Lindsay Smith

The Wont of Photography, or the Pleasure of Mimesis

It remains common to assume that the invention of photography in the nineteenth century represented the epitome of imitation, a perfect culmination of the age-old debate on mimesis. By enabling the faithful reproduction of an original, a photograph held the capacity to establish as its own wont or habit that ancient aesthetic category. The extreme verisimilitude of photography, the miraculous closeness to an original of an aptly termed photographic ‘likeness’, had widespread implications for the representational status of painting as one of the fine arts chiefly determined by its mimetic qualities. A photograph’s causal connection to a referent, its physical proximity to an object through the chemical fixity of light, signalled in one sense a trumping of the painter’s art. For it made possible an impression of grapes or of a faithfully rendered curtain that in classical accounts of mimesis no Zeuxis or Parrhasius could have imagined. Indeed, photography seemed to close the gap between appearance and reality, an achievement which would have profound ramifications. On a practical level a great many painters, especially portraitists and miniaturists, would find their livelihood threatened while on a conceptual one the pleasure of trompe l’oeil, the process of tricking the eye of the beholder, would no longer be dependent simply upon the virtuosity of a painter.

Photographic portraiture and the forgetting of colour

The annual autumn display of the National Portrait Gallery of London’s John Kobal Photographic Portrait Award, named after the journalist and film historian who had a passion for movie-star gazing, reminds us of the Gallery’s age-old dictum: ’we know ourselves better for having seen them.’ Self-knowledge, it is suggested, is correlative with a knowledge of visually represented others. A portrait, whether painted or photographed, is assumed to inform the self-consciousness of a disinterested viewing subject. Perhaps, more than this, the National Portrait Gallery’s catch-phrase implies that in viewing portraits we are at a certain level no longer disinterested, indeed that we can be bnt interested observers. Suggested in the subject’s experience of viewing a portrait of an other, contrary to what we might expect, is an oddly specular relationship. By extension, when one confronts a photographic image of the self, the medium of photography re-defines that self as other. Let’s begin in the 1930s with an opulent photographic studio in central London. The British portrait photographer with the unlikely name of Madame Yveonde (otherwise Yveonde Cumbers, 1893-1975)

“Play[ing] Narcissus to a Photograph”: Oscar Wilde and the Image of the Child

This chapter considers the relations between three phenomena: the image of the child in nineteenth-century photography; Oscar Wilde’s interest in the photographic medium; and the presence of photographic metaphors in several of his fairy stories. The main argument is that Wilde’s fairy tales invite their readers to contemplate the child as an image formed by a relatively new technology of vision. Wilde, however, maintained a critical perspective on the narcissistic lure of the photographic image. Part of the discussion explores his important exchanges with the teenager Louis Umfreville Wilkinson, who began a correspondence with Wilde after the writer’s release from jail. Moreover, the schoolboy Wilkinson sent photographs of himself to Wilde. Wilde’s letters to the young Wilkinson reveal a pressing concern with the temptation to “play Narcissus to a photograph,” since the image onto which one projects one’s desires is also an image of oneself.

A Royal Passion: Queen Victoria and Photography

transcriptions of conversations with the city dwellers themselves, and notes on the technical considerations of nineteenth-century photography. For good measure, he has recruited additional historical analyses from the art historian Shalini Le Gall, who contributes an essay on Marville’s photography surrounding the creation of the Avenue de l’Opéra, and architecture/urban planning historian Min Kyung Lee, who considers Marville’s and Haussmann’s intertwined labours in an interesting essay on the spatial production of the nineteenth-century city through the complementary technologies of cartography and photography. Given these multi-faceted ruminations, Piercing Time ends up being part memoire, part social history, part conceptual art project, part urban study, part nostalgic reverie, and part oral history. Taking his cue from Haussmann’s notion of the radial boulevard ‘piercings’ that would radically relieve city congestion, Sramek chose for himself a diagonal path through the city that would intersect with sites of Marville’s and Atget’s photographs. In researching, mapping, and walking his route, studying the sites, obsessively re-making the views, and engaging with passers-by who stopped to talk, Sramek imagines himself as a sort of urban archaeologist, making ‘a slice through time’ that allows the overlaying of the contemporary moment with those of Marville and Atget, revealing at the same time the city’s historical, cultural, social, and political layers. He also uses the metaphor of ‘urban performance’ to describe his peculiarly focused wanderings through the city, comparing his activity with both the flâneur’s promenade and the situationists’ dérive (drift), aware of and yet disconnected from the consumer spectacle, provoking strangers momentarily to suspend their own routines out of curiosity. All of this would have made Piercing Time an unusually self-reflective rephotographic project, but in teasing apart these many diachronic threads Sramek also manages to correct old errors of identification and captioning in the original prints, but more importantly he offers concrete insight into the work of the photographers who came before him. By his nearly forensic study of the pictures and his experience of the physical sites through the ground glass, he is able to distil the consistent interests of each photographer, showing how their work – the outcome of ‘contrary conditions’ – is more different than similar. Atget, Sramek argues, was personally invested in the photograph as a form of preservation, a collector of details who returned multiple times to the same subject, whereas Marville worked unsentimentally for the ‘agents of change’, ‘more in accordance with the rational and orderly than with nostalgia for the past’. Here Sramek points out a paradox – that Marville’s work on behalf of the ‘official viewpoint’ ultimately produces a reversal, a détournement that is the opposite of what his employers intended. Produced in the spirit of modern progress, Marville’s archive reads today as the record of a vulnerable city with an architectural heritage that was in need of protection. Like Kennel, Sramek also gets sidetracked by the desire to articulate Marville’s ‘subjectivity’, but his materialist understanding of how Marville made the photographs helps ground his observations. For example, Sramek shows that when Marville made multiple plates from one location, it was never a matter of pivoting the camera for views in several directions. Instead, he took the time to move the heavy camera and search for a composition in each direction, which, Sramek argues, ‘places his work into the context of visual aesthetics as much as that of the surveying gaze’. With so many moving parts, Piercing Time is quite a shaggy book, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. Its many sections, interleaved with maps and the images by three photographers, do make it unwieldy and disorienting; one has to wonder whether Sramek intended this design as a metaphor for wandering the convoluted city itself. But it is nevertheless a rich volume that balances genuinely scholarly material with Sramek’s engaging, thoughtful voice.

Roger Fenton’s Nature Morte: The Pull of Sculpture

In 1860, Roger Fenton exhibited a distinctive set of photographic still lifes. Little did viewers of the time know that these would be among his last photographs. Technically accomplished, large in format and expensively priced, the prints of fruit and flowers – some including plaster figurines – stretched the limits of the photographic medium by transforming the look of monochrome. Although in some ways strikingly atypical, in their rendering the ‘black and white’ medium newly commensurate with a popular genre, the sumptuous still lifes perpetuate a vital connection with the medium of sculpture characteristic of Fenton’s earlier photographs. That connection emerges in the propensity of such photographs to petrify – turn to stone as it were – those objects they capture while simultaneously holding their potential for subsequent metamorphosis. Such a quality of transformation, most obviously present in Fenton’s photographs of antiquities in the British Museum, is also at work in his landscapes. Indeed, as the natural world is petrified in his views of north Wales, Fenton highlights the implicit metamorphosis within the apparent stasis, or characteristic immobility, of the photographic image.