to the experience. And when I asked, my friend obliged.
My perfunctory notes on the experience are hereafter augmented by corrections and musings from 2024, in parenthesis and italicized for easy distinction. Note that during the nineteenth century the expense of a Daguerreotype portrait sitting was scaled according to the size of the copper plate. Only the wealthiest of patrons could afford a full or half plate photograph, and while quarter plates are most common, sixth and ninth plate images are not unheard of. My unedited older notes begin, therefore, with the plate size:
- 1/4 plate study – Australian? European? almost certainly three siblings: two girls one boy. All seated, shoulders almost touching. No names.
- little brother about 5 years old? sisters around 9 & 11?
[I remember it occurred to me that the age gap between boy and girls – while in no way unusual today – might have indicated the passing of an absent fourth sibling, but as I was already knee-deep in speculation, I let the thought slip away.]
- girls: light-colored dresses…book muslin? identical except for embellishments at collar. Not smiling.
[But then the smile has had such a short tenure in Western visual culture...]
- the older girl. I instantly like her, something demure, delightful about her countenance. Probs quick-witted, a little bit cheeky. & pretty.
[Or ‘smart-as-paint’ as the contemporaneous expression might have it...]
- long, slender fingers laced in lap
[I remember thinking that perhaps this afternoon she will sit down and practice at the pianoforte…]
- little brother, tight coat, black, buttoned to chin. Fuller face, well-fed little man. Very serious, earnest.
[Perhaps trying hard not to fidget?]
- middle child seated centre - chin pulled in, closer to chest, gaze - still charming - has discomfiting intensity. Eyes are strikingly clear – she stares down the barrel of the lens. As in she stares-it-down. Wow – mesmeric, disarming.
[I need to flesh this out: she stared as if fixated on some distant point far behind the camera, behind and beyond the viewer even, so that a paradigm of space and time normally oblivious to the hammer-blows of history now came apart at a molecular level, like a tadpole-shaped Prince Rupert’s drop clipped at the tip with a pair of pliers. The longer I looked, the more it seemed her gaze engaged not the lens, but me. Perhaps she was communicating something, but I could not even begin to guess as to what it might be, whether a query, a plea, some tacit acknowledgement of recognition, or a whispered utterance I could never hear. I think what I experienced was some variation of the phenomena associated with scopaesthesia – that well-documented but inexplicable fact that people can sense when someone is staring at them – and so I imagined that I could ‘feel’ her gaze, that she was leaving upon my person some imperceptible and uncanny trace that – while demanding of my complete attention – landed gently, well-intentioned, soft as a butterfly-kiss.]
- between the making of this exposure and me opening the case to view it this morning, no further mediation has taken place.
[And a day or two after these observations, I sat down and wrote the following, fuller account:]
Now, for what it might be worth, I will describe as best I can what is happening here: held safe under glass in a velvet folder for 150 years, I hold in my hand the copper plate that was set inside the wooden camera obscura on the day of the sitting. Furthermore, I have no doubt that each nameless child held this same object - exactly as I do now - as they marveled at themselves captured thus. To sit for a Daguerreotype was a special occasion, and the very notion of a photograph still an astonishingly new idea. You wore your Sunday-best clothes, and mother fixed your hair in pretty ribbons. The photographer gathered you before his strange apparatus and arranged you, as mother and father likely looked on. It was exciting but you had to sit very, very still. There…don’t move…hold it...hold it! And now it is done.
Everyone in this picture is dead. Our eyes meet long after they have lived their lives and left this world. But this morning, I am in the room with them – or them with me - and they are vital, fresh, and curious children. We each hold and ponder this same image-object in our hands – there are no copies. But why should this realization be tempered by a sense of ineffable sadness?
I tip the thing a little this-way-and-that in my hand, turning it in the light to catch the image properly, like a jeweller will roll a diamond between thumb and fore-finger until it fires the secret colour it will otherwise withhold. The image lays ghostly a moment, floating tentatively in a silvery, almost watery distance, before it pops into full effect, and there is a catch in my breath. It seems that in this impossible instant of recognition - not because I see them, but because they are in such close proximity - that our reciprocated gazes begin to soften and feather at the edges, and we are all taking solace, stitched together as we are in a web of gazes and touch that validates each other’s eternal absent-presence. Perhaps now is the moment I can steal a glance down the long, cold corridor of my own mortality, and take comfort.
‘Are you sure that we are awake?’ Shakespeare’s Demetrius wondered aloud, ‘for it seems to me that yet we sleep, we dream.’
How could people not have been astonished at such a shocking development in technology, this visual marvel, when seemingly out-of-nowhere we could create in minutes an image that surpassed the finest painterly verisimilitude?
A nineteenth-century Daguerreotype photograph in its worn velvet-lined case is a supremely human artifact, and one that remains a truly subversive social and cultural object. It represents a rare moment of existential respite when together – at barely a degree of separation - we might hold the chill gaze of Death himself just long enough to see a shadow of doubt pass across his terrible face.
Glenbrook, September 2009
[Copenhagen, April 2024]