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his congenital shortsightedness; a more distinct vision
was the result. Through such simple experiments as
these, the human body, in all its contingency and physi-
cal specifi city, was shown to generate its own images.
Eight years earlier, the German philosopher Goethe
had proposed a series of simple experiments in which
one stared into bright light or at colored objects and
then closed one’s eyes. His point was that the observer
continued to see colors and shapes, a retinal afterimage
produced, he argued, by the eye itself. The human body,
in all its contingency and specifi city, generates its own
spectrum and thus becomes the active producer, not just
the passive receiver, of optical experience. Thus by the
early nineteenth century, seeing, once thought to be an
action composed of a reliable and unmediated refl ection
of an outside world, is situated in and identifi ed with the
specifi c body of the individual human subject.
The observer is no longer presumed to be the passive
and transparent conduit of God’s own eye but is now
imagined to actively produce what is seen. Moreover,
scientifi c study showed that seeing was inseparably
tied to the particular exigencies of the time and circum-
stances within which that act of seeing takes place. In
that sense, the subject seeing and the object being seen
could be said to be continually producing one another.
These conclusions were in accord with the basic tenets
of German Idealist philosophy that was then being
propagated throughout Europe. Immanuel Kant consid-
ered the human mind to be not a mirror but a legislator
of nature; human beings actively constitute their world
through their representations of it. The act of this con-
stitution, he argued, is at the same time a self-realisa-
tion, a constitution of the self. Thus the subject makes
the object, even as the object makes the subject. Georg
Hegel took this idea and located it within a grand system
of historical and human forces (such that being is not
fi xed but is rather a never-ending process of becoming).
The instigators of the French Revolution were acutely
aware of their differences from past generations, and
demanded histories that recognised this fact. Hegel’s
arguments about human subjectivity as something
continually in process were formed in the midst of this
general expansion in historical consciousness. In 1798
the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was sponsored by
Tom Wedgwood and his brother to travel to Germany
and study this philosophy at fi rst hand. His subsequent
writings, which infl uenced Wedgwood, Davy and, a little
later, Samuel Morse, could be taken as an attempt to
articulate these new ideas in poetic form. As Coleridge
put it in 1825, to understand the modern subject, what
had to be imagined was a “self-conscious looking-glass”
or even “two such looking-glasses fronting, each seeing
the other in itself, and itself in the other.” The traditional
camera obscura could no longer fulfi ll this radical new
world-view. What had to be invented instead was an
apparatus of seeing that involved both refl ection and
projection, that was simultaneously active and passive
in the way it saw things, that incorporated into its very
mode of being both the subject seeing and the object
being seen.
We have one notable reference by Coleridge that
explicitly links his imagined apparatus of seeing to Tom
Wedgwood’s photographic experiments. On November
16, 1802, Coleridge wrote a letter home to his wife
while on a hiking expedition to South Wales with his
friend Wedgwood. “He will be out all the mornings—the
evenings we chat, discuss, or I read to him. To me he is
a delightful & instructive Companion. He possesses the
fi nest, the subtlest mind and taste, I have ever yet met
with.—His mind resembles that miniature Sun seen, as
you look thro’ a Holly Bush, as I have described it in
my [1798 poem] Three Graves:A small blue Sun! and it has got
A perfect Glory too!
ten thousand Hairs of color’d Light,
make up a Glory gay & bright,
Round that small orb so blue!”Coleridge here compares Wedgwood’s mind to an im-
age created by the lens-effect of a leafy tree projecting
the image of the sun, by, in other words, a natural cam-
era obscura. Given that he is writing only a few short
months after Wedgwood and Davy’s essay appeared
in the Journals of the Royal Institution, an appearance
they must surely have discussed in detail, Coleridge is,
in effect, likening Wedgwood’s ever-inquiring mind to
a photographic image-making process.
Philosophy was not the only discipline dreaming
of such a process. If the naked human eye is prone to
mistakes and physiological imperfections, the sciences
had to devise a more dependable method of ‘seeing’
and recording visual information. This effort coincided
with the increasing importance of empirical science as
an ideological discourse. By the 1830s this discourse had
been theorised as Positivism, based on the idea that truth
is confi ned to forms of knowledge which can be empiri-
cally and repeatedly tested under scientifi c conditions
(truth is knowledge which can be made visible). But even
in the previous century, the Royal Society and similar
organisations were putting more and more stress on the
need for objective forms of representation and calling for
the production of accurate pictures that allowed different
specimens and views to be directly compared and stud-
ied. The early photographic experiments with botanical
contact prints by Wedgwood and Talbot, for example,
sought to improve on nature printing, a centuries-old
procedure in which a physical specimen would be inked
and pressed directly onto paper. An image that could be
made to spontaneously represent itself in a camera would
be similarly true to nature, being not only an accurate