History of Photography ISSN: 0308-7298 (Print) 2150-7295 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/thph20 The Miracle of Analogy, or, The History of Photography, Part I Kaja Silverman. Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, CA, 2015. 240 pages, with 96 black & white illustrations. Softcover $21.95, ISBN 978-0-804-79399-5 Eugénie Shinkle To cite this article: Eugénie Shinkle (2017) The Miracle of Analogy, or, The History of Photography, Part I Kaja Silverman. Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, CA, 2015. 240 pages, with 96 black & white illustrations. Softcover $21.95, ISBN 978-0-804-79399-5 , History of Photography, 41:1, 95-97, DOI: 10.1080/03087298.2017.1286760 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2017.1286760 Published online: 10 Apr 2017. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 16 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=thph20 Download by: [University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries] Date: 25 April 2017, At: 03:23 Reviews and wifely intemperance as she turns with righteous anger on her husband. Erotic views, set within the home, involve all manner of transgressions: master acting upon servant or wife dallying with her cross-dressing tutor. Sadomasochism and voyeurism ‘lite’ cross the gender divide: ‘Women, while specularised, are specularising themselves, and men, by the all-for-one logic of the home, seem to be doing the same’. Their conventional roles are reinforced by minor outrages. The same gendered repertoire of ‘imaginative possibilities and covert critiques’ is canvassed in the last chapter’s parade of anti-heroes and action heroines, interpreted as throughout the book, with recourse to contemporaneous literature and popular culture. Davis ends Women’s Views with a reflection on exclusions, beginning with race and racism, which is effectively invisible in her case studies. She has operated within the walls of the American domestic sphere and, as she bluntly states, ‘what the narrative view did not show is what it did not wish to invite inside’. The reinforcement of those walls by market capitalism is fully acknowledged, as is the transnational circulation of images and themes. Davis recognises the social, political, and economic delimitations of women’s lives throughout this book. The author never fails to draw the lines, and even as she develops a sense of women’s expanding horizons, she never exaggerates the outcomes. Her subjects in formation are not the actors in their pictures and they are rarely the creators. They are the consumers: willing participants in an economy of entertainment. As domestic impresarios, women are given their due, including the occasional scolding. Informed and inspired by both contemporaneous and contemporary perspectives, Davis offers a close reading of imaginative possibilities, the space of the stereoview internalised and shared. Martha Langford # 2017 Martha Langford http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2017.1287335 The Miracle of Analogy, or, The History of Photography, Part I Kaja Silverman. Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, CA, 2015. 240 pages, with 96 black & white illustrations. Softcover $21.95, ISBN 978-0-804-79399-5 ‘The photographic image does not belong to the natural world’ – so wrote Hubert Damisch in Five Notes for a Phenomenology of the Photographic Image (1978). The photograph, he claimed, is ‘a product of human labour, a cultural object whose being – in the phenomenological sense of the term – cannot be dissociated precisely from its historical meaning and from the necessarily datable project in which it originates’. The indexicality of the photographic image, the spatial conventions on which the camera obscura and the photographic camera are based, and the industrial character of photographic activity itself: the essence of photography is constituted, Damisch writes, by historical circumstances such as these, which have marked photography’s emergence and its use. But what if photography was not a human invention? Rather than an index or a trace of an absent referent, what if the photograph was part of the world – the world’s way of announcing its presence? These are among the claims that Kaja Silverman makes in The Miracle of Analogy. Photography, Silverman suggests, is not a medium invented by certain individuals at a specific point in history. In fact, she argues, it is ‘the world’s primary way of revealing itself to us – of demonstrating that it exists’, and the means by which it does so is not representation, but analogy. Silverman understands the latter term in a very specific sense: rather than ‘sameness, symbolic equivalence, logical adequation, or even a rhetorical relationship – like a metaphor or a simile – in which one term functions as a placeholder for another’, the photograph’s analogical character lies in the way that it acts as a vehicle for revealing ‘the authorless and untranscendable similarities that structure Being, […] and that give everything the same ontological weight’. In its short history, as Silverman shows, can be found analogies for some of the most urgent questions shaping the past five centuries of western metaphysics. Silverman’s argument is built around a meticulous re-reading of accounts of photography’s early years, looking not just at the images that were created, but at the language in which these discoveries were set out. Alongside this, she sets a parallel investigation into the history of western philosophy – a history in which the camera obscura features prominently as an analogy for both the human eye and human consciousness – and the ongoing debates around the ontology of the subject. The notion of the photograph as a representation – a means of mastering the visible world – is aligned, Silverman argues, with the Cartesian notion of the modern subject as the centre of the world and the agent of this mastery. By demonstrating that the world existed beyond the boundaries of sensory perception, the camera seemed to solve the problem of objectivity that Descartes had only been able to overcome by substituting mental representations for duplicitous and unreliable retinal 95 Reviews images. Standard histories of photography are, in part, attempts to associate the controlling, rationalising gaze of the camera with that of the subject. Early discussions of the camera obscura, for example, understood the image as something that was received rather than taken; the surface on which it formed was a site for revealing the constant flux of visual analogies emanated by the world and objects in it. It was only with the addition of increasingly precise lenses in the seventeenth century that the camera obscura began to be understood as an instrument for taking pictures from the world rather than receiving them; for capturing the flow of images rather than revealing analogies. Such shifts, Silverman argues, promoted the fantasy of a sovereign subject by suggesting that the origin of the images in the camera obscura was not the world itself, but the camera’s human operator. The appearance of processes such as the heliograph and the daguerreotype, she claims, ‘was clearly driven by the desire […] to “harness” the worlds’ power, and force its drawings to obey [the operator’s] commands’. This struggle for control is analogised in Jeff Wall’s 1989 essay ‘Photography and Liquid Intelligence’, in which he distinguishes between the optical or ‘technological’ intelligence involved in taking a photograph with the ‘liquid’ intelligence of the processing stage, which is unpredictable and uncontrollable. This liquidity is nowhere more evident than in the early years of chemical photography. In the first decades of its history, the photographic image was ‘neither immobile nor permanent […]. It emerged slowly […] and it often disappeared shortly after it arrived’. Lengthy exposure times meant that the image was the aggregate of minutes, even hours, of continuous change. Certain colours emerged on the plate sooner than others, which meant that some elements of the picture remained ‘unfinished’ when the plate was fixed. Even fixed images were prone to vanishing without a trace. Evolving ‘in tandem with the world’, with no definitive point of completion, the image was a ‘trans-temporal’ analogy, linking together many moments in time. The drive to create faster exposure times arose, Silverman suggests, from a desire for certainty – the knowledge that the scene recorded on the photographic plate represented a single instant rather than an extended interval. Similarly, developments in camera technology that replaced photographic plates with viewfinders and mirrors were motivated by a desire to see the image at the moment that it was exposed. The industrialisation of photography – the replacement of messy chemical development with sealed boxes, and the ability to produce an infinite number of identical prints from a single negative – is aligned with a philosophical project that began with the cogito, and ended with the emergence of the modern, sovereign subject. It is in the relationship between the negative and the positive image, however, that Silverman finds the most compelling analogy for human subjectivity – one that, significantly, is phenomenological rather than Cartesian. Early in its history, before the positive became the privileged form, the two images enjoyed a reciprocal relationship that Silverman likens to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the chiasmus: the ‘ontological thread stitching the seer to what is seen, the toucher to what is touched, and sign and visibility to touch and tactility’. This interchangeability is also embodied in the stereograph, which allowed the viewer to feel their way around the depths of the image, while also permitting the less welcome sensation that objects in the picture were encroaching into the viewer’s space. While Cartesian accounts position the individual as the origin of the look and the creator of meaning, photography’s chiasmatic character, as Silverman suggests, is aligned with the ‘primordial reversibility’ that defines and binds us together as human subjects. We see and we are seen, we experience our own visibility through the gaze of others, and we affirm our sense of ontological kinship with them by sharing the ‘reversible and mutually defining’ pronouns I and you. The tropes associated with early photography – fluidity, reciprocity, receptivity – appear again and again from the late nineteenth century onwards, in philosophy and cognate fields such as painting, literature, and psychoanalysis. They also appear in Walter Benjamin’s ‘Little History of Photography’, only to be repudiated by him five years later with the publication of ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility’. In the first of these essays, Benjamin not only recognised the photograph’s capacity for analogy, he also remarked on the capacity of preindustrial photography to render its sitter present in the ‘now’, rather than relegating them to the indexical past. In the time it took to expose the slow emulsion, he wrote, the subject ‘grew into’ the picture: the photographic portrait functioned as an ‘ontological extension’ of the sitter, allowing their presence to be felt in the here and now – even long after their death. If the industrialisation of photography ‘stripped the photographic image of the capacity to render its sitter present’, this ontological rupture has come to dominate histories of the medium – histories built around the impulse to still the camera obscura’s image stream, to inscribe the human subject as the author of the image, and, in so doing, to isolate the subject from the world. Set in this context, The Miracle of Analogy is less a counter-history than a return – a re-embodiment of medium that develops ‘with us, and in response to us’ (original emphases). What is at stake in this return is not just the history of photography, but that of the human subject itself. The analogical relationships revealed by photography pose a challenge to long-established metaphysical givens – to notions of subjective agency, autonomy, and unity. The idea of the world as self-disclosing, and thus as possessed of its own agency, is thus both ‘profoundly enabling’ and, for some, unwelcome. What Silverman offers 96 Reviews in The Miracle of Analogy is a way of ‘awakening us from our Cartesian dream’, and although this awakening may be a troublesome one, the rewards it promises are rich: to restore to photography and its subject what history has stolen from them – the capacity to embrace the world, and, in turn, to receive a response. Eugénie Shinkle # 2017 Eugénie Shinkle http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2017.1286760 Singular Images, Failed Copies: William Henry Fox Talbot and the Early Photograph Vered Maimon. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2015. 288 pages, with 43 black & white illustrations. Softcover $30.00, ISBN 978-0-816-69472-3 This ambitious book attempts to develop a new context in which to consider the photographic endeavour of William Henry Fox Talbot. Singular Images, Failed Copies argues that the scientific and scholarly culture of early nineteenth-century Britain, above all as it confronted the collapse of natural philosophy as a viable framework for producing knowledge, makes up the proper vantage from which to understand Talbot’s photographic experiments (readers who follow scholarship on Talbot will immediately note the affinity between this argument and other significant, recent work on him, such as the anthology of essays edited by Mirjam Brusius, Katrina Dean, and Chitra Ramlingam, William Henry Fox Talbot: Beyond Photography [2015]). As part of arguing for the significance of natural philosophy’s demise and the attendant state of flux in which knowledge-making found itself in the first decades of the nineteenth century, Singular Images tries to decouple early photography from the camera obscura. To this argument, the camera obscura appears as an artefact that participates in the ‘philosophic and aesthetic premises’ of seventeenth and eighteenth-century scientific culture, and thus decoupling photography from the camera obscura provides a means by which to situate photography in the specific historical moment of 1830s and 1840s Britain. Situating Talbot’s work firmly in this transitional period, one ‘of crisis in the epistemological ground that [had earlier] informed philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, serves the broader goal of denying early photography a univocal character. Maimon wishes ‘to reconsider the suggestion that there was one “idea” of photography or that photographic experimentation was guided by a well-defined end’, and embedding Talbot’s work in a milieu of uncertainty and disjuncture lets her argue ‘that photography’s philosophical and cultural significance was not always associated with the epistemological “quest” for “evidence” and objective “truth”’. Instead, Maimon seeks to explore the ways in which photography operated within far more equivocal and complex regimes of knowledge. At the same time, according to Maimon, the decoupling of early photography from the camera obscura poses even more significant stakes, in that it occasions a revision of the conceptual status of early photography, which now appears neither ‘as an emblem of mechanical copying nor as one of visual verisimilitude’. Sundered from the camera obscura, early photography no longer contributes to any ‘continuous Western quest for visual resemblance and verisimilitude in representation’, and acquires a character that renders it intractable to many of the ways in which scholars have sought to understand the authority and importance of the medium. In Maimon’s account, treating the camera obscura and early photography as conceptually alien to one another not only locates photography in the specific knowledge-making milieu of 1830s and 1840s Britain, but problematises core features of the scholarly discussion of photography. Indexicality, notions of the mechanical, objectivity, teleological accounts of the medium, the distinction between modern and post-modern photography, even the way in which scholars have understood relations between photography and aesthetics: all of these require reconceptualisation if we attend to the discrepancy between the photographic image, on the one hand, and ‘the camera obscura image and the philosophical and epistemological premises that informed it’ on the other. Singular Images has much to commend it, particularly its effort to contextualise Talbot in the local scientific and scholarly milieu that Talbot knew. Maimon makes an important contribution to the literature simply by drawing out connections between Talbot and his intellectual world that other scholars have either not noted, or have not deployed in the way Maimon does. For example, the first two chapters of the book give great attention to what Maimon sees as two different discovery stories that Talbot provided for his work with photography. The first such story issues from ‘Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing; or, the Process by Which Natural Objects May Be Made to Delineate Themselves without the Aid of the Artist’s Pencil’ (1839), while the second comes from ‘A Brief Historical Sketch of the Invention of the Art’ which Talbot provided in his book The Pencil of Nature (1844). Maimon treats the former as responding to John Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse on 97