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Abstract
The supposedly intimate relationship between photography and human vision has served as an enduring basis for asserting the medium’s proximity to reality. Yet, a number of first generation theoreticians of photography posited a far more ambiguous connection between the two, not least the prolific critic Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894). By imagining photography as superior to human perception in accessing the comprehensive, serial nature of the reality of phenomena, Holmes implied that vision was in fact more akin to the selective judgment of the painter. It is in the representation of objects moving at rapid speed, and the series of photographs required to capture the entirety of this cycle, that photography’s multiplicity emerges as a most distinct counterpoint to the capacity of human vision. The acts of judgment that comprise perception are, in the writings of Lady Elizabeth Eastlake (1809–1893) and others, important bases for infusing representations of social class into the realm of this human ability. The complex constellation of photography, vision, and artistic taste attests to the deeply contested nature of the medium in its earliest years.
Notes
1 Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, “Photography” (originally published in April 1857 in Quarterly Review), in Beaumont Newhall, ed., Photography: Essays and Images (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1980), 81. This article develops material I have touched on tangentially in other contexts, principally “Inhuman Sight,” in One/Many, exh. cat. (Chicago, University of Chicago Press), 55–75, and “On Photographic Elegy,” forthcoming in Karen Weisman, ed., Oxford Handbook of the Elegy.
2 Many scholars have considered the ways that commentators have articulated the relationships between seeing and photography, and the meaning of the ways in which they have done so. Two of the more famous examples are Mary Anne Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002) and Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). In my own work, I have also considered this question, with the most relevant example being “Camera and Mind,” Representations 101 (Winter 2008): 86–114.
3 The writings on which I draw are Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph” (1859), “Sun‐Painting and Sun‐Sculpture” (1861), “Doings of the Sunbeam” (1863), and “The Human Wheel, Its Spokes and Felloes” (1863), as gathered together in Holmes, Soundings from the Atlantic (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1864); Eastlake, “Photography” (1857); and Delacroix’s reflections in his journal of 1 September 1859, in Journal de Eugène Delacroix, (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1932).
4 The three particular works to which I allude here are, respectively, Nancy West, “Fantasy, Photography, and the Marketplace: Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Stereoscope,” Nineteenth‐Century Contexts 19 (Summer 1996): 231–58, Megan Rowley Williams, Through the Negative (New York: Routledge, 2003), and Allan Sekula, “The Traffic in Photographs,” Art Journal 41 (Spring 1981): 15–25. Father of the famous jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Holmes was a physician, essayist, and poet. His endlessly stimulating discussions of photography all originally appeared in The Atlantic in the late 1850s and early 1860s.
5 Thomas Hankins and Robert Silverman, if not from the perspective of this article, are among the scholars who have considered Holmes’s approach to human seeing. See their Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). Similarly, Holmes’s response to certain images that this article privileges, above all high‐speed photographs of objects that display change through time or that move, has also received a measure of attention. Beaumont Newhall, for one, considered Holmes’s treatment of instantaneous photography as early as 1944. See his “Photography and the Development of Kinetic Visualization,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 7 (1944): 40–5.
6 Joel Snyder’s classic “Picturing Vision” in W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., The Language of Images, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 219–46, offers the most sustained treatment of the conceptual habit that models vision on pictures and the consequences that flow from the habit.
7 Holmes, “The Stereoscope,” 143.
8 Holmes, “Sun‐Painting,” 170.
9 Holmes, “The Stereoscope,” 125.
10 Holmes, “The Stereoscope,” 124 and 125, italics in original.
11 Holmes, “The Stereoscope,” 126.
12 Although not identical to the one found in Holmes, photographer Félix Nadar (1829–1910) retrospectively attributed a similar position to novelist Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850). See his memoir, “My Life as a Photographer,” reprinted in October 5 (Summer 1978): 9.
13 Holmes, “The Stereoscope,” 126.
14 Nancy West has identified irony as the principle rhetorical mode that Holmes employs, and has noted how his writings are “marked by uneasy moments, by tensions or contradictions that suggest an underlying ambivalence” about particular aspects of photography. See “Fantasy,” 238.
15 Holmes, “Doings of the Sunbeam,” 232.
16 Holmes, “Doings of the Sunbeam,” 232.
17 Holmes, “Doings of the Sunbeam,” 233.
18 Hankins and Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination, 155 and 156.
19 I refer to Holmes’s earlier claim regarding the “superficial aspect” of the films photography captures.
20 Oxford English Dictionary.
21 Holmes, “Sun‐Painting,” 167.
22 Holmes, “The Stereoscope,” 132.
23 Oxford English Dictionary. One might also consider Holmes’s love of “palpable presence” in relation to broader developments in modernity for which Crary (Techniques, 19) has argued, “the loss of touch as a conceptual component of vision,” which triggered “the unloosening of the eye from the network of referentiality incarnated in tactility and its subjective relation to perceived space.”
24 Holmes, “The Stereoscope,” 140.
25 Holmes, “The Stereoscope,” 140, italics in original.
26 Holmes, “The Stereoscope,” 142, italics in original. By using the term “pictures,” I invoke Holmes’s earlier claim that “our two eyes see two somewhat different pictures, which our perception combines to form one picture, representing objects in all their dimensions, and not merely as surfaces.” In this quote, Holmes talks about pictures as he specifically treats binocular vision, so speaking of “pictures” here is warranted.
27 Holmes, “The Stereoscope,” 145–6.
28 Discussions of Mokanna in the West, from the eighteenth century to today, have long emphasized this fact. See, for example, the preliminary discourse to George Sale’s translation of the Koran. Originally published in 1734, it served as the standard English‐language version of the text into Holmes’s day. It discusses the one‐eyed Mokanna in Section VIII of Sales’s introduction (London: Wilcox, 1734), 181. For a more recent example, see the article on Mokanna in the 1907 edition of the Nuttall Encyclopaedia, available online at http://www.fromoldbooks.org/Wood-NuttallEncyclopaedia/m/mokannaal.html (accessed 18 January 2010).
29 See West’s claim (“Fantasy,” 243) that “unlike two‐dimensional representation, the stereoscope seems to offer for him [Holmes] an immediate and unmediated vision comparable to normal vision.”
30 I shall leave aside how Holmes conflates two different images, here, the real image in a photograph with the virtual image in a mirror.
31 Holmes, “Sun‐Painting,” 167 and “Doings of the Sunbeam,” 262.
32 Holmes, “Sun‐Painting,” 169–70.
33 Holmes, “Doings of the Sunbeam,” 259.
34 Holmes, “The Human Wheel,” 294–95.
35 Holmes turns to instantaneous photographs of the walk in his discussion of artificial limbs, a question that had become topical in 1863 owing to the great number of war‐amputees. He believes the surprising positions instantaneous photography reveals, phases of motion that unfold too quickly for the eye to detect, give valuable information that should be incorporated into the design of prosthetics.
36 Holmes, “The Human Wheel,” 294.
37 Of course, apart from his encounters with particular kinds of photographs, other sources contributed to Holmes’s willingness to construe the perception and representation of moving objects this way. Although I do not have space to cover the matter here, for example, established discussions in aesthetics made their own contribution. These discussions attained even greater importance later in the century, particularly in Francis Galton’s photographic project, and the understanding of movement it deployed. I treat these questions more fully in the essay “Educated Eyes and Impressed Images,” forthcoming in Art History.
38 Holmes, “The Stereoscope,” 149–50.
39 One might be able to argue for a certain difference between the changing expressions of the friend and the changing positions of the walking person. Holmes suggests that when we behold the photograph of an aspect of our friend we had never seen before, while we are surprised by it, we also accept it, finding it to be “a wholly different aspect, which is yet as absolutely characteristic” as the single aspect we thought was adequate to our friend. This situation seems not to hold for the pictures of human locomotion, pictures so strange that “no artist would have dared” to draw a man this way. In order to explain how Holmes can try to argue this point, as well as to establish what standard he could be using in referring to the pictures of the friend as “characteristic,” would require a complicated discussion that is inappropriate here.
40 This parallel, which turns on the idea that human observers neglect to see certain postures in movement, requires that the postures be available to them in the same way as individual details are in an unmoving scene they look at. The parallel therefore derives from the foregoing account of serial pictures.
41 Holmes, “The Stereoscope,” 155. Holmes before advanced the similar claim that the imperfect way in which artists rendered moving bodies, confining themselves to one or two accepted positions, established a kinship between painting and seeing.
42 Holmes, “The Stereoscope,” 152.
43 Holmes, “The Stereoscope,” 148.
44 Holmes, “Sun‐Painting,” 183–84.
45 If one wanted to do so, one could try to create a kind of distinction between what we “see” and what we “perceive” in Holmes, suggesting that we see all the details in any given scene, as well as all the positions through which physiognomies and moving bodies pass, but that, owing to the treatments we visit on these materials, we only “perceive” a limited sample. Holmes occasionally speaks in a way that might warrant treating “perception” as finished vision, stating, as already noted, that “What we see in ordinary vision is modified in our perceptions by what we think we see,” as well as “our two eyes see two somewhat different pictures, which our perception combines to form one picture … .” But Holmes’s thinking, as well as his vocabulary, is not systematic in this way, and so I have avoided inserting this distinction into his work.
46 Holmes, “The Stereoscope,” 151.
47 Wife of Sir Charles Eastlake, the first president of the London Photographic Society, Lady Eastlake was a brilliant essayist and art critic. Aside from her own studies of the Italian Renaissance, she also translated into English the German art historians Gustav Friedrich Waagen (1794–1868) and Franz Theodor Kugler (1808–1858).
48 Eastlake, “Photography,” 88.
49 Eastlake, “Photography,” 84, 81.
50 Eastlake, “Photography,” 91.
51 Eastlake, “Photography,” 91.
52 Eastlake, “Photography,” 92.
53 Eastlake, “Photography,” 91.
54 Eastlake, “Photography,” 94.
55 Eastlake, “Photography,” 94.
56 See Eastlake’s claims that: “For all that requires mere manual correctness, and mere manual slavery, without any employment of the artistic feeling, she [photography] is the proper and therefore the perfect medium,” 93; “The field of delineation, having two distinct spheres, requires two distinct labourers; but though hitherto the freewoman [painting] has done the work of the bondwoman [photography], there is no fear that the position should be in the future reversed,” 94; appraising the perfect detail in a photograph, she states “no artist, it is to be hoped, could have been found possessing the requisite ability and stupidity” to make such a picture, 88; as distinct from a photograph, “the hand of the artist is but ignobly employed … in servilely following the intricacies of the zigzag ornament,” 94, and so on.
57 Steve Edwards has done the most to demonstrate the vital significance of Reynolds’ aesthetics to later discussions of photography, above all in regard to ideas of the “mechanical.” See his The Making of English Photography: Allegories (University Park: Pennsylvania State Press, 2006).
58 Joshua Reynolds, The Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds (London: Oxford University Press, 1907), Discourse XI, 165.
59 Reynolds, Discourses, Discourse XI, 173.
60 Reynolds, Discourses, Discourse XI, 164.
61 Reynolds, Discourses, Discourse XI, 163. I do not have space to run through all of Reynolds’s arguments here. Reynolds holds that “the whole beauty and grandeur of art consists, in my opinion, in being able to get above all singular forms, local custom, particularities, and details of every kind,” in order to make an image that refers to “the idea of the central form, if I may so express it, from which every deviation is deformity” (Discourse III, 26 and 27). By “central forms,” Reynolds means general concepts of species and type, so that paintings can refer to the idea “tree” rather than just individual trees. According to Reynolds, painting based in “the effect [objects] have on the eye when it is dilated, and employed upon the whole, without seeing any one of the parts distinctly,” best addresses these conceptual entities.
62 Reynolds, Discourses, Discourse XI, 171.
63 Eastlake describes the photographer in a way that bears a certain similarity to how she describes the sun, where “the great luminary concentrates his gaze” on photo‐sensitized surfaces. The photographer can also be found “gloating over the pictures as they developed beneath his gaze,” leading the photographer wrongly to say “in his heart ‘anch’ io son pittore’” [“I, too, am a painter”]. (Eastlake, “Photography,” 91).
64 I refer of course to Walter Benjamin. There are enormous distinctions between Benjamin’s account from eighty years later and the nineteenth‐century discussion I am here treating, but it does seem that this older treatment of the medium may have contributed to the intellectual reservoir on which he drew.
65 Delacroix, Journal, 231–32.
66 Delacroix, Journal, 232–33.