Kenaan. Photography and Its Shadow

Photography and Its ShadowAuthor(s): Hagi KenaanSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Spring 2015), pp. 541-572Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/680085 .Accessed: 27/06/2015 17:33

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Photography and Its Shadow

Hagi Kenaan

Now I see for the first time how rude I am to you, my beloved shadow.Friedrich Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow

Prologue: A Photographs QuestionTriggered by a photograph. Thats one way to put it.The question that I wish to discuss here, a methodological question

about how to articulate the ontological specificity of the photographicimage or about how a philosophy of the image can contribute to an un-derstanding of the particularity of photography, emerged while spendingtime looking at Karen Knorrs The Pencil of Nature (1994). Knorrs photo-graph is part of her Academies series and was taken in a corridor of theSwedishRoyal Academy of Arts in Stockholm. Between a large neoclassicalstatue of a standing nudemanon apedestal whose head cannot be seen anda medallion relief depicting a mans head in profile (hanging on the walland seen through a glass partition), the photograph presents a staged scenethat evokes an anecdote or myth which is immediately familiar to the arthistorian. At the very center of the picture, two women are intensely en-gaged in amutual endeavor, one tracing the shadow of the others face thatfalls against a wall (fig. 1).

An earlier version of this essay was presented in the colloquium of Georg Bertrams researchgroup in the Institut fur Philosophie at the Freie Universitat Berlin. I would like to thank thegroup for an inspiring discussion and Georg Bertram for an eye-opening conversation after theevent. Special thanks to Martin Berger, Keith Moxey, and Joel Snyder for their illuminatingcomments and good advice. Many thanks to Karen Knorr for the illuminating dialogue on herThe Pencil of Nature and her permission to use the image and to Larry Schaaf for the generousresponses to my questions about W. H. F. Talbot. Omer Michaelis provided invaluable researchassistance and has been an inspiring interlocutor. I am indebted to him as well as to MeiravAlmog, Vered Lev Kenaan, and Orna Raviv for their ongoing dialogue during different stages ofwriting this essay.

Critical Inquiry 41 (Spring 2015)

2015 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/15/4103-0006$10.00. All rights reserved.

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My reflection on Knorrs The Pencil of Nature began with a point thatmay seem obvious: the work opens up to its viewer through an inter-twining, a doubling of two originary moments in the life of images.While alluding in its title to the origin of photography, the image itselfevokes the more primordial origin of drawing. Knorrs The Pencil ofNature echoes (quotes or refers back to) the 1844 title of the first pho-tographically illustrated book, a titleand tropeused by the Britishinventor of photography, W. H. F. Talbot, for introducing to the gen-eral public the principles on which his production of a new kind of

HAG I K ENAAN is professor of philosophy at Tel-Aviv University. He is theauthor of The Ethics of Visuality: Levinas and the Contemporary Gaze (2013);Visage(s): Une Autre Ethique du regard apre`s Levinas (2012); and The PresentPersonal: Philosophy and the Hidden Face of Language (2005).

F I GUR E 1 . Karen Knorr, The Pencil of Nature, 1994.

542 Hagi Kenaan / Photography and Its Shadow


image was based. At the same time, what we see in Knorrs pictureitsvisual theme, so to speakis a nonstandard feminized variation onPlinys influential myth of the origin of drawing (or painting). Theconnection drawn by Knorr between Talbot and Pliny is, at first sight,not a surprising one. The tale of the Maid of Corinthwho, upon theimminent departure of her lover, drew in outline on the wall theshadow of his face thrown by a lamp1enjoyed great popularity in lateeighteenth-century culture2 and is most likely to have been known bythe inventor of the art of fixing shadows. Furthermore, the isomorphicrelationship between the two image paradigms has been a consistentlypopular theme in both art and theory since the early days of photogra-phy. This isomorphism is often articulated in terms of the clear simi-larities shared by Plinys imagery and the conditions of photographysbirth. The shared features that are commonly highlighted are the copy,the trace, the index, and the positive/negative relation, as well as moregeneralcall themtranscendental themes such as the triangularstructure of presence, absence, and re-presentation or, when taking amore psychoanalytic guise, of a desired object, loss, and substitution.In this context, the figure of the shadow has acquired an emblematicstanding.

Hence, against this backdrop, Knorrs The Pencil of Nature may eas-ily lend itself to a reading that underscores the rootedness of photog-raphy in the same primal setting from which the tradition of visualrepresentation emerges.3 But thematizing the picture in this way wouldimmediately hide from us a crucial complexity in the manner in which

1. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), 9: 35: 373;hereafter abbreviated N.

2. With its specific focus on romantic classicism, Robert Rosenblums The Origin ofPainting should be noted as setting the field for the study of the impact of Plinys tale onthe pictorial imagination; see Robert Rosenblum, The Origin of Painting: A Problem inthe Iconography of Romantic Classicism, The Art Bulletin 39 (Dec. 1957): 27990. TheCorinthian Maid was a frequent theme in the years of the first experimentations withphotography. The version painted by Joseph Wright of Derby (1782-1785), for example, wascommissioned by Josiah Wedgwood, father of Thomas Wedgwood, one of the claimants tophotographys invention. Wedgewood was fourteen years old when the Corinthian Maid madeits way to the family house. For a discussion of this episode and its significance, see GeoffreyBatchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), p. 114.

3. Photography shares with the shadow its indexical nature. The indexical sign is afterall the cornerstone of the photographic image (Karen Knorr, interview with RebeccaComay, Natural Histories, Genii Loci: The Photographic Work of Karen Knorr [London,2002], p. 66). For further readings on Knorrs The Pencil of Nature, see David Campany,Museum and Medium: The Time of Karen Knorrs Imagery, in Genii Loci, pp. 11423. Seealso Gen Doy, Picturing the Self: Changing Views of the Subject in Visual Culture (London,2005): 1012. David Campany reads Knorrs The Pencil of Nature as a reflection on culturalheritage, photography of artworks, and museum culture. Gen Doys follows Campanys

Critical Inquiry / Spring 2015 543


Knorrs photograph addresses its viewers. Knorrs The Pencil of Naturepictures (articulates in a pictorial way) the origin of drawing. It deals with theorigin of the image by presenting an image of origin. This image on originis, itself, a photograph whose photographic being is alluded to in theworks title. But, in bearing a title that invokes Talbots invention, KnorrsThe Pencil of Nature also seems to be saying something about photogra-phys origin and the way that story of origin is apposite to an understand-ing of the image that it photographically presents. If thats the case, thenwecannot take for granted the manner in which the works title weighs onwhat we see in the picture, and we just might well need to be attentive tohow the works visuality complicates its title. In other words, the apparenttension between what were told of and what we see in the photographshould be understood as an invitation to ponder a question that is, in fact,addressed to us: What is the significance of the works intertwining ofsaying and showing in its title and visual theme?What is the significance ofthe calligram tying the origins of photography to the much older originsof drawing? Should the simultaneous reference to these two distinct originstories be understood as simply providing two variations on a singletheme, or is the workmaking its way (as it dawned onme) toward dividingthe image of origin from within, presenting nonidentity as integral to thequestion of the images origin?

Knorrs photograph was made at the very end of photographys an-alogue era. Soon after, Knorr would move to work with digital tech-nology, and I cannot but ask myself whether the works entanglementwith the origins of the imageand particularly with photographysoriginis not connected to certain, albeit latent, concerns with pho-tographys changing condition, the gradual disappearance of a spec-trum of visual options, and the advent of new image modalities.4 Newor old, I think that themodal quality of images is clearly an issue for ThePencil of Nature, in which the act of drawing is depicted as part of awider range, a plurality, of image modalities. In addition to drawing,we see a high-relief medallion, a statue, and ephemeral traces of bodies

metacultural reading while underscoring the significance of Knorrs feminized retelling ofPlinys tale.

4. This is also how I tend to read Knorrs technical description of her image. ThePencil of Nature, she explains in an email is neither digital nor retouched. It is analogueshot on 50 ISO Velvia Fujichrome positive film and printed on cibachrome. . . . It comes inone size 105cm X 105cm, framed. The frame is part of the work and it comes with a brassplaque attached with the title: The Pencil of Nature. Would it be right to hear in Knorrsdetailed specifications an indirect commentary on the continuing need to negotiatephotographys vanishing materiality twenty years after the making of the work?



and objects in the reflections appearing on a black floor that functionsas a darkmirror and, of course, the pronounced presence of the shadow(or, to be more precise, a series of shadows of which only one is traced).We know that the act of drawing at center stage is bound to produce animage, but that image is not (yet) a fait accompli and cannot be seen inthe artwork. It lacks materiality, but, being congruent with a perspic-uous shadow, its potentiality as an image is abundantly clear. The fore-grounding of this modality of becoming-an-image is, in my view, ofcentral importance to Knorrs picture. And it ascribes to drawing an ax-ial position on a spectrum leading from prototypes to well-determinedimages, from natural intangible appearances to plastic renditions ofimages that function as artifacts. Knorrs The Pencil of Nature invites usto ponder the relationship between these different (procedural) mo-dalities of the image, reminding us (through its title) of the presence ofthe photographic image that represents all these modalities withoutleaving a trace of its own medial identity. Moreover, as The Pencil ofNature connotes what Talbot understood as photographys naturalcondition of representationality, a more general question arises here:how should we understand the relationship between the ontologicalconditions of the photographic image and the historical space withwhich it singularizes itself?

In responding to these questions opened by Knorrs The Pencil ofNature, this essay offers a reading of Talbots invention story in thelight of Plinys tale of origins. Doing so, my discussion centers on therole of the shadow in providing internal focus for these two pictures oforigin; the shadows function is metonymical for what I understand asthe settingsor the constellations, to use a Benjaminian termin andthrough which these originary moments become legible.5 In this con-text, however, the shadow will ultimately be dealt with as a figure ofdifference. This difference is not, however, a manner of framing the

5. What concerns me here, in other words, is the setting in which a dynamicconfiguration of a plurality of vectors (for example, affectivity, visibility and invisibility,temporality, corporeality, technology, and so on) opens up and upholds the possibility ofnew modalities of imageness, of being-an-image. In this context, I share Joel Snyders viewthat no matter how revolutionary a new picture-making process may be, it cannotconstitute by itself a pictorial medium. At best it can only suggest the possibility of one. Ittook time for photographers to learn that the constraints and opportunities afforded byphotography were not identical with those of the older, manual techniques of depiction. Italso took time for them to value and insist upon the differences. Understanding theorigination of photography can suggest, but cannot determine, possibilities (Joel Snyder,Inventing Photography in On the Art of Fixing a Shadow: One Hundred and Fifty Years ofPhotography, ed. Sara Grenough et al. [exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Art,Washington, DC, 7 May30 July 1989], p. 5).



relationship between photography and drawingit is not, in itself, away of distinguishing between drawing and photographynor is it, inthis sense, a refutation of any claim about a form of sameness integrat-ing these image modalities. What is at stake for me, rather, is the pres-ence of an ontological difference that, on a general level, is alwaysalready part of the space of images but that takes on a new, distinctiveform with the birth of the photographic image. This ontological differ-ence is constitutive, as I shall argue, of the photographic, and yet it alltoo often remains unnoticed due to a common theoretical tendency toconstrue the photographic image in one of two opposing ways: eitherembracing a closed visual identity for the photograph (vis-a`-vis othergenres of images) or locating the photographs modus operandiitspulsing heartin a more basic, general notion of images, such as theone typically extracted from Plinys tale.6

1. Tracing ShadowsLet me, then, begin with a short recapitulation of Plinys origin

myth, whose resonance in contemporary thinking of the image is typ-ically indicative of the tendency to understand the space of the image interms of a triangulation of three dimensions of subjectivity: desire, loss,and memory (fig. 2).7 In Plinys Natural History, we find two etiologicalaccounts of drawings origin (or the origin of pictures), the first ofwhich consists of the mere mention that the drawing of pictures beganwith tracing an outline round a mans shadow (N, 9: 35: 271). Plinyreturns to elaborate on this theme precisely at the moment he moves

6. A clear example of the oscillation between these two tendencies can be seen forexample in a debate between Victor Burgin and Geoffrey Batchen discussing, in aninterview, the relationship between image and desire. According to Burgin, viewed interms of desire, the origin of photography is identical to the origins of painting, with theorigin of any desire for the image. . . . So to introduce considerations of desire into thestory of the invention of photography is necessarily to construct a definition of apparatusthat pushes the invention of photography back beyond the nineteenth century. Batchen,unsatisfied with this paradigm, looks instead at reframing the question as one that relatesto photographys unique desire: could we . . . articulate the desire to photograph not asone instance of general desire common to all cultures and times, but rather a desire quitespecific to the historical period beginning in the late eighteenth and early nineteenthcenturies? (Victor Burgin, For an Impossible Realism, interview with Geoffrey Batchen,Afterimage 16 [Feb. 1989]: 45).

7. The example of Roland Barthess influential Camera Lucida is particularly interestinghere: while investigating the essence of the photographic image, Barthes ultimately embracesthe logic implied by Plinys triangulation; see Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections onPhotography, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1981). For a critique of Barthess thematizationof the relationship between mourning and the photographic image, see, for example, JamesElkins, What Photography Is (New York, 2011).



away from painting to a discussion of a different art form, the modelingof clay:

Enough and more than enough has now been said about painting. Itmay be suitable to append to these remarks something about the plas-tic art. It was through the service of that same earth that modellingportraits from clay was first invented by Butades, a potter of Sicyon,at Corinth. He did this owing to his daughter, who was in love with ayoung man; and she, when he was going abroad, drew in outline onthe wall the shadow of his face thrown by a lamp. Her father pressedclay on this and made a relief, which he hardened by exposure to firewith the rest of his pottery; and it is said that this likeness was pre-served in the Shrine of the Nymphs. [N, 9: 35: 371, 373]

In this second version, Pliny provides a richer and more concrete settingfor the legendary birth of imagemaking, one that allows the original act ofdrawing to lose its anonymity. The attention to a mans shadow and thetracing of its contour is thus integrated into the particularity of a painfulmoment inwhich a youngwoman faces her lovers departure. The drawingof the first image thus originates at an intersection of love and the experi-

F I GUR E 2 . Joseph Wright of Derby, The Corinthian Maid, 178284.



ence of loss, of eros and thanatos,8 andwemayalso say that its backdrop is thereality principle by which eros inevitably needs to face thanatos, becoming, asVictor Burgin puts it, a desire for protection against the loss of the object.9

The life of the image develops, in other words, out of the human need tonegotiate thepresenceof death (and, specifically, thedeathof another). This isalso where the questions of substitution and memory become pertinent.While absence takes the place of the lost object, the image is a human creationthat saves the object from complete oblivion, allowing it to remain, in someform,partof thepresent.10 In this respect, the image is abeingconstitutedby itsrelation to the future. It not only addresses the imminent departure of themaidens lover but becomes fully significant through its ability to bearwitnessto the lovers presence after his departure.11 While generalized as an essentialfeature of the image, the bearing of this futural dimension will become a par-adigmatic aspect of the tradition of portraiture in which the very idea of cre-ating a faithful likeness of a person is inseparable from theneed and thus theintent to remember the depicted person after his or her eventual death.

The centrality that the presence of the shadow has in this schemeis clarified by a historical contextualization of the tale, suggestingasJ. P. Vernant, Victor Stoichita, Gerhard Wolf, and Hans Belting eachdothat the story should be read within an anthropology of theshadow in the classical world (and in other ancient societies), where theinsubstantial eidola of the dead were called shadows.12 For the Greeks,the term eidolon held together the symbolic connection among images,shadows, phantom phenomena, apparitions of the dead, and dreams thatall belonged to the terms semantic extension.Hence, according to Belting,for example, a Greek understood his shadow as a premonition of hisshadowy existence in the underworld, when he would no longer be able to

8. As W. J. T. Mitchell puts it, there is simply no getting around the dialectics of life anddeath, desire and aggression, in the fundamental ontology of the image (W. J. T. Mitchell,Drawing Desire, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images [Chicago, 2005],p. 68).

9. Burgin, For an Impossible Realism, p. 4.10. For Lisa Saltzman, Plinys tale presents that mythic moment when imminent loss

drives the impulse to record and remember. It is, according to her, a story in whichanticipated absence inspires and grounds the birth of [the] pictorial (Lisa Saltzman, MakingMemory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art [Chicago, 2006], p. 2).

11. No one believes any longer in the ontological identity of model and image, but all areagreed, according to Andre Bazin, that the image helps us to remember the subject and topreserve him from a second spiritual death (Andre Bazin, The Ontology of the PhotographicImage, in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg [New Haven, Conn., 1980],p. 238).

12. Gerhard Wolf, The Origins of Painting, Res 39 (Autumn 2009): 61. See also Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Birth of Images, Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays, ed. Froma I.Zeitlin (Princeton, N.J., 1991), pp. 16485.



cast a shadow but would himself be a mere shadow.13 Analyzing theshadow in similar terms, Victor Stoichita explains the making of theshadow image in Plinys tale as a creation of a living double, a surrogatefigure difficult to understand without visualizing the ritual actions we ex-ert over it. For him, the tale fuses different aspects of the surrogate figure,which serves first as a memory token, then as an exorcizing medium andultimately as a cult object in a cult of the clay semblance that reproduces,includes and accommodates the shadow of the young man, who in allprobability is forever absent.14 Furthermore, as these archaic conceptionsfind their way into Platonic metaphysics, the shadow is incorporated intoan ontological hierarchy by which it is not only relegated to the ontologi-cally insubstantial domain of mere appearance (as a kind of image, or inanalogy to images) but also becomes, according to Stoichita, a figure thatis charged with a fundamental negativity that, in the history of Westernrepresentation, was never to be abandoned altogether. There are otherinteresting and relevant aspects of Plinys tale that we have not touchedupon,15 but, given that we shall be returning to the tale, I think that themore or less standard reading just provided here is sufficient for beginningto think about the presence of the shadow in Talbots account of his pho-tographic invention.

2. Natures Pencil: Talbot and the Model of DrawingTalbots first written account of his invention was read to the Royal

Society ofGreat Britain, on Jan. 31, 1839, and subsequently published underthe title, Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing, or the Processby which Natural Objects may be Made to Delineate Themselves withoutthe Aid of the Artists Pencil. As the title suggests, the new invention is akind of drawing (photogenic) that posits itself as an art vis-a`-vis thecommon understanding of drawing as an activity dependent on an artistshand and pencil. Unlike traditional drawing, the process Talbot invents isone that allows natural objects to delineate themselves without the aid ofthe artists pencil. This point is just as central to Talbots later account

13. Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, trans. Thomas Dunlap(Princeton, N.J., 2011), pp. 18, 20.

14. Victor I. Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow (London, 1997), p. 20.15. For more recent discussions of the figure of Butades and her pioneering act of tracing

shadows, see Michael Newman, The Marks, Traces and Gestures of Drawing, in The Stage ofDrawing: Gesture and Act, ed. Catharine de Zegher (London, 2003), p. 93108; Mitchell,Drawing Desire, pp. 6672; Satzman, Making Memory Matter; and Marina Warner,Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first Century (Oxford,2006).



of the invention in his first photography book, The Pencil of Nature (1844).The book opens as follows:

The little work now presented to the Public is the first attemptto publish a series of plates or pictures wholly executed by the newart of Photogenic Drawing, without any aid whatever from theartists pencil.

The term Photography is now so well known, that an explana-tion of it is perhaps superfluous; yet, as some persons may still be un-acquainted with the art, even by name, its discovery being still of veryrecent date, a few words may be looked for of general explanation. Itmay suffice, then, to say, that the plates of this work have been ob-tained by the mere action of Light upon sensitive paper. They havebeen formed or depicted by optical and chemical means alone, andwithout the aid of any one acquainted with the art of drawing. It isneedless, therefore, to say that they differ in all respects, and as widelyas possible, in their origin, from plates of the ordinary kind, whichowe their existence to the united skill of the Artist and the Engraver.

They are impressed by Natures hand.16

At a first glance, Talbots declaration seems to presuppose a traditionaldistinction between natural objects and the sphere in which theseobjects are represented, between nature and the human world of cul-ture typified by art and, especially, by the artists hand and pencil.However, as we consider the described workings of the pencil of na-ture, we see that Natures hand and pencil actually blur the sep-aration between these two spheres. Whereas the artists pencil may besaid to belong to the sphere of culture, Natures pencil does not remainwithin the bounds of the natural but writes itself into the world ofculture (in the form of the photograph). In this respect, the inventionof which Talbot reports is one that straddles the divide between natureand culture, creating a conceptual tension that continues to resonate inTalbots elaboration of the manner in which this natural drawing willbe an asset to culture. Another way to put this is to say that Talbotsunderstanding of photogenic drawingsas created by natures pen-cil or natures handimplicitly ascribes to nature an expressivequality. Nature is not only the sum of natural objects or natural factsthatto use a later phrase by Bertrand Russellare simply what theyare but consists in a certain inner movement of self-presentation. This

16. William Henry Fox Talbot, Introductory Remarks, The Pencil of Nature (1844; NewYork, 1869), pp. [iii]; hereafter abbreviated PN.



means that nature is not self-enclosed, self-sufficient, or self-identicalbut that its being has a relational structure, always beyond itself, toward theshowing of itself (toward appearance). Nature can show itself beyond the factthat it is simply there, and this showing does not need the artists pencil orthe aid of anyone acquainted with the art of drawing.

This is tied to what, for Talbot, is the self-delineation of natural objectswith which photography is synchronized. That is, photography is a me-dium that, while appearing within the bounds of culture, allows nature toshow itselfto use a Heideggerian phrasingfrom within itself. Photog-raphy is not understood as a re-presentation, as a detached and indepen-dent domain in which copies of things appear but as an enabling processby which natural objects may be made to delineate themselves. And,again, photographys manner of enabling the self-delineation of naturalobjects implies that natural objects have an inner tendency of delineatingthemselves under the right conditions. I will need to return to this idea ofnatures superabundance or surplus being (the trace of which I find in thenotion of the shadow) (fig. 3).

Hence, while Talbots presentation of the new invention is donethrough the opposition to the idea of drawing, it nevertheless remainsconceptually dependent on the paradigm that it opposes, as can be seen,

F I GUR E 3 . William Henry Fox Talbot, Trees with Reflections, c. 184143.



for example, in the description of Lacock Abbey, Talbots house in thecountry, as the first [building] that was ever yet known to have drawn itsown picture17 (fig. 4). In other words, the negative model provided by theartists pencil and the idea of drawing nevertheless remain the grounds forarticulating the new discovery. Photography, in this sense, is a special typeof drawing that lacks all the basic features of traditional drawing, and,mostsignificantly, it is a drawing empty of the artists singular presence andinvolvement, intention, skills, body, gesture, touch, and so on (fig. 5). Forour purposes, what is important to see is that in its very attempt to detachitself from drawing, photography remains dependent on drawing for itsself-understanding. That is, in gesturing toward a separation from draw-ing, the new-born art remains haunted by the shadowof drawing, which is,at the same time, that shadowwhich grounds the prototypical act of draw-ing. Lets turn now to Talbots discussion of the shadow as it appears in hisfirst account of his invention.

17. Talbot, Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing, or, The Process by WhichNatural Objects May Be Made to Delineate Themselves without the Aid of the Artists Pencil,in Photography: Essays and Images, ed. Beaumont Newhall (1839; New York, 1980), p. 28;hereafter abbreviated SA.

F I GUR E 4 . Talbot, Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire, 1844.



3. Fixing Shadows (Again?)Shadows were part of Talbots earliest imagery. His first name for pho-

tography was sciagraphy (literally, a shadow drawing or shadowwriting), aterm that was replaced by the time he made his announcement of photog-raphy in January 1839.18 While the new art of making pictures becameknown as the art of photogenic drawinga heading underscoring theworkings of lightthe figure of the shadow nevertheless continued toperform significant work in Talbots writing. Hence, in opening SomeAccount of the Art of PhotogenicDrawing, Talbot presents the shadow ascentral to his first experiments with the discoloration of sensitive paper.He writes:

I proposed to spread on a sheet of paper a sufficient quantity of thenitrate of silver, and then to set the paper in the sunshine, having firstplaced before it some object casting a well-defined shadow. The light,acting on the rest of the paper, would naturally blacken it, while theparts in shadow would retain their whiteness. Thus I expected that a

18. On this point, see Larry J. Schaaf, introduction to Records of the Dawn of Photography:Talbots Notebooks P & Q (Cambridge, 1996), p. xviii.

F I GUR E 5 . Talbot, Wall in Melon Ground, Lacock Abbey, 1840.



kind of image or picture would be produced, resembling to a certaindegree the object from which it was derived. [SA, p. 23]

Yet, alongside a literal understanding of the shadow as that dark area orshape produced by an object coming between rays of light and a surface,Talbot also uses the shadow inmore emblematic ways that evokeeven ifequivocallywhat he takes as the gist of the newly developed photo-graphic process. This kind of use finds its clearest expression in the ac-counts fourth section, which Talbot famously titles The Art of Fixing aShadow. It comes after Talbots explanation of his preserving processand opens in the following way:

The phenomenon which I have now briefly mentioned appears to meto partake of the character of the marvellous, almost as much as anyfact which physical investigation has yet brought to our knowledge.The most transitory of things, a shadow, the proverbial emblem of allthat is fleeting and momentary, may be fettered by the spells of ournatural magic, and may be fixed for ever in the position which itseemed only destined for a single instant to occupy. . . . Such is thefact, that we may receive on paper the fleeting shadow, arrest it thereand in the space of a single minute fix it there so firmly as to be nomore capable of change, even if thrown back into the sunbeam fromwhich it derived its origin. [SA, p. 25]

Talbot speaks of the photogenic image as a shadow, deliberately usinga language that, as he knew well, reverberates through a range of liter-ary and metaphysical overtones. The shadow is the most transitory ofthings . . . the proverbial emblem of all that is fleeting and momentary.This allowed him to present the inventions achievementas he ex-pounded on in The Pencil of Naturein terms of a certain resisting andovercoming of (the grinding teeth of) time. The photographic processnot only copies light-based images but moreover succeeds in haltingtheir quintessential form of transience and, in this sense, partakes inthe character of the marvellous. Its surprising ability to chain theshadow and deactivate its evanescent presence implies a sense of magicnotas artifice, but as a natural form of magic, which conjures up the ancientritualistic magic that summoned the shadow spirits of the dead.

Talbots metaphorical use of the shadow seems to have its primaryunderpinning in his direct-contact photogramshis first photo-graphswhich, like shadows, consisted in two dimensional projec-tions of objects (made by placing objects on a sensitized surface). As



such, a shadow may be thought of as that dark hidden side of theobject whose image potentiala white imprintis realized only oncethe object is removed from the paper. Within this same logic, however,Talbots use of the termmight also be extended to refer, more generally,to the reproductive process that relies on negatives. The negative is ashadow in that it reverses the objects (or the in-camera images) darkand bright areas while retaining its form.19 These two ways of under-standing the shadow both hinge on a certain concept of resemblance-through-reversal that is grounded in the traditional figuration of theshadow as a double or a copy. And yet, if we listen to Talbots repeatedclaims for the shadows fleeting character, we recognize that the part itplays in Talbots imagery has another sense, one that is not spatial butthat stems, rather, from the shadows temporal constitution, its intrin-sic ephemerality (fig. 6).

In order to unpack Talbots concern, it is important to recall that hisinvention of photography takes place against the background of un-successful attempts to produce pictures by means of the agency of light.As Joel Snyder shows, this does not imply that there was a coherentlyformulated idea [of photography] pre-dating the invention of the firstprocesses but only that the invention did not occur ex nihilo.20 Indeed,Talbots experiments relied on certain technological (chemicallybased) procedures that were already availabletogether with a set ofunresolved technological problemsin the late eighteenth century.These were inseparable from a certain shift, not only in the understand-ing of image-making, but also in the appropriation of the question ofwhat an image is. At its core, this new understanding brackets thevisuality of images in order to articulate their essence in terms of thephysical-chemical impact of light on the materiality of given surfaces.

19. In Talbots words: The ordinary effect of light upon white sensitive paper is to blackenit. If therefore any object, as a leaf for instance, be laid upon the paper, this, by intercepting theaction of the light, preserves the whiteness of the paper beneath it, and accordingly when it isremoved there appears the form or shadow of the leaf marked out in white upon the blackenedpaper; and since shadows are usually dark, and this is the reverse, it is called in the language ofphotography a negative image (PN, text to plate 20).

20. Snyder, Enabling Confusion, History of Photography 26 (Summer 2002): 159. ForSnyder the demand for clear and distinct pre-existing ideas that motivate and guide alldiscoveries does not follow from accounts of actual practiceit is little more than amethodological imperative and, as such, no more than a fantasy. Providing a nuanced critiqueof this relatively common view, Snyder thus calls for a shift of theoretical attention toward themixed or ambiguous motives, impenetrable dead-ends, strokes of good luck, failed hunches,inspired insights, and embarrassing loose ends that would eventually be determined asphotography ex post facto (ibid., p. 155). In this context, see also Helmut Gernsheim, TheOrigins of Photography (London, 1982); Batchen, Burning with Desire, p. 24; and Snyder, reviewof Burning with Desire, by Batchen, Art Bulletin 81 (Sept. 1999): 54042.



In other (Aristotelian) words, light is not only the images efficientcause but also (together with the surface) its unique material cause.This understanding was already part of the experimentations of theeighteenth-century forerunners of photography that allowed light toleave its mark on surfaces in the form of images. And yet, as Talbotknew, these proto-photographers faced a weighty problem for whichthey had no solution: once an image registered itself chemically (as anegative) on the sensitive surface, viewing it as an autonomous picture(for example, independently of its appearance in the camera obscura)

F I GUR E 6 . Talbot, A Peony Leaf above Leaves of a Species of Chestnut.



became a problem because light continued to darken the sensitive sur-face, leading to the ultimate loss of the image.21

Talbot presents this problem in a personal, affective manner that isanomalous in the context of the inventions announcement: At the verycommencement of my experiments upon this subject, he writes, when Isawhowbeautiful were the imageswhichwere thus produced by the actionof light, I regretted the more that they were destined to have such a briefexistence, and I resolved to attempt to find out if possible, somemethod ofpreventing this, or retarding it as much as possible (SA, p. 24). Thismoment can easily be read on a technical level. It consists in an articu-lation of a problemthe evanescent existence of the produced imagestowhich the newly discovered fixer provides a successful solution. Talbotsinvention thus allows him to receive on paper the fleeting shadow . . .[and] fix it there so firmly as to be no more capable of change, even ifthrown back into the sunbeam from which it derived its origin (SA, p.25).22 But can this more technical understanding explain away the meta-

21. Despite different attempts to create darkened viewing conditions, the burden of thisstructural difficulty was not lifted prior to Talbot, whose fame as an inventor rests largely on hissuccess in fixing the image. In both of his accounts of the invention, Talbot pays homage to theproto-photographers Thomas Wedgewood and Sir Humphry Davy who were able to producelight-images but whose numerous series of experiments . . . ended in failure. In this context,Talbot makes it a point to underscore how fortunate he was to have made his own discoveryprevious to his reading of Davys report, which could have gravely discouraged him: thecircumstance . . . announced by Davy, that the paper upon which these images were depictedwas liable to become entirely dark, and that nothing hitherto tried would prevent it, wouldperhaps have induced me to consider the attempt as hopeless, if I had not (fortunately) before Iread it, already discovered a method of overcoming this difficulty, and of fixing the image insuch a manner, that it is no more liable to injury or destruction (SA, p. 24).

22. The full context of the images transience is more complicated, however. And here Ithank Snyder for his illuminating reading of this essay as well as for points he makes whendiscussing similar themes in Enabling Confusion. As Snyder shows, the experience of lossthat Talbot attaches to the photographic image has yet another important aspect, one thatprecedes the question of fixing the (chemically registered) image. This is the problem ofcopying the image or of translating its vivid appearance in the camera obscura into theobjective form of a picture. In other words, as Snyder shows, Talbot understands theproduction of the photographic image as a two-stage transformation of the image that showsitself in camera. First, theres the question of capturing the lively apparition within the cameraand, in a corollary fashion, the understanding of an unbridgeable gap between that apparitionand the visual content of the photographic image registering itself on the sensitive paper. And,second, once the photographic image has already formed itself, there arises the problem of itsephemerality, a problem solved by the invention of the fixer. While Talbot makes a point todistinguish between these two stages in his analysis of Wedgwoods experiments, I read hisrhetoric of loss as often collapsing them together. For an analysis of Talbots conception ofcopying and the pictorial conventions that implicitly govern his practice, see Snyder, EnablingConfusion, pp. 15659. On the evolving conception of a mechanical copy from nature, seeSnyder, Res Ipsa Loquitur, Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science, ed. LorraineDaston (New York, 2004), pp. 197213.



physical resonance of Talbots words? Indeed, Talbot uses the figure of thefleeting shadow to speak of the images that appear on the surface and thatwould fade awaywere it not for a procedure that desensitizes them to light;but does this explain why he chooses the figure of the shadow to speak ofthose images he finds beautiful? Or, why is he so affected by the disappear-ance and loss of these beautiful appearances and so determined, in the firstplace, to fix them to paper? Is his use of the shadow figure merely a rhe-torical conceit to underscore the fleeting character of these vanishing im-ages, or is there, perhaps, a deeper connection between the evocation of (adesired) beauty,23 the problem of transience, the affect of loss, and thefixing of a shadow?

4. Time, Beauty, MelancholyThe themes of beauty, transience, andmelancholy continue to resonate

in Talbots The Pencil of Nature, which opens with the much discussedBrief Historical Sketch of the Invention of the Art. This semiautobio-graphical text offers a different, more personalized account of the birth ofthe photograph. Taking on a more literary form, Talbots second accountnot only seeks to announce and explain the impact of the invention butalsoas its title suggeststo incorporate it into history. In his account,Talbot presents the birth of the newly produced image as the climax of apersonal story of emancipation from the grip of drawing or, more pre-cisely, an overcoming of the hands deficiencies in capturing nature. Itopens as follows:

One of the first days of the month of October 1833, I was amusingmyself on the lovely shores of the Lake of Como, in Italy, takingsketches with Wollastons Camera Lucida, or rather I should say, at-tempting to take them: but with the smallest possible amount of suc-cess. For when the eye was removed from the prismin which alllooked beautifulI found that the faithless pencil had only left traceson the paper melancholy to behold.

After various fruitless attempts, I laid aside the instrument andcame to the conclusion, that its use required a previous knowledge ofdrawing, which unfortunately I did not possess. [PN, pp. (vvi)]

Talbots story begins in a beautiful setting in the cultivated landscape onthe shores of Lake Como, in Italya locus amoenus that is particularly

23. Beauty is a recurring theme for Talbot, who had given the term calotype to hisinvention in 1841. For an elaboration on the significance of this term, see Schaaf, Records of theDawn of Photography, pp. xixxx.



significant to Talbots classical education and interests (fig. 7). In this ap-parently relaxed ambience, Talbot (who chooses not to mention the factthat he is on his honeymoon) makes a few attempts to sketch the sur-rounding landscape using a relatively popular technological aid: Wallas-tons camera lucida (invented 1807). His attempts are not successful. And,although the sketching activity is initially described as a form of amuse-ment, its failure seems to disrupt the harmony promised by the beauty ofthe place. A sense of estrangement from the hand (from the body?)may beglimpsed in Talbots reference to the workings of the faithless pencil thatbars him from capturing the beauty of things, leaving only traces on thepaper melancholy to behold. The word melancholy, which is here em-ployed against the more common phrasing of wonder to behold, may carrya range of meanings, but, judging from Talbots letters, this is not a wordthat he uses inadvertently.24 Hence, without psychologizing Talbot, let usjust mark the seemingly unexpected way in which limited satisfaction withthe hands abilities turns his amusement into a melancholic affect. If Tal-bot was indeed only amusing himself with drawing, why does a limitedsuccess (his existing sketches of the shores of Lake Como seem technically

24. In a personal communication with his mother Talbot employs the notion ofmelancholy to describe an Italian landscape, as I passed by the roofless walls of the unfinishedhospice, on the summit of the pass, the appearance was most melancholy & forlorn (Talbot,letter to Elizabeth Feilding, 24 July 1821, The Correspondence of Henry William Fox TalbotProject, ed. Schaff, foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk/index.html).

F I GUR E 7 . Talbot, Lake Como, Sketch with Camera Lucida, 1833.



adept) bring on suchmelancholy?25What is it, then, that Talbot had soughtto achieve in drawingwhat is drawing for him, in this contextand inwhat sense had he experienced failure? As the story continues, however, wesee that this initial failure and the decision to overcome it is key to theunderlying narrative of the invention. As in a fairytale, Talbots story de-velops in three stages. The failed attempt to draw with a camera lucida isfollowed by a second attempt to draw with another technological aid, anattempt that also ends in failure but then paves theway for the invention ofphotography and its happy solution to the problem.

I then thought of trying again a method which I had tried manyyears before. This method was, to take a Camera Obscura, and tothrow the image of the objects on a piece of transparent tracing paperlaid on a pane of glass in the focus of the instrument. On this paperthe objects are distinctly seen, and can be traced on it with a pencilwith some degree of accuracy, though not without much time andtrouble.

I had tried this simple method during former visits to Italy in 1823and 1824, but found it in practice somewhat difficult to manage, be-cause the pressure of the hand and pencil upon the paper tends toshake and displace the instrument (insecurely fixed, in all probability,while taking a hasty sketch by a roadside, or out of an inn window);and if the instrument is once deranged, it is most difficult to get itback again, so as to point truly in its former direction.

Besides which, there is another objection, namely, that it baffles theskill and patience of the amateur to trace all the minute details visibleon the paper; so that, in fact, he carries away with him little beyond amere souvenir of the scenewhich, however, certainly has its valuewhen looked back to, in long after years.

Such, then, was the method which I proposed to try again, and toendeavour, as before, to trace with my pencil the outlines of the scen-ery depicted on the paper. And this led me to reflect on the inimitablebeauty of the pictures of natures painting which the glass lens of theCamera throws upon the paper in its focusfairy pictures, creationsof a moment, and destined as rapidly to fade away.

It was during these thoughts that the idea occurred to me . . . . .how charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural

25. Psychoanalysis would probably have its say on such questionsapropos, for example,the functioning of the pencil in the context of the new contract celebrated by honeymoon, butwe wont go there.



images to imprint themselves durably, and remain fixed upon thepaper!

And why should it not be possible? I asked myself. [PN, pp. (24)]

The idea of photography presents itself to Talbot after his second attemptto trace with pencil the images that appear in the camera obscura. Heretoo his failure only accentuates in him a sense of an unavoidable loss in theface of beauty. Talbot is preoccupied and disconcerted by the tension be-tween the beauty of images and their ephemerality.26Yet, unlike Odysseus,whose three attempts to embrace the image/shadow (eidolon) of his deadbelovedmother all result in failure,27 Talbots two failures lead to a successin which the shadow is captured. As he tells his readers, it is in reflecting onthis melancholic tension, between the inimitable beauty of what he seesand the momentary, shadowy existence of these images destined as rap-idly to fade away, that the idea of how to overcome this potential lossthe idea of photographyoccurs to him.

5. Shadow/ImageThe new idea of causing these natural images to imprint themselves

durably is based on an approach that is strategically different from theones previously taken by Talbot. Having failed with two differentmethodsof tracing the fleeting images by hand, Talbot no longer seeks to improvehis drawing skills or the technology of his copying techniques. Shiftingperspective, it becomes clear to him that the key to his problem is found inthe material constitution of these fairy pictures themselves. What givesbirth to Talbots new idea is a transformation of his relationship to theimages that so affect him, a transformation by which the desirein whichthe hand participatesto literally hold on to these images is forsaken or atleast bracketed. Hence, in releasing himself from the allure of these im-ages, Talbot is able to regard them as divested of their pictorial meaning,

26. The fading of beauty, or beauty as an epitome of transience is a theme articulated, in avariety of ways, from Plato to Sigmund Freud and onwards. What seems to be peculiar inTalbots version is that his complaint is not at all about the structure of life or of being humanas much as about the being of images appearing in the camera obscura. That is, we can pointhere to a certain transference between the sphere of existence in which these questions aretypically discussed (for example, the fading beauty of the beloved, and so on) to that oftechnically produced images. Moreover, Talbots version is also unique in the kind of solutionit offers: that is, a kind of deus ex machina, an invention that can save beauty by lifting theburden of time.

27. See Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Richmond Lattimore (New York, 1965), 11.2068. Seealso Aeneass three attempt to embrace the shadow of his beloved in the underworld in Virgil,The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York, 1990), 2.79294. Three is a typological numberhere. And, with his classical training and interests, Talbot was well acquainted with thesignificance of these dramatic moments.



illusion, and reference beyond themselves. Seen in this way, the materialcharacter of these fleeting images comes to the foreground: The picturedivested of the ideas which accompany it, and considered only in its ulti-mate nature, is but a succession or variety of stronger lights thrown uponone part of the paper, and of deeper shadows on another (PN, p. [4]).28

Seeing images merely as distributions of light and shades, that is, as nat-ural patches that are an integral part of the physical, causal order, enablesTalbot to envision the possibility of solving the problem of their durabilityin terms ofby intervening inthe physical-chemical condition of thepaper surface on which they appear.

This revolutionary gestalt shift in the perception of images is particu-larly instructive for our discussion, as it accentuates the need to differen-tiate between twomodalities of appearance: the shadow and the image (orbetween shadow image and picture image). The significance of this dis-tinction needs some elaboration, however, since it typically remainsblurred within the current understandings of images. The roots of thisblurring are to be found within the parameters of an age-oldcall it Pla-tonictradition in which the predominant opposition between being andappearance ineluctably imposes auniformityon thefieldof appearance, treat-ing it enbloc asmere antithesis to the real (interestingly, the assimilationof theshadow continues, in different guises, also in anti-Platonic approaches toart).29 As such, both shadow and image are treated, without distinction, astokens of representation, thus relating to and drawing their significance fromthe ontologically more basic entities that they allegedly represent.

The common tendency to subsume the shadow under a uniform con-ception of representation is also apparent in dominant readings of Plinys

28. And Talbot continues:

Now Light, where it exists, can exert an action, and, in certain circumstances, does exert onesufficient to cause changes in material bodies. Suppose, then, such an action could be ex-erted on the paper; and suppose the paper could be visibly changed by it. In that case surelysome effect must result having a general resemblance to the cause which produced it: sothat the variegated scene of light and shade might leave its image or impression behind,stronger or weaker on different parts of the paper according to the strength or weakness ofthe light which had acted there. Such was the idea that came into my mind. [PN, pp. (45)]

29. As they resist the idea of image-as-representation, these positions all too often articulatethe images autonomy in terms of its objecthood; rather than focusing on the ways in whichimages can be said to be about the world, they are thus addressed primarily via the manner inwhich, as objects, they are in the world. Indeed, the framing of the image as an object oftensucceeds in granting it new forms of autonomy; but, this kind of autonomy is still typicallygrounded in the basic binary opposition between the thing (with the fullness of its being) andthat which lacks a genuine rootedness in the world of things. And, in this respect, the positingof the object as a model for the image does not bring us closer to understanding the role of theshadow.



tale, readings that understand the essence of the first, mythical act of draw-ing in terms of the making of a copy, a double, or a substitution of themaidens departing lover. As I illustrated, the shadow is indeed often un-derstood in this context as a figure of an absence created by the loss of thedesired object, a loss that the image is taken to partly restore in its appeal tomemory. Yet, in treating the shadow as the objects negative presence (andthus as derivative of the object), the question of the shadows autonomousplace within the visual and, in particular, of the role it plays in the forma-tion of the images visuality hardly ever opens up. Indeed, in Plinys tale, nomore than a sentence is dedicated to drawings origin, and even then it isimmediately subsumed, like the shadow, under the productive telos andthe name (Butades) of the maidens father. And, yet, within this terse form,the tale nevertheless succeeds in making the distinctiveness of shadow andimage clear: and she, when [the lover] was going abroad, drew in outline onthe wall the shadow of his face thrown by the lamp. Shadow and image areseparate entities that are connected through the act of drawing. The shadowserves as the enabling condition (the underlying schema) of the drawing act,and the image (in the form of an outline) is the acts outcome.

Imagemaking is born out of a certain appropriation of the shadow, butthis appropriation is inseparable from the ability to see the shadow as avisual form. Butades, the Corinthian maidenwho in the tradition takeson the name of her fathercan make use of the shadow in drawing herlovers silhouette only once she sees the shadow as bearing the form of herlovers profile. This mode of seeing as differs significantly from Talbotsmanner of relating image and shadow; while Talbots idea of photographyis dependent on seeing the image as a shadow (that is, stripped of itspictorial content), Butadess mythical act of drawing depends on the in-versed ability to see the shadow as (bearing the potential of becoming) animage. But how exactly is the shadow different from the depicted image?

6. Shadow OntologyShadows are two-dimensional entities whose visual form is created by

the projection of an object. As such, like images, they differ in their modeof being from fully constituted, three-dimensional objects. They also sharewith images a basic form of iconicity governed by an in-built perspectivalstructure. That is, shadows and images are not only visible but are bothvisual entities. At the same time, unlike the images form of presence, theshadow, in itself, is neither an artifact nor a re-presentation. An objectsshadow does not primarily re-present the object (does not, for example,reproduce the natural object within the sphere of culture) but takes part,rather, in the manner that the object offers itself to sight. A shadow is not



a second order manifestation of the object but belongs to the core of anobjects visibility, which is never independent of its concrete viewing con-ditions. Hence, while it is not part of the materiality of the object itself, atrees shadow, for example, is inseparable from our visual encounter withthe tree, just as the spaces between its branches are integral to what we see.This is a point that was very important to, and that I take from, MauriceMerleau-Ponty, who understands the shadow as a central dimension ofwhat he terms the metamorphosis of Being into its vision (fig. 8).30

The shadow is an instance of natures self-showing, of its movementtoward appearance. The shadows presence within the natural order isindicative of a movement of self-presentation that is part of nature andthat, as such, reveals natures expressive character (touched upon by Tal-bot in his idea of the self-delineation of natural objects). In other words, inbeing a form of natural likeness, the shadow manifests a doubling ofnature that interestingly belongs to the very order of nature itself. And,consequently, it allows us to recognize in nature an inner formof doublingthat carries two interconnected kinds of implications. First, nature (orbeing) is never self-identical but always overflowing itself, transcending itsmateriality while remaining (and this is important) within the realm of thesensible. And, second, the re-presentational is not opposed to a naturalkind of presence; the seed of virtuality already resides in nature itself.

The grounds of the possibility of representation is, thus, beings innerdoubling, an ontological condition of which the shadow is a trace. Tounderstand the shadow, in this context, is to recognize its presence as amanifestation of the ontological structure that enables nature to open itselfto the possibility of representation (of being represented). Indeed, thepossibility of the image (of having, making, and experiencing images) isdependent on an ontological structure, and yet this structure is not animmutable given but reciprocates with the development of human vision.Nature is never there, in and of itself, but is always in relation to us, devel-

30. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind, trans. Carleton Dallery,The Primacy ofPerception and Other Essays on Phemenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History, andPolitics, trans. James M. Edie et al., ed. Edie [Evanston, Ill., 1964], p. 166). Light, lighting,shadows, reflections, color . . . Merleau-Ponty writes, are not altogether real objects; likeghosts, they have only visual existence. In fact they exist only at the threshold of profane vision;they are not seen by everyone. And yet, this dimension of being is opened up, according toMerleau-Ponty, in the painters work. The painters intention, he writes, is to unveil themeans, visible and not otherwise, by which it makes itself a mountain before our eyes. . . . Thepainters gaze asks them what they do to suddenly cause something to be and to be this thing. . . to make us see the visible. We see that the hand pointing to us in The Nightwatch is trulythere only when we see that its shadow on the captains body presents it simultaneously inprofile. The spatiality of the captain lies at the meeting place of two lines of sight which areincompossible and yet together (ibid., pp. 16667).



oping its resistances in relation to the developments of our capacities asviewers and appropriators of being.

I take this to be one of the philosophical lessons of Plinys tale in whichthe human interventionButadess actnot only gives birth to a drawnimage but concomitantly turns the shadow into that which bears the im-ages potentiality. Another way to put this is to say that in tracing a shad-ows contour, Butades changed forever the form of our human encounterwith the visible. Before the birth of drawing, the visibility of the world wasencountered as that which simply imposes itself on the eye. The visualappearance of things was cast on the human eye as a shadow. When facedand looked at, the world appeared. And it appeared through the medium

F IGUR E 8 . Talbot, Oak Tree in Winter, c. 184243.



of sight. That is, before the birth of the image, seeing was no more than away, a lens, for accessing and processing the world. And, accordingly, thevisible appeared as a manifestation of the world itself, of those things,qualities, events, and facts that show themselves in ones field of vision.Yet, with Butades and her inventive act, a new possibility has opened up.This is the possibility of notmerely seeing theworld but of seeing theworldas that which is seen. Butades, the first painter, should be remembered asthe one who allowed the visible to become visual. The primordial line ofButades is the mark of human possibility in overcoming our fundamentalthrownnessto use a Heideggerian terminto the realm of visibility.With the first paintingand this applies also to paintings actual begin-nings in such places as Chauvet, Lascaux, and Altamirathe human con-dition of being in a perceived world had changed. In the presence ofimages, the world is no longer whats simply there but is there in the formof what shows itself to a viewer. Hence, what is celebrated in the tale of thefirst painting is the impregnation of the field of visibility with a structure ofrelationality from which the history of visuality can develop and take onnew forms, including, of course, photography. 31

In this respect, I suggest we understand the shadow as a particular kindof an ur-image. The shadow is a schema (in the Kantian sense) thatgrounds the images condition of representationality, its potentiality ofimageness. And, yet, the ground from which it allows the image todevelop is not an unchanging foundational structure but the manner inwhich the worlds visibility opens up to human vision with its historyand possibility of renewal. This brings us closer to the central concernof this essay, that is, the transfiguration of the shadow that occurs whenthe image takes over as a fait accompli. How does the pictorial modalityof a fully determinate image relate to its underlying grid of potentiality,its condition of representationality?

7. The Transfiguration of the ShadowWeve been dealing with two origin stories that appear to provide two

different paradigms for constructing the relationship between the imageand its shadow. Comparing the manner in which this relationship is artic-ulated in these two image paradigms, well be able to return to one of theopening themes of this study and consider the kind of ontological differ-ence that shows itself between drawing and photography. Lets first look at

31. In A General Theory of Visual Culture, Whitney Davis is concerned, within quite adifferent theoretical setting, with similar questions and similar dialectical processes aproposwhat he terms successions of pictoriality; see Whitney Davis, A General Theory of VisualCulture (Princeton, N.Y., 2011), chap. 6.



Plinys articulation of the shadow-image relationship before turning toTalbot.

In Plinys tale of origin, the primal act of drawing is guided by a shadowthat appearsthat is seenthrough its pictorial potential. When seen-as-image, the shadows quivering and ever-changing appearance invites atracing of its contour. The shadow guides Butades in drawing its outlinebut, in itself, bears no positive articulation of that contour. There is nosuch outline on the wall prior to Butadess act of drawing, and in this sensethe line she draws is not a copy, a second making, of an already existing, ifephemeral, line. It is only through Butadess drawing that the line showsitself as a line and, ultimately, as a form of figuration. Her drawing act iswhat allows a potential dimension of the visible that is implied by theshadow to come to the fore and present itself in a determinate way.32

As we read Butadess tale as a whole, however, the question of the im-ages relation to the shadow getsmore complicated. Readwithmy interestsin mind, we see that the tale delineates a relationship among three modal-ities of the image: the shadow that supports the making of a drawn imageand the drawing that, in turn, serves as a layout for the production of a clayrelief used for ritualistic purposes. In this context, the daughter and thefather embody two different modes of image making that call for a com-parison. Drawing comes first. Its ability to articulate a determinate visualdimension of the shadow is inseparable from its way of lendingmaterialityto the image. Taking on a material form, the image is no longer only aconfiguration of the play of light and darknessa mere ephemeralitybut exists beyond the specificity of any required viewing conditions (un-like the shadow, the drawing on the wall can be said to exist also in fulldarkness, when it cannot be seen). At the same time, the materiality of thedrawn image is still veryminimal. The image is not part of an autonomousmediumof representation but remains anchored in the original location ofthe event of drawing. With the fathers production, the image is trans-formed again in a manner that carries the image into a categorically newphase. It not only takes a new material form but, more significantly, takes

32. This understanding of the line is, again, central to Merleau-Ponty, whoseunderstanding of drawing develops together with a critique of what he terms a prosaic[conception of the] line. For him, like shadows, the visible presence of lines is typically not apositive one. Lines are indicated, implicated, and even very imperiously demanded by thethings . . . [but] they themselves are not things. The uncovering of this preobjective existencebelongs to the work of the painter. Merleau-Ponty never mentions Plinys tale of origin, but theprimordial line ascribed to Butades seems to exemplify well his conception of drawingaccording to which the line no longer imitates the visible. . . [but] renders visible; it is ablueprint of a genesis of things (Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind, p. 183).



on a new ontological status: it becomes a thing, a portable object that,being transferred to a shrine in a different location, is integrated intoandacquires its value withina well-established practice in the public sphere.The fathers clay relief severs the image from its rootedness in the shadow;it sublates the personal significance of the daughters drawing act and hersingular manner of inhabiting the line she draws, thus transposing theimage into a new positivity that, in itself, is a prototype for the technicalreproduction of images.33

For Pliny, the act of drawing thus seems to be part of a more generalprocess/trajectory of reification that awaits the images potentiality.And, yet, in presenting reification as a possible horizon of the image,Plinys tale only accentuates the difference between the creative acts offather and daughter and invites its reader to recognize the vulnerableautonomy of drawing as a unique modality of image making. In thiscontextis this the time to take another look at Knorrs The Pencil ofNature?Butadess drawing takes the position of an intermediary mo-ment in between the shadow and the fathers clay relief. In its materialarticulation of a potential dimension of the shadow, drawing marks animage modality that is neither a natural phenomenon nor an artifact.This intermediate modality is, as Ive suggested, always susceptible tomodification and can all too easily become an artifact when subsumedunder a reifying telos. And yet, given its precarious existence, Butadessdrawing nevertheless denotes an important possibility open for an im-age: the possibility of being an open image, one that is responsive toand that, in a unique sense, is thus responsible forthe fluctuatingpresence of the shadow, the unreifiable dimension of human visionfrom which it has coalesced and taken its leave.

Lets turn now to examine the different kind of predicament that awaitsthe shadow in Talbots account of his photographic invention. To recapit-ulate, shadows, for Talbot, are the self-delineations of nature appearing onthe sensitive paper in the form of images. They are still not fully producedpictures, but they do bear a pictorial form that he initially understands inanalogy to life drawing. Talbot is clearly attracted to the unique (let usanachronistically call it ontological) modality of these images and isstrongly affected by their beauty. At the same time, he is also utterly dis-mayed by their tendency to rapidly fade away.

33. Newman has written perceptively on this, considering the role of the daughter vis-a`-visthat of her father in Plinys tale: For Butades, the outline drawing is a plan on which to base arepresentation. For his daughter it is something else, valuable as memento, inseparable from itsrelation to the moment of its making and from the fleetingness of that moment (Newman,The Marks, Traces, and Gestures of Drawing, p. 96).



In Talbots narrative, the shadow is a protoimage, whose natural beautygoes hand in hand with a tenuous kind of visibility, one that cannot beincorporated into the sociocultural sphere of visuality. The shadow is animage that cannot be integrated into the everyday since it is unable toendure (through) daylight; it can neither be displayed nor circulated andused in public and, as such, can never qualify as an artifact. Talbot under-stands the unique condition of the shadow image but is unwilling to acceptit as final. He thus pursues a solution that would secure the shadowspresence anddiscovers the fixer that allows him to create a durable image,34

a fully fledged photograph-thing. He thus proudly embraces the art offixing a shadow as that by which the most transitory of things . . . theproverbial emblem of all that is fleeting and momentary . . . may be fixedfor ever. Yet, can the proverbial emblem of all that is fleeting ever take ona fixed form?Can it retain its identity (as a shadow)when robbed/deprivedof its constitutive temporal trademark? What is the meaning of the aspi-ration to fix forever the momentary and essentially ephemeral? Would itbe correct to understand Talbots attitude in terms of what FriedrichNietzsche terms the wills unwillingness toward time?35 Talbots relationto time calls for a separate discussion that, at this point, cannot be opened.The point that specifically matters to us, here, is that the photographic isborn within an imagery space that conflates two antithetical attitudes to-ward the shadow. This conflation creates a conceptual tension that reso-nates most clearly in the rhetoric of fixing shadows by which the inventionis introduced. Talbot eventually abandons this terminology, even as thedual attitude toward the shadow continues to be part of his vision of pho-tography. In The Pencil of Nature, this duality can be identified in theaccount of the crucial turning point that makes the invention possible. Assuggested, Talbot anchors his photographic invention in a new form ofseeing-as, one that inverts a more common form of seeing-as underlyingour experience of pictures. The key to the invention was found, accordingto Talbot, in a certain gestalt shift that neutralized the captivating power of

34. It was in this spirit that the first advertisements of photography called for anendorsement of the new invention with the words Secure the Shadow Ere the Substance Fade.For a discussion of the interesting history of this slogan, see H. K. Henisch, The PhotographicExperience, 18391914 (University Park, Penn., 1994), pp. 22325.

35. It was: thus is called the wills gnashing of teeth and loneliest misery. Impotentagainst that which has beenit is an angry spectator of everything past. The will cannot willbackward; that it cannot break time. . . . That is the wills loneliest misery. . . . That time doesnot run backward, that is its wrath. . . . and on everything that is capable of suffering it avengesitself for not being able to go back. This, yes this alone is revenge itself: the wills unwillingnesstoward time and times it was (Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Alland None, trans. Adrian Del Caro, ed. Del Caro and Robert B. Pippin [Cambridge, 2006],p. 111).



images by bracketing their pictorial effect. Once the shadow is denuded ofits pictoriality, Talbot is able to see it as a map of lights distribution on achemically codified plane that, as such, lends itself to chemical manipula-tion. This is a significant moment in the narrative that unknowingly her-alds the advent of a new phase in the life of images. Having been triggeredby natures self-expressivity, its metamorphosis into vision, Talbot, atthis point, turns his back on the images rootedness in the visible. And, inreframing the images presence in terms of a codified understanding oflights workings, he ultimately turns the pictoriality of the shadow into anepiphenomenon.

The breach created in the images relation to the visible can also besensed in Talbots later incorporation of the term photographythat is, inits inclusion of the Greek graphein with its double-sensemeaning of draw-ing and writing. The term photography thus introduces a certain ambiva-lence into natures pencil, which now operates between drawing andwriting, between visual depiction and the codified signs of a language.These two interconnected aspects of graphein both play a part in Talbotsimagery according to which the shadows that indeed appear as picturesare, in their essential underpinnings, the written inscriptions of naturespencil. In this respect, we may say that Talbots account not only an-nounces the birth of the photographic image but also intimates (beyond itsexplicit intentions) the birth of what Vilem Flusser would term the post-historic technical image.36

The birth of photography is tied to the ability to transform the shadowinto a durable image. Like Butadess father, Talbot ultimately extracts theimage from its shadowy existence and brings it into relief. And, yet, pho-tographys reification of the shadow is not just about the making of arti-facts out of shadows. Whats unique about photographys manner ofsuperseding the shadow is not the durable materiality it lends the imagebut the transmutation of the images visual constitution. The birth of thephotographic lies in the ability to see the shadow as a code and, conse-

36. In the case of technical images one is dealing with the indirect products of scientifictexts. This gives them, historically and ontologically, a position that is different from that oftraditional images. Historically, traditional images precede texts by millennia and technicalones follow on after very advanced texts. Ontologically, traditional images are abstractions ofthe first order insofar as they abstract from the concrete world while technical images areabstractions of the third order: They abstract from texts which abstract from traditional imageswhich themselves abstract from the concrete world. Historically, traditional images areprehistoric and technical ones post-historic. . . . Ontologically, traditional images signifyphenomena whereas technical images signify concepts. Decoding technical imagesconsequently means to read off their actual status from them. [Vilem Flusser, Toward aPhilosophy of Photography, trans. Anthony Mathews (London, 2000), p. 14]



quently, to create a new visually uprooted image whose self-sufficiency isno longer indebted to vision.37 In Talbots accounts the reification of theshadow remains unacknowledged and is, at times, even concealed by arhetoric that seems to embrace the shadows ontological significance. Inthe developing history of photography, shadowswill become an importantvisual theme and a consistently popular source for the photographic imag-ination, particularlywithin contexts ofmedial and personal self-reflection.What is the connection between the widespread appearance of shadows inphotographs and the shadows ontological exclusion/repression in the pri-mal scene of photographys birth?

8. Image and DifferenceThe twoorigin scenes of drawing andphotography that I have discussed

here evoke differentmodalities of the image/shadow relationship.While inPlinys tale shadow and image are significant as two separate, albeit dialec-tically related entities, in Talbots account of the origin of photography thedifference between the potentiality and determinateness of the picture isultimately cancelled. While drawings tale of origin construes the space ofthe newborn image as open and responsive to the shadow, the tale ofphotographys origin (whichmay be granted the discovery of the ontolog-ical significance of the shadow) ultimately reifies the shadow anddoes so ina manner that occludes the fact that the shadow has been excluded fromthe birthplace of the photographic. In reading these two origin storiestogether, my intention is not, however, to make a claim about how draw-ing and photography differ but, instead, to articulate the presence of adifference that, in my view, is integral to the being of images, that is, to themanner in which images uphold themselves as images. This difference isaccounted for in terms of how an image relates to the grounding it has inthe visible, of how the pictorial relates to its potentialitythe shadow. Animage can thus open up visually in a manner that testifies to its rootednessin vision, but it can also operate in a manner that is visually uprooted,having severed its ties with vision as its condition of representationality.38

The difference between these possibilities is always already part of thespace of the image and is pertinent to an understanding of drawing andphotography alike. That is, photographs, just like drawings (as well as a

37. And yet, in the course of time, these images will come to have an influence on vision,and a new dialectics will be on its way.

38. In this context, Daviss formulation of the relationship between vision and visuality isrelevant: vision without visuality is merely animal proprioception. . . . Visuality without vision ismerely quasi-robotic information-uptake (Davis, A General Theory of Visual Culture, p. 339).



whole range of image modalities), can, in different ways, be either open orimpervious to the shadows presence.

Another way to put this is to say that the image is never a given, never asimple or stable fact, but an entity that bears, in its fabric, the tensionbetween openness and determination, potentiality and actualization of thevisual. The shadow as potentiality can give rise, as weve seen, to the for-mation of an image, but it is insufficient in itself to qualify as one. Theimage needs determination. And, yet, when such a determination is obliv-ious to its own grounding in vision, it becomes an overdetermination thathas its dangers. This is precisely where the ethical dimension of an imagesvisuality becomes an issue.39

The question, however, of how the visuality of an image or of a genre ofimages (of a photograph or a certain kind of photography, for example)negotiates the tension between openness and determination is neither apriori nor abstract. And, as such, it cannot be understood solely in philo-sophical terms. The question, in other words, requires a specificity thatphilosophy cannot generate from within itself; the heterogeneity of imagemodalities, the plurality of image regimes is embedded, in different ways,in different cultural-historical contexts. But, remaining on the limit of thatspecificity, what philosophy can offer is an understanding of the image(and, in particular, of the photographic image) as a dynamis that cannot beframed only in terms of its givenness (as a representation, an object, or acultural product). Rather, the image is a product of an ongoing negoti-ation of the aforementioned tension between the potentialities of vi-sion and their determination. This concrete negotiation takes place ina historical space in which different agents participate: art (and artists),technology (inventors and technical operators), economy, and theory.Art is not alone in the formation of the image, but it has a unique rolethat at times intersects with philosophys undertaking in allowing theimage to resist reification.

39. On the ethical dimension of images, see, in this context, Hagi Kenaan, Facing Images:After Levinas, Angelaki 16 (Mar. 2011): 14359. See also Kenaan, What Makes an ImageSingular Plural? Questions to Jean-Luc Nancy, Journal of Visual Culture 9 (Apr. 2010): 6376.



Documents

Kenaan. Photography and Its Shadow