2
As Willis maintains, "Photography has certain; it is
mobile, diverse, and ubiquitous, compared to the more
fixed form of film" (Willis: 1995, 77). 3
This aspect - soon taken at face-value when Oliver
Wendell Holmes (1859) presented his first camera as a
mirror with memory, and Henry Fox Talbot defined
photography as a message without a code - links
photography to science and to a presumed scientific
rendering of reality. At the same time, and in the same
period, the mimetic potential of photography was harshly
satirized on a French daily paper, Le Chavarin, on 30
August 1839. Elaborating on the desperately long time of
exposure needed to secure portraits by Daguerre's
technique, the article's author wrote: "You want to make
a portrait of your wife. You can fix her head in a
temporary iron collar to get the indispensable
immobility. You point the lens of your camera at her
face, and when you take the portrait it does not
represent your wife; it is her parrot, or watering pot,
or worse" (Newhall: 1982, 28). 4
This peculiar Conradian way of relating to Modernism is
articulated in Erdinast-Vulcan (1991,
9-21). 7
This attitude was certainly reinforced and authorized by
two parallel events: on the one hand, the wide emotional
reaction developing around the practice of posthumous
portraits; on the other, the elaborated scene usually
built to function as the background of actors'
portraits. 8
Erdinast-Vulcan chooses the same perspective and borrows
Bakhtin's terminology in her analysis of Conrad's short
fiction. "The Other has become, in Bakhtin's terms again,
a 'usurping double', forcing the narrator to articulate a
position in conflict with the communal ethos to which he
is committed by vocation. The fabricated
mirror-relationship born out of the psychic need for
self-objectification now becomes a question of what
Bakhtin would call 'axiological authority'"
(Erdinast-Vulcan: 1999, 43) 9
His quest is to consist - as Erdinast-Vulcan maintains -
in a fundamental acceptance of doubleness. His attitude
to feeling a stranger even to himself prepares him to
assume total responsibility, to the point of complete
identification with some "other". This results in an
attempt at reversing the role of Cain, the prototype of
modern man, in that Conrad's protagonists declare
themselves as their brother's keepers in recognition of
an alternative ethical code (see Erdinast-Vulcan: 1991,
6). 10
The quotation is drawn from Nadar's testimony in a
lawsuit (translated from Prinet & Dilasser: 1859 and
quoted in Newhall (1982, 66). 11
As for anthropological photography see Maxwell (1999,
1-14). The same text elaborates on the role of road shows
and exhibitions in the spreading of photography (Maxwell:
1999, 15-38). 12
Quite meaningful is the debate developing around
Fading Away (Henry Peach Robinson, 1858), a
portrait apparently representing a young girl's death and
actually obtained through a method called "combination
printing", a sort of proto-photomontage. On that
occasion, the public was shocked by the subject and then
it was outraged by the discovery that the picture did not
represent anything "real". 14
They were not so far from reality - maintains
Benjamin though the magic they were referring to was
simply their awareness of being placed in front of a
technical device able to produce in a very short timespan
a faithful and truthful image of the surrounding world,
just like nature (Benjamin: 1966, 63). David Hill was a
well-known paint er in
Edinburgh, working mostly on single and group portraits.
Sitters usually posited outdoors. The strong shadows cast
by the direct sunlight were softened by reflecting light
into them with a concave mirror; the exposures were often
minutes long. 16
The impact of this assumption on literary imagination
is elaborated in Lutz Marsh (1995,
159-173). 18
As Erdinast-Vulcan maintains, "The narrative moves in a
cinematic fashion from the panoramic (the view of the
land) to the scenic (the ship and her crew), and finally
closes up on the perceiving individual" (Erdinast-Vulcan:
1999, 38). 19
A few years before, another writer (and Conrad's friend)
had provided - through another disembodied (because never
physically described) narrator - a curiously similar
profile of the main character of his story. In that case,
the narrative focus ed not on the appearance of the
character but on his disappearance: "I seemed to see a
ghostly, indistinct figure sitting in a whirling mass of
black and brass for a moment - a figure so transparent
that the bench behind, with its sheets of drawings, was
absolutely distinct; but the phantasm vanished as I
rubbed my eyes"( Wells: 1991, 113). 21
The quotation is drawn from Fox Talbot's "The Process of
Calotype Photogenic Drawing", a lecture to the Royal
Society delivered on June 10, 1841 (Newhall: 1980,
34). 22
After manufacturing paper negatives, George Eastman made
also a universal holder for a 24-exposure roll of
sensitized paper. The invention was perfected in 1888:
the camera christened The Kodak, for everyday use
(Frizot: 1994, 238). 23
The gum print was invented in the late 1850s, but only
used extensively from 1895 onwards. Paper was coated with
potassium bichromate and gum arabic (a substance which
hardens on exposure to light). The chosen colour pigment
was also incorporated in the coating. After the
sensitized paper had been exposed under the negative, it
was washed to get rid of those areas of gum and pigment
which had not been affected by the light. The finished
image was formed by the pigment which remained in the
hardened gum (Lucie-Smith: 1975, 70). 24
The ozotype was introduce in 1899, this was an
improvement on the Carbon Print because it did not entail
lateral reversal of the image. Paper coated with
bichromated gelatine containing manganous salts was
exposed to give a faint image. Pressed into contact with
a sheet of gelatine impregnated with pigment, this was
then immersed in an acid solution. The acid penetrated
and hardened the overlying areas of pigmented gelatine,
the tissue was peeled off, and the image transferred from
the gelatine to a fresh sheet of paper (Lucie Smith:
1975, 70). 25
The most famous advertising slogan used in this field
which can give a flavour of the shared feeling about this
kind of photographic practise is: "Secure shadow 'ere the
substance fade/Let nature imitate what nature made"
(Newhall: 1982, 32). 26
The final separation of the real and the symbolic makes
the two aspects of photography clash: commonly perceived
as totally mimetic, photography as an art - on the
contrary - claims the legitimacy of taking distance from
reality, thus reinforcing the gap between what is real -
and therefore reduced to a catalogue of empirically
observable phenomena - and meaning - fatally linked to
the realm of the symbolic (Erdinast-Vulcan: 1999,
14).
15 Quoted in Frizot (1994,
61).
20 Quoted in Barker & White
(1991, 2).
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