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paratus tells us something about how photography came
to be realised but not much about why. To explain the
motivation behind photography’s conception, we need
to identify what it was, philosophic or otherwise, that
the early experimenters were dreaming about.
As it happens, most of the earliest accounts we have
of the desire to photograph talk of it in representational
rather than technical terms. In his fi rst letter to Niépce,
written in 1826, Daguerre described them both as
“seeking the impossible,” by which he meant an image,
as Niépce described it the following year, “obtained
spontaneously by the action of Light.” When Niépce
prepared a synopsis of his experiments in November
1829, his title further elaborated their aspirations: “On
Heliography, or a method of automatically fi xing by the
action of light the image formed in the camera obscura.”
Daguerre’s subscription broadsheet, issued in December
1838, again claimed that the daguerreotype “consists of
the spontaneous reproduction of the images of nature
received in the camera obscura...the daguerreotype is not
merely an instrument which serves to draw Nature; on
the contrary it is a chemical and physical process which
gives her the power to reproduce herself.” In his fi rst
published paper on photography, presented in January
1839, Talbot described the image he wanted to capture
in more poetic language: “the most transitory of things,
a shadow, the proverbial emblem of all that is fl eeting
and momentary.” This image, the kind projected into the
back of a camera, may, he now claimed, “be fettered by
the spells of our ‘natural magic,’ and may be fi xed for
ever in the position which it seemed only destined for
a single instant to occupy.”
These three brief extracts describe the desire to
photograph in terms of a “spontaneous” (meaning,
self-generated) representation of a camera image. This
was a radical idea. Photography, by allowing nature to
represent itself by means of the indexical agency of light,
would remove the human hand from the act of repre-
sentation. But photography would also work to stop the
world in its tracks, grabbing a single freeze frame from
the passing parade of possible pictures seen in the back
of a camera. In other words, these experimenters wanted
to make a kind of image that solved two representational
problems that had taken on a particular urgency in the
early nineteenth century—subjectivity and time.
As described by French philosopher Michel Foucault,
this particular moment in European history marks the
beginning of an unprecedented relationship between
individual citizens and state power, embodied in new
social structures and new notions of subjectivity. There
was, for example, a general shift in the disposition of
power such that the absolute domain of the king over his
subjects was transformed into a more diffuse arrange-
ment of legal and social networks involving each citizen
in a self-perpetuating system of constraints and incen-
tives. Foucault points to the design of the panopticon
by the English utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham
in 1791 as an apt metaphor for this new arrangement.
The panopticon was to be a form of prison architecture
in which incarceration was enhanced by a system of
looking. A ring of barred (and therefore transparent)
cells was to be built around a central viewing platform,
so that a single warder could effi ciently survey many
prisoners at the same time. A light would always shine
down into these cells so that the prisoner couldn’t see
the warder’s platform and thus never knew whether he
was being surveyed or not. In this situation, the prisoner
must live under the assumption that he is always under
surveillance and thereby is induced to behave as if it is
so. In a sense, the prisoner ends up watching himself
and regulating his own behaviour. The subject in his
cell becomes both the prisoner and the warder, both
the surveyor and the surveyed, both the vehicle and
the victim of incarceration. This, says Foucault, is the
general principle for the whole of social organisation
in the modern era, and also for the constitution of each
individual subject.
The panopticon turns the gaze back onto the subject
who gazes, in effect dividing the subject from himself.
And indeed, as Enlightenment reason increasingly
addressed itself to the question of the nature of the hu-
man subject, “Man” himself became an object of study,
fi nding himself examined for the fi rst time in taxonomic
terms. As a consequence, the years around 1800 wit-
nessed the disintegration of Natural Philosophy and the
birth of a whole archipelago of sciences of the human,
including all the comparative social sciences, such as
anthropology, sociology, criminology, clinical medicine
and so on. This scientifi c study of “Man” necessarily
had to include his physical capabilities and limitations.
Human beings, once thought to be God’s mortal in-
carnation, had turned themselves into specimens to be
examined and analysed like any other.
The emergence of biology as a separate science
involved, for example, the systematic study of sight,
science’s primary means of investigation, and of sight’s
instrument, the human eye. Like the camera, the human
eye was known to operate according to the rules of
perspectival geometry, allowing light to form images on
the back of the retina; therefore sight has reason as its
very means of operation. Accordingly, knowledge and
sight had long been thought to have a close association.
But around 1800 it was found that the human eye is also
fraught with physiological frailties. It was found, for
example, that the eyeball was in constant movement, and
simple tests showed that not everyone saw things in the
same way. In 1818 Talbot wrote to his mother to tell her
that he had been “reading books on the structure of the
eye” and about his own experiment in this area. He had
gently pressed his eye with his fi nger to try and improve