Inadvertent Images: A History of Photographic Apparitions

257 Pages·2018·9.88 MB·English

by  Peter Geimer

Inadvertent Images

Inadvertent
Images
Peter Geimer
A History of
Photographic
TranslaTed b y
Apparitions
GerriT Jackson
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2018 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without written permission, except in the case of
brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For
more information, contact the University of Chicago
Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637.
Published 2018
Printed in the United States of America
Originally published as Bilder aus Versehen: Eine
Geschichte fotografischer Erscheinungen. © Philo
Fine Arts Stiftung & Co. KG, Hamburg, Germany.
27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226-4 7187- 7 (cloth)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226-4 7190-7 (e- book)
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226471907.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Geimer, Peter, author. | Jackson, Gerrit,
translator.
Title: Inadvertent images : a history of photographic
apparitions / Peter Geimer ; translated by
Gerrit Jackson.
Other titles: Bilder aus Versehen. English
Description: Chicago ; London : The University
of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017038031 |
ISBN 9780226471877 (cloth : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780226471907 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Photography—Psychological
aspects. | Photography—History. | Photography—
Philosophy. | Phenomenology.
Classification: LCC TR183 .G4513 2018 |
DDC 770—dc23
LC record available at
https://lccn.loc.gov/2017038031
♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/
NISO Z39.48- 1992 (Permanence of Paper).
Contents
Introduction 1
1 History and “Prehistory” 11
2 Visibility by Destruction/
Disturbance
Incidents of Photography 31
3 Case Study I: Signs of
Life or “False Flames”?
Jules Luys and the Controversy
over “Effluviography” 77
4 Case Study II: A Self- Portrait
of Christ or the White Noise of
Photography?
Paul Vignon and the Earliest
Photograph of the Shroud
of Turin 99
5 Visible/Invisible
Critique of a Dichotomy 140
6 The “Optical Unconscious”
of Photography 170
Notes 201
Index 231

Introduction
In 1929 the Hungarian photographer André Kertész took a picture of the
Paris cityscape. The photograph shows a steeply descending street in the
18th arrondissement, with the spire of Notre Dame de Clignancourt behind
it and a sea of houses stretching to the edge of the frame. The photograph
was presumably meant to bear a title such as Paris or View of Paris. When the
glass negative was subsequently shattered, Kertész gave his picture another
title: Broken Plate (fig. 1). It shows Paris but also, simultaneously, the glass
of which the photograph is made. An accident has made visible what usually
disappears in the vitreous transparency of the photographic medium. So
Broken Plate keeps the beholder’s gaze wavering indefinitely: between the
picture of the city and the material of the picture, between the representa-
tion and the web of cracks that disrupts it.
In his phenomenology of the photograph, Roland Barthes describes pri-
marily one side of this indissoluble figure—the transparency of the photo-
graphic image. In this connection, he also brings up a picture by Kertész
(fig. 2): “There is a photograph by Kertész (1921) which shows a blind gypsy
violinist being led by a boy; now what I see, by means of this ‘thinking eye’
which makes me add something to the photograph, is the dirt road; its tex-
ture gives me the certainty of being in Central Europe; I perceive the refer-
ent (here, the photograph really transcends itself: is this not the sole proof
of its art? To annihilate itself as medium, to be no longer a sign but the thing
itself?).”1 As is well known, Barthes saw this art of disappearance as the
essence of photography. In contradistinction to other pictorial techniques,
photography succeeds in “annihilat[ing] itself as medium”; by simply show-
ing “the thing itself,” it ultimately becomes invisible. “A specific photograph,
in effect, is never distinguished from its referent (from what it represents),
or at least it is not immediately or generally distinguished from its referent
(as is the case for every other image, encumbered—from the start, and be-
2 IntroductIon
Fig. 1 André Kertész, Broken Plate, 1929. © Estate of André Kertész/Higher Pictures.
cause of its status—by the way in which the object is simulated): it is not im-
possible to perceive the photographic signifier (certain professionals do so),
but it requires a secondary action of knowledge or of reflection.”2 Barthes
illustrates his utopian vision of the disappearance of the photographic sub-
stance with a peculiar comparison: “The Photograph belongs to that class of
laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroy-
ing them both: the windowpane and the landscape.”3 The old metaphor of
the picture as a window on the world has been turned on its head: the pic-
ture Barthes writes about is not manufactured by artifice but shows itself of
its own accord, appearing like a landscape in the field of view demarcated
by the window—without indirection, mediation, or the likelihood of diver-
gence. We see through a photograph as we see through a glass pane. A pic-
ture like the shot of the blind violinist who walked down a Hungarian village
street decades ago, in this reading, allows our gaze to fall upon a moment in
the past, but as the medium of such rendering-v isible, it is itself intangible.
Fig. 2 André Kertész, Violinist, 1921. © Estate of André Kertész/Higher Pictures.