Photography, the Excess of Visibility and the Invisible: Reflections on Photography

Behind two thick and heavy velvet curtains, the red light bulb below the spectrum of sensitivity barely illuminates the otherwise completely dark room. In this opaque light, immersed in the exhalations of acetic acid and ammonium hyposulfite, the washing water flows clearly and rhythmically from the basin into the large gray metal tank.

The sheet of photographic paper, previously exposed to the light of the enlarger, sits immersed in the developing tray, while three of us wait, leaning on our elbows in anticipation, our gaze intent on spotting the first colorings. While waiting for the image to develop, we employ a technique that serves to deceive the suspension of that revelatory moment. This approach, which regulates the contrast in the image, consists of taking the tray from one corner or side and gently raising and lowering it while distributing, or rather massaging, the solution over the paper.

I am certain that anyone who has printed photographs in a darkroom will remember the first time when, in the gentle rocking application of the developer liquid, they have witnessed the manifestation of the image that, hidden in the paper, slowly emerges from the surface of the sheet and reveals itself to eyes filled with wonder and a grateful and satisfied smile: the appearance of a magical spirit from another world.^[1] Our amazement derives from the sensation of witnessing to something supernatural, phenomenal.^[2] Thus something analogous to the real is born, a new image that, achromatic, speaks to the present, the past, and the possible.

However, this initial enchantment concealed the exact formulas that this magical illusion tacitly omits. Indeed, that wonder could be rationally explained as a manifestation of deliberate chemistry: more-or-less known reagents first reveal and then fix the image on paper (or on many other different surfaces), giving life to a photograph.

These few lines, in which enchantment is dissolved by the scientificity of the chemical formula, manifest two fundamental aspects of photography and the time in which it was born. Henry Fox Talbot in The Pencil of Nature, the first photographic book, declares that photographs are “impressed by the hand of Nature.”^[3] If this is, in a certain sense,^[4] what we can define as the “idealistic side” of photography, in which nature enables the creation of images that can be considered a-technical,^[5] as opposed to photography as an “invention,” that is, something that did not exist before and that, for all practical purposes, belongs to the discoveries^[6] of humankind.

Thus, if on the one hand it derives from natural processes, one cannot fail to acknowledge that those natural processes in the physical world would never have spontaneously and completely manifested themselves in precisely this manner, that is, to record and then fix a photorealistic image on a given surface. It is therefore chemistry, experiments, and experience that allow for the realization of a photograph, so that the temptation to deify or define as magical the process that leads to the realization of a photograph inevitably leads to the disenchantment of the world.^[7]

It is worth noting that Talbot’s statement might contain an additional concept: that innovations and discoveries are based on the exploitation or channeling of a natural phenomenon into a process governed by humans. Therefore, in our specific case, cosmic forces such as solar light that impresses and the silver lunar^[8] light are channeled toward an appropriate space so that they may enter into relationship with other elements and create new possibilities and phenomenic realities. We could therefore consider photographs as technical and technological phenomena created by human ingenuity.

Photography can certainly be considered the first form of hybrid reality, both augmented and virtual. With it is born an intriguing, ambiguous, and dualistic form of creation and reception of the real. Strongly descriptive and at the same time abstract, it constitutes a practice that on the one hand, thanks to its technology, shapes reality because it allows the senses to evaluate it differently while also virtualizing it through a chemical-mechanical process that manifests its physical presence in the real. Photography was (and is), moreover, capable of generating unusual conjugations of time that revealed themselves precisely in the medium that underpins the photographic image.

In my view, it is difficult to imagine a revolution of the same scope in the current moment that generates such an original form of seeing, living and perceiving reality.^[9] This type of representation acts as a stand-in for the real and which can become itself confused, or creates confusions by creating a non-existent reality and or showing a reality that was previously invisible. Humanity has become postmodern, but modernity still expands and exponentially manifests its characteristics. Indeed, one cannot deny that there are many ways and devices with which to create images and immerse ourselves in them, but currently none equal the subtlety of photography nor its capacity to forcefully overturn human beliefs.

Compared to analog photography, digital photography is only a partial revolution.^[10] The elimination of film, the addition of ease and speed to the creation and manipulation of images, can not overturn the historical, cultural, and theoretical paradigms of photography. Even the hyperrealism of augmented reality, virtual reality, fluid animation, 3D, algorithmic imagery, morphing, holograms, video games, and MMORPGs^[11], the creation of images from textual sources by AI, variously seek immediacy of transmission, construction of imaginaries, sharing and interaction on platforms and devices, but are, more or less, all products of a photorealistic representation and a perspectival reconstruction. Indeed, apart from specific characteristics, although these represent a new technological aesthetic, they nonetheless aim to imagine reality, some more successful than others.

If it is therefore clear that there exist new mathematical places in which images do not claim any physical and direct reference with respect to the presence of someone who immerses themselves in them or enters them; it is probably unnecessary to emphasize that the transformation of the means of communication and transmission of images, as well as the birth of new types of visual apparatus, are concomitant with the rapid social changes of our time. Considering that I conceive of photography as an entity^[12] capable of manifesting itself through photographs, the digital “revolution” that was supposed to bring about the so-called death of photography is, actually, a misnomer. Photography will not die or disappear because of digital technology, first and foremost because its digitalization is the current technological evolution of the tool; secondly because the manifestation of reality embedded in photorealism is virtually indifferent with respect to its origin.^[13] Photography will be replaced by other practices only when, due to the conditions set by the culture of a future time, a new way of perceiving, seeing, and being in the world emerges.

The digital form, in fact, does not overturn the world of photography, and it could not have been otherwise, because the activity with which an individual relates to the visible depends on the structure of ones senses and on how those senses have come to interact (in a historical and cultural sense) with the manifestations of the world. Going back a few decades, according to the media-ecological thought of Neil Postman, media are technological environments that form and shape our senses and our perceptions. Going even further back in time, Walter Benjamin writes that human perception is conditioned not only in a natural sense, but also as social and historical experience.^[14]

As our aesthetic forms and representations of “reality” become externally realized and then unsettled first by photography, then cinema, and now electronic media, our values and evaluative criteria of what counts in our lives are also unsettled and transformed. In sum, just as the photograph did in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so in the late twentieth and early twenty-first, cinematic and electronic screens differently solicit and shape our presence to the world, our representation in it, and our sensibili- ties and responsibilities about it. Each differently and objectively alters our subjectivity while each invites our complicity in formulating space, time, and bodily investment as significant personal and social experience.^[15]

The current technological development of nascent digital environments has built “ephemeral” dwellings in which new typologies of images perhaps act on bodies more decisively and subliminally than a simple photograph.^[16] But, let me reiterate, I believe them to be a technological actualization of the creation of another (developing) reality, which derives from the iconic and visual experience historically created and provided by photography and which is strengthened by the persistence of their insistent visibility.

Thus, if photography is a form of language that our senses have become accustomed to perceiving according to each person’s degree of literacy in that language, it follows that it is certainly not the generative phase, that is, the moment of image production, especially for those who are not connoisseurs, or the technology used, that modifies the modes of expression of this instrument. On the other hand, the fluid immateriality of digital images certainly makes them appropriable, shareable, and, as Flusser has foreseen for all technical images, conversational.^[17] All words, all images layered together create chatter, an excessive chatter, a background “buzz” that makes listening impossible and which reinforces the ego. According to Byung-Chul Han, the digital has brought about that “we no longer inhabit the earth poetically” and that “Today’s hypercommunication suppresses the free spaces of silence and solitude without which it would have been impossible to say things that were truly worth saying” such that this sub-natural^[18] noise “makes it impossible to listen. Nature as a poetic principle only reveals itself in a primal passivity of listening”.^[19]

What new cultural realm will make appear and cultivate the new type of visual language that will supersede photography, its descendants, and photorealism? Probably when the desires and necessities of the new cultural arrangement allow it, we will witness a new way of seeing. But it is also possible that those who succeed us will have no desire to create or see images and will be amazed at the massive and perhaps useless production that the naive and unprepared inhabitants of this world in this time had awkwardly created and possibly will not understand neither its purposes nor its entertainment. It could be that there will come a time in which there is no interest or even existence of a typology of reality concomitant to our current moment. Thus, perhaps instead of concentrating on images, we should also think about what humanity will be, what kind of individual will be produced? How much naturalness will be in humanity and how much in the world? What will be the paradigms with which we will relate to it and among humans?

Without going too far forward in time or in imagination, probably the only (and true) great revolution that could occur without waiting for epochal changes is the one that would lead us to see the invisible.

Although seeing the invisible is in itself a contradiction, let’s suppose we “look behind the scenes of the theatre. We may watch the way in which the actors get ready, how the machinery produces the effects of thunder and rain; how everything works together so that, by the complicated action of many invisible helpers, a play having an intelligible sequence is finally unfolded before the spectator. But such a glimpse behind the scenes tells us neither the gist of the play nor its significance. This must be gathered from the auditorium, by looking at it as a whole; we must even entirely forget the paraphernalia of concerted action that we may grasp the complete effect.”^[20]

When we look at a work of art, whether it is a film, a photograph, a sculpture, a performance, we appreciate it (or not) certainly for its aesthetic characteristics and probably, even if we do not always concern ourselves with it, for the artistic intent or communicative purpose of the artist or director. There is, therefore, in creative work something invisible that serves as a sort of veil,^[21] itself in turn invisible, an immaterial surface that the work itself generates. The work of art is thus capable of expression; its veil thus stands between the object (the work) and the spectator. What is invisible is therefore something not evident that requires comprehension and sensitivity to be grasped.

Does not the same process happen in nature? The eighteenth and nineteenth-century natural sciences eagerly sought to discover and reveal what was invisible to the eye, to seek especially the mechanisms that create and animate matter. These two invisibilities—that of creative work and that which science wants to reveal in the field of the visible in order to receive its secrets (or mysteries) of creation—occupy the same space but have opposite positions.

The invisible that hides behind and within creative work is a reflection of human thought embedded within the work and is perceptible by senses other than sight, although it happens through sight; the other is not visible to the human eye and, for physiological reasons, requires machinery to be developed and manifests itself in the convention that through sight it will be perceived.

In the preface to Portmann’s work, Pietro Conte writes that our object-life and truth are no longer “inseguite nelle eteree regioni di un qualche iperuranio, bensì nello spazio microscopico e submicroscopico di molecole, atomi e particelle elementari”^[22]

However, the invisible should not be examined solely by reducing it to the exploration of atomistic images, to the recording of images observable at frequencies outside our visible spectrum, or to the imaginary reconstructions of planets millions of light-years away; nor is it a matter of viewing figurations that stem from various types of instrumentation that allow us to augment and extend the capabilities of our sight. If we take for granted that our senses do not deceive us, it would probably suffice to concentrate exclusively on the physical phenomena perceptible by them, rather than searching for what is not simply given to us to see—but this approach is perhaps too romantic.

The Spirit^[23] presents in this world through the creation of matter, within and through which it manifests its theophanic character. In other words, the occult^[24] is a place of enormous potentialities that, to my mind, dominates the visible.

From yet another point of view, we might consider the time in which we live as both the imprisonment of the senses in matter, and as the two-dimensional simplification of the world created by the screen-ocracy of devices, and the assiduous and persistent presence of humanity in the control and modification of the operation of spiritual forces, (the theophany itself). Perhaps then we are wrong to completely trust our eyes or the instruments that amplify their perception to try to understand secrets and mysteries or to reveal new truths. The organ of sight is strongly specialized and perfected, but it does not necessarily characterize our condition, not because it is limited but rather because it is precisely its totalizing specialization that cannot “constitute the fulcrum of our nature.”^[25]

Will the great change—after nearly two centuries of technical images analogous to visual perception—therefore be the one that fully reveals to us the content of the prefix in visible? That something which encompasses and, at the same time, is inside the visible, and which we still cannot manage (or can no longer manage), and probably cannot see with our physical eyes. Yet no machine, at least up until now, is capable of showing us the ontology of that prefix either. That in- could be the quid, the force, the agent that allows the visible to be brought to life.

From these premises alone, we can understand that it can be useful to shift our ordinary or habitual point of view—considering the visible as a small part of the invisible, and imagining the latter as immensely vaster and more complex.

When I speak of the visible, I like to imagine it as a concretion of the idea, as expressed by Chiara Cantelli^[26] concerning Pavel Florensky’s conception of art. In Florensky’s thought, ideas establish a unity between themselves and the phenomenon, ‘constituting it as its symbol, that is, as the visibility/perceptibility of the idea; a visibility that presupposes that our sense organs are “in correspondence with the metaphysical lines of the world.”^[27]

The invisible, therefore, requires an imaginative intent that must “this Imagination must be a purely spiritual faculty, independent of the physical organism and therefore able to continue to exist after the latter has disappeared.”^[28]

The invisible, or the Mundus Imaginalis, could therefore be a diffuse realm, without space or time, non-localizable, which at once intermediate and intermediary, and “which is ontologically real as much as the world of the senses and intellect”^[29] and which is intelligible only through true, psychic, non-illusory imagination, capable of relating to the supersensible.

An analog photograph shows a visible interrupted by magical invisible latency; this does not happen in the immediacy of digital or in the rapid textual translations of AI, but the prodigy of the appearance of images, on paper or on a display, has little to do with the comprehension of the invisible. Indeed, in a world and in a time that are experienced and created through a bulimic fragmentation of space and time, even the mere position of seeking the invisible can become ridiculous because it leads one to distance oneself from disenchantment, from evidence, and from the concreteness of the visible. In my opinion, instead, such a predisposition is fundamental to find an impassioned, personal and liberatory imagination that allows one to look without fear into the possible transcendence of contemporaneity.

Since we essentially live “We are living in a scientific civilization, which is said to have gained mastery even over images”^[30] let us accept the fact that in our present “instead of the image being raised to the level of the world to which it belongs, instead of being invested with a symbolic function that would lead to inner meaning, the image tends to be reduced simply to the level of sensible perception and thus to be definitely degraded. Might one not have to say then that the greater the success of this reduction, the more people lose their sense of the imaginal and the more they are condemned to producing nothing but fiction?”^[31]

Considering that the degradation of images also derives from photographic practices, we can ask: Can photography help contemporary humanity to rediscover a form of new enchantment aimed at recovering that predisposition to see the world without superstructures and with the purpose of returning images to that creative level and perceptibility that is necessary to reestablish or to lean toward an imaginative realm that is spiritually more elevated, conscious, and sensitive?

 

Translation by Scott Palmer

 

Bibliography

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Brunet, François. Photography and Literature. Reaktion Books, 2009.

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Portmann, Adolf. La forma degli animali. Translated by Alfredo Marini, Raffaello Cortina Editore, 2013.

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Sobchack, Vivian. “The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Photographic, Cinematic, and Electronic ‘Presence’.” Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film, edited by Shane Denson and Julia Leyda, REFRAME Books, 2016.

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Notes

1. Magic here refers to the beauty of the ineffable mystery. Two particular aspects of magic are closely related to the origins of photography: “The phenomenon which I have now briefly mentioned appears to me to partake of the character of the marvellous…The most transitory of things, a shadow, the proverbial emblem of all that is fleeting and momentary, may be fettered by the spells of our ‘natural magic,’ and may be fixed for ever in the position which it seemed destined for a single instant to occupy” – François Brunet, Photography and Literature, London 2009, p. 30. Another aspect is tied to our present moment: “Magic gives way to transparency. The imperative of transparency fosters an animosity to form.” Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present, Polity Press (2020) 24–25. ↑
2. “Every object taken as a means to an end becomes a tool, and every means deliberately conceived for an end is a rational tool.” Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (1973). ↑
3. (Photographs) “They are impressed by Nature’s hand; and what they want as yet of delicacy and finish of execution arises chiefly from our want of sufficient knowledge of her laws”. William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature, Londra 1844. ↑
4. From another perspective, the absence of direct human intervention in the creation of the image can be traced back precisely to the events of that time, when machines began to replace humans in productive processes. The emergence of the desire to fix a realistic image formed by a natural force—which is light itself—can be linked to a series of historical and cultural factors tied to modernity. The absence of human involvement in the creation of something, whether it is generated by a natural or mechanical force, represents lines of thought that are perceived as antagonistic, but could instead be considered complementary to ultimately arrive at a complete form of the reality of things. ↑
5. See Francois Brunet, La naissance de l’idée de photographie, Paris 2012, iBooks. ↑
6. Was photography discovered or was it invented? In the first case, we are faced with something that already exists and is uncovered—the discovery of an archaeological site, for example—while in the second, humans invent, creating something that did not exist before. Both words can apply because, in fact, one discovers, for instance, the reaction of silver to the sun, and invents the optical-chemical system that makes it possible create a “frozen” image. See.Francois Brunet, La naissance de l’idée de photo-graphie, cit. ↑
7. “The increasing intellectualization and rationalization do not, therefore, indicate an increased and general knowledge of the conditions under which one lives. It means something else, namely, the knowledge or belief that if one but wished one could learn it at any time. Hence, it means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service. This above all is what intellectualization means.” Max Weber Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, translated and edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946 (p. 139). ↑
8. Before silver took its place in the periodic table of elements, it was associated with the characteristics of the Moon and was thought of as condensed moonlight. In Sanskrit, the root ARJ means silver, shining, or bright. Alchemists called silver ‘Luna,’ which in turn was considered the mirror of the Earth, to which it sent the influences of neighboring planets, the Sun, and the stars of the cosmos when they could not reach it directly. ↑
9. For example for Roland Barthes “..the type of consciousness it [the photograph] implies is indeed truly unprecedented; photography sets up not a consciousness of the being-there of the thing (which any copy could provoke) but an awareness of its having-been-there. What we have is a new space-time category: spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority, the photograph being an illogical conjunction between the here and the now-then”. Roland Barthes “The Photographic Message” in Image-Music-Text, translated by Stephen Heath Hill and Wang / Fontana (1977), 44. In the present moment, the use of photography in social media is perhaps a kind of conceptual hyperbole tied to the celebration of the individual. ↑
10. This is even more true (if only partially) if one considers the image file as a vehicle that incorporates and transmits pressing and immediate information, both with respect to the content of the photograph and the subject who creates it. ↑
11. An MMORPG (an acronym for Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) is a role-playing video game played simultaneously by multiple real people via the Internet. In MMORPGs, thousands of players can play together and interact with one another, role-playing as customizable characters that evolve (acquiring skills, earning in-game currency, obtaining items and equipment, etc.) together in this emersive, virtual world. ↑
12. I want to venture that there may exist a sort of Platonic idea of photography, which manifests itself in the physical world through photographs. There is no separation between the entity and the manifestation; it is a whole, a unified and sudden process: one is, in essence, the image of the other. The potential of photography can be derived from the historical-cultural analysis of the process that led to its birth, from the course of the critical and theoretical evolution of the photographic image, and, of course, from its mimesis. I consider these three aspects fundamental for navigating the world of realistic photographic images, as well as the worlds of images that descend from its idea. ↑
13. Whether it be digital or analog—we should take into account that the vast majority of images are experienced through digital media. ↑
14. “During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well.” Walter Benjamin “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” Selected Writings: Volume 3, 1935–1938, translated by Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, Harry Zohn, et al, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002 (p. 104). ↑
15. Vivian Sobchack, The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Photographic, Cinematic, and Electronic “Presence” in Shane Denson, Julia Leyda, Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film, Brighton 2016. ↑
16. The digital medium differs from the optical medium in that it is a medium without a gaze. The digital panopticon functions without perspective. […] Thoughts elude the gaze. The digital panopticon, however, is something thoughts cannot escape. Big data spreads without a gaze. Byung Chul Han, The Expulsion of the Other: Society, Perception and Communication Today Translator Wieland Hoban Polity Press (2018), 46. ↑
17. “L’uomo viene così assorbito dal collegamento in rete in un’esistenza dell’“uniformare”, fungendo sempre contemporaneamente da emittente e destinatario. La sede veramente creativa è il collegamento in rete della conversazione. La telematica secondo Flusser è la prima tecnicaconsapevole dell’intenzione presente in tutte le tecniche che cerca di incrementare la somma delle informazioni disponibili, garantendo così una distanza critica e rinnovando l’attuale piano elettrico discorsivo delle “immagini tecniche” in uno dialogico.” Giorgio Cipolletta, Il flusso di Flusser: una prospettiva ubiqua oltre il contemporaneo, Macerata 2015, p. 3. http://www.flusserstudies.net/sites/www.flusserstudies.net/files/media/attachments/cipolletta-il-flusso-flusser.pdf, (10/02/2023 12.45). “[…] Uni-formare significa quindi quella capacità di ritornareverso il concreto a partire dall’universo”. Vilém Flusser, Immagini. Come la tecnologia ha cambiato la nostra percezione del mondo, Roma 2009, p. 45. ↑
18. The far greater part of that which works in civilization today through technology, and in which man with his life is entangled to the highest degree, is not Nature, but Sub-nature. Our age requires a knowledge that goes above Nature, because inwardly it must come to terms with a content of life, dangerous in its action, which has sunk below Nature. Of course, this does not mean that we should return to earlier stages of civilization, but that man should find the way to place the new conditions of civilization into a right relationship with himself and with the cosmos.” Rudolf Steiner From Nature to Sub-Nature (Letter dated April 12, 1925) in Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts: Anthroposophy as a Path of Knowledge, translators George and Mary Adams, GA 26, Letter 29. ↑
19. 19 Byung-Chul Han, The Expulsion of the Other 74-79. ↑
20. Adolf Portmann, Animal Forms and Patterns: A Study of the Appearance of Animals, Schocken Books (1967), 161. ↑
21. The impalpable veil present between the work of art and the spectator recalls the archi-screen, an invisible locus capable of shaping perceptions, as theorized by Mauro Carbone. See Mauro Carbone, Filosofia schermi. Dal cinema alla rivoluzione digitale, Milano 2016. ↑
22. Adolf Portmann, Animal Forms and Patterns: A Study of the Appearance of Animals ↑
23. By Spirit or Spiritual I mean that which places us in relation to values that do not necessarily belong to the sphere of the sensible—that is, of what we can perceive with the senses—but which are connected to present, past, and future realities that transcend our very existence. In this text, Spirit is also used interchangeably with divine, thinking, or thought. ↑
24. “…occultness is not an absence that becomes presence through revelation, the unintelligible now made intelligible, the invisible now visible. It is rather, as it were, a category of existence which, if ‘revealed,’ becomes literalized as ‘the hidden,’ whereas as a category of existence it contains and offers depth, secrecy, interiority, pregnancy, receptacle, resonance, potentiality, and death in any and every phenomenon.” James Hillman The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972, 291. ↑
25. Marco Mazzeo, Storia naturale della sinestesia, 2005, pp. 151-152. ↑
26. Chiara Cantelli, L’icona come metafisica concreta. Neoplatonismo e magia nella concezione dell’arte di Pavel Florenskij, Palermo 2011, p. 47. ↑
27. Ibid. p. 38. ↑
28. Henry Corbin, Mundus Imaginalis Or The Imaginary And The Imaginal, Zurich 1972, p. 9. ↑
29. Ibid. p.5. ↑
30. Ibid. p.12. ↑
31. Ibid. p.12. ↑