Visual Thinking - Lecture I

Ulus Baker

This lecture will be a short remembrance of the so-called “technical images”, term coined by Vilem Flusser in his “Towards a Philosophy of Photography”...

In fact, any image which is artificial –from cave paintings to the postmodern fine arts (with mixtures of all materials) is “technical” in the broadest sense of the word...

Or, really there is a room for making a distinction between painting and photography... even I feel some important inadequacies in the treatment of photography and cinematography by Flusser and Bazin –in his article “Ontology of Photography” in the book “What is Cinema?”

Flusser's way to describe technical images is phenomenological –mine and Bazin's are rather psychological...

Phenomenological... it means a Kantian-Husserlian way to develop a sense of subjectivity... Or, according to Flusser, subjectivity in “representational” images (fine arts, painting, sculpture and even dance and theater) differs from the kind of subjectivity in technical images (photography, film, TV, video and digital images)...

The first image is seen, the second is watched and read... There is a readability of technical images...

Secondly, technical images are produced through an “apparatus”... which differs from tools, like the brush and canvas of a painter... or an instrument used by a carpenter...

An apparatus or device is something in-formed... a complex information is there... Flusser calls it a “programme”...

So to speak, photo camera is an apparatus, rather than a tool or instrument. The subject (here the photographer) generally fails to know how it works from within...

“Programmed things” exist everywhere around us and in modern technology: TV, film camera, video, computers etc. are apparata, not tools or instruments... with their higher degree of embedded information...

For Flusser, a photographer is like a hunter –a great game... rather than a simple producer or artizan... He has to behave like a hunter to shoot... and thereby he has first to “deceive” the apparatus...

(Reading: the first two chapters of Flusser's book...)

So, we are living in an era of technical images and we are habituated to them –so long, so far, since almost two centuries with photography, we are living the centenary of cinema,more than fifthy years of television and video, more than fiftheen years of digital images –that is, “computer graphics”.

Every generation read less and watch more... You are reading less than me, but watching more than me. Alas... this is TV that you are watching more than anything else...

This is a culture of images.... they are bombarding us everywere... not only in cinema halls but in the streets, roads, and through TV inside our houses...

So we have to begin with photography...

Already a long history since Nicephore Niepce invented it: the heliographe... that is, something like “the writing of the sun”... it was 1830...

He was a bad painter and left painting for an amateurish chemistry work –he has done it for helping his son, probably a worse painter than him...

Not only chemistry, but also physics or rather optics... the invention of photography is the meeting of two sciences...

Aristotle already knew about the principles of camera obscura... the dark room... Arabs developed and used them for entertainment... from Renaissance painters on, it was largely used by painters, for having exact shapes and images to copy in their paintings... Vermeer was using it more than anyone else... This was the optical side of Niepce's work...

On the other side, some chemical elements were diversely affected by light, that is with various intensity of photons, in the modern sense... so some materials could “capture”, or “record” light –as known by earliest alchemists...

The historians of photography ask why these two genealogies never met each other until Niepce... photography could be invented thousand years ago... but no one thought to record the image through the camera obscura...

A French sociologist, historian and political economist of the past century says that an invention is the meeting of two series of traditions or “imitations”... at some moment two lines meet each other in an inventor's mind... and the process goes on...

The first photography by Niepce was a shot from the window of his prairie house... a landscape... but just like a mud... since the posing needed more than eight hours, the sun moving around... and shading everything... his sun could only have shapes, not a complexith of shapes, colors or things like that...

Historians of art generally believe that the invention of photography sooner or later affected in the “worse” way the great classical and romantic painting... the great portraits and landscapes, based on the resemblance... Or for me resemblance was something to be removed from painting, in order o give way to a liberation of colors, shapes and forms, to light and everything... It was a prejuge –prejudice-- of the classical and especially romantic art...

From a psychological viewpoint, a painting or sculpture is a representation –there is a supposed subjectivity –that of the painter-- behind the image... he is a creator... already we have the question of whether photography and its followers could be accepted as “art”...

This subjectivity seems to disappear in technical images: in the writing of the sun, the heliographe, the apparatus works by itself, there is no subject, a brush or mind, without that activity of “hunting” and “deceiving the apparatus” , as Flusser said... and these are not “representations of reality” but the “traces of reality”, according to Andre Bazin... These are completely different psychological forms...

Since we are long habituated with technical images, perhaps it is difficult to understand the “cultural shock” created by photography... You have the trace of the real –not the real itself... but it is nevertheless not a representation of reality... you have your dead parents before your eyes... Bazin says that it is a mortuary and photography had always a relationship with momies and death cults...

The problem was that the heliographe needed long poses –so no way to portraits –a smile could not be preserved on a face for such a long time... so, from a Tardean standpoint, the process (or progress) of photographic imitation will become a tendency towards lessening the exposure time, up to the “instantaneous image”... and from this, to moving images...

But this does not mean that photography was born premature. It had immediate cultural, social and artistic consequences... Louis Daguerre has developed a technique to reduce exposure time... up to five minutes... his works were called daguerrotypes... very small pictures... bibloes etc... they were stamped on almost everything possible in a bourgeois house... it becomes an ornament culture...

Living, animated and moving things could not be captured by photography... in 1839 Louis Daguerre took the first “photographic human image”: a shoemaker and his client, out there, on the coin of a large place in Paris... the place is empty, since the crowds are moving, but not these two persons... so they appeared in the long exposure time...

And if you fail to take the photos of the living persons, you could take the dead... these are the Protestant memento mori –remember death--, especially in USA... in the living room there was always the daguerrotypes of the past dead persons of the family... especially children ... the dead were, still in the nineteenth century, not to be sooner or later be removed from ordinary life... they had to be conserved, at least with their images. This was a family thing...

So, there were artists of memento mori... they were the continuation of landscape photographers or “home photographers” --that is, those who decorated an “inside” to shoot it... they decorated the dead, with their last image before the burial, with flowers, souvenirs and everything...

What is a memento mori? Remember the death and the past dead persons... from the Medieval up to Renaissance, the painters who were generally small artisans, when they had to paint the portraits of a king, of a member of clergy or aristocracy, or of a rich person –poor people were not generally admissible for portraits-- they painted a small skull behind the canvas... at the back... this was the figure of death... everyone will die, and without his or her wealth... this was a moral thing... a medieval-christian morality...

You can see as an example the famous “The Ambassadors” of Holbein... a skull anamorphose is there... to be seen from everywere, and through Renaissance, the figures of memento mori tend to take part in the front of the canvas, as an exemplary part of the image itself.

To see how far in the past the death was familiar and inside the ordinary life, you have to read Tolstoy's novel The Death of Ivan Ilyich... the death remains inside the house or homeland...

Figurative or representational arts, just like the popular culture, conserved death inside life...This is almost a “pornography of death”, in modern terms... But this has also been the earliest generation of photography... according to Bazin, it is a momie or death mask...

Evidently, first photographers were impressed by far away lands, that is, colonies for the European... and the press was already there, with their articles, news, but also with their illustrations and caricatures... Inevitably, photography entered into the press... It was a second culture created by photography...

And photography will tend towards the development of the “instantaneous image” ... capable to capture life “as it is” in the streets, places, landscapes... urbanity enters into the art... and in the press, it became already “news”...

However, the instantaneous image also created problems... taking the photos on streets captured life as standstill, having almost paralytic persons out there... this was a debate between Rodin and a photographer... Rodin believes that life and reality could not be captured by photography... fine arts could totalize the movement and represent it in its peak, that is, at its privileged moment...

Thereby, instantaneous photography will tend towards “moving images”, that is, cinema...