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picture of the world but, through photography’s harness-
ing of the “natural” laws of chemistry and physics, also
true to nature’s own way of being.
By the nineteenth century this way of being was
conceded to be a diffi cult thing to pin down, precisely
because nature was itself constantly on the move. Where
once the earth had been regarded as eternal and static,
looking now much as it did on the day of Creation, scien-
tists began to uncover increasing evidence that the world
around them had a long and tumultuous history. In 1774,
in his Théorie de la terre, French naturalist Georges
Buffon gave the earth an age of “approximately” 74,047
years; with the advent of the science of geology and the
theory of evolution in the early nineteenth century this
fi gure was extended into the millions of years. Nature
was apparently an entity always in process, a fact that
could be witnessed by any individual, just by looking
around them and trying to describe that they saw.
Coleridge is a prime example of such an individual.
Calling himself “an Eye-servant of the Goddess Nature,”
his poetry sought to somehow represent in images made
with words the lived experience of seeing the world.
Informed by modern science, with which he was very
familiar, he regarded nature as “an ever industrious
Penelope for ever unravelling what she had woven, for
ever weaving what she had unravelled.” In much of his
work he tries to capture the instant of perception, that
image which is in the eye for only a moment before it
changes forever. But he has to do so through a form of
representation (writing) that is permanent and fi xed in
place. His problem, as he often laments, is that the mo-
ment always passes faster than his words can cohere.
How can he produce a representational form that solves
this ‘time anxiety,’ that combines both permanence and
the instant, both fi xity and transience?
In 1817, Coleridge described this ambition with a
strikingly photographic metaphor; he desires, he says,
“creation rather than painting, or if painting, yet such,
and with such co-presence of the whole picture fl ash’d
at once upon the eye, as the sun paints in a camera ob-
scura.” In poems like The Eolian Harp (1795) and This
Lime-Tree Bower My Prison (1797) he again compares
this ‘co-presence’ to the fl eeting image stilled by the
camera obscura or its equivalent (specifi cally, an Eolian
Harp, which allows the wind to create its own music, and
a leafy bower that projects an image of those leaves onto
the ground below). Stretched out on the side of a hill at
noon, he looks upwards through half-closed eyes, seeing
nothing but “the sunbeams dance.” He becomes, he tells
us in The Eolian Harp, a kind of living camera.
Full many a thought uncall’d and undetain’d,
And many idle fl itting phantasies,
Traverse my indolent and passive brain,
As wild and various as the random gales
That swell and fl utter on this subject Lute!
Hovering between passive reverie and active thought, the
object of Coleridge’s vision is nothing less than his own
subjectivity. True to idealist philosophy, he assumes that
“a great mind becomes that which it meditates on.” In
other words, Coleridge recognises that the image he sees
is an interaction of nature and his own eye; becoming
a camera involves witnessing the spontaneous produc-
tion of both. What else could Coleridge’s “unregenerate
mind” be shaping here but the equivalent of a desire to
photograph, a desire to take his particular, evanescent
and contingent vision of nature and, as Talbot later put
it, have it “fi xed for ever in the position which it seemed
only destined for a single instant to occupy”?
This struggle to overcome the passing of time, to
fi x an image that would otherwise be temporary, can
be found articulated throughout early nineteenth-
century European culture. Compare Talbot’s descrip-
tion of photographs, for example, to the description
of landscape paintings offered in 1833 by English
painter John Constable: “an attempt has been made to
arrest the more abrupt and transient appearance of the
Chiar’oscuro in Nature...to give ‘to one brief moment
caught from fl eeting time’ a lasting and sober existence,
and to render permanent many of those splendid but
evanescent Exhibitions, which are ever occurring in the
changes of external Nature.” Throughout the 1820s and
1830s, Constable produced a whole series of paintings
of “skies.” At fi rst glance many of them appear to be
pictures of nothing much at all. A thin horizontal strip
of landscape anchors what is an otherwise empty sheet
of paper or canvas, empty, that is, but for some rapidly
applied strokes of paint meant to represent clouds scur-
rying about in the wind. These are, in fact, attempts on
Constable’s part to make time visible. The attempt can
never quite succeed of course, as he implicitly acknowl-
edges through the rapidity and insubstantiality of his
paint-application, and his demonstrated need to paint
this same subject over and over again. Time, it seems,
stops for no man.
To a degree foreign to earlier generations of paint-
ers, Constable is interested in representing the reality
of immediate and momentary perceptual experience.
He deliberately shows us a landscape as it is being
seen by an imperfect human eye rather than by the
ideal, eternal gaze of God. He depicts what a particular
person saw standing in a particular place at a particular
time looking upwards at the sky under quite particular
atmospheric conditions. The picture not only acknowl-
edges and presumes the presence of this viewer; it puts
that viewer fi rmly in place, inscribed as it were in the
very fi bre of its being. As Peter Galassi has argued in
Before Photography, Constable was only one of many
European artists working around 1800 who ventured
out into nature to wrest permanent images from the
contingencies of vision and time. Another was Louis