Dress
Daniel Webster, Brady Studio daguerreotype c. 1849
Theoretically New Yorkers knew there was a difference between outward appearance and the true self. In his diary Phillip Hone wrote a brief essay, “Dress,” in which he commented on the responsibility of older men and women to dress well: “An old house requires painting more than a new one.” But they also ought to dress appropriately, soberly, and not gaudily. He was scandalized by the refusal of his friend Daniel Webster to appear “in the only dress in which he should appear—the respectable and dignified suit of black.” Instead, Webster was fond of “tawdry,” multicolored clothes:“I was much amused a day or two since meeting him in Wall Street, at high noon, in a bright blue Satin Vest, sprigged with gold flowers, a costume incongruous for Daniel Webster, as Ostrich feathers for a Sister of Charity, or a small Sword for a judge of Probates. There is a strange discrepancy between ‘the outward and visible form, and the inward and spiritual grace,’ the integuments and the intellect.”
Dell Upton, “Inventing the Metropolis: Civilization and Urbanity in Antebellum New York” from Art in the Empire City: New York, 1825-1861
One might be driven to think that the sour expression on Webster’s face in most paintings and photographs might be the result of the more restrained wardrobe he was forced into for decorum’s sake. This passage casts a new light on the old sourpuss.
Chris has suggested the topic of “scale” as fruitful. I agree, and no, I have not addressed it before. Brady makes for a fruitful leaping-off spot. The small daguerreotypes we associate with his early work are only a small part of his commercial venture. He also sold “Imperials,” larger than life-size portraits taken from daguerreotypes projected out on textured albumen paper, retouched carefully by painters in his employ.
I am somewhat resistant to viewing the aspect of the medium of photography marked by teams of technicians producing large scale works as “evolutionary,” or worse still, “revolutionary.” I could write much more on that (and might) reflecting on my experience of Avedon’s Portraits exhibition in the mid 1980s, and as counterpoint, the somewhat more guerilla tactics of Willie Middlebrook’s large scale works on long-roll paper. He is right to suggest that the reflective technologies also have a certain obligation of stewardship.
We pay a price for dressing-up much larger than the price for dressing-down.
Desiring Dualisms
Having decisively abandoned empirical explanation in favor of poetic metaphor, Talbot finds himself speaking of the new medium as a quite peculiar articulation of temporal and spatial coordinates. Photography is a process in which “position” is “occupied” for a “single instant” where “fleeting” time is “arrested” in the “space of a single minute.” It would seem he is able to describe the identity of photography only by harnessing together a whole series of unresolved binaries: “art” and “shadows,” the “natural” and “magic,” the “momentary” and the “for ever,” the “fleeting” and the “fettered,” the “fixed” and that which is “capable of change.” Photography for Talbot is the uneasy maintenance of binary relationships; it is the desire to represent an impossible conjunction of transience and fixity. More than that, the photograph is an emblematic something/sometime, a “space of a single minute” in which space becomes time, and time space. (Each Wild Idea 11)
The dualities listed by Batchen are all easily to reduced to space and time except “art” and “shadows,” and “natural” and “magic.” The latter examples are worse than superfluous, they are misleading. Art and shadows is not a binary, but a desire—the latest innovation in the art of Talbot’s time was chiaroscuro. Natural and magic is not a binary either—“Natural Magic” was an obsession of many scientists, including Talbot’s friend Sir David Brewster.
Brewster’s book on natural magic sought to explain the scientific principles behind the magical amusements that were all the rage. But this is not to say that Batchen’s observation of a certain binarism as an essential quality of the “spirit of the age” is erroneous—far from it.
Philosophical Instruments
Where Niépce and Daguerre both take pictures from their windows, Talbot makes an image of his window. He tells us that photography is about framing, and then shows us nothing but that frame; he suggests that photography offers a window on the world, but then shows us nothing but that window. As Derrida suggests,, “The time for reflection is also a chance for turning back on the very conditions of reflection, in all senses of that word, as if with the help of a new optical device one could finally see sight, one could not only view the natural landscape, the city, the bridge and the abyss, but could view viewing.” This then, is no ordinary picture. It is rather what Talbot elsewhere called a “Philosophical Window.” (Each Wild Idea 10)
Geoffrey Batchen’s reading of Talbot’s “Oriel Window” seems intuitively correct, but for the wrong reasons. The use of optical devices for “self-reflection” (not self in the sense of individual ego, but rather in the sense of a self-meditating device) is not limited to photography. Derrida’s essay cited here is not concerned with photography but with relationship between seeing and knowing. In its full context, the observation about sight is followed by one about hearing: “As if through an acoustical device, one could hear hearing, in other words, seize the inaudible in a sort of poetic telephony” (Derrida, “The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils,” Diacritics 13:3). The “bridge and the abyss” refers both to a perception of the sublime, and the fact that Cornell university installed a guard rail on a bridge to keep students from leaping off it into the abyss, committing suicide.
Batchen localizes the “optical device” to photography; Derrida and Talbot do not. The Talbot quotation regarding the “Philosophical Window” is footnoted thusly:
Mule
Henry Fox Talbot, The Oriel Window, Lacock Abbey, seen from the inside c. Summer 1835
Could the window picture be read as an emblem of itself, the very photogenic drawing process that has made its own existence possible? When you think about it, Talbot has set up his camera at exactly the point in the South Gallery where the sensitive paper once sat in his own modified camera obscura. His camera obscura looks out at the inside of the metaphorical lens of the camera of his house (which he later claimed was “the first that was ever known to have drawn its own picture”). He is, in other words, taking a photograph of photography at work making this photograph. (9)
Geoffrey Batchen offers expansive and creative readings of early photogenic drawings by Henry Fox Talbot. I find his exploration of the “desiring production” of photographs in Each Wild Idea and Burning With Desire to be compelling. But the closer I look at his essays, the more I wonder if he is really exploring his own desire rather than the desires of early photographers. Many of his assertions seem quite astute on the surface, but as I think them through they sort of dissolve.
