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In this book, Peter Geimer, professor of art history at the Frei Universität Berlin, offers a history of photography through the prism of the photographic accident, a history that, according to him, cannot be understood without addressing “the corresponding history of contaminations, disturbances and disintegrations” (p. 53). To focus the history of photography on the accident in this way is to highlight what emerges in the image, something that escapes the will and control of the photographer. The history of photography is therefore not only the history of photographic intention, but also a history of unwanted images, the fruits of chance and accidents specific to the photographic medium itself. Who says emergence, also says an approach to photography that is more interested in the process of visualizing the image than in the image itself (what happens before the appearance of the image, what is its manufacturing process, what happens to it afterwards?) The author’s aim is to circumvent the dichotomies that the histories and theories of photography have difficulty breaking free of: subjective/objective, constructed/realistic, artificial/natural.

Photographic accidents, between art and science

Instead of beginning his history of photography with its famous “inventors” (Niepce, Daguerre, Talbot, etc.), Geimer prefers to begin with the appearance of photography “without a camera, without an optical system and without photosensitive substances” (p. 21), such as the phenomenon of “images produced by lightning” recounted by Camille Flammarion in The Caprices of Lightning (1905) or that of “the effect of light on colored fabrics” reported by Joseph Maria Eder in Story Photography (1932). The photographic process is understood upstream of its “invention” as physical effects, destruction, fading and discoloration, effects that will be found downstream, once the photograph becomes the product of a technical apparatus. With the invention of the apparatus, begins a history of photographic error where the question arises as to whether the technique produces “a representation of the object targeted or a reflection of itself” (p. 55). Indeed, it is the very nature of the medium that tends to make indiscernible what is manifested in the image:

… the enterprise of revealing the visible in photography required a set of instruments relying so heavily on physical and chemical processes that distinguishing natural phenomena from technical phenomena, real facts from artifacts, was by no means obvious (p. 85)

Very early on, there was an interest in listing the disturbances inherent in the photographic process, halos, blackening, parasites, etc., with the aim of perfecting the technique. This catalogue of photographic accidents also opened up two avenues that Geimer would explore further throughout the work: disturbance as a “supplement aesthetic » and as « added value epistemological » (p. 82). As the author rightly notes, the aesthetic supplement appears spontaneously when tracking down errors: we then speak of “comets”, “frost flowers”, “telegraph wires” disfiguring the images. More significantly, artists seize upon the accident, provoking it or using it in their photographic practice, as do Nobuyoshi Araki and Sigmar Polke whose work is analyzed. Geimer also dwells on the interesting case of Strindberg and his photographs without a camera: between art and science, the writer is perhaps one of the first to grasp “the difference between perception of the eye and photographic capture” (p. 103).

The question of what is seen in the image, unknown natural phenomena or artifacts of the photographic process itself, will become recurrent in many laboratory experiments towards the end of the XIX^e century. Geimer thus analyzes the quarrel around the “photography of effluvia” of Bernard Luys and Émile David who claim to fix by the image the different states of the vital fluid and thus allow “a new form of classification and visualization of pathological symptoms” (p. 141). The controversy is not reducible to the deception of the spiritist photographs: at the time, the scientific scope of the work of the two researchers was not questioned, but the interpretation of their result was questioned. Another case study, “Self-portrait of Christ or parasitism of photography”, analyzes the complex debate around the enigma of the shroud of Turin. When the shroud was exhibited to the public in 1898, Secondo Pia photographed it for the first time. In developing photography, he realizes that the negative offers in some way a positive image, which implies that the image of the shroud would itself be a negative (in the logic of the “negative-positive” process, the negative of a negative is positive), as if the image of God was waiting for the photographic plate to reveal itself. Thus, from the outset, the controversy over the authenticity of the holy shroud is also “a dispute over mediums and the arts” (p. 174). On the one hand, the biologist Paul Vignon develops a theory of the shroud as the vaporographic self-impression of the image of the body on the fabric, a self-representation of Christ due to photochemical effects. On the other hand, Aldophe-Louis Donnadieu, professor at the Catholic Faculty of Sciences in Lyon, published a study to demonstrate that the supposed self-representation of Christ is only a self-reference of the medium himself, “an accident of lighting” when taking Pia’s picture, and that Vignon’s reading is only “a simple question of actinism” (p. 215). According to Geimer, this debate testifies to the “epistemic dilemma” specific to all attempts to “make the invisible visible” (p. 219): natural vision and artificial vision do not designate the same thing, seeing and recording are two different things, the gap between one and the other is irreducible, not a defect, but the positive condition of experiences. Hence the aporia of photographic visualization: on the one hand it is considered to be truly different from the perception of the eye, as well as more reliable than it (objectivity), on the other hand, it can only be understood according to the modalities of human perception (subjectivity), it must be retranslated according to a human point of view (the objective/subjective distinction maintains this aporia, so it must be abandoned).

Photography of the invisible?

The last two chapters of the book proceed to a critique of technical vision (set of photographic processes coupled with automatic triggers, microscopes, telescopes, etc.) and its corollary, the “photography of the invisible”. If photography is a useful tool for scientific reproduction, it is also considered a “true method of scientific research” (René Koehler, 1893, cited p. 234). Very quickly after having explored the visible world, photographic technique launched into the exploration of the field of the invisible. Thus, in 1894, Ottamar von Volkmer mentioned the photography of projectiles in flight to study their behavior. According to him, one can thus “fix” the invisible on an image. In the field of physiological research, Étienne-Jules Marey uses the chronophotography process to capture and fix movement, invisible to the eye: photography must compensate for the deficiency of the senses. Yet, according to Geimer, the “photography of the invisible” must be understood as ” production of visibilitythe making of an image where there was none, or another one” (p. 239). This construction of the artifact is not, however, a deficit, but the positive condition for accessing visibility. “Invisible photography”, explains Gemeir, does not tend to reveal a latent phenomenon through an image, but rather to to manufacture an image. Furthermore, what this image shows must be interpreted, which is not easy because it is necessary to distinguish and isolate the real facts from the artifacts (the photographic image is a confused set of traces where it is not always easy to dissociate the photographed phenomenon from the effects of the technique that are accidentally recorded on the film). It must also be remembered that any interpretation is always based on “a kind of structured obscurity”, full of “experiences, expectations, or imaginary representations” (p. 247). In fact, it is the opposition between visible and invisible that is not as exclusive as we might have believed: the invisible is never really absolutely invisible, the visible is never perfectly visible. How then can we explain that we are still attached, today, to the idea that photography makes the invisible visible? According to the author, it is the interpretation of photography and other vision instruments as an “artificial eye” that has been problematic from the beginning of the history of optical media to the present day.

The metaphor of the artificial eye suggests a continuity of the visible, an easy passage from sensory “vision” to technical “vision”, but in trying to establish this passage, it marks the breaking point which then requires resorting to this rhetoric to glue the pieces back together. (p. 297)

Yet the technical apparatus does not see better, nor differently than man: it sees nothing, it produces rather a photographic artifact. An artifact that does not provide proof of the existence of unknown entities, but which offers another point of view on known objects, “a visual distancing of known objects”, “a new iconography of daily life” (p. 256), as shown by the example of the X-ray photograph presented by the author (two images: on one, the outside of a package, on the other the objects inside).

“Mediation is both the condition and the threat of photographic representation – what makes it possible, while being the source of its possible opacity or ambiguity” (p. 320), Geimer states in the conclusion of his essay. By focusing his analysis on the camera and the process of visualization, the author succeeds in writing an original history of photography and develops an important critique of this idea of ​​the visibility of the invisible still present today. With each photograph an image is constructed And something emerges in the image: Geimer develops a beautiful definition of photography as encounter.