Stretching and Dissolving Boundaries:
Technological Practices in Nineteenth Century Science
and Art[1]
by Amy Ione[2]
Contemporary visual forms frequently foster deeply embodied experiences, display how the eye and the brain work together, and incorporate scientific data. More important to this discussion, when we probe how scientific ideas, artistic creations, and technology interface today we see that the collaborations that seem to have grown with the proliferation of new technologies have clearly definable historical roots. This paper proposes that evaluating these historical roots adds three important elements to our understanding of contemporary visual idioms. First, we can identify important cross-disciplinary influences that have informed today’s methods and the practices that have moved us to be a more visual culture. Second, we can distinguish between literary and visual contributions to a larger degree. Finally, and bringing the first two points together, identifying areas of cross-fertilization allows us to speak directly to some of the limitations within a modernist canon that fails to give full credit to the degree to which technologically-based investigative practices of the nineteenth century contributed to and helped define aesthetic approaches in twentieth century photography, film, video, and the digital arts. In summary, this paper extends the research of historians of art and science who have proposed that nineteenth century innovations in all domains were a part of a systemic interface that fostered innovative, collaborative work.
Visual science as known today began to take form in 1838, when Sir Charles Wheatstone (1802-1875) provided the empirical grounds for rejecting the then prevalent notions of binocular combination, or how we see (Wade 1983). This work on binocularity was presented to the Royal Society in London by using paired outlines of the same geometrical figures, as the drawings would be seen by either eye respectively. What Wheatstone was trying to convey is easier to perceive if you close one eye and extend a finger so that it is pointing at a specific spot. Now, without moving your finger, open that eye and close the other eye. As you can see, your finger is not longer pointing at the same spot.
The Wheatstone demonstration also made this point and additionally explained that we fuse what our two eyes see. In order to explain this fusion, Wheatstone used a stereoscope he had invented for this purpose. The instrument precisely superimposed the paired drawings by using a combination of lenses and mirrors specifically designed to demonstrate to his audience that our two eyes merge the two slightly different images we perceive into a singular form. It should be noted that Wheatstone was able to convey a robust and accurately fused form because the stereoscope’s design was based on measurable distances between our eyes and was thus able to clearly incorporate for the fact that we normally converge two perceptions when we see, although we think we see one image with both of our eyes. The noteworthy feature — and what made the instrument most exciting scientifically — was that Wheatstone was able to convincingly demonstrate how the two slightly different images formed on the retina of each eye are due to each eye’s different position in space.
More concisely, since Wheatstone’s demonstration produced what appeared to be a 3-dimensional form to the viewer, each viewer was able to experientially perceive a fused result, one that was neither a flat image nor an exact counterpart of a physical object as the object is extended into space. Instead two slightly different visual experiences are merged to appear as a whole and the singular whole has a quality that differs from the perspectival depth of a singular form drawn on a flat surface. Wheatstone’s own words best explain the value of these paired images and what they showed regarding the hitherto unobserved phenomena of binocular vision:
For the purposes of illustration I have employed only outline figures, for had either shading or colouring been introduced it might be supposed that the effect was wholly or in part due to these circumstances, whereas by leaving them out of consideration no room is left to doubt that the entire effect of relief is owing to the simultaneous perception of the two monocular projections, one on each retina. But if it be required to obtain the most faithful resemblances of real objects, shadowing and colouring may properly be employed to heighten the effects. Careful attention would enable an artist to draw and paint the two component pictures, so as to present to the mind of the observer . . . perfect identity with the object represented (Wade 1983, p. 72).
In summary with the stereoscope Wheatstone (1) clarified how we see, (2) described that paired images can appear as one image to a viewer, (3) conveyed that two correctly spaced flat images can appear to have a 3-dimensional quality, and, finally, (4) demonstrated that the way we perceive the world does not correspond to the kind of one point linear perspective artists have presented since the Renaissance. (In Renaissance perspective the sense of depth is technically created using vanishing points that are constructed using a one-eyed or monocular vantage point.[3])
Today Wheatstone’s work in vision and perception is often linked with the work of his colleague Sir David Brewster (1781-1868). Although the men were contemporaries and shared an interest in visual science, their rivalry and theoretical disagreements become clear when reading their correspondence, recorded debates, and scientific writings (Wade 1983). Both Brewster and Wheatstone, nonetheless, agreed the camera could aid empirical research. As a result, both men worked closely with early photographic pioneers and eventually the fruits of these collaborations entered the culture as a whole. Indeed one obvious outcome was that the new ways the camera could depict the physical world were used to expand understanding of binocularity as well as how we see in general. Less obvious is the way in which the technology stimulated photographic artistry.
Before turning to aesthetic products it will prove useful to look at a freely viewed stereogram. This image demonstrates (1) what photography adds to paired views, (2) how to fuse a stereogram without the aid of a stereoscope and, by extension, (3) what Wheatstone was demonstrated to his audience. To fuse these side-by-side images you need to stare at a point between the two dots, as if you are looking through the surface, until the dots merge at a point in the center and you see three dots. Once this parallel fusion is in place, without blinking, lower your eyes to the 3-dimensional image that will now appear as a result of the superimposition of the left and right views. The exceptionally robust, 3-dimensional quality you see is a result of how your eyes are superimposing the slightly different images on the left and the right. This experience of stereoscopic understanding is somewhat different from what Wheatstone presented due to the fact that photographic binocularity is more robust than line drawings due to the camera’s ability to record complex vantage points. More important to this discussion is that the 3-dimensional quality of this visual superimposition is precisely what Wheatstone demonstrated using the stereoscope and paired outline drawings. In other words, the photographs demonstrated binocularity more effectively than the numerous line drawings due to the camera’s ability to record rich visual relationships. Moreover, the camera’s accuracy and ability to render quickly (even with all of the camera’s initial pictorial limitations!) served two purposes. On the one hand, it permitted scientists to put aside the tedium of making precise pairs of perspective drawings -- with all of their possible errors -- when studying binocularity. On the other hand, it allowed studies to consider significantly more complex visual relationships.
Having enlarged the visual terrain, the photographic stereograms were welcome additions to the original hand drawn stereoscopic line drawings. Moreover, once Brewster invented the two-lensed binocular camera and an easy to use stereoscope (in the 1840s) it became possible to fully appreciate how the stereoscopic experience differed from looking at flat images contrived to picture the world. Photography was not only intriguing because of the ways it aided scientific inquiry. Close investigation also shows that many 19th century photographs contain the formal, aesthetic, visual qualities generally associated with modernism and thus looking closely at the events of that time suggests we must consider how to revise the linear chronologies that are used to describe photography and modernism, an area I will consider at the end of this paper. Equally important, as I will now discuss, when we combine the methods and practices that crossed domains we discover the degree to which new kinds of new information circulated among several disciplines. Two areas of interface are particularly noteworthy.
First, the literature shows that photographic processes were independently invented by artists and scientists. The primary French contributors were artists (Nicephere Niepce and Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre), while the primary English inventor (William Henry Fox Talbot) was trained in several sciences. Secondly, the photographic processes, like the stereogram and stereoscope, were invented in the 1830s. Thus photography and the scientific advancements connected with binocularity coincided chronologically and are logically paired contextually. Each innovation also enlarged our information base in a different way and these enlargements interfaced.
How these tools touched art and science, while reaching into
the community as a whole needs to next be pursued since the relationships speak
directly to how focused artistic and scientific perceptions differ from casual
human perceptions. This is particularly
evident when we compare how a superficial perception differs from the kind of
active viewing a practitioner uses when producing innovative work. The key point here is that the innovations
operated on several levels and, as a result, impacted the nineteenth century
community in multiple ways. More specifically, while some stereograms advanced
scientific investigations, many more were conceived for entertainment or to
simply record the world. Likewise,
while the public frequently saw photographs as a form of entertainment, we can
also find examples of photographic stereograms that clearly go further,
demonstrating that many of the new practitioners were artists, interested in
subtle, visual, aesthetic statements.
Photography, in fact, was explored from every angle. The clear, crisp daguerreotypes, invented in France in 1839, were produced on silver-plated copper sheets. These images generally had a glittery, reflective surface and are exquisitely detailed. The photogenic drawings of Talbot and others, on the other hand, were soft images. Produced when sensitized paper was exposed to light until an image became visible, the images were fixed with water and, when stabilized, lacked the detail of the daguerreotype. Calotypes, an extension of the photogenic process, were produced when sheets of paper were brushed with salt solution, dried, and then brushed with a silver nitrate solution. After being dried again, the paper was used in the camera. Unlike the daguerreotype, the calotype could be used to produce multiple copies of any image. Still, like the photogenic drawing before it, the calotype contained less detail than the competing daguerreotype. These are only some of the early variations practitioners used in the basic process of fixing the image. Viewing the variations that were tried, even in this limited way, allows us to establish that many subtle perceptual differences defined the images as artists began to experiment with possibilities (Newhall, 1982; Trachtenberg, 1989).
By the middle of the nineteenth century many prominent photographers were producing both singular and stereo photographs. Julia Margaret Cameron, for example, avoided the perfect resolution and minute details that glass negatives permitted opting instead for carefully directed light, soft focus, and long exposures (counted in minutes when others did all they could to reduce exposure to a matter of seconds.) (Daniel, 1999). All of these elements explain why her many prints are extraordinary, as her 1867 portrait of Sir John Hershchel illustrates well.
Carleton Watkins,[4] on the other hand, worked with a stereo camera that gave him several options. His artistry is particularly apparent when we look at his breathtaking photographic recordings of California’s natural beauty. The practiced, technologically astute, subtly Watkins cultivated was a quality frequently found in the work of those who focused on the artistic possibilities of photography. In some of Watkin’s best photographs we find the stereo camera registers two slightly different images, the two lenses acting like two eyes. These side-by-side photographs, like his singular prints, reveal an aesthetic eye at work. Moreover, despite being produced as commercial products, both the singular and paired views demonstrate the exquisite possibilities photography offered.
Maria Morris Hambourg, Curator of Photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, explains Watkin’s aesthetic as follows:
In landscape, as in human life, meaning lies less in objects than in relations, the links that tie specific incidents and entities together as an event or a place. In grasping myriad related connections and recording them photographically, Watkins created an intelligible world that maps and illustrates mental activity, mimicking the skeins of meaning our perceptions generate. His photographs awaken us to the exquisite pleasure of active seeing, inducing that conscious visual alertness we experience when viewing landscapes by Cézanne, for example. Only here the artist’s mental calculations are not laid down in painted strokes. They merge diaphanously with the trees and dissolve on the surface of the objective world.
She continues.
Looking at the photograph, we think we
see the true structure of nature, its orderly scaffolding and superb textures
merely disclosed; it takes real imaginative effort to recognize that no things
in the picture nor the relations between them were self-evident. Everything — the slant of a shadow on fresh
clapboards, the depth of the darkness in cracks in pine bark, the silkiness of
slightly shimmering water — is the delicate trace of the artist’s considered
attention. (Hambourg, 1999, p. 16)
Hambourg’s description of Watkins’ work speaks only to
Watkins’ art. Others have placed this
kind of artistry in a larger context.
Crary, for example, proposes
that we understand both nineteenth century photography and the avant-garde art of that century as overlapping components
of a single social surface on which the modernization of ‘vision’ was
everywhere taking place (see Crary,
1992). This is to
say that the developments in optics and vision, like photography and the
emergence of modernist painting,
can be seen as a part of a larger, more fundamental transformation occurring
within Western culture.
Placing the above in a larger context is critical. It is for this reason that I want to conclude with a few points that touch on some literary views of the nineteenth century, views that have informed presentations of nineteenth century art history. These ideas will broaden the discussion, albeit briefly, and suggest there are significant areas in need of further investigation.
Briefly, as is well known, one of the more forceful voices
of the 19th century was that of the poet and critic Charles
Baudelaire.
Baudelaire presented an extremely hostile view of photography, linking
the practice with mass taste and asserting that photography had contributed
substantially to the destruction of the imagination and true art (Edwards,
1999, p. 83). Baudelaire summarized the
tasks he saw for the modern artist in his 1863 essay “The painter of modern
life” (Baudelaire, 1986), where he says that any adequate form of modern art
had to address not merely the ‘eternal and immutable’ but also the ephemeral
and contingent — much as Manet does in ‘Concert in the
Tuileries, 1860-62.’
Yet, as recent research has increasingly shown, mapping this
modernist view on art in general highlights the artistry of some artists at the
expense of others. Clearly, the kind of
identity Baudelaire praised does not stretch far enough to acknowledge the
imaginative eye of a photographer like Watkin’s, for example. Nor do ideas that see nineteenth century
photography as primarily a form of documentation stretch far enough to include
the kinds of lyrical compositions Watkins and others often produced. In other words, close inspection
demonstrates that many images of the nineteenth century contain the formal
values and the kinds of aesthetic arrangements we would see as compositionally modern today.
Moreover, as noted earlier,
Watkins and his colleagues often worked with
their two-lensed cameras to produce striking
photographs that are not easily fit into the kind of limited view Baudelaire
and his legacy present of nineteenth century art history. Let me emphasize that this is not simply
because the photographs were commercial products. Rather, these pioneers produced images that aesthetically reveal
the degree to which the photographers were fascinated by what the new
technology could do. Thus, and in
summary, to suggest that the modern artist should take on the identity of a
middle class figure, wandering in the culture of the spectacle, noting down the
unstable, trivial, and superficial modes of the modern crowd within it’s
artificially constructed environments is to limit our perceptions of what art
and aesthetics are – and to do so needlessly.
Problematic aspects related to painting are strikingly evident too. For example, we can retrospectively see why Manet’s notations led later critics to group Manet and Baudelaire with others (such as Balzac) when they characterized art of the 19th century. Likewise, we can claim retrospectively that compatibilities in the philosophical dispositions of those grouped set the tone and the agenda for what we now term modern art and literature. In addition, we can say the characterization has a logical basis. Yet, the logic we see from our future position, to my mind, does not adequately define the period as a whole. Clearly, even within the limited scope of Western painting there are critical anomalies when we look closely!
For example, while Baudelaire privately admired Manet, although with some reservations, it was Constantin Guys (1805-92) and Eugène Ferdinand Victor Delacroix (1798-1863) who were Baudelaire’s touchstones for greatness (Baudelaire, 1986, 1998). In fact, some modern critics have rebuked Baudelaire for not discovering Manet at a time when Baudelaire was in a position to do so (Edwards, 1999). Broadly speaking the generalizations that are interwoven with the view that gives French history predominance points to several problems beyond those inherent in assuming photography was either a form of documentation or should be characterized as a ‘low’ art that served to free painters from the need to blindly copy nature. One assumption being introduced is based on the tendency to overstate the prominence of realistic and naturalistic painting in 1839, when photography was invented —a point a painting such as Delacroix’s 1830 bare-breasted Liberty leading the people illustrates. In other words, when we actually look at the work of the nineteenth century we quickly discover that Western painters around 1839, the year in which photography was invented, mostly favored a theory and practice premised on idealization rather than an optically-based, naturalistic realism.
I’ve used the term mostly here because research reveals many
examples of impressionistic-like works – with
their optical emphasis -- were completed early in the 19th century,
long before Manet, Baudelaire, and the Impressionists began to question the
conventions of their time in France.
For example, works of the German painter Adolph
von Menzel (1815-1905) in the 1840s and 1850s are
particularly noteworthy. Von Menzel
made his reputation in the 19th
century as a court painter and his small, spontaneously conceived
paintings were unknown while he lived (
see Gaiger, 1999; Keisch & Riemann-Reyer, 1996). One
element that makes von Menzel’s private pieces
exceptional is that they document a concern for the effects of light and the
subtle modulations of tone and color.
Conceived twenty years before Manet began to produce the work that is
now pointed to as the foundation of modernism and Impressionism, von Menzel’s
work, like that of the English painter J. W. Turner (1775-1851)
is not easily fit into a linear modernist canon. Yet Turner, who died in the mid-nineteenth century, was the pre-eminent
modern painter, at least according to John Ruskin’s 1843 book entitled Modern
Painters (Ruskin, 1843).
In summary, when we look at domain interchange in the nineteenth century we find significant cross-fertilization, and more important, we find the ways in which disciplines crossed is often underplayed in historical chronologies. Studying these historical innovations broadly, I would propose, can help us develop a better understanding of how technological advance stimulates the imagination of people in all communities and the subsequent community-wide collaborations that emerge. This is evident today, as it was evident historically.
References
Baudelaire, C. (1986). The Painter of Modern
Life. In J. Mayne (Ed.), The Painter of
Modern Life and Other Essays (pp. 1-41). New York: A Da Capo Paperback.
Baudelaire, C.
(1998). On Colour. In C. Harrison & P. Wood & J. Gaiger (Eds.), Art in Theory 1815-1900 (pp. 259-262).
Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Inc.
Crary, J. (1992). Techniques of the Observer : On Vision and
Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Daniel, M. (1999).
Inventing a New Art: Early Photography From the Rubel Collection in the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Metropolitan
Museum of Art Bulletin, LVI(4).
Edwards, S. (1999).
Photography and Modernity in Nineteenth-century France. In P. Wood (Ed.), The Challenge of the Avant-Garde (pp.
70-90). New Haven and London: Yale University Press in association with the
Open University.
Gaiger, J. (1999).
Modernity in Germany: the Many Sides of Adolph Menzel. In P. Wood (Ed.), The Challenge of the Avant-Garde (pp.
91-111). New Haven and London: Yale University Press in association with the
Open University.
Hambourg, M. M.
(1999). Carleton Watkins: An
Introduction, Carleton Wilkins: The Art of Perception (pp. 8-17). San
Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Keisch, C., &
Riemann-Reyer, M. R. (Eds.). (1996). Adolph
Menzel: Between Romanticism and
Impressionism (exhibition catalogue). New Haven and London: Yale University
Press.
Newhall, B. (1982).
The History of Photography. New York:
The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Ruskin, J. (1843). Modern Painters. London: George Allen.
Trachtenberg, A.
(1989). Reading American Photographs:
Images as History Mathew Brady to Walker Evans. New York: Hill and Wang.
Wade, N. J. E.
(1983). Brewster and Wheatstone on Vision.
London: Academic Press.
[1] Presented at: Science, Literature and the Arts: Where are the Boundaries? Brussels, Belgium, April 2000. Sponsored by the American Society for Literature and Science and Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Brussels Free University, Belgium).
[2] For further information: contact Amy Ione, PO Box 12748, Berkeley, CA 94712-3748 USA. email: ione@Lmi.net / URL: http://users.Lmi.net/ione, Tel: 1 510 548 2052 / fax: 1 510 5482054
[3] The linked image is ‘The Healing of the Cripple and the Raising of Tabitha’ by Masolino (1425). Note the central convergenceof structures from the front of the canvas to the far distant background.
[4] A comprehensive collection of Watkin’s work can be found in Nickel, D. R. (1999). Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
