Through my project I want to use photography as a tool to show the duality of our reality.
Photographer Shannon Taggart is drawn to what she calls “psychological spaces.” She describes these as “invisible realities, like an interior experience you can’t really see,” and relishes the challenge of making visuals to describe them. Taggart says she values photography’s ability to open up new worlds. A straightforward documentary approach seemed inadequate, so she began to combine fine art photography, anthropology, journalism and historical photography to tell the tale.
In her new book, Séance: Spiritualist Ritual and the Search for Ectoplasm, Taggart writes, “Spiritualism developed at a time when photography and other scientific developments were exposing many forces operating beyond human perception. Disease-causing bacteria could be photographed through microscopes; the vastness of the universe was glimpsed through astrophotography; electricity was made visible when placed in contact with photographic materials; X-rays revealed the body’s interior. What else, people wondered, could photography uncover?”
“The crazy photographic history and records of the movement…are bizarre, unsettling, and absurd, but also speak about human love and longing.”
When research or concepts move on, as they soon did in the first decade of the twentieth century, the photograph might no longer represent the object, and it becomes obsolete. Photography then, could be said to generate objects. Not objects in the conventional sense that they exist in the real world, but objects that normally have no corporeal presence. These might be physical phenomena, or, taking the example of Becquerel, however, they might also be scientific concepts. (https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/still-searching/articles/26935_photography_and_the_invisible)
Photography has been related to a positivist aim since its beginning and its genealogy is generally drawn from the realism of the camera obscura. But when it comes to the sort of photographs usually called “spirit photography” and “fluid and thought photography”, classic theorists like Barthes, Rosalind Krauss and Tom Gunning tend to relate this practice with the magic and the ‘uncanny’ reception that occurred at its very beginnings.
how theories of spectre layers as the basis for the human being.
Barthes – Camera lucida. Barthes considers photography as asymbolic, irreducible to the codes of language or culture, acting on the body as much as on the mind.
The book develops the twin concepts of studium and punctum: studium denoting the cultural, linguistic, and political interpretation of a photograph, punctum denoting the wounding, personally touching detail which establishes a direct relationship with the object or person within it.
According to Balzac’s theory of spectres it would follow that capturing an appearance (in a photograph, in a written description) would correspond to a sort of “extraction” operation. As a realist, Balzac conceived his writing as a mere capturing of the soul of his characters just through the process of depicting the surface of things and bodies. …photography should, in this sense, be a kind of invisible peeling of the soul.
Since then many others have underlined this haunted side of photography, connecting it with the repetition it carries out as a duplicate and the “uncanny” effect produced by it, in the sense Freud had theorized.
((This commensurability is embodied by William Crookes, a physicist and spiritualist, who sums up the concept with which he intends to unify the world of the mind with that of earthly phenomena. He borrows the concept from Sergeant Cox, from whom he quotes:
The theory of Psychic Force is in itself merely the recognition of the fact that under certain conditions, as yet but imperfectly ascertained, and within limited, but as yet undefined, distance from the bodies of certain persons having a special nerve organisation, a Force operates by which, without muscular contact or connection, action at a distance is caused, and visible motions and audible sounds are produced in solid substances..)) That force, Crookes says, “proceeds from this organization by a means yet unknown,” but he identifies these means with “the soul, Spirit or Intelligence,” which, moving the body from within, would also be responsible for its
The idea of capturing thoughts with the help of mechanical apparatuses had already been set forth in texts such as “Photography Extraordinary” by Lewis Carroll, with less scientific but by no means less significant ambitions. Carroll, in this text from 1855, had already spoken about a machine to “transcribe thoughts,” a “psychographic” machine. A machine similar to a photographic camera that could capture ideas and automatically transcribe them onto a recording surface:
Although this is a literary and fictional text, it shows the way in which the idea of automated register of the immaterial objects, like thoughts or ideas, was creeping as a common fantasy. Photography would play a “natural” role – a medium associated from the very start with an undeniable presence of the world through image and the objectivity of the latter, mainly based on the fact of its use of automated apparatus and its (apparently) non-mediated result.
It was upon this pseudo-passivity that the “white mythology of photography” was fabricated. The medium was then taken for no-medium at all, since it merely registers what is in front of it, making it just a “transfer” from the thing to the paper or plaque. Michael Charlesworth underlined the way Fox Talbot fought to assert the place of photography in the context of that “white mythology,” caring for photography’s ability even to depict things the human eye couldn’t positively have seen. Like Rosalind Krauss, Charles worth also quotes the enigmatic passage of Talbot in The Pencil of Nature, close to the image “A scene in the library.” Talbot speculatively elaborates on the idea that photography can capture some images (radiations, more precisely) impossible for the human eye to see directly:
When a ray of solar light is refracted by a prism and thrown upon a screen, it forms there the very beautiful coloured band known by the name of the solar spectrum.
Experimenters have found that if this spectrum is thrown upon a sheet of sensitive paper, the violet end of it produces the principal effect: and, what is truly remarkable, a similar effect is produced by certain invisible rays which lie beyond the violet, and beyond the limits of the spectrum, and whose existence is only revealed to us by this action which they exert.
Now, I would propose to separate these invisible rays from the rest, by suffering them to pass into an adjoining apartment through an aperture in a wall or screen of partition. This apartment would thus become filled (we must not call it illuminated) with invisible rays, which might be scattered in all directions by a convex lens placed behind the aperture. If there were a number of persons in the room, no one would see the other: and yet nevertheless if a camera were so placed as to point in the direction in which anyone were standing, it would take his portrait, and reveal his actions. For, to use a metaphor we have already employed, the eye of the camera would see plainly where the human eye would find nothing but darkness.
For Talbot, the raw automatism of the device goes further than what human beings can see, and even speculates about its ability to capture “invisible” radiations. The epistemic support for spirit photography can be related to the very beginning of its narrative by its pioneers. Although as for Talbot’s speculation the invisible was not supernatural, but just a kind of nature not possible for the human eye to capture, it is interesting to note how the photography pioneer was dreaming of the ability of the apparatus to enlarge the realm of possibilities beyond human scope.
Madge Donohoe, an Australian journalist of the nineteen thirties, made an album of what she called “skotographs,” or “photographs of thoughts”. The images were almost completely vague and blurred, showing no figure at all for the most part or, at the most, some shadows. For Madge Donohoe, the images were produced just by overlapping the plaque next to her face or head and letting the messenger imprint his message. It could have been her late husband or her late friend sir Conan Doyle. She talked about a kind of telepathic status during the printing of the plaques with no help of any camera.
But it is certainly not by chance that the telepathic and skotographic images of Madge Donohoe coincide, in time, with the period of the great expansion of Psychology and Psychoanalysis and it is also very likely that the dissemination of the theory of dreams, published by Freud in 1900 and very popular in the nineteen thirties, inspired the interpretative strategy as well as the construction of these images, which would thus reflect the impact on common sense of the ideas concerning a hidden dimension of the mind and the encoded meaning of visual material.
Curiously both deal with blurred images, although in a very different sense and with a very different scope. A same interest in the apparition of a certain truth in the image, allowed by its figurative distortion and abstraction, seems to cut across the different discourses. Just as dreams distort and gain meaning in verbal communication, so too thought photography is a distorted visual representation, the meaning of which being obtained through the reading the subject works through. The problem of (re) cognition as projection is, significantly, referred to by Freud throughout his writings and particularly when he analyses slips of the tongue, misreading and clumsiness, relating these with unconscious desire: “In a majority of cases the text is modified by the reader’s readiness to see something in it that he is prepared to see, some subject that is occupying his mind at the time.”
Chéroux concludes about this projective move that It is precisely because they represent nothing that these images can image anything and whoever looks at them can imagine anything.
Faced with such a-photographic photographs, from which the image of reality is absent, in which there is no reference to the world, the viewer can relax and give free rein to his imagination
Thoughtography is the claimed ability to “burn” images from one’s mind onto surfaces such as photographic film by psychic means.
Bazin and his “Ontology of the Photographic Image.” Bazin underlined that photography obeyed “not an aesthetic but a psychological need to replace reality with its double,”
Bazin points out the mechanical nature of the representation of photography as a fertile ground for belief in “objectivity”:
In spite of any objections our critical spirit may offer, we are forced to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced, actually re-presented, set before us, that is to say, in time and space. Photography enjoys a certain advantage in virtue of this transference of reality of thing to its reproduction.
(https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1045&context=cpo)
Jane's Advanced Media Production Project 