WI daguerreotype photographic process discovered earlier?

[proximefactum]

WI the daguerreotype photo process was discovered a hundred or even two hundred years before its discovery in 1820s -- 1830s France? The basic camera obscura was known from Renaissance times, yet it took until the early 19th century to mate the projection of an image onto a dark panel with the "fixing" of an image onto a silver plate coated with silver chloride.

How would events like the French Revolution look through the eyes of a daguerreotype camera? Even earlier, would the lost buildings of the Great Fire of London be preserved for all time through primitive photography? Would the ability to fix images within the space of minutes dramatically change the course of wars? The invention of the daguerreotype validates Kuhn -- scientific discoveries arrive in leaps and bounds.

 

[NKVD]

I don't know what effects it would have other than butterflies, but it would be cool to have photographs from the Revolutionary War era.

 

[Bill Cameron]

WI the daguerreotype photo process was discovered a hundred or even two hundred years before its discovery in 1820s -- 1830s France?

proximefactum,

There are no real technical hurdles involved. Many of the various chemicals could be whipped up by a good alchemist.

The basic camera obscura was known from Renaissance times, yet it took until the early 19th century to mate the projection of an image onto a dark panel with the "fixing" of an image onto a silver plate coated with silver chloride.

That was because Schultz(?) didn't conducted his experiments involving silver and chalk until the early 1700s. If someone else does those experiments earlier, the idea that something like photographs could be achieved would occur earlier too.

How would events like the French Revolution look through the eyes of a daguerreotype camera? Even earlier, would the lost buildings of the Great Fire of London be preserved for all time through primitive photography?

No reason why they couldn't. The camera obscura is well known and all you need are a few more chemical tinkerers. The daguerreotype is best suited for portraits and cityscapes after all. Preserving those "photos" for centuries will be the hard part however.

Would the ability to fix images within the space of minutes dramatically change the course of wars?

Within a space of minutes? That won't happen with daguerreotypes I'm afraid.

The invention of the daguerreotype validates Kuhn -- scientific discoveries arrive in leaps and bounds.

Bullfeces. If anything, daguerreotypes prove that Kuhn had no idea about how things really work or how people actually get things done. You'd be better off listening to the practical Burke of Connections than a borderline mystic like Kuhn.

Like 99.99% of inventors, Daguerre and his partner will looking for a better way to make money. Daguerre was already wealthy thanks to his Diorama Theater, but he needed a faster way to produce the huge panoramic paintings that theater required. His partner, whose name escapes me, was a printer who wanted to develop a faster way to produce printing plates so he could sell more books.

Both men were already rich because the newly literate middle class was wealthy enough to pay for illustrated books and newspapers and had enough leisure time for entertainment. They began the project that led them developing the daguerreotype process with the intent of providing more of what they were already selling and not with the intent of "inventing" photography.

They weren't alone in that effort either. A Britain named Talbot undertook a similar effort that led to a similar process because he wanted a cheaper way to illustrate books and news sheets. Once again, someone looking to make some money began tinkering with various items that had been developed by other people interested in different ways of making money and a happy accident occurred.

Daguerre and his partner spent several years patiently developing their process, Talbot's effort to develop his process was just as lengthy, and all three men were simply interested in making a buck. There was no "paradigm shift" ala Kuhn or "episteme" ala Foucalt at work here. Someone needed to play around with silver and chalk and then write about their findings, others needed to produce odd chemcial compounds for other uses and write about that, and finally three guys needed to find a cheaper faster way to produce illustrations and paintings so they could make money more easily.

Progress is prosaic, pragmatic, and pedestrian. Kuhn's and Foucalt's woolly-headed mysticism need not apply.


Bill

 

[sarapen]

Impressionism could have begun much earlier and then afterward would come the whole shebang of Modernist art - Expressionism, Abstract art, etc. And perhaps later Postmodernism? After all, one of the stated reasons for the invention of Impressionism was that a camera reproduced images more realistically, so what was the point of realistic trompe l'oeil paintings?

At the time, Impressionist art was criticized as being crude ("You can see the brush strokes"), but the whole point was to convey the artist's impression of the scene depicted, not reproduce it exactly. The focus on feeling over realism was further emphasized by the Expressionists (Picasso, Matisse et al.) and taken even further by the Abstract artists (Klee, Kandinsky, Pollock). Generally speaking, Modernism is about rejecting existing traditions, so you can see a clear line of progression in each new movement.

But art is a product of its times and I doubt things would have been so neatly linear. So many things were contingent on prevailing circumstances. For example, Post-Impressionism (Van Gogh, Gauguin) was heavily influenced by Japanese art, but would its development wait around until the opening of Japan in 1845? And the Fauvists and many contemporaries were inspired by African tribal art (masks and stuff) which was only accessible with African colonization. Also, while people were quite happy rejecting staid traditions in the 20th century, would they have been so open in the 18th and 19th? I suspect demographic upheaval plays into the whole thing, since it's easier to reject tradition when the old traditionalists are dead or outnumbered by the Young Turks.

It would be even harder to say when or if anything recognizable as Post-modernism would arise. That one was clearly in the zeitgeist since it appeared in fields as disparate as architecture and philosophy. Arguably, the optimism and pessimism after WWII fed into Post-modernism, but who can really say when the conditions would arise for its development?

Oh wait, here's a non-art history thing: military intelligence would be a lot different with cameras involved. Perhaps commando-ish units would arise to photograph fortifications and stuff. In fact, modern intelligence would happen a lot earlier. The spy business was rather haphazard and ad hoc before the 20th c. and the things we associate with spying didn't really arise until WWI. Don't believe the stuff about Victorian intelligence agencies, they only existed in adventure novels of the time.

Actually, that's one of the weird things about modern spying, it existed in fictional form long before it existed in meatspace. The British populace in WWI was panicky about Johnny Foreigner hiding in their midst and demanded that the government use their mythical spy agencies to counter this non-existent threat, a couple of spies were sent overseas and of course got caught poking around in an amateurish way in enemy military installations, then of course the other side panicked that they didn't have a spy service and voila! - the birth of the spy.

 

[proximefactum]

No reason why they couldn't. The camera obscura is well known and all you need are a few more chemical tinkerers. The daguerreotype is best suited for portraits and cityscapes after all. Preserving those "photos" for centuries will be the hard part however.

Quite true. Daguerreotypes "tarnish" quite easily, creating that discolored ring around the portrait. I have wondered if that was due to the aging of the daguerreotype or interaction with the framing material.

Within a space of minutes? That won't happen with daguerreotypes I'm afraid.

I thought that by the 1850's "daguerreotypists" had whittled down the exposure time to a minute or so. Yes, Daguerre's early experiments required extremely long exposure times.

Bullfeces. If anything, daguerreotypes prove that Kuhn had no idea about how things really work or how people actually get things done. You'd be better off listening to the practical Burke of Connections than a borderline mystic like Kuhn.

They [Daguerre and associate] began the project that led them developing the daguerreotype process with the intent of providing more of what they were already selling and not with the intent of "inventing" photography.

There was no "paradigm shift" ala Kuhn or "episteme" ala Foucalt at work here. Someone needed to play around with silver and chalk and then write about their findings, others needed to produce odd chemcial compounds for other uses and write about that, and finally three guys needed to find a cheaper faster way to produce illustrations and paintings so they could make money more easily.

Progress is prosaic, pragmatic, and pedestrian. Kuhn's and Foucalt's woolly-headed mysticism need not apply.

You did correctly guess that I have Foucault on my mind. I just finished writing about Foucault and authorship in antiquity, so perhaps this WI was a bit subconsciously tilted towards "episteme" even though I referenced Kuhn instead.

I stand by an "episteme"/paradigmatic view of the development of daguerreotypes. The pursuit of profit as a motivator for invention does not necessarily detract from an "episteme" based evaluation of where "daguerreotypes" stand within the constant destruction and reconstitution of history (or in the case of Kuhn, the cataclysmic moments of discovery). Individuals might simultaneously arrive at similar conclusions about a particular phenomenon, through, as you say, a "prosaic", "pragmatic" and "pedestrian" manner. But manner and profit pales against historical change. The time that it takes to produce items, or the profit associated with discovery, pales in comparison to a new invention's ability to create a radically new perception of self against others within the public sphere (from a historical perspective, episteme.)

The daguerreotype process permitted people to instantly see themselves captured on an image that faithfully represented their likeness. Walk through a portrait gallery today and look at the skewed perspective of the lesser-skilled portrait artists of the 18th century. One can see the impact of "episteme" behind an infallible representation of self as a more accurate representation of self within life. Some even feared the photograph's ability to "steal their souls" and erase their identity. The ability to change perception and public discourse through inventions grants them their importance within "historical" perspective (whatever "historical" means), not profit. Did the invention of photography radically change human interaction in early 19th century France, thus effecting the "series" of measurable events behind the development of episteme? No, perhaps not, but there is more to this than the random selection of time and happenstance, given that peoples' perceptions of self and community changed rapidly after the invention of the daguerreotype process.

 

[sarapen]

Let's not forget that photography allows not just the realistic depiction of the Self, but also the Other. Okay, it allows ostensibly realistic depiction.

I'm mostly thinking of Goya's The Third of May 1808. The painting was controversial at the time for depicting war not heroically, but brutally. With photojournalism, how would the Napoleonic Wars, the Crimean War, and so on have happened differently? The photos would still need to get home to be published, of course, requiring reliable and speedy transportation networks, and there would need to be newspapers and a mass readership to react to the pictures.

As well, the pictures would probably only be intellectually interesting to a populace uninvolved in the affairs of the country from the lack of nationalism and national identification. Absent nationalist indoctrination, pictures of wartime death and destruction might be consumed not with horror, but with prurient excitement - think medieval beheadings and public executions with the guillotine. I wonder if people would get disillusioned faster with the French Revolution when pictures of severed heads started making the rounds? That would certainly strike a blow against the claims of the Enlightenment. "We are building a secular Jerusalem", the Enlightened folk would say, but their opponents would reply, "Yes, but you're building it on a pile of severed heads". This assumes that there is no censorship, of course.

And what of colonialism? Would depictions of the colonized arouse greater sympathy from the colonizers, or would it arouse greater prejudice from seeing the otherness of the Other? That in itself might slow down the Enlightenment too, since Enlightenment ideas of the noble savage and universal humanity would have to counter the strangeness of non-European ways of life. Romantic notions of the countryside and the Volk might also have to be reworked. Romanticism itself was a reaction to the progressivism of the Enlightenment; it hearkened to a pure, pre-modern past as symbolized by the countryside and the peasants and as opposed to the city and its urbane cosmopolitans. Since the lionization of the farmers paradoxically fed into the modernizing drive of nationalism, as seen in Germany, things might have progressed differently. I wonder if pictures explicitly comparing peasants to colonized peoples would get bandied around. To a city dweller, they would both be Other.

 

[DuQuense]

I don't know what effects it would have other than butterflies, but it would be cool to have photographs from the Revolutionary War era.

This would allow us to solve the mystery of Washington's Horse.

 

[Lugal]

It may have happened in OTL.

It could lead to some earlier version of impressionism like sarapen said, and I would be curious how it would play into the Romantic movement, if painters would go into photography.

Perhaps several nations would document themselves like Prokudin-Gorsky in Russia.

 

[Grey Wolf]

There's also the side-shoot like Vermeer - whilst his paintings may have used projection rather than photography per se, the idea is there. Quite possibly those who knew about this process simply didn't think there WAS a way to preserve the image, other than by drawing it. When you come to think of it, it IS quite a conceptual leap.

Best Regards
Grey Wolf

 

[Bill Cameron]

Quite true. Daguerreotypes "tarnish" quite easily, creating that discolored ring around the portrait. I have wondered if that was due to the aging of the daguerreotype or interaction with the framing material.

proximefactum,

They do age and light, sadly, is among their worst enemies. All had to be boxed in some fashion because they're actually negatives and the boxing is needed to view them. Most of the best preserved daguerreotypes were boxed inside an inert atmosphere, nitrogen IIRC.

While alchemists could easily come up with the various silver-doped chemical concoctions the process requires, a nitrogen-filled box is another kettle of fish entirely. Daguerreotypes produced in say the 1300s may have faded beyond recognition in a century or so.

I thought that by the 1850's "daguerreotypists" had whittled down the exposure time to a minute or so. Yes, Daguerre's early experiments required extremely long exposure times.

Exposure time and the developing time required were significantly reduced, but only because Daguerre's original methods were quickly made obsolete. While the name "daguerreotype" stuck around for a long while, the actual daguerreotype process wasn't even used for a decade.

Daguerre's process was frightfully dangerous. It involves boiling mercury at some point IIRC. Other methods using albumin and colloidal suspensions lowered the chemical/technical hurdle enough for itinerant photographers to work out of wagons.

Also, even with these other easier, somewhat faster processes in hand, photos still required what we'd consider to be lengthy exposure times. All photos were posed, even those taken outside. You can see this in photos containing both living and inanimate subjects that simply cannot stay still for a few minutes; i.e. dogs, children, flags, etc. Among a portrait photographers most important tools were a series of stands and clamps that held the subject's head and body still for the length of time required. Exposure time is also why you don't see anyone smiling as you can't keep a "stiff" smile on your face long enough. Over the length of time required, your expression will change and blur the results.

I stand by an "episteme"/paradigmatic view of the development of daguerreotypes. The pursuit of profit as a motivator for invention does not necessarily detract from an "episteme" based evaluation of where "daguerreotypes" stand within the constant destruction and reconstitution of history (or in the case of Kuhn, the cataclysmic moments of discovery).

I'm sorry but that's nothing more than philosophical gobbledeegook. One can gaze too deeply into one's navel and quickly lose contact with what one was supposed to be examining. I can parse a living cell down to it's component quarks, but after a certain point the fact I'm examining a cell gets lost. Deconstructionism and all it's attendant foolishness does just that. They produce little more than iterations of iterations spun well out past any remaining context.

The time that it takes to produce items, or the profit associated with discovery, pales in comparison to a new invention's ability to create a radically new perception of self against others within the public sphere (from a historical perspective, episteme.)

Photography did change society, but it didn't do so overnight and it did so in concert with hundreds of other events in the 19th Century. Kuhn and Foucalt are simply using twenty dollar words to say "Things Change" and "Shit Happens" while inflating their intellectual pretenses in order to sell books and gain tenure in the bargain.

You should always be leery of someone who has to invent new words and terms to describe their ideas because that usually means they're bullshitting you. Jargon of any type is just an all to human way of differentiating the self-appointed "enlightened" from the "ignorant" masses whether it's used by plumbers or philosophers; i.e "I'm sorry but if you don't know what a triple-flipple-whipple-dipple is this is quite beyond you"

No, perhaps not, but there is more to this than the random selection of time and happenstance, given that peoples' perceptions of self and community changed rapidly after the invention of the daguerreotype process.

I'd suggest there was many social factors more driving those changes than just photographs. A daguerreotype process invented by Francis Bacon in the 1590s may have left us a photographic portrait of an elderly Elizabeth I, but it would not have sparked the types and kinds of social changes that occurred after Daguerre's OTL invention of the 1830s.


Bill

 

[proximefactum]

Deconstructionism and all it's attendant foolishness does just that. They produce little more than iterations of iterations spun well out past any remaining context.

Photography did change society, but it didn't do so overnight and it did so in concert with hundreds of other events in the 19th Century. Kuhn and Foucalt are simply using twenty dollar words to say "Things Change" and "Shit Happens" while inflating their intellectual pretenses in order to sell books and gain tenure in the bargain.

Bill

Bill, you would do very well to write (and title) an article challenging Kuhn and Foucault's theories as high-falutin' 500 page ways of saying "Shit Happens". Because so much of academia is just posturing, navel-gazing, and tenure-bartering, as you say but I wouldn't dare say.

I actually think many grad students would breathe a sigh of relief after having to plow through pages and pages of postmodern philosophy without making any sense of it at all.

 

[Bill Cameron]

Bill, you would do very well to write (and title) an article challenging Kuhn and Foucault's theories as high-falutin' 500 page ways of saying "Shit Happens".

proximefactum,

Please don't get me wrong. Kuhn's and Foucalt's ideas and observations are both insightful, original, and correct up to a point. The trouble began when the ideas were "overapplied" in both depth and breadth.

A rough analogy can be found in Turtledove's writing. Turtledove had an excellent idea with Timeline 191-, but he milked, padded, and "overapplied" that idea across 10+ books. The same thing occurred with Kuhn's and Foucalt's perfectly correct initial ideas and observations. Those men and their acolytes couldn't leave well enough alone and beavered away "overapplying" those ideas while drawing wilder and wilder inferences past the point of absurdity. It's as if they noticed 2 + 2 equals 4 and then spent the next 40 years of their academic careers padding that simple observation instead of moving on to other work.

Because so much of academia is just posturing, navel-gazing, and tenure-bartering, as you say but I wouldn't dare say.

The process I'm describing is entirely human and occurs in all human activities. If anything Sturgeon's Law about everything being 90% shit is an gross underestimate. I simply find it sad that the process and willful ignorance of the same is so prevalent academia because those folks should know better.

I actually think many grad students would breathe a sigh of relief after having to plow through pages and pages of postmodern philosophy without making any sense of it at all.

There's sense in it up to a point. The trouble is that too many people have pushed those ideas well past the point where they make any real sense.


Bill

 

[proximefactum]

Impressionism could have begun much earlier and then afterward would come the whole shebang of Modernist art - Expressionism, Abstract art, etc. And perhaps later Postmodernism? After all, one of the stated reasons for the invention of Impressionism was that a camera reproduced images more realistically, so what was the point of realistic trompe l'oeil paintings?

sarapen, I'm not an art historian, so my comments on art will be a bit naive. But I gather that photography began the trajectory from 'trompe l'oeil' to Impressionism and other art movement that reflected less of what the human eye sees (i.e. visual range) and more reflective of the mind's eye (the interpretation of visual apprehension). But after all, humans have depicted abstractions through writing and storytelling in a pre-photographic age. Perhaps early photography loosened the boundaries between the necessity of precise reflection of human sight in portraiture towards an emphasis on what sight perceives.

Let's not forget that photography allows not just the realistic depiction of the Self, but also the Other. Okay, it allows ostensibly realistic depiction.

Yes, but there is a necessary division between self/other in order for society to perpetuate itself. Rene Girard based his life's work on the idea that "sameness", or the destruction of society without sharp and often violent social differences. As Bill has noted, daguerreotype required the artificial posturing of people in order to represent them as actors within an artificial landscape. The depiction of a person in a daguerreotype maintains the difference between self/other through the static artificality of the daguerreotype, even if the daguerreotype captures the field of vision (albeit in black and white). The "Other", then, is how the person wishes him/herself to be viewed by others at large in a highly artificial and static position. The daguerreotype posing created people who did not exist in the fluid movement of interpersonal interaction.

I'm mostly thinking of Goya's The Third of May 1808. The painting was controversial at the time for depicting war not heroically, but brutally.

Primitive photography was present in the Crimean War. Getting back to Goya and the "stigmata". The crucifixion is another one of Girard's hobbyhorses, as in his view the sacrifice of Jesus Christ relieved societal tensions over same/other. For Goya to depict the about-to-be executed man as a fascimile of Jesus Christ ties the random executed man with a grander scope of history and the idea of execution as a means to correct social disturbances. Such a depiction would not have been possible with photography, save obviously touching up. But that is immaterial since painting depicts to some degree the mind's eye as well as the visual range of the eye. Photography would have difficulty with that task.

And what of colonialism? Would depictions of the colonized arouse greater sympathy from the colonizers, or would it arouse greater prejudice from seeing the otherness of the Other? That in itself might slow down the Enlightenment too, since Enlightenment ideas of the noble savage and universal humanity would have to counter the strangeness of non-European ways of life.

Colonization (and post-Colonization) both survived and expanded after the invention of photography. The self/other dichotomy is crucial in colonization, and photography might highlight cultural differences and brutalities obscured by Enlightenment (mis)perceptions. But the brutalities of colonization did not cease with the photographic record. If anything, photos were merely reinterpreted socially according to pre-conceived prejudices about colonized people, and not reinterpreted according to the needs of those people or the brutalities they were facing.

 

[Bill Cameron]

Colonization (and post-Colonization) both survived and expanded after the invention of photography. The self/other dichotomy is crucial in colonization, and photography might highlight cultural differences and brutalities obscured by Enlightenment (mis)perceptions. But the brutalities of colonization did not cease with the photographic record. If anything, photos were merely reinterpreted socially according to pre-conceived prejudices about colonized people, and not reinterpreted according to the needs of those people or the brutalities they were facing.

proximefactuim,

That's a very important point and one that extended past photography or other forms of artistic representation during the period in question.

Each of the many international exhibitions the colonial powers put on during the imperial period included "native villages" allegedly depicting people from the hosting power's colonial possessions. Those exhibits only superficially resembled the various "living history" efforts we're more familiar with however

Unlike our current "living history" settings in which the observer is encouraged to understand the way of life being presented, the "native village" exhibits were designed either consciously or unconsciously to enforce the idea of the "other". The colonized peoples in the exhibits were put on display like trained animals as they performed what were alleged to be aspects of their everyday life.

Because the media wasn't "immediate", it could be more easily manipulated.


Bill

 

[sarapen]

sarapen, I'm not an art historian, so my comments on art will be a bit naive. But I gather that photography began the trajectory from 'trompe l'oeil' to Impressionism and other art movement that reflected less of what the human eye sees (i.e. visual range) and more reflective of the mind's eye (the interpretation of visual apprehension). But after all, humans have depicted abstractions through writing and storytelling in a pre-photographic age. Perhaps early photography loosened the boundaries between the necessity of precise reflection of human sight in portraiture towards an emphasis on what sight perceives.

No worries, the last time I took art history was in high school. I should have specified I was talking about 19th c. European art. After all, van Gogh's beloved Japanese prints didn't try at all to show a three dimensional space but deliberately made its subjects look flat.

Yes, but there is a necessary division between self/other in order for society to perpetuate itself. Rene Girard based his life's work on the idea that "sameness", or the destruction of society without sharp and often violent social differences. As Bill has noted, daguerreotype required the artificial posturing of people in order to represent them as actors within an artificial landscape. The depiction of a person in a daguerreotype maintains the difference between self/other through the static artificality of the daguerreotype, even if the daguerreotype captures the field of vision (albeit in black and white). The "Other", then, is how the person wishes him/herself to be viewed by others at large in a highly artificial and static position. The daguerreotype posing created people who did not exist in the fluid movement of interpersonal interaction.

Eh, I've never been sure that focusing on self/other in this way really takes you anywhere productive, analytically speaking. Anyway, I think I captured this with the "ostensibly" bit, and of course, even without digital manipulation photos from today are still manipulated in ways not immediately apparent to the naive observer.

Primitive photography was present in the Crimean War. Getting back to Goya and the "stigmata". The crucifixion is another one of Girard's hobbyhorses, as in his view the sacrifice of Jesus Christ relieved societal tensions over same/other. For Goya to depict the about-to-be executed man as a fascimile of Jesus Christ ties the random executed man with a grander scope of history and the idea of execution as a means to correct social disturbances. Such a depiction would not have been possible with photography, save obviously touching up. But that is immaterial since painting depicts to some degree the mind's eye as well as the visual range of the eye. Photography would have difficulty with that task.

Oh yeah, you're right, I'd forgotten about the Crimean War photos. I was thinking more in terms of war journalism and showing the mangled bodies of soldiers, but I guess the social mores of the time probably would have never allowed it. The only pre-WWII photojournalism I can think of that shows dead bodies are from the Philippine-American War, and it was almost certainly because the dead bodies are of people who aren't white.

As for photography and the religious themes of 3rd of May, I recall that there were attempts to create pictures of typical religious scenes by photographing staged scenes with actors, but it never really caught on and churches went back to the traditional Renaissance-derived paintings. I think that photos were too realistic, too immediate, and too present, and that worshippers needed a certain remove from the subject, a certain amount of idealization to be able to worship something essentially non-corporeal.

Anyway, photography couldn't have created that scene, but it could create similar iconic scenes - recall the picture of the naked Vietnamese girl covered in napalm, her arms stretching Christ-like and crying in pain as if to the viewer. Which is to say that a photojournalist in the Peninsular War could have probably found some other real-life scene that would arouse similar sentiments as the painting. Unless your what-if only allows daguerreotypes, of course.

Colonization (and post-Colonization) both survived and expanded after the invention of photography. The self/other dichotomy is crucial in colonization, and photography might highlight cultural differences and brutalities obscured by Enlightenment (mis)perceptions. But the brutalities of colonization did not cease with the photographic record. If anything, photos were merely reinterpreted socially according to pre-conceived prejudices about colonized people, and not reinterpreted according to the needs of those people or the brutalities they were facing.

Yeah, you're right, I was being too optimistic with the transformative power of photography, but I did mention it could only happen with no censorship. Do recall, though, that two can play at the game of representation, and that when native elites travelled to Europe they often dressed up in European clothing so as to be taken seriously. There probably would be counter-representations of the essential civilized nature of the Indochinese or whatever.

 

[proximefactum]

Eh, I've never been sure that focusing on self/other in this way really takes you anywhere productive, analytically speaking.

I get paid (literally nothing), but paid nevertheless, to think about this crap all day. Think about the purgatory it is to sit in seminars and endlessly discuss tired philosophical concepts.

As for photography and the religious themes of 3rd of May, I recall that there were attempts to create pictures of typical religious scenes by photographing staged scenes with actors, but it never really caught on and churches went back to the traditional Renaissance-derived paintings. I think that photos were too realistic, too immediate, and too present, and that worshippers needed a certain remove from the subject, a certain amount of idealization to be able to worship something essentially non-corporeal.

Well the preference for painted representations of Christ, the BVM, the saints etc. ... represents a refined view of the veneration of images and their role in the liturgy. While the Roman Church never really developed a theology of iconography, Byzantine style icons have remained static in design since the post-Iconoclasm controversy, and are incongruent with artistic perspective and the development of Western portraiture. But the function of icons remain "windows to heaven", that is a participation with the reality of the Orthodox faith through the veneration of images reflective of a greater and transcendental reality. Daguerreotypes, or any photography for that matter, would likely not substitute for the highly entrenched role of stylized iconography in worship.

Anyway, photography couldn't have created that scene, but it could create similar iconic scenes - recall the picture of the naked Vietnamese girl covered in napalm, her arms stretching Christ-like and crying in pain as if to the viewer. [...] Unless your what-if only allows daguerreotypes, of course.

We can consider Kodachrome, Technicolor, or *.jpg. The representation of Christ-like images through photography signifies more than the outstreched hands. These images extend into our collective understanding of Christianity, but in a rather different way than iconographic representations of scriptural and theological events. An icon of the Theotokos (Virgin Mary) reflects a time-honored and honed reflection of the Orthodox Christian faith. The naked Vietnamese girl in napalm might reflect the sufferings of Christ, but in a way that is specifically tied to the context of the Vietnam War.

 

[sarapen]

I get paid (literally nothing), but paid nevertheless, to think about this crap all day. Think about the purgatory it is to sit in seminars and endlessly discuss tired philosophical concepts./QUOTE]

In grad school, are you? I feel your pain, my former compatriot (I got out). I do wish I could contribute to the discussion about Foucault, but I've read more about Foucault than read his words directly. The only F. I've ever read is Madness and Civilization, the weird outlier. It amuses me to shelve my copy beside Habermass.

Well the preference for painted representations of Christ, the BVM, the saints etc. ... represents a refined view of the veneration of images and their role in the liturgy. While the Roman Church never really developed a theology of iconography, Byzantine style icons have remained static in design since the post-Iconoclasm controversy, and are incongruent with artistic perspective and the development of Western portraiture. But the function of icons remain "windows to heaven", that is a participation with the reality of the Orthodox faith through the veneration of images reflective of a greater and transcendental reality. Daguerreotypes, or any photography for that matter, would likely not substitute for the highly entrenched role of stylized iconography in worship.

A question: can photos be transcendent? I can't think of any that I'd describe that way. One of the essential qualities of a photo is its reproducibility - if you have the film, you can make more copies, while a painting only exists in one place at one time. I think this is another reason for the unsuitability of photos for worship, since they are perceived as inauthentic. The singular and authentic painting versus the mass-produced and spiritless photo; one is a product of skill and inspiration, the other is coldly produced by an unfeeling machine.

We can consider Kodachrome, Technicolor, or *.jpg. The representation of Christ-like images through photography signifies more than the outstreched hands. These images extend into our collective understanding of Christianity, but in a rather different way than iconographic representations of scriptural and theological events. An icon of the Theotokos (Virgin Mary) reflects a time-honored and honed reflection of the Orthodox Christian faith. The naked Vietnamese girl in napalm might reflect the sufferings of Christ, but in a way that is specifically tied to the context of the Vietnam War.

Okay, but what are you getting at? No one would dispute that the picture is indelibly linked to the Vietnam War. I was using 3rd of May and the Vietnam picture as examples and I'm not sure how we got to discussing Orthodox iconography. The daguerreotype, of course, could not have captured the moment of the execution nor the Vietnamese girl's moment of suffering, only later technologies could have. Of course, even if there had been a photographer at those scenes they might not have been allowed to take photos, and then we'd be back to only being able to represent the scene through paint and canvas. With every new mode of expression comes attempts to control it, after all.

 

[proximefactum]

A question: can photos be transcendent? I can't think of any that I'd describe that way. One of the essential qualities of a photo is its reproducibility - if you have the film, you can make more copies, while a painting only exists in one place at one time. I think this is another reason for the unsuitability of photos for worship, since they are perceived as inauthentic. The singular and authentic painting versus the mass-produced and spiritless photo; one is a product of skill and inspiration, the other is coldly produced by an unfeeling machine.

I'd agree that there is a difference between skill/inspiration and an "unfeeling machine". The reason why I brought up Eastern Christian iconography is exactly this point. Sacramental objects can't be replaced or reduplicated like some forms of film. Icons are often photographed or crudely copied and glued onto tryptichs, but do not contain the same sacramental import as the originally written icon. I would agree that religious iconography is "authentic" because of its inability to be reproduced.

I don't think that "inauthentic" is the best way to describe photography. Maybe "blind" is a better word. Photography cannot perceive the circumstances of a particular composition (portrait? sacramental?) and instead renders light indiscriminately through an aperture. Can photographs carry some level of devotion or transcendence? Yes -- many Catholics have photos from shrines that remind them of the particular devotions practiced there. But those photographs are not the shrine, and few people would confuse them with, say, the awesome experience of cramming into the Sistine Chapel and gazing at the ceiling. (Just don't talk in the Chapel. That drives the guards nuts! Silenzio! Silenzio!)

The daguerreotype, of course, could not have captured the moment of the execution nor the Vietnamese girl's moment of suffering, only later technologies could have.

It's irrelevant to say that only certain photographic methods are relevant to a person's suffering, since suffering doesn't require the the presence of photography. However, artistic renderings of suffering (suffering in the mind's eye, such as painted depictions of the Crucifixion) require skill and forethought.

Of course, even if there had been a photographer at those scenes they might not have been allowed to take photos, and then we'd be back to only being able to represent the scene through paint and canvas. With every new mode of expression comes attempts to control it, after all.

This brings us back to what you mentioned earlier about the mechanistic nature of photography. Photography only captures what is made visible by the choice (or ability) of the photographer. Wars, suffering, injustices (such as colonialism), all have been under censorship. And you are right, we then fall back on other ways to represent that which is visible and that which ought to be recorded.

 

[sarapen]

I don't think that "inauthentic" is the best way to describe photography. Maybe "blind" is a better word.

I was riffing on Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. He said that even if it were possible to copy a painting down to the atomic level (heck, make it quantum level), people would still insist on keeping track of which was "real" and which was not - despite the fact that scientifically and objectively speaking, there is no difference. Hence why even a perfect photographic reproduction is not valued as much as the original.

It's irrelevant to say that only certain photographic methods are relevant to a person's suffering, since suffering doesn't require the the presence of photography. However, artistic renderings of suffering (suffering in the mind's eye, such as painted depictions of the Crucifixion) require skill and forethought.

I wasn't saying that, I was saying that daguerreotypes, needing long exposures, would not be able to capture either the moment of the execution or the immediate aftermath of the bombing. The types of expression and representation possible is dependent on the limitations of the medium, and without photography those types of scenes could only have been rendered through the mediation of an artist.

 

[proximefactum]

I was riffing on Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. He said that even if it were possible to copy a painting down to the atomic level (heck, make it quantum level), people would still insist on keeping track of which was "real" and which was not - despite the fact that scientifically and objectively speaking, there is no difference. Hence why even a perfect photographic reproduction is not valued as much as the original.

I see that we're talking over each other's heads. I haven't read your books, so I can't really make an argument. I have to catch up on this meme to understand what you're talking about. This was an interesting discussion. I just need to read much more to get what you're getting at.

The closest I could find to the title you mention is:

Walter Benjamin, The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility, and other writings on media (trans. of Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit) Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2008.

Is this the title you're referring to? Most of his writings have not been translated into English. German is my archnemesis, so as for his correspondence and other works I will have to consume much antacid to get to the end of it all.

Thanks for the interesting arguments.