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Abstract
This article explores turn-of-the-twentieth-century occult photographic experiments by Louis Darget and Hippolyte Baraduc that eliminated the technological medium of the photographic equipment and worked with an altogether different kind of medium: namely, the so-called ‘vital fluid’. These experiments fit into their era’s aim for scientific objectivity; however, by striving to exclude the camera from the image-making process, they highlight the complex media-theoretical dynamics at work in Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s ‘mechanical objectivity’. It is these media-theoretical implications that form the subject matter of this article. I explore the tension between Darget’s and Baraduc’s photographic practice, which stresses immediacy even as it continually enacts ‘medial tautologies’. Their attempts to capture the subtle media of effluvia reveal the presence of other media within the images: that of the technical apparatus (the emulsifying liquid) and that of the surrounding environment (the fluid of air). Thereby, their practice continually blurs the line between its object of representation and its medium of representation. This peculiar medial situation makes their experiments into sites for the analysis of the entwinement between objects of knowledge and their means of knowing as well as for the study of the attempt to grasp with the exact methods of science that which is beyond the purported limits of science.
Notes
1 ‘Tells New Marvels of Thought Photos’, New York Times (2 February 1913), 4.
2 Ibid.
3 Pascal Rousseau, ‘Psychography: From Spirits to Thought Photography’, in Imponderable: The Archives of Tony Oursler, ed. Anne Wehr, Zurich: Luma Foundation 2015, 490. Rousseau sketches a helpful context for Darget’s and Baraduc’s acquaintance.
4 Louis Darget, ‘Verschiedene Methoden zur Erzielung fluido-magnetischer und spiritistischer Photographien’, Die übersinnliche Welt, 19 (April 1911), 121–35. This text is a German translation of Darget’s original in French from 1909.
5 Clément Chéroux, ‘Photographs of Fluids’, in The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult, ed. Clément Chéroux, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2005, 116. Chéroux quotes from Albert de Rochas, L’Extériorisation de la sensibilité, Paris: Chamuel 1895, 45–46.
6 Hippolyte Baraduc, The Human Soul: Its Movements, Its Lights, and the Iconography of the Fluidic Invisible (1896), English translator’s name not given, Paris: Librairie Internationale de la Pensée Nouvelle 1913, no pagination for images, caption under experiment III. It should be noted that the English translation of Baraduc’s L’âme humaine contains many inaccuracies, not only linguistic ones but also others that pertain to the numbering and captioning of the images.
7 Ibid., caption under experiments XXV and XXVa.
8 Ibid., caption under experiment XXXIII.
9 Rolf Krauss, Jenseits von Licht und Schatten. Die Rolle der Photographie bei bestimmten paranormalen Phänomenen: Ein historischer Abriss, Marburg: Jonas Verlag 1992, 48.
10 Chéroux, ‘Photographs of Fluids’, 119.
11 In the interview quoted in the New York Times, Darget explains that his studies had persuaded him as early as 1882 ‘that the vital fluid was luminous and might affect photographic plates just as ordinary light does’. ‘Tells New Marvels’, 4.
12 Baraduc, Human Soul, 76.
13 Baraduc argues that ‘the [photographic] plate has proved degrees of luminosity unknown to the eye’ (ibid., 74); he describes the invisible light of the fluid, ‘which possessed a remarkable photo-chemical power’ (ibid., 291).
14 Krauss, Jenseits von Licht und Schatten, 48.
15 ‘Tells New Marvels’, 4.
16 Chéroux, ‘Photographs of Fluids’, 118. For a discussion of the idea of ‘cerebral radiations’, see Rousseau, ‘Psychography’, esp. 491–94.
17 Geoffrey Batchen, Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph, Munich: DelMonico Books and Prestel 2016, 5.
18 Ibid. Batchen writes about the ‘photographic contact print, the originary gesture of all photography’. Ibid., 8.
19 Ibid., 5–7.
20 See Rousseau, ‘Psychography’. In his essay on the history of the photography of thought, Andreas Fischer notes another connection between spirit and thought photography: ‘in the 1880s, growing numbers of people espoused the hypothesis that the ghosts in the pictures might be images of dead people preserved in the memories of the living, or other images from their imaginations, mentally projected onto the photographic plate’. Andreas Fischer, ‘“La Lune au front”: Remarks on the History of the Photography of Thought’, in Perfect Medium, ed. Chéroux, 139.
21 Chitra Ramalingam, ‘Dust Plate, Retina, Photograph: Imaging on Experimental Surfaces in Early Nineteenth-Century Physics’, Science in Context, 28:3 (September 2015), 318.
22 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity, New York: Zone Books 2007, 121.
23 Daston and Galison write: ‘By mechanical objectivity we mean the insistent drive to repress the willful intervention of the artist-author, and to put in its stead a set of procedures that would, as it were, move nature to the page through a strict protocol, if not automatically. This meant sometimes using an actual machine, sometimes a person’s mechanized action, such as tracing’. Ibid. (Emphasis in original).
24 Daston and Galison note, however, that ‘the relationship of scientific objectivity to photography was anything but simple determinism. Not all objective images were photographs; nor were all photographs considered ipso facto objective’. Ibid., 125.
25 I am indebted to Brigid Doherty for this term.
26 With ‘drawn by nature’, Ramalingam is referring to the nineteenth-century trope of photography – a trope that is often associated with William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature (Ramalingam, ‘Dust Plate, Retina, Photograph’, 349).
27 Leo Spitzer, ‘Milieu and Ambiance: An Essay in Historical Semantics’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 3:1 (September 1942), 1–42; and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 3:2 (December 1942), 169–218.
28 Ibid., 6–7.
29 Donald R. Benson, ‘Facts and Fictions in Scientific Discourse: The Case of Ether’, The Georgia Review, 38:4 (Winter 1984), 828.
30 Gaston Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit (1934), trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Boston: Beacon Press 1984, 63.
31 Ibid., 62–63.
32 For a discussion of the theory of imponderable fluids and their relation to disciplinary formations within the natural sciences in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Rudolf Stichweh, Zur Entstehung des modernen Systems wissenschaftlicher Disziplinen: Physik in Deutschland, 1740–1890, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1984, especially the chapter on ‘Chemie, Physik, und die Theorie der Imponderabilien’, 94–173.
33 Fischer, “‘La Lune au front”’, 140.
34 Darget’s invocation of the theory of imponderables is an illustration of the occult’s capaciousness – insofar as the occult drew not only on many different disciplines but also incorporated different moments in the historical development of a single discipline. One good example comes from the vital fluid’s reliance on physics. With their reference to imponderables, Darget and Baraduc integrated an early moment in the development of physics as a scientific discipline – namely, a particular moment that Stichweh describes as a moment of vacillation between chemical models of substances and physical notions of phenomena. Stichweh emphasises that in their properties, the imponderabilia resembled the characteristics of chemical substances that can bond with other substances. However, since they dealt with phenomena such as heat, light, electricity, and magnetism, imponderables also pertained to the domain of Naturlehre or what later became known as physics. Therefore, Stichweh argues, they were situated at a disciplinary threshold between chemistry and physics. This disciplinary transitional phase is also reenacted in Darget’s and Baraduc’s invocation of early photographic practices and their origin in both chemistry and physics. The centrality of chemical substances such as light-sensitive emulsifiers showed the relevance of chemistry for photography. The action of light emphasised, in turn, the role of optics and thus of physics. At the same time, Darget’s and Baraduc’s awareness of the then current research on electricity (for instance, in Baraduc’s electrographs) reveals their reference to the contemporaneous established discipline of physics and the phenomena particular to its jurisdiction. Thus, theories from physics’ early disciplinary delineation are present simultaneously with theories from its later disciplinary formation.
35 Franz Anton Mesmer, Mémoire sur la découverte du magnétisme animal, Geneva: P. Fr. Didot le jeune 1779, 6.
36 Ibid., 74: ‘un fluide universellement répandu’. Mesmer lists the various characteristics of his magnetic fluid (ibid., 20).
37 ‘Ein Brief Dargets’, Zentralblatt für Okkultismus (June 1914), 668: ‘Mein Lebensfluid ist in Wahrheit nichts anderes als das allgemein bekannte magnetische Fluid Mesmers’.
38 See Christoph Asendorf, Ströme und Strahlen. Das langsame Verschwinden der Materie um 1900, Giessen: Anabas Verlag 1989, chapter X: ‘Das Od ist eine Naturkraft, ein sogenanntes Dynamid deren Existenz zuerst in den Odisch-magnetischen Briefen (1852) behauptet wurde […] eine Kraft ähnlich der Elektrizität, Magnetismus und der Wärme und eigentlich zwischen diesen drei Naturkräften mitten inne stehend’.
39 Krauss, Jenseits von Licht und Schatten, 22.
40 Karl Reichenbach, Odische Begebenheiten zu Berlin in den Jahren 1861 und 1862, Berlin: Verlag von G. H. Schroeder 1862, 4.
41 For other examples, see Perfect Medium, ed. Chéroux; Wunder über Wunder. Wunderbares und Wunderliches im Glauben, in der Natur und in der Kunst, ed. Kai Uwe Schierz, Bielefeld: Kerber Art 2007; Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840–1900, ed. Corey Keller, San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2008; and Asendorf, Ströme und Strahlen.
42 Krauss, Jenseits von Licht und Schatten, 48.
43 Fischer, “‘La Lune au front”’, 140.
44 Archiv für Mediengeschichte – Wolken, ed. Lorenz Engell, Bernhard Siegert, and Joseph Vogl, Weimar: Verlag der Bauhaus-Universität Weimar 2005, 7.
45 Ibid.: ‘die Malerei [wiederholte] das Gestaltlose der Wolken in der Desorganisation ihres Materials – die Zufallsbewegung von Farbe und Pinsel auf der Leinwand’.
46 Ibid.: ‘In der (Wolken-)Fotografie etwa korrespondiert sie [die Materialität] mit jenen Flecken, Schleiern und Schlieren, in denen sich unscharfe Objekte mit den chemischen und physikalischen Spuren ihrer materiellen Träger verwechseln […] Die Schlieren, Schleier und Spuren der Fotografie … die die Unschärfe nicht darstellen sollen, sondern […] selbst sind: Störungen nähmlich, Unsauberkeiten, in denen sich das Verfahren selbst in seiner Fehlbarkeit meldet’.
47 Ibid.
48 Ibid., 6.
49 Ibid., 7.
50 See Richard Wedel, ‘Entwicklung und Wesen der Transcendental-Photographie’, Die Uebersinnliche Welt. Monatsschrift für okkultistische Forschung (April 1898), 99: ‘Wenn man […] Radiogramme mit gewissen Tafeln aus Professor Schmidts Fehlerbuch der photographischen Praxis vergleicht, so zeigt sich eine erstaunliche Aehnlichkeit’.
51 For an extended discussion of such phenomena in which ‘fact and artifact’ become blurred, see Peter Geimer, Bilder aus Versehen. Eine Erforschung fotografischer Erscheinungen, Hamburg: Philo Fine Arts 2010, esp. 153–73.
52 Josh Ellenbogen, Reasoned and Unreasoned Images: The Photography of Bertillon, Galton, and Marey, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press 2012, 3. Ellenbogen is referring here to Ernst Mach’s ballistic-photographic experiments.
53 Fritz Heider, Ding und Medium, Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos 2004.
54 Archiv für Mediengeschichte, 5.
55 Krauss, Jenseits von Licht und Schatten, 23.
56 Ibid., 24.
57 Ibid. Krauss is referencing the photochemist Hermann Wilhelm Vogel’s Lichtbilder nach der Natur, Studien und Skizzen, Berlin: A. Hofmann & Comp. 1879.
58 Ibid., 26. Krauss is quoting the photographer Julius Schnauss’s ‘Über das sogenannte Odlicht’, Photographisches Archiv, 3 (1862), 197.
59 Ibid., 27. Krauss cites the photochemist Josef Maria Eder’s ‘Die Reichenbachschen Emanationen und ihre vermeintliche photographische Wirkung’, Photographische Korrespondenz, 51:649 (1914), 397.
60 Fischer, “‘La Lune au front”’, 143n11, quoting from Josef Maria Eder’s ‘Die V-Strahlen oder Lebensstrahlen des Majors Darget’, Photographische Korrespondenz, 629 (1913), 77–80.
61 Hippolyte Baraduc, Les vibrations de la vitalité humaine: méthode biométrique appliquée aux sensitifs et aux névrosés, Paris: Baillière 1904, 265.
62 Ibid., 113.
63 Ernest Bosc in Dict. des sciences occultes (1896): ‘le corps de l’homme comporte une sorte d’enveloppe subtile dénommée double aïthérique et périsprit par les spirites’ (the human body possesses a kind of subtle envelopment called aetherial double and perispirit by the spirits). E. Bosc, Dict. des sciences occultes, Paris: Chamuel 1896, quoted in Spitzer, ‘Milieu and Ambiance’, 37.
64 Geimer, Bilder aus Versehen, 153–73.
65 Baraduc, Human Soul, 33.
66 Ibid.
67 Ibid., explanation XXXVII, n.p. (emphasis in original).
68 See Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, trans. Alisa Hartz, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2003, 91 (emphasis in original): ‘It is the problem of contact at a distance, the givens of which photography overturned, since in photography touches or marks of lights are no longer vain words’. Baraduc’s invisible fluidique invokes the Newtonian fluid model, which relied on a generalisation and wider application of gravitation theory which explained effects in terms of actio in distans. See Stichweh, Zur Entstehung des modernen Systems wissenschaftlicher Disziplinen, 121: ‘Das impliziert, dass ihre Wirkung als „Fernwirkung“ durch den leeren Raum hindurch und nicht etwa als Kontaktwirkung verstanden wird’ (This implies that their effect is understood not as contact-effect, but rather as ‘action at a distance’ through empty space). In his discussion of fluidic phenomena in The Human Soul, Baraduc stresses that mechanical effects do not suffice to explain the action of the vital fluid: ‘One is no longer, in fact, in the presence of purely mechanical forces’ (Baraduc, Human Soul, 11). Instead, he invokes a gravitational model of fluids that allows one to measure ‘from a distance, without contact with the hand […] movements of attraction or of repulsion’ (Baraduc, Human Soul, 17–18).
69 Baraduc, Human Soul, 9 (emphasis in original).
70 Ibid., 13.
71 Yve-Alain Bois, ‘The Use Value of Formless’, in Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide, New York: Zone Books 1997, 32. ‘Pure visuality’ is in quotation marks in Bois’s and Krauss’s text, but is not a quote of any particular source.
72 Ibid., 27.
73 Ibid., 25.
74 Wedel, ‘Entwicklung und Wesen der Transcendental-Photographie’, 99.
75 Volkmer, Die photographische Aufnahme von Unsichtbarem, Halle a. S.: Wilhelm Knapp 1894, 2: ‘Unsichtbar sind aber auch mannigfache Vorgänge, welche sich in farblosen Medien, insbesondere in farblosen Gasen vollziehen, wie beispielweise das Verhalten der atmosphärischen Luft am Orte einer Schallerregung, oder das Verhalten von verdichteten Luftstrahlen, welche durch eine Oeffnung frei aus einem Reservoir treten […] oder endlich die Vorgänge in der Luft um ein fliegendes Geschoss herum’.
76 Ibid., 3: ‘Erscheinungen von unsichtbaren Vorgängen in der atmosphärischen Luft’.
77 Ibid., iv: ‘wie es sich mit der Luft um das Geschoss herum während seines Fluges verhält’. Volkmer concentrates on the swirling motion (‘Wirbelbewegung’) and the curling and twirling of air (‘Wirbelringe’). See ibid., 25.
78 Ibid., iv–v: ‘Aufnahm[e] von Luftbewegungserscheinungen’.
79 It was only in 1899 and 1900 that Mach decided to employ photography for the study of air currents and, more generally, aerodynamics. See Laurent Mannoni, ‘Marey Aéronaute: De la méthode graphique à la soufflerie aérodynamique’, in Mouvements de l’air. Étienne-Jules Marey, photographe des fluides, ed. Georges Didi-Huberman and Laurent Mannoni, Paris: Gallimard 2004, 42.
80 Ibid., 7.
81 Krauss, Jenseits von Licht und Schatten, 52.
82 Mannoni, ‘Marey Aéronaute’, 39. Marey was particularly impressed by Müller’s method: ‘L’auteur a rendu l’air visible au moyen de fumées ou de vapeurs de phosphore, il y à la une méthode pour voir l’invisible que me séduit beaucoup’ (The author has rendered the air visible with the aid of smoke or phosphor vapours, and this is a method for seeing the invisible that inspires me very much).
83 Ibid., 3.
84 Ibid., 17: ‘c’est l’air qui capte et transmet le mouvement’.
85 See, for example, ‘Ausdünstungen’ (11) and ‘Emanationen’ (21), in Agathon Wernich, ‘Über gute und schlechte Luft’, in Sammlung gemeinverständlicher wissenschaftlicher Vorträge, 344 (ser. 15), Berlin: Habel 1880, 1–35.
86 ‘Ausdünstungen der Krankheit’, in Wernich, ‘Über gute und schlechte Luft’, 15.
87 Baraduc, Human Soul, 13.
88 Krauss, Jenseits von Licht und Schatten, 52.
89 Ibid.: ‘Die Seele atmet über das Aspir und Expir gewissermaßen ein und aus’.
90 Baraduc, Human Soul, 13.
91 Robert Hirsch, Seizing the Light: A History of Photography, Boston: McGraw-Hill 2000, 169. See Mannoni, ‘Marey Aéronaute’, 8: ‘Rappelons’, writes Mannoni regarding Marey’s method of graphing movement, ‘que la méthod graphique consiste à transcrire sur papier ou sur une surface sensible, […] les pulsations, vibrations, ondulations, secousses, tressaillements, frémissements, produits par tous les mouvements de tous les corps vivants ou des objects mobiles’ (Let us remember that the graphic method consists of transcribing onto paper or onto a sensitive surface […] pulsations, vibrations, undulations, thrusts, tremors, quivers produced by all the movements of all living bodies or mobile objects.)
92 Corey Keller, ‘Sight Unseen: Picturing the Invisible’, in Brought to Light, ed. Keller, 33.
93 Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘La danse de toute chose’, in Mouvements de l’air, ed. Didi-Huberman and Mannoni, 203: ‘dans une photographie, le phénomène trace lui-même […] sa propre configuration visible’. We can compare this self-depiction of phenomena with the ‘phonautograph’, described by Thomas Y. Levin as an ‘apparatus for the self-registering of the vibrations of sound’. See Thomas Y. Levin, ‘For the Record: Adorno on Music in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’, October, 55 (1990), 36. Just as in the case of fluidal photographs the vital fluid is graphing itself, in the case of the phonautograph sound writes itself. Levin also refers to É.-Léon Scott de Martinville’s Le Problème de la parole s’écrivant elle-même, Paris: Chez l'auteur, Marchand d'estampes et libraire 1878, and Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni’s Klangfiguren from Die Akustik, Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel 1802. The latter involves an experiment for the study of acoustic wave patterns. Levin writes that in this experiment, ‘for the first time, one could associate acoustic phenomena to specific graphic figures which, most importantly, were “drawn” by the sounds themselves!’ Levin, ‘For the Record’, 39.
94 Didi-Huberman, ‘La danse de toute chose’, 198.
95 Baraduc, Human Soul, 11.
96 Jennifer Tucker, ‘The Social Photographic Eye’, in Brought to Light, ed. Keller, 40.
97 Baraduc, Human Soul, 11.
98 Corey Keller quotes the French scientist Pierre Jules César Janssen in Keller, ‘Sight Unseen’, in Brought to Light, ed. Keller, 30.
99 Baraduc, Human Soul, 12 (emphasis in original).
100 A New History of Photography, ed. Michel Frizot, Cologne: Könemann 1998, 282, quoted in Tom Gunning, ‘Invisible Worlds, Visible Media’, in Brought to Light, ed. Keller, 58.
101 Walter Benjamin, ‘Kleine Geschichte der Photographie’ (1931), in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1991, 376.
102 As Corey Keller points out, during the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 photography was placed into the category of ‘philosophical instruments and processes’ together with ‘eyeglasses, telescopes, microscopes, stereoscopes, kaleidoscopes’. See Keller, ‘Sight Unseen’, 25.
103 Baraduc, Human Soul, 13.
104 Wedel, ‘Entwicklung und Wesen der Transcendental-Photographie’, 99.
105 Didi-Huberman, ‘La danse de toute chose’, 183 (emphasis in original): ‘qui ouvrent le monde physique à des perspectives jusque-là inconcevables ou imaginées seulement dans l’ordre métaphysique’. Didi-Huberman is referring to Nadar’s Quand j’étais photographe (1900), ed. J.-F. Bory, Dessins et écrits II, Paris: Arthur Hubschmid 1979, 1224–25.