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Abstract
This essay inquires into attention and detail as aesthetic categories in the nineteenth-century reception of photography in Scandinavia. It circles around what is generally considered to be Sweden’s first book with original photographs, Johannes Jaeger’s Molin’s Fountain in Photographs, with text (1866), read through two articles on the aesthetic potential of the photographic medium written by two contemporary Scandinavian art critics. In seven albumen print photographs, the book documents a fountain sculpture by Swedish sculptor Johan Peter Molin, exhibited at the first Scandinavian Art and Industrial Exhibition in 1866. However, the book also includes poetry; each photograph is juxtaposed with a poetic stanza that describes the part of the sculpture that the photograph reproduces. This paper studies the close relation between image and text in Jaeger’s volume. It argues that a contemporary view of the photographic image, also articulated by the Scandinavian art critics, can be discerned from the layout of the book – namely, that photography produces images too distractive and oversaturated with insignificant details to be aesthetically valuable. The visual and verbal framework for the photographs, then, arguably aims to overcompensate the distractive qualities of the image, by regulating the reader/viewer’s attention towards the sculpture and its significant details. In this ambition, Jaeger’s photobook anticipates a future aesthetic appreciation of the photograph in its own right.
I owe my thanks to Patrizia Di Bello of Birkbeck College, Marta Weiss of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Hope Kingsley of the Wilson Centre for Photography, for their knowledgeable comments and intelligent suggestions on earlier versions of this text. I would like to dedicate this article to my late grandfather, Sten Bremmer (1917–2011), who passed away during its conception and whose eye for photography grew increasingly passionate in his later years. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are those of the author.
Notes
1 – ‘Första skandinaviska industriutställningen’ [The First Scandinavian Industrial Exhibition], Ny illustrerad tidning [New Illustrated Journal], 2 (1866), 193: ‘ej varit möjligt att vinna en sådan öfverblick öfver denna rikedoms villande mångfald, som utgör villkoret för en ordnad plan’.
2 – The story of the photograph is as well known as the photograph itself. Jaeger’s employer, King Karl XV, being ill in bed, could not attend the opening ceremony. After taking the picture, Jaeger developed a print and sent a copy by carriage to Ulriksdal Palace outside Stockholm. Hence, the King had a copy in his hands only an hour or two after the event. For this reason, this image has been called Sweden’s first ‘reportage’ photograph. See Rolf Söderberg and Pär Rittsel, Den svenska fotografins historia: 1840–1940, Stockholm: Bonnier fakta 1983, 85.
3 – Johannes Jaeger, Molins fontän i fotografi, med text, Stockholm: P. A. Norstedt & Söner 1866. The book appeared in two small editions in the first year.
4 – This photograph, the first in the book, appears in three versions in the two editions: one where the background is visible; a second where the background is retouched out; and a third where both the background and its reflection in the water are retouched. The last variant is not found in the first edition.
5 – Joel Snyder, ‘Nineteenth-century Photography of Sculpture and the Rhetoric of Substitution’, in Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension, ed. Geraldine A. Johnson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2006, 21–34. The Swiss art critic Heinrich Wölfflin recommended the erasing of background material in his articles on how to photograph sculpture. His advice was based on the conviction that the photographer has to be objective and consolidate, rather than challenge, the subjective authority of the artist. See Heinrich Wölfflin, ‘Wie man Skulpturen aufnehmen soll’, in Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst, new series 1:7 (1896), 224–8; 2:8 (1897), 294–7; and 3:25 (1915), 237–44; translated as ‘How One Should Photograph Sculpture’ by Geraldine A. Johnson, Art History, 36:1 (2013), 52–71.
6 – The afterword and these stanzas are unsigned in the book. However, Molin’s correspondence at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in Stockholm demonstrates that Sätherberg wrote an early version of the afterword and sent it to Molin for proofreading. This draft also suggests strong similarities with several formulations and observations later found in the anonymous stanzas juxtaposed to the photographs. I therefore attribute these stanzas to Herman Sätherberg.
7 – Contemporary Swedish commentators mentioned the unfinished look of photographic reproductions, preferring xylographic versions, made more comprehensible by erasing distracting stimuli. Lena Johannesson, Xylografi och pressbild: Bidrag till trägravyrens och till den svenska bildjournalistikens historia, Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell 1982, 297–8.
8 – August Wilhelm Malm, Monographie illustrée du baleinoptère trouvé le 29 octobre 1865 sur la cote occidentale de Suède, Stockholm: P. A. Norstedt 1867, 97: ‘il n’a pas été possible de s’arranger pour avoir un fonds uniforme, ce qui fait que les tableau contiennent différentes choses qui n’y ont aucun rapport’.
9 – ‘R.’, ‘Till fotografiens historia’ [To the History of Photography], Ny illustrerad tidning, 2 (1866), 302: ‘Ett konstverk har betydelse hufvudsakligast genom sin komposition. En konstnärs arbete består framför allt deri, att försvaga ett stort antal underordnade effekter, som endast skulle skada den allmänna effekten, och framhäfva vissa partier, som skola beherrska det hela’.
10 – Ibid.: ‘Hon gifver lika vigt åt de stora massorna och åt de omärkligaste bisaker. En fotografi af t. ex. en gata utgör en den omständligaste förteckning på allt, som på den är synligt, man igenkänner hvar enda sten, intill dess afstötta hörn o. s. v.’.
11 – Ibid.: ‘[H]an glömmer alla dessa gagnlösa enskildheter och rigtar hela sin uppmärksamhet på anletsdragen’.
12 – Ibid., 303: ‘lättare att begripa’.
13 – Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1999, 13.
14 – Ibid., 17.
15 – With these arguments, ‘R.’ enters into familiar ground in the early critique of the photograph. In February 1853, Sir William J. Newton famously caused a commotion at the first meeting of the Photographic Society of London with a much-debated address in which he advised artists using photography to reduce the chemical quality of the image in order to render images more ‘in accordance […] with the acknowledged principles of Fine Art’. To articulate in what sense photography challenged these ‘acknowledged principles’, Newton put forth his belief that it was not ‘necessary or desirable for an artist to represent or aim at the attainment of every minute detail’. William J. Newton, ‘Upon Photography in an Artistic View’, The Journal of the Photographic Society, 1 (March 1853), 6. A few years later, Elizabeth Eastlake published an article that concurred with Newton’s view on the aesthetics of photography. Eastlake also found a lack of aesthetic value in the photograph’s abundance of detail. For Eastlake, it is ‘the power of selection and rejection’ that contributes to ‘that mystery called Art’. Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, ‘Photography’, The Quarterly Review, 101 (April 1857), 442–68.
16 – Julius Lange’s article ‘Fotografiens Esthetik’ was originally published in the Danish journal Fædrelande (11 March 1865). It was later collected in a volume of critical writings: Julius Lange, Nutids-kunst. Skildringer og karakteristiker [Contemporary Art: Descriptions and Characteristics], Copenhagen: P. G. Philipsen 1873, 523–32. I quote and translate from the latter (Lange, Nutids-kunst, 526): ‘At Fotografien ikke er Kunst i Ordets egenlige og strengere Betydning, er vel en Sandhed, som trods Hr. Disdéris Bog de Fleste ville anerkjende’.
17 – Ibid., 527: ‘alle Enkeltheder fremtraede samtidig’.
18 – Ibid.: ‘efterhaanden gaaer alle Billedets Enkeltheder igjennem paa ethvert Punkt’.
19 – Ibid., 529: ‘Fotografien lader Øjet i Stikken, tillader det at see ligesaa vrangt och vildt, som det kan og vil /…/’.
20 – Ibid.: ‘leder det sikkert ad Skjønhedens Veje’.
21 – Lange’s corporeal emphasis on the hand echoes Ruskin’s contemporary emphasis on the unity of bodily craft and soulful inspiration in the true art work. In a lecture from 1858, Ruskin asserted that: ‘The highest art unites both in their intensest degrees the action of the hand at its finest, with that of the heart at its fullest’. See John Ruskin, ‘The Work of Iron, in Nature, Art, and Policy’ (1859), in On Art and Life, London: Penguin 2004, 70.
22 – Lange, ‘Fotografiens Esthetik’, 529: ‘Saaledes regulerer Kunstværket umærkelig Øjets Bevægelse og viser os, hvorledes vi skulle see, medens Fotografien blot viser os, hvad vi skulle see’.
23 – ‘R.’, ‘Till fotografiens historia’, 302.
24 – Emmanuel Hermange, ‘Aspects and Uses of Ekphrasis in Relation to Photography, 1816–1860’, Journal of European Studies, 30 (March 2000), 5–18.
25 – Johannes Jaeger, Nordiskt konstnärs-album, Stockholm: Skoglund 1877, 1: ‘detta med Konstnärs-albumet afsedda ändamål ernås endast under förutsättning att urvalet sker med sakkännedom och reproduktionen åtföljes af en på en gång gedigen och tillräckligt populär text’.
26 – Tony Bennett relates this to the emergence of the modern museum in the nineteenth century: ‘Culture, in its existing form, could not simply be made available and be expected to discharge its reforming obligations of its own and unaided. It needed to be fashioned for the tasks to which it was thus summoned and be put to work in new contexts specially designed for those purposes’. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, London: Routledge 1995, 23.
27 – James Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1993, 138.
28 – Diana Shaffer, ‘Ekphrasis and the Rhetoric of Viewing in Philostratus’s Imaginary Museum’, Philosophy & Rhetoric, 31:4 (1998), 304.
29 – Jaeger, Molins fontän i fotografi, 16.
30 – Charles Sanders Peirce, ‘A Guess at the Riddle’ (1885), in The Communication Theory Reader, ed. Paul Cobley, London and New York: Routledge 1996, 58.
31 – Charles Sanders Peirce, ‘What is a Sign?’ (1894), in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 2, 1893–1913, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1998, 9.
32 – Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures, New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1985, 1.
33 – Heffernan, Museum of Words, 1.
34 – W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 1994, 168.
35 – Jaeger, Molins fontän i fotografi, 20.
36 – Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975), in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, New York: Oxford University Press 1999, 838.
37 – ‘R.’, ‘Till fotografiens historia’, 302.
38 – Nancy J. Vickers, ‘The Body Re-membered: Petrarchan Lyric and the Strategies of Description’, in Mimesis: From Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes, ed. John D. Lyons and Stephen G. Nichols, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Dartmouth College 1982, 97.
39 – Ibid., 95.
40 – Lange, ‘Fotografiens Esthetik’, 528: ‘Kunstneren er uindskrænket Herre over sin Tavle og indretter sig Ganske efter Behag’.
41 – The power structure involved in the practice of showing and telling is one amongst several connections between the photographically illustrated book and the art museum. The relation between Jaeger’s photobook and his assignment at the newly opened National Art Museum in Stockholm is an issue that I will examine in my forthcoming dissertation.
42 – Johannes Jaeger, Collection Jaeger: Illustrerad katalog öfver fotografiska reproduktioner af svenska och utländska konstnärers arbeten i Nationalmusei och andra samlingar, Stockholm: Aktiebolaget Johannes Jaeger 1905.
43 – In his 1966 book, Szarkowski appoints detail – which photography by that time was able to grasp more dynamically with the aid of cropping, enlargements, and other framing effects – as one of the distinguishing features of the photographic art. See John Szarkowski, The Photographer’s Eye, New York: Museum of Modern Art 2007. Barthes famously makes the unintentional detail the prime embodiment of the photograph’s punctum, the wounding or striking effect of a photograph. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard, London: Vintage 1993.