When I first found one, in what seemed like a typical daguerreotype/ambrotype case, it seemed to be a black ambrotype with no image. But then I saw that it was thicker and somewhat convex. A friend [I have special friends] identified it as a “Lorraine Glass” or “Claude Glass,” named after the great French 17th-Century master of landscapes with figures (they showed wondrous light effects,) Claude Lorrain [his name is a chameleon of different spellings.] Originally this was a “hand held device that contained a series of ‘smoke’ or colored lenses through which one looked out upon the world” [from the web site presentation of an article from the ART TIMES, December 2004, by Raymond J. Steiner.] This device was carried by aesthetically inclined travelers in their excursions in nature, as well as by painters. It altered the view of the natural scene, miniaturizing and framing it, and enhancing the light and color values that would otherwise be obscured by bright sunlight: in other words turning the “actual” view of the world into an art-like construct. (This isn’t the place to consider whether there can be a view of the world that isn’t some kind of construct.) What this device did was to make that construct conform to the values of composition and light that were supremely represented in Claude’s paintings. It would provide an already modified view for the painter to copy or the aesthete to sigh over, transforming “nature” into a “picture.”
A later development was the “black mirror” that I had found. It could be held up to nature and provide a similar effect. (I’ve found several more over the years, and have one still, the largest yet.)
Some people love daguerreotypes because they feel a daguerreotype is the closest thing to having a mirror image of the person or scene represented. Not me. I enjoy the play of light, depth, coloration as it changes with the viewing angle, as intentional aspects of the daguerreotypist’s artistry—these are not things we would see if we were looking at the subject directly, or in a normal mirror. And we all know or should know how to pay attention to and savor the actual paper or medium a print is printed on, whether a calotype or contemporary print. To the extent a daguerreotype or any other photograph is a mirror it is closer to the “black mirror” than to an unmediated vision of “reality.”
The only creative role at the disposal of the user of the black mirror was to tilt it this way and that, making minor adjustments in the angle, until some alignment produced an aesthetically desired picture. The artist who used this as an aide in painting did not simply want to slavishly duplicate what was seen in the glass. The artistry of the painter was to use the techniques available in painting to further transform this image and finally to produce something that had its own qualities only partly owing to the scene in the black mirror. A deep consideration of this would lead us into the later use by painters of photographs rather than “live” altered reflections.
The daguerreotypist had many elements to manipulate to make the final product an artistic vision of the practitioner. Some had to do with the preparation of the plate and the applied tinting, but much had to do with the arrangement of the subject before the camera, including the composition, lighting and posing.
I’ve alluded in past Newsletters to the paradoxical distinction between a “picture” of a photograph, for example in a book or photocopy or printout of a scan, and the “original” photograph. In some cases we accept the “copy” of the photograph as giving the “same” information as the original photograph. This is the case when we are looking something up for identification. When we are seeking the identity of someone, the representation of the photograph in a book will serve as well as the “original” photograph itself. Even if we have a scan on the Internet of a printed copy of the original from a book, we look through all these layers of representation and assume we are seeing a semblance of the features of the actual person. This leads us to say, “Yes that’s who it is!”
It wasn’t that long ago that in order to present a daguerreotype to a distant collector one had to send the actual piece, or a photograph of it. Then the photocopy became the convenient “reference” to what one was proposing. When it was still unthinkable to own one’s own photocopy machine I had to become knowledgeable about the various merits of the machines at various libraries and drug stores around town [there were no STAPLES and the like]—this one was best for stereo views, that one for 1/6 plate daguerreotypes, this for larger plates, etc. If you were responsible, you would mark up the photocopy with notations on the image and in the margins, indicating problem areas and trying to describe them, and saying that the photocopy was darker (or lighter) than the original.
This served very well to give some idea of the nature of the object, but you never thought you were “re-presenting” the photograph. But with the advent of the scan and the Internet, something new soon developed. The level of verisimilitude dramatically increased.
We can see something similar with the transformation of erotic representation. At the dawn of photography the erotic stereo daguerreotype must have produced an electric effect that we can hardly appreciate. Viewers must have felt that they were privy to the actual voyeuristic scene itself, almost unmediated. But to us, while we can still savor the erotic subject matter if we are so inclined, the artifice is also very visible. With the various technical developments of representation, through finer grain film, motion picture advances, TV, the stakes became ever higher for the illusion of a more life-like presentation. But the Internet has raised the level of verisimilitude to a threshold where the artifice is barely visible to us.
The Internet voyeur has the illusion of seeing the object of the voyeuristic gaze directly. In the 1850’s the clientele for the erotic stereoscopic daguerreotype might have been only hundreds or a few thousand at most. Today the worldwide audience for voyeuristic material on the Internet is in the millions upon millions—this is the highest use of the Internet worldwide.
Oddly, even when the evidence of digital manipulation is manifest, the verisimilitude remains high. Every day my E-mail contains unsolicited invitations to visit “adult” sites where the “reality” level appears to be much closer to the animated cartoon than to the window or mirror, yet these sites hold enormous power over the huge target audience.
This same tendency of heightened verisimilitude applies to the representation of photographs on the Internet, and this is the central theme of this Newsletter. The marketing aspect of the Internet, and venues such as eBay in particular, has been frequently discussed. But what has not been brought out as much is the changed nature of the representation of photographic objects on the Internet. The tendency of the Internet to present the object of representation as “really there” means that when we see an object on the Internet we are under the illusion that we are not just seeing a semblance of the “subject” of a photograph for identification, but we are seeing the photographic object itself. Most of us have even learned to see around the artifacts of a bad scan, to infer the actual qualities of the photograph itself, just as the voyeur will project the “real” subject beyond the artifacts of the manipulation of the digital erotic image.
One factor has to do with the luminous character of the computer monitor. It is something that the scan on the Internet shares with the TV image—we are seeing direct illumination and not light reflected off an object, as with looking at an actual photograph, or projected light reflected off a screen, as with movie projection. But still when I look at something on TV, I have a consciousness of the studio, the lighting, the camera, the lens, the artifice of it, but when I look at a scan on the monitor I feel I am looking at the object itself. You can compare your experience of a photograph as presented on “Antique Roadshow” with seeing a presentation of a photograph on eBay. Don’t you feel you are seeing the photograph itself, and not the scene it purports to represent?
This partly explains why the sales of photographs via the Internet have become such a significant part of photographic sales worldwide. Many of the major “live” auctions have a growing presence with “eBay live” [Be-hold too has taken advantage of this opportunity] and related venues. It is because you have the sense that you are seeing the actual photographic object, and not just a representation of the photograph as from a photocopy or catalog entry. One of the first of these Newsletters dealt with the lack of clear condition reports from many of the “major” auctions. The presentation of the object on the Internet, supplemented by appropriate verbal and other indications, gives you a much better sense of the object than if you were an absentee bidder guided by a catalog illustration.
So how to explain the sudden rise of interest in photographic books at this time of intense interest in the photographs themselves on the Internet?
It may be that now that the photographic book does not have the same authority to represent the original photograph itself as the images we are accustomed to seeing on the internet, its special character as a different kind of object becomes more interesting and precious. The book becomes less utilitarian as a means to see the nature and content of the original photograph, and becomes an object of rarity itself, not as a representation but as a thing itself with its own life and character.