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Abstract
An optogram is an image fixed on the retina by a biological, photochemical process. In the late nineteenth century, it was widely believed that optograms could be excised from dead bodies to procure their final visions. Optograms were most frequently compared to photographs, so that the retina of the eye was likened to the sensitive plate in a camera. Just as photography became capable of superseding human vision in the 1870s, optograms discursively came to light as latent photographs, making photography the original for preconscious sight. These historical inversions of primacy challenge our conceptions of the relation between nature and culture in photography, with the cultural invention preceding the natural discovery of optography. This article examines how an incidental, speculative, and ultimately forgotten discovery in the physical sciences was deployed rhetorically to reinforce personal or disciplinary beliefs about what photography was and what it could do, in realms ranging from physiological laboratories to science fiction, from police departments to courtrooms. Analysis of optographic discourse indicates that the true value of photography in the late nineteenth century was not primarily in the photograph’s relation to its indexical referent, but in the possibility that it might grant access to seeing as another living being.
Notes
1 Willy Kühne, On the Photochemistry of the Retina and on Visual Purple, trans. Michael Foster, London: MacMillan 1878, 89. Kühne preferred albino rabbits because light shines clearly through the sclera (white of the eye) to illuminate the retina, even in life. Ibid., 89 and 68–72.
2 Ibid., 88–89.
3 In his preface to Kühne’s On the Photochemistry, translator Michael Foster is keen to draw out the distinctions between Boll’s and Kühne’s research. Ibid., v–vi.
4 Helmholtz invented the ophthalmoscope without knowledge of Charles Babbage’s 1847 invention of a similar instrument. No models of Babbage’s ophthalmoscope are extant. Hermann von Helmholtz, Helmholtz’s Treatise on Physiological Optics, vol. 1, trans. and ed. James P. C. Southall, 3rd edn, Menasha, WI: Optical Society of America 1924, 47.
5 The first published mention of optograms may be R. W. Hackwood, ‘Impressions on the Eye’, Notes and Queries: A Medium of Intercommunication for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc., 4 (3 October 1857), 268–69. The first sustained literary precursor is Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s ‘Claire Lenoir’ of 1867. This was expanded into a novel-length version titled Tribulat Bonhomet in 1887. See Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Claire Lenoir, trans. Arthur Symons, New York: Albert and Charles Boni 1925.
6 Arthur B. Evans notes that Scotland Yard pried open the dead eyes of Annie Chapman, a Jack-the-Ripper victim, to photograph her retinas in the hope that they preserved optograms, but no images were found. Some murderers, including members of the Russian mafia, allegedly destroyed the eyes of their victims as late as 1992. See Arthur B. Evans, ‘Optograms and Fiction: Photo in a Dead Man’s Eye’, Science Fiction Studies, 3:3 (November 1993), 343–44. See also Craig Monk, ‘Optograms, Autobiography, and the Image of Jack the Ripper’, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, 12:1 (Fall 2010), 91–104.
7 There are several late outliers that refer to optograms without irony. See F. W. Edridge-Green, ‘Some Curious Phenomena of Vision and their Practical Importance’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 71:3679 (25 May 1923), 469–78; and Walter Clark, ‘Pseudo-Photographic Effects’, Science Progress in the Twentieth Century (1919–1933), 19:74 (October 1924), 266–74.
8 Martin Jay gives an elegant discussion of his use of the concept ‘discourse’, from which my own usage is drawn, in Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, Berkeley: University of California Press 1993, 15–16.
9 Recent treatments of optographic discourse from these disparate realms include Douglas J. Lanska, ‘Optograms and Criminology: Science, News Reporting, and Fanciful Novels’, Progress in Brain Research, vol. 205 of Literature, Neurology, and Neuroscience: Historical and Literary Connections, ed. Anne Stiles, Stanley Finger, and Francois Boller, Amsterdam: Elsevier 2013, 55–84; Andrea Goulet, Optiques: The Science of the Eye and the Birth of Modern French Fiction, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2006; Monk, ‘Optograms’; Charles Colbert, ‘Winslow Homer, Reluctant Modern’, Winterthur Portfolio, 38:1 (Spring 2003), 37–55; Rachael Z. DeLue, ‘Picturing: An Introduction’, in Picturing, ed. Rachael Z. DeLue, Chicago: Terra Foundation for American Art 2016, 10–40; and Véronique Campion-Vincent, ‘The Tell-Tale Eye’, Folklore, 110 (1999), 13–24. A nascent but rich debate has also been circulating among German and French historians. See Bernd Stiegler, Belichtete Augen: Optogramme oder das Versprechen der Retina, Frankfurt: S. Fischer 2011; Christoph Hoffmann, ‘Zwei Schichten: Netzhaut und Fotografie, 1860/1890’, Fotogeschichte, 81 (2001), 21–38; and André Gunthert, ‘La rétine du savant: la fonction heuristique de la photographie’, Etudes photographiques, 7 (May 2000), 29–48.
10 Exceptions include Tom Gunning, ‘Tracing the Individual Body: Photography, Detectives, and Early Cinema’, in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. Vanessa R. Schwartz and Leo Charney, Berkeley: University of California Press 1995, 15–45; and Phillipe Dubois, ‘Le Corps et ses fantomes: Notes sur quelques fictions photographiques dans l’iconographie scientifique de la second moitié du XIXeme siècle’, in L’Acte photographique et autres essays, Paris: Nathan 1991, 212–16.
11 Kühne, On the Photochemistry, 12.
12 An exception is Corey Keller, ‘Sight Unseen: Picturing the Invisible’, in Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840–1900, ed. Corey Keller, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2008, 30.
13 According to Joel Snyder, ‘Prior to the late 1870s, photographs were rarely thought of as capable of revealing “hidden” aspects of things, or of providing evidence of matters invisible to the eye’. See Joel Snyder, ‘Res Ipsa Loquitur’, in Things That Talk, ed. Lorraine Daston, New York: Zone Book 2004, 216–17. An exception is Jean-Baptiste Biot’s experiments in the 1840s. See Therese Levitt, ‘Biot’s Paper and Arago’s Plates: Photographic Practice and the Transparency of Representation’, Isis, 94:2 (September 2003), 456–76.
14 The phrase ‘natural photographs’ appears in Mark F. Griswold, ‘Occult Proof: The Tale of a Physician’, Pittsburgh Dispatch (26 July 1890), 12. Certainly Griswold knowingly plays with the relationship of ocular (Latin oculus or eye) perception and occult (Latin occultare or conceal, to hide) truth.
15 Kühne, On the Photochemistry, 68.
16 Quoted in George Wald, ‘Eye and Camera’, in Scientific American Reader, ed. Dennis Flanagan, New York: Simon and Schuster 1953, 564. As for Wald’s own experiments with photography using rhodopsin, he had to admit that his attempts were still relatively crude: ‘I doubt that it has a future as a practical process’. Ibid., 568.
17 Geoffrey Batchen, ‘The Naming of Photography: “A Mass of Metaphor”’, History of Photography, 17:1 (Spring 1993), 28. Rather than argue with Batchen for the essential conflict of these modes of thought, I would suggest that, consistent with the tenets of mid-nineteenth-century natural theology, both nature and culture were understood fundamentally to derive from the same source: God. Man sought to understand the divine plan by studying nature, and to harness its power for the benefit of culture. Therefore, rather than an impossible binary, ‘photograph’ synthesizes two necessarily related features of Creation. See Douglas Nickel, ‘Talbot’s Natural Magic’, History of Photography, 26:2 (Summer 2002), 132–40.
18 William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (1844), repr., New York: Da Capo Press 1969, 20 (original italics). Talbot’s friend, Sir David Brewster, similarly described vision as ‘the handwriting of Nature on the retina’. Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic: Addressed to Sir Walter Scott, New York: Harper and Brothers 1836, 21.
19 Talbot, Pencil of Nature, 42.
20 Snyder, ‘Res Ipsa Loquitur’, 195–221; and Laura Saltz, ‘Natural/Mechanical: Keywords in the Conception of Early Photography’, in Photography and Its Origins, ed. Tanya Sheehan and Andrés Mario Zervigón, London: Routledge 2015, 196–205.
21 Steve Edwards, The Making of English Photography: Allegories, University Park: Penn State University Press 2006, 131–53.
22 Hermann Vogel, ‘German Correspondence’, The Philadelphia Photographer (May 1877), 150.
23 Ibid.
24 ‘The Conditions of Vision’, The Irish Monthly, 6 (June 1878), 38.
25 Kühne, On the Photochemistry, 94.
26 By the early 1840s, the retina’s various components – including globules, rods, and cones, the latter two positioned behind the nerves – were observed, complicating the previous simple threshold model. In the mid-1840s, Ernst Brücke argued for recognition of the rods and cones as an optical apparatus. Finally, by the mid-1850s, Heinrich Müller published his observations, made with the aid of a microscope, of the retina’s six layers. With this research, the rods emerged as the light-sensitive seat of vision. The retina, although belonging to the eye, came to be seen as part also of the central nervous system – the only part of it visible by non-invasive means. The eye and mind were deemed fundamentally inseparable – an integrated system rather than separate organs of sight. Jutta Shickore, The Microscope and the Eye: A History of Reflections, 1740–1870, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2007, 199–215.
27 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1992, 119.
28 Goulet, Optiques, 7.
29 René Descartes, Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology (1637), trans. Paul J. Olscamp, rev. edn, Indianapolis: Hackett 2001, 91.
30 Kaja Silverman, The Miracle of Analogy: or The History of Photography, Part 1, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2015, 17–19.
31 For the difference between physiological and physical optics, see Helmholtz, Helmholtz’s Treatise, 47.
32 Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 70.
33 For example, the body can produce light or colour effects through the application of physical pressure to the eyelid.
34 Jonathan Crary, ‘Modernizing Vision’, in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster, Seattle, WA: Bay Press 1988, 35.
35 Timothy Lenoir, The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechanics in Nineteenth Century German Biology, Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands 1982, 2–15. See also Garland E. Allen, ‘Mechanism, Vitalism and Organicism in Late Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Biology: The Importance of Historical Context’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 36:2 (June 2005), 261–83.
36 Douglas Nickel, ‘Photography and Invisibility’, in The Artist and the Camera, ed. Dorothy Kosinski, Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum of Art 1999, 36.
37 Tom Gunning, ‘Invisible Worlds, Visible Media’, in Brought to Light, ed. Keller, 51–63.
38 Walter Benjamin, ‘A Short History of Photography’ (1931), in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg, New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books 1980, 203.
39 Josh Ellenbogen, ‘Camera and Mind’, Representations, 101:1 (Winter 2008), 86–115.
40 In a similar manner to Ellenbogen, historian of visual culture Lisa Cartwright describes Scottish physician John Macintyre’s short 1897 film animating X-rays of a frog’s leg as ‘something between a picture and a graphic inscription, or between a pictorial photograph and a kymographic trace’. Lisa Cartwright, ‘“Experiments of Destruction”: Cinematic Inscriptions of Physiology’, Representations, 40 (Autumn 1992), 132.
41 Jan von Brevern, ‘Resemblance After Photography’, Representations, 123:1 (Summer 2013), 16.
42 Jennifer L. Mnookin uses this point to explain the motivations of the category of so-called ‘supernatural realist’ witnesses in the Mumler trials. Jennifer L. Mnookin, ‘The Image of Truth: Photographic Evidence and the Power of Analogy’, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, 10:1 (Winter 1998), 35–36.
43 Sigmund Exner, The Physiology of the Compound Eyes of Insects and Crustaceans (1891), trans. Roger C. Hardie, Berlin: Springer-Verlag 1989, 23–24.
44 Deborah R. Coen, ‘A Lens of Many Facets: Science Through a Family’s Eyes’, Isis, 97:3 (September 2006), 403.
45 Exner implies that some insects may correct for blurriness with retinal pigments not unlike rhodopsin, and further signals differences based on evolutionary stages, implicitly in accordance with Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection.
46 Exner, Physiology of the Compound Eyes, 123–27; and Coen, ‘Lens of Many Facets’, 406.
47 ‘Dr. Gabriel’s Experiment’, Pittsburgh Dispatch (10 May 1890), 10.
48 Ibid.
49 David Brewster, ‘On the Structure of the Crystalline Lens in Fishes and Quadrupeds’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 106 (1 January 1816), 311–17; and Shickore, Microscope and the Eye, 90.
50 This state differs from Paul Virilio’s ‘splitting of viewpoint, the sharing of perception of the environment’ (original italics) between animate subjects and inanimate objects like machines, precisely because the physiologists assume the subjectivity of the once-animate creatures. Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine, trans. Julie Rose, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1994, 59.
51 Talbot, Pencil of Nature, 19–20.
52 The phrase ‘mute testimony’ is Talbot’s. Ibid., 19.
53 John Henry Wigmore, The Principles of Judicial Proof: As Given by Logic, Psychology, and General Experience, and Illustrated in Judicial Trials, vol. 1, Boston: Little and Brown 1913, 68.
54 The phrase ‘trained judgment’ is Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s. I am indebted to their groundbreaking work historicising the concept of objectivity for the history of science and the humanities more broadly. See Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, ‘The Image of Objectivity’, Representations, 40 (Autumn 1992), 81–128; and Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity, New York: Zone Books 2007.
55 Jennifer Tucker, Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Photography, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press 2005, 7. See also Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Photographic Uncertainties: Between Evidence and Reassurance’, History and Anthropology, 25:2 (March 2014), 174.
56 Jimena Canales, ‘Photogenic Venus: The “Cinematographic Turn” and Its Alternatives in Nineteenth-Century France’, Isis, 93:4 (December 2002), 585–613.
57 John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1993, 4 (original italics).
58 Alan Trachtenberg, ‘Photography: The Emergence of a Keyword’, in Photography in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Martha A. Sandweiss, Fort Worth, TX: Amon Carter Museum 1991, 17. See also Batchen, ‘Naming of Photography’, 28.
59 Mazie Harris, ‘Photographic Portraits and Proprietary Claims, 1853–1884’, PhD diss., Brown University 2013.
60 Snyder, ‘Res Ipsa Loquitur’, 214–21.
61 The precedent seems to have been set by Cowley v. People of 1881. Mnookin, ‘Image of Truth’, 25–26 and 43–45.
62 Ibid., 50.
63 Ibid., 62–66.
64 Ibid., 57.
65 Eborn v. Zimpleman, 47 Texas 503 (1877), s.c. 26 Am. Rep. 315, quoted in Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2009, 255–56.
66 He continues: ‘In other words, would a living eye-witness, whose memory only preserved the fleeting photograph of the deed, be heard, and the permanent photograph on the dead man’s eye be excluded? We submit that the eye of the dead man would furnish the best evidence that the accursed was there when the deed was committed, for it would bear a fact, needing no effort of memory to preserve it. It would not be partial evidence based on uncertain memory, but the handwriting of nature, preserved by nature’s camera’. Ibid., 256.
67 Crary, ‘Modernizing Vision’, 35–36.
68 Gunning, ‘Tracing the Individual Body’, 32.
69 Galton coined the term ‘eugenics’ in 1883. This pseudoscience promoted the idea of controlled breeding to ‘improve’ (in their terms) the human race.
70 Allan Sekula, ‘The Body and the Archive’, October, 39 (Winter 1986), 18–19 and 30.
71 Simon A. Cole, Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2001, 32–59.
72 Jonathan Friday might extend this claim to photography in general: ‘Photographs, or at least many photographs, are iconic indexicals: they point pictorially’ (original italics), in an edition of ‘The Art Seminar’, in Photography Theory, ed. James Elkins, New York: Routledge 2007, 141.
73 Griswold, ‘Occult Proof’, 12.
74 Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method’, trans. Anna Davin, History Workshop, 9 (Spring 1980), 26–27.
75 Francis Galton, Fingerprint Directories, London: Macmillan 1895, 1.
76 John Henry Wigmore, A Treatise on the Anglo-American System of Evidence in Trials at Common Law, vol. 4, Boston: Little and Brown 1923, 874. For the history of the 1941 Grice decision, see Cole, Suspect Identities, 259.
77 Goulet, Optiques, 182.
78 See, for example, Rosalind Krauss, ‘Introductory Note’, in Photography Theory, ed. Elkins, 125–27.