Photography - Friedrich Georg Junger

 SELF-DECEPTION BY PHOTOGRAPHY

In a world of pure being, that is, in a world in which there can be no change, propaganda could not exist, no more than a difference between being and appearance, truth and falsehood. No deception could enter such a world – there would be no openings, no crevices to admit it. There could not even be such shadows as Plato believed to be cast by thought, shadows which came between the things and the ideas of things. Wherever the ideas formed in the human mind begin to predominate, there a process of separation sets in: the prototypes vanish while the images we are forming of them multiply. Without this process of ideation no science could have developed. For only as we begin to form ideas of things, does our reason demand to have these things explained. Without this separation between things and ideas, there would be no explanations forthcoming from the human mind. In mythology, for instance, the myth has no need to explain itself. It is only in the later stages of antiquity that philosophers attempt to explain myths. Euhemerus of Cyrene, for one, declared the ancient myths to be apotheoses of outstanding human beings. Others explained them as symbols and allegories of events in nature or in history.

For a modern example of this separation between actual things and the images we form of them, let us consider photography. When we ask: How is this photographic picture made? any expert or technical dictionary will explain the chemical processes on which photography is based. This explanation does not interest us at all here. What interests us is quite another question, namely, how photography has come into existence. Why is it that only as late as 1802, Wedgwood and Davy invented a method of exposing paper saturated with silver nitrate to the darkening influence of light, and in that way produced pictures? What is the significance of the use of the camera obscura, heliography, or the daguerreotype that first operated with sensitized glass plates and mercury developers?

Superficially seen, all this but shows the stage-by-stage development of photo techniques, improvements which still continue. But the significant aspect of this development which goes unobserved is this: at first, it was impossible to make the picture lightproof, to fixate it. The white outline that had been caught kept on darkening when exposed to light, until it disappeared. Next, difficulties arose in the process of mechanical copying. Only by the use of numerous exposures and elaborate processes, Daguerre finally succeeded in making a copy. The problem of mechanical reproduction from the negative was not really solved before the invention of the collodion process.

Looking at the old daguerreotypes, one has the feeling that these pictures were split off from the prototype with much greater difficulty than in modern photography and that consequently more of the prototype has entered into the picture. This is the reason why the old photographs seem to us somehow more significant, more faithful or even convincing. It is as if in those days man had been harder to photograph, and not just because the techniques had not yet been worked out.

This impression is not deceptive. For obviously, the photographic process could be invented only after man had become psychologically ready to be photographed. The new invention, in other words, signifies a change of mind. It was in the degree that the human model adapted itself to portrayal by photography that the new techniques developed. The difficulty of making a lightproof picture was not merely a technical one. In order to bring the copying process to the automatic dependability it has today, it was necessary to overcome obstacles, not only of a technical nature, but also obstacles that lay in the human model itself. And, perhaps, it was just these human obstacles which challenged the inventors and made the improvements of technique worthwhile to them. For today, one often has the impression that photography is getting to be boresome. We can no longer escape the suspicion that the rising tide of copied reality contains an element of selfdeception. As they are reproduced in millions, the reality behind these pictures wears thin, turns vague and the old charm evaporates. The photographic techniques continue to function with undiminished excellence and mechanical dependability. But a man changes. It is quite conceivable that we may grow tired of the mere copies of things which alone photography is able to supply."

- Friedrich Georg Junger