For the official version of record, see here:
Peraica, A. (2024). The Unphotographable: On Photography and the Unseen. Media Theory, 8(1), 277–296. Retrieved from https://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/1077
The Unphotographable:On Photography and the Unseen
ANA PERAICA
Danube University Krems, AUSTRIA
Abstract
In his famous discussion of the transparency of the photographic image, Walton (1984) claimed there are opaque photographs that fail to be transparent because of technological error, willful dishonesty, or author experimentation. Photographic history, philosophy, and epistemology have rarely interpreted such photos. The Fraenkel Gallery’s exhibition Unphotographable (2013) explored such failed, doubtful, and experimental photographs. This essay aims to further advance the concept of the unphotographable by interpreting this exhibition in relation to abstract images from the project Scotoma (2014–2018) by the Slovenian artist DK. Evoking Lacanian scotomization, DK’s project Scotoma points towards defining the unphotographable as a photographic black spot enforced by its technological, ideological, or operator-imposed conditions. Yet, since these shots are still photographs, the unphotographable is part of the photo-universe (Laruelle, 2011). Thus the unphotographable becomes a way of defining the photographable, revealing it as a dynamic field in which technology makes something that was previously unphotographable into part of the photographable.
Keywords
oblique photography, metaphysics, unphotographable, scotomized, unseen
Some photographic records do not contribute to the formal structures of scientific or political evidence. Although we may think such images would, in the first place, be reworked images, many of the photographs that fail to serve as evidence are also unsuccessful photographs, or “failed photographs” (Alphen, 2018), such as overexposed and underexposed shots. In addition, there is also a vast array of other types of photographs that either fail to depict something or claim to record something whose existence is denied by science. Such are, for example, photographs of ghosts (Harvey, 2007) and unidentified flying objects, or UFOs (Stevens and Roberts, 1985). Finally, some photographic images do not aim to show any real object, for example, artistic images, so they too cannot be considered as providing evidence. Photographic history as well as its philosophy – particularly epistemology – has not particularly engaged in interpreting such photographs. Rather, failed images were viewed as a byproduct or even a fallout of the process. Some philosophers, however, maintained that regardless of their success as representations, these are still photographs. For example, in his famous discussion of transparency of the photographic image, Walton admitted that there is something he defines as opaque images, images that fail to record something for various reasons including technological error, deliberate deceit, or author experimentation. The exhibition Unphotographable (2013) by Fraenkel Gallery overlayed some photographs of all three of types, failed, dubious, and experimental – images that can hardly be taken as proof of anything. What did these failed photographs, misinterpretations, and non-objective images have in common, besides the fact that they can easily be dismissed as evidence for failing to depict reality in the conventional manner, as expected of photography? Are there common qualities of such unsuccessful images, and where do they belong in the structures of knowledge of our ‘Photographocene’ (Peraica, 2021)?
In order to unveil what is unphotographable and what the photographic camera ‘does not see’, this article analyzes a couple of abstract photographs by Slovenian artist DK that are deliberately not representational. The title of the series, Scotoma (2014–2018), suggests that this non-representation is due to a perceptual fallacy of an eye and is taken from the Lacanian concept of scotomization. By employing pattern recognition (reverse image search), it is possible to find the structural similarity between three types of images: scientific, metaphysical, and aesthetic photographs (or photographs that are dismissible for their technological, ideological, and author error), showing that photographs actually appear to ‘see’ something that is similar, but which cannot be photographed, rather than that they photograph something that does not exist. This photographic ‘seeing’ defines the field of the unphotographable as a field structured by a unique photographic black spot, its own error in seeing photographically through different conditions: technological, ideological, or imposed by someone else. Being still photographs, these images of the unphotographable also furnish the photo-universe, as Laruelle (2011) defines the expanded field in which photographic objects exist for themselves, without necessary reference to anything.
Aside from that, there isn’t much we can say about the unphotographable, except that they are photographs that depict something that isn’t what we expect, but is somehow photographable. It is true that while we don’t see anything in them, the photographs do depict something, or they ‘see’. However, when viewed in a comparative and historical context, one trait becomes distinct: the transitory behavior of the unphotographable. As technology advances, formerly unphotographable objects become photographable. Thus, the unphotographable has a dynamic relationship with the photographable in photographic history, since the history of penetrating the field of the unphotographable has enhanced our ability to see photographically. And nothing in that history guarantees that another object that was previously unphotographable will not one day become photographable, and therefore constitute scientific proof. Weird as it may sound, any arguments contradicting this claim would be fairly unrelated to the medium of photography itself, since photographs provide arguments depending on the advancement of the medium rather than discursive expectation.
Are unsuccessful photographs also photographs?
Throughout the history of photography, an intensive debate has revolved around the issue of whether or not photography is obligated to represent. This debate originated among photographers in the nineteenth century as some photographers preferred pure media use and others sought free artistic or pictorial expression, with social photography on one side and Pictorialists on another. At the time, photographers already possessed a variety of complicated techniques to alter the factuality of the image. The emergence of digital image technology in the latter part of the twentieth century provided the general public with the possibility of their own experiments with photomontage and retouching. With new tools, the epistemological discourse posed questions about the status of reworked photographs, but also about failed or unsuccessful photographs.
Two distinct layers comprise the image’s epistemological nature: the first asserts that ‘photographs can only capture that which necessarily exists’, which is an ontological claim, and the second layer extends this claim by asserting that the subject exists in a ‘specific manner’ as described by the images, which is an epistemological claim. In the first case, photography serves as evidentiary support, while, in the second, it functions as a qualified descriptor. In 1986, Critical Inquiry published an epistemic discussion between the philosophers Kendall Walton and Edwin Martin regarding the possibility that photographs can deceive.[1] Kendall Walton, in his article ‘Transparent Pictures’, argued that the reason a photograph is always a photograph of something that ‘actually exists’, and, concerning the second claim, that it does describe that something accurately, is that we actually do not see photographs, but rather we ‘see the world through them’ (Walton, 1986: 250-251, 258). He argues that the human eye does not perceive images; instead, photographic images serve as a transparent and ephemeral medium for vision. Because of that, Walton declared photography to be more like visual prosthesis (Walton, 1986: 251). Yet, contrary to other instruments like telescopes and mirrors, photographs also afford us the opportunity to glimpse into the past.[2] Immediately, Walton received criticism for his theory. Edwin Martin was the first to argue against Walton’s idea that he directly observes his own great-grandfather (Martin, 1986). We do see photographs, but not through them, as Walton claimed. To underline his argument, Martin took the paradigm of another instrument, a seismograph, which provides us with information on earthquakes. We can only see the seismograph, but not the earthquake.
However, this discourse concerning the nature of the relationship between photographic technology and reality would have veered into trivial matters of comparison of processes if Martin had not raised the most crucial question for media theory of photography: whether unsuccessful photographs, such as those that have excessive exposure, are, in fact, photographs. Martin (1986: 797) states that ‘A photograph which is grossly overexposed or underexposed so as to appear as pure white or maximum black can hardly qualify here’. While Martin sequenced Walton’s process of transparency, saying that it is not us that see, but rather photographs that do so, and we in turn see photographs, he questioned whether failed images could be named photographs. Walton, on the other hand, held a different opinion. He did see failed photographs as photographs, but oblique ones. He admitted they are the results of the photographic technique that produced each of them. Light is still being captured on a sensitive surface, such as a chip, coated glass plate, negative film, or sensitive paper, and irrespective of the nature of the object, a causal relationship exists between the image and the object, indicating the existence of the latter. But we do not see through these images. These images are oblique ones, as their transparency is corrupted. In addition to reworked pictures, for example by retouching, combining negatives, manipulating exposure and contrast, or applying filters (Walton, 1986: 267), Walton provided an additional note for trusting photographic images. He noted that transparency is effective under the following conditions: that ‘the camera was of a certain sort, that no monkey business was involved in the processing’, or that we have confidence in the photographer (Walton, 1986: 263). By setting these conditions, Walton defined three types of images that are photographic in origin but are not transparent: those that have problems with technology, those that are ‘monkey’ jobs, and those that are different due to autonomous photographic decisions. Each of these sits at one point of the production process: the apparatus, the object, and the author as the subject. Thus, he has thrown unsuccessful scientific images and those representing ghosts in the same bin.
Photographic behindness
This type of overlap between images of science and ghosts is reflected in an interesting way in a passage of the interview with Jacques Derrida published in Copy, Archive, Signature: A Conversation on Photography (2010). It is when Hubertus von Amelunxen asked Jacques Derrida in interview:
The photography of the invisible, radiography, the photography of thought, so-called transcendental photography: the nineteenth century witnessed an entire debate, quite pronounced, concerning photography and spiritualism. The positivists demanded proof of the apparitions, and the spiritualists said to themselves that nothing could be easier than producing false testimonies with photography. The spirit medium was at the center of the question concerning the technology of the revenant.
that Derrida answered:
In my response I presented some variations on the theme of a spectrality that, far from being reduced by the rationality of modern technology, found itself, on the contrary, amplified, as if this medium (photocinematography, teleperception, teleproduction, telecommunic-ation) was the very site, the proper element (also properly privileged), of a fantastical phantomaticity, of the phainesthai in its originary link with technê. The revenant is not confined to the culture of the manor house or to the spiritualism and fantastic literature from the last century. Every culture has its phantoms and the spectrality that is conditioned by its technology (Derrida, 2010: 38-39).
In this passage Derrida directly refers to photography in the Victorian era which, on the one hand, developed science and, on the other, also the parasciences he mentions. This collision is well elaborated on in photographic history. Historian of scientific photography Kelley Wilder, for example, stated that photography during that era has been ‘used to register spirits, atoms, radiation, and a whole host of things real and imagined’ (Wilder, 2009: 63-64). Jennifer Tucker provided an exhaustive account of how the Victorian era influenced the evolution of numerous scientific fields, such as bacteriology, astronomy, meteorology, and spiritualism (Tucker, 2013). Metaphysical accounts were, according to Gamwell (2002), especially provoked by photography penetrating the field of the previously invisible, as, for example, with microscopic photography and X-rays (Kevles, 1996). Many of these Victorian photographs were destroyed as they were presenting only one step in the technological development of the medium, yet some even today represent historical or artistic curiosities.
Some photographs failing to represent, unclassifiable in their representation, or forbidden to represent, to refer to Walton’s three categories of the oblique image, were exhibited in the exhibition Unphotographable, which ran from January 3 to March 23, 2013 in the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco.[3]The show displayed images of early Victorian science and images of ghosts, but also works by a number of artists whose photographic representations were not faithful to reality, especially those who experimented with the medium at the beginning of the twentieth century.[4] The exhibition approached the field of the unphotographable, defined by Jeffrey Frankel in the text of the catalogue for the exhibition:
From the moment of its invention almost 175 years ago, photography has proven adept at depicting the photographable: the solid, the concrete, that which can be seen. […] But another tradition exists, a parallel history in which photographers and other artists have attempted to describe by photographic means that which is not so readily seen: thought, time, ghosts, god, dreams(Fraenkel Gallery, 2013).
The show did not give a clear answer to what the unphotographable is, but it mapped the field of unrepresentative photography. Some categories of photographs could be distinguished, and these were again the ones that Walton had named in his writing on oblique photographic images, differentiating them by origin. There were photographs that were the result of scientific processes, ones that were the result of para-scientific attempts to provide ‘evidence’, as well as ones being processual experiments made by artists.
Images that were produced by scientific instruments comprised the first category. Unknown photographers appear to have employed scientific instruments, including powerful telescopes, X-rays, and oscilloscope photographs, to create photographic documents in support of their theories, but many of these efforts failed because of technological weakness. The recent advancement of photographic technology has enabled the subject of these images to be verified by more powerful images, showing that the earlier images were a mere step in that progress. The second group of images are those that use photographic lenses to verify claims often not supported by science. One of these images, for example, is said to represent the profile of Christ in the tree, the other an angel in the sky, or even other spiritual beings. One of the most intriguing, in light of the discourse surrounding its existence and description, is the 1933 photograph ‘The T’Zan Teleplasm’ by T. Glendenning Hamilton. This photograph is strongly influenced by transcendentalism and its radical psychic interpretation of spiritualism. The objective of this experiment was to illustrate how photographic technology could capture extrasensory phenomena, including the teleplasm exhibited by a subject identified as Mrs. J. Young. The information contained in the artwork at the exhibition includes the following details:
Between 1918 and 1945, Dr. Thomas Glendenning Hamilton and his wife Lillian investigated various psychic phenomena in their Winnipeg, Manitoba home, including telekinesis, teleplasm, and trance states. Though the early experiments were more clandestine, in 1926 Dr. Glendenning, a respected community doctor, went public with his explorations and authored numerous articles and lectures on the supernatural. The Hamiltons received worldwide recognition for their abilities, even hosting outspoken spiritualist Sir Arthur Connan Doyle at a home seance in the 1920s (Fraenkel Gallery, ‘#OTD in 1933…’).
Yet, spiritual beings were not only a theme in the nineteenth century. Even more recent authors refer to images of spiritual beings, such as Bruce Conner’s life-size rayograms, named angels, made by the body being impressed onto a photosensitive surface. Similar to images of ghosts or angels are images of extraterrestrial visitors, as referred to in Kota Ezawa’s Lubbock Lights (2012), referring to the unresolved mystery of a UFO sighting. Ezawa’s photographs refer to an event from a single night in 1951, during which hundreds of people, among them some prominent scientists in Lubbock, saw bluish green lights in a V formation in the sky. A student named Carl Hart took a series of photos that were later analyzed as showing birds flying.
The third group of photographs is those experimenting with non-traditional photographic methods, including double exposures, extremely long exposures, accidental shots, nonstandard perspectives, or various filters. Some of these images are blurry, as in Adrien Majewski’s right hand posed at room temperature for twenty minutes, which happened somewhere between 1895 and 1900. Others are glowing images made by the solarization process, as in the case of Man Ray’s picture. The medium is also investigated in the ‘Equivalents’ series by Alfred Stieglitz, which features images of clouds, as well as in the experiments conducted by optician Ralph Eugene Meatyard in the 1950s, created with double exposures, or through various abstract approaches adopted by authors such as Clarence John Laghlin, Diane Arbus, and Richard Misrach. Additionally, later experimental classics, such as an analysis of the grainy RGB 35mm film structure of Paul Graham’s Fuji Fujicolor Super HR400, further explore the quality of photographic media. In the course of their inquiry, these authors examine an experiment known as ‘concrete photography’ (Jäger, Kraus, and Reese, 2005), wherein the medium of photography is utilized as a vehicle to convey its own message. Pieces of concrete photography often use descriptions or titles to indicate they show something that is unphotographable such as concepts, ideas, conditions, etc.
Despite all being part of the field of the unphotographable, there are slight differences among these images. The first type, scientific image failures, features the error of technology. As in the case of the early pictures of Jupiter, such images do not describe their object well, either for the reason that the lenses are not powerful enough so the object is blurry, or they are not complex enough to depict all the colors of the spectrum. This kind of error can be resolved by further development of technology. The second type of images actually refers to the unseen in terms of ontology, claiming that something does exist or probably exists. This type is dependent on the discourse it attempts to affirm, and more or less represents a logical mistake of petitio principii, or begging the question. The last group of images compiles those that are creatively and decidedly not representational, and which explicitly challenge the long debate on photography’s obligation to realism. One type of these images is rational, another is irrational and voluntary, and because of that, while one can be seen as useless, the other can be seen as weird and authentic. But if we cannot see behind the image, how do we, as viewers, distinguish among them? Or how do we know which type of error is behind the production of that certain type of image?
In order to explore this, I will take a group of unrepresentational photographs from the project Scotoma, made by a Slovenian photographer who goes by the alias DK and chooses not to identify themself. Some of the images in this series resemble images from the Unphotographable show. These include, for example, ‘Blowing Newspaper at a Crossroads’ (1956) by Diane Arbus, ‘Untitled’ (1976) by Richard Misrach, and ‘Empty Mirror’ (1976) by Richard Learoyd. One of the reasons for taking this work is its general concept of scotoma, the biological error that makes us not able to see clearly, and I would be very curious to know who does not see; is it us or the picture (if the picture records something at all)?
Scotomization of the technological apparatus
Scotoma is a biological anomaly, genuine for all mammals, manifesting in the form of a black spot in natural sight caused by eye construction. It is typically located 15 degrees from the point of fixation. When one eye is closed and the other eye is incapable of generating any light to compensate for the void, it manifests as a certain disruption in an otherwise continuous field of vision. The online Merriam-Webster dictionary (2024) defines scotoma as ‘a spot in the visual field in which vision is absent or deficient’. In philosophy, this concept is often employed more metaphorically, to describe damage from a particular vantage point. In his seminal work The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan alludes to scotoma as the fear-induced blindness that results in the substitution of a portion of the image with an alternative or psychotic reality (Lacan, 1973: 97). When afraid and missing part of an image, we produce the missing part. According to Martin Jay, who elaborated on this theory, the term ‘Scotomization […] suggests that an actual blindspot occurs when something is too threatening to be seen […] In both cases, psychosis appears to be connected to a disturbance in sight, whereas health is identified with linguistic introjection’ (Jay, 1993: 355).[5] To sum up, in scotomization we see things that are not there.
In spite of the fact that the escape to fiction appears to be quite common among humans, scotomization is relatively uncommon for photographic technology, as the lenses of cameras are monocular, they are able to focus and sharpen, and some can change the diopter automatically. Yet, lenses can also be parallactic, broken, dirty, or have a damaged coating that would maybe produce an error. However, despite the error, lenses can hardly experience fear and look inside by themselves.
DK suggests a number of possibilities for photography to accomplish scotomization. He gives us several thematic units showing us different types of glimpsing inside our own internal, psychic world. The series ‘The Planets’, ‘Memories of Tomorrow’, ‘Premonition’, ‘Behind the Eyelids’, ‘Gloom’, ‘Almost Hope’, and ‘Darkening’ all progress from one to another. In wrapping up the whole set of the project Scotoma, with all its series, DK writes that ‘the images gradually progress towards the disintegrating role of watching and turning the view inwards so that, in its concluding series, images visualize what are primarily mental objects’ (DK, 2019). Starting with the outside world, the titles of each series appear to be progressing from biological optic processes, such as focusing, blinking, and closing the eyes, to looking inwards. Looking inwards can be compared to photographic processes such as sharpening, darkening, the inability to represent, and the metaphorical representation of inner states (which is opposite to the direction of camera lenses). Due to these processes, all of these photographs are characterized by their lack of transparency and opacity. The depth of field is shallow, objects are unfocused and unsharp, and the overall image is, in most cases, underlit. As a result, the images fail to represent the object or have no physical and concrete object in the image to focus on.
Despite not showing anything decidedly, these images do suggest something. For example, the set ‘Memories of Tomorrow’ bears a resemblance to depictions of landscapes, as if formed from dense and substantial atmospheres, including fog, vapour, rain, or snow. Image captions are pointing at geographical locations, often to very distant and inaccessible places, such as the Ronne Ice Shelf and Vinson Massif in Antarctica, Lake Goshikinuma in Japan, Mt. Nanos in Slovenia, Orkhon Valley in Mongolia, the Tengger Caldera in Java, the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, and the Pinsk Marshes in Ukraine and Belarus. Reading their titles, we may think that photographers have returned from a circumnavigation of the globe with these photographs. But, according to the artist’s statement, he took every photograph within a one-hundred-meter radius of his home. Therefore, the photographs do not refer to a visible and represented geographical landscape, but rather to an imagined one; in Lacan’s sense, they represent a scotomized landscape, an imagined one.
Overexposed or underexposed, blurred or with shallow field, these photographs exhibit some kind of unseen, which besides focusing on nothing also refers to the practice of capturing ‘something’ that lacks a discernible referential framework. We cannot verify or attest to what, and we are unable to locate where. These images reveal nothing to us, as described by Peter Geimer in his history of photographic apparitions that he classes as ‘inadvertent images’ (Geiner, 1986). But we do see – something. And this something is, firstly, unrecognizable, and if recognizable, it is, secondly, unexplainable in the context of Western science built on the evidence of correspondence and coherence of visual artifacts with bodies of knowledge. And what is that ‘something’?
Fig.1: DK: ‘Crossing Dark Passage at Night’ from the Memories of Tomorrow series, project Scotoma, with permission from the author.
Fig. 2: DK: ‘Iceberg Underwater’ from the Memories of Tomorrow series, project Scotoma, with permission from the author.
Fig. 3: DK: Untitled image from the Gloom series, project Scotoma, with permission from the author.
Photographic ‘something’
By performing a reverse image search on a few of these images, it might be possible to grasp what that something is. Pattern recognition of reverse-image searching works on the logic of Rorschach’s test, yet not identifying the form per se but the appearance of such a form at another place. The results of performing this analysis are not spectacular. They are predictable and confirm what we actually saw in these images in the first place. For example, the photograph ‘Crossing the Drake Passage at Night’ (2018) yielded similar images of a turbulent and dramatic sky, while ‘Iceberg Underwater’ was identified as an artistic representation. One image from the Gloom series is identified as a photographic bokeh, while the other portrays an underwater environment. The most striking image from the Darkening series is not identified as a photograph or an image; instead, it is identified as graphics. But images from the series ‘Premonition’, featuring more tangible forms, depict a considerably more expansive array of visuals. Searching for the online ‘relatives’ of the photograph entitled ‘Almost Hope’ (2014) exemplifies this point. Numerous scientific articles discuss almost the same visual form, yet across very wide areas. The reverse image search suggests that similar forms and photographs construct visual evidence in the case of the optic fiber’s transmission, an electron image captured in conjunction with Cyt+ for direct photoionization, water in a sequential dual-energy scan without scatter correction, ion photofragments generated during the photodissociation of N20, a Monte Carlo method utilized to simulate scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images of an inhomogeneous specimen, or three-dimensional imaging. One of the numerous scientific articles that discuss the field of optics, titled ‘Efficient Ray Tracing via Imperfect Bokeh Synthesis and Aspheric Lenses’, also furnished with a similar image, may be the closest to the point of the artistic practical media research. By utilizing pattern recognition, it is possible to see how one image transcends multiple genres. It encompasses a vast array of phenomena, including those found in engineering, electronics, energetics, optics, microphysics, astrophysics, and digital neural network programming. Or, it could be a scientific, para-scientific, or artistic image. It can be almost anything.
Fig. 4: DK: Untitled image from Almost Hope series, project Scotoma, with permission from the author.
To conclude, images from the project Scotoma may represent various things. They can be scientific images, which represent and document some reality inaccessible to the natural eye; images that are completely unrelated to reality; and finally, artistic images or images that distort reality. That means they can be almost everything other than what we wanted photography to be – a precise and descriptive picture of a certain object in a certain space. They potentially show everything else other than that. Thus, the area in which they are potentially operable is larger than the one referred to by ordinary photographs, and we can define it as some kind of photography’s otherness, or photography’s metaphysics, defined as the field from the other side of the representative role of photography and the other side of our expectations. This area has rarely been referred to, yet some traces can be found in recent theories of photography, such as one by French philosopher Francois Laruelle.
Laruelle laid the foundation for onto-photographic research, which is more precisely defined as a metaphysics of the photographic image (Laruelle, 2011). Instead of analyzing the manner in which photographs acquire and communicate knowledge of external and objective reality, or the truth, he sought to determine the extent to which photographs construct it, without actually representing anything. Even though some photographs do not provide an ontological and epistemological statement, one of the ideas that Laruelle investigated was that, despite not looking alike, they represent something. Onto-photography research, as he defined it, does not serve to undertake an analysis of the extent to which photographs represent their subjects inaccurately or fail to convey the truth and/or knowledge of external and objective reality. Rather, its focus is the transformation of photographic subjects into existing subjects, parallel to the materialization by which photographs become tangible objects. Starting with an ontological claim based on epistemology, saying that ‘From a photographic standpoint, to be is to be photographed and only photographed; and not half-real, half-photographed, half-real, half-imaginary, half-being’ (Laruelle, 2011: 117), Laruelle continued to the argument that entities do indeed exist but as photo-fictions, objects that exist only in photography.[6] Photo-fiction objects provide further elaboration on the assortment of fiction forms that are already present in object-oriented ontologies.[7] Laruelle further elaborates on the concept by defining photo-fiction as ‘about creating a new type of object, about adding fiction to the photo according to a precise logic’ (Laruelle, 2012: 12).
Apart from shifting the emphasis from the external and depicted reality to the notion of existence and documentation within the medium, photo-fiction can also encompass unidentified forms such as presumed ghosts, supernatural phenomena, or unidentified flying objects that now are seen as existing in reality, but inside the medium, and without reference to outside reality. Photographic metaphysics, according to Laruelle, does not require photographs to accurately represent the subjects they portray; rather, they can be entirely constructed. Objects that are immaterial and have never been material, such as concepts, also exist in this photography, albeit in a different way. They exist in their own photographic manner. Though psychoanalytic theory does not, at least not in this case, refer to photography, Laruelle’s photo-fiction appears to have a rationale within the process of scotomization; rather than directing attention towards the external world, the photographs depict the internal realm that the author seeks to escape to, into photographic alterity, liberated of the obligation to represent. There, they see the unphotographable. The image sees something, something that can be anything.
That which is ultimately unphotographable…
During the early stages of photography’s history, the world that was visible was largely unphotographable; portraits of living people and even landscapes with a light sky were resisting photography. Subjects such as moving animals, tiny physical and biological particles, and even black holes were once considered unphotographable, too. As time passes, an increasing number of unsuccessful photographs, unsharp images featuring unrecognizable objects, and unwashed glass negative plates bearing ‘ghosts’ of previous uses diminish in number and start to make sense. This is due to the fact that photographic imaging technology is becoming more sophisticated. What was previously unphotographable may become photographable after some technological upgrades. Thus, in order to recount the history of the photographable, the unphotographable, which is the antithesis of the photographable, must be present. The unphotographable is a dynamic field that elucidates the progression of the photographable as the history of photography itself. So, it can be said that to be unphotographable is a transient quality. As evidence, an object that was previously obscure is now transparent, a scotomized object has become scopophilic, and a previously invisible object has become visible. But this, according to the inner logic of photography, does not mean that one day ghosts would not be recordable, as photographs do ‘see’ differently than we do. Thus, the unphotographable presents a large challenge to Western science, which is organized around photography as its evidence, defining the knowledge standing on photographic evidence under the criteria of the photographable.
References
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Notes
[1] Gregory Currie published a subsequent article in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism in 1991, which further elaborated on this discourse.
[2] Walton demonstrates this glimpse by employing a photograph of his great-grandfather, whom he has never met and yet who he is now clearly seeing, to demonstrate this definition of the term photographic ‘seeing’.
[3] The Unphotographable. Fraenkel Gallery, 2013. https://fraenkelgallery.com/exhibitions/the-unphotographable
[4] Artists participating in the show were, among others: Robert Adams, Diane Arbus, Mel Bochner, Sophie Calle, Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo, Liz Deschenes, Kota Ezawa, Adam Fuss, Idris Khan, Richard Learoyd, Christian Marclay, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Richard Misrach, Jakob Ottonowitsch von Narkiewitsch-Jodko, Man Ray, Frederick Sommer, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Edward Steichen, whose images are known.
[5] Martin Jay argues that Lacan’s notion of the processual definition of scotomization is linked to the application of ‘Merleau-Ponty’s chiasmic ontology of the visible and the invisible, which he redescribed in terms of ‘the eye’ and ‘the gaze’’, continuing that it even ‘parallels Charcot’s dialectic between scopophilia and scotomization’ (Jay, 1993: 353). Charcot and Lacan both define scotomization as the notion that signifies the obstruction of access to consciousness. This visual concept served as a paradigm in psychoanalysis up until Freud apparently dismissed it (Jay, 1993: 354). Although some theorists continued implementing it, as for example in the writings of Hal Foster (2004), notably in regard to subconsciousness in the image, the concept has found no larger reverberation in theory.
[6] ‘It is the technological extension of photographic optics that exists within the quantic (production of a photo-fictional resemblance), the formal extension of its algebraic ingredient (photo-fiction as science), die extension of its material aspect (photo-fiction as a neutralized living of a certain still undetermined subject=X and of its objects), and the extension of the finality of the subject=X (the photographer-as philosopher and the philosopher-as-photographer are nothing more than simple aspects of the subject=X)’ (Laruelle, 2012: 17).
[7] As Graham Harman names them: ‘along with diamonds, rope and neutrons, objects may include armies, monsters, square circles and leagues of real and fictitious nations’ (Harman, 2011: 66-67).
Dr. Ana Peraica authored The Age of Total Images (Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2019; Jesenski i Turk, Zagreb, 2021), Fotografija kao dokaz (Multimedijalni intitut, Zagreb, 2017), and Culture of the Selfie (Institute for Networked Cultures, Amsterdam, 2017). Her writings are included in readers and anthologies published by Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan, Springer, and Bloomsbury, as well as other academic publishers. As a reviewer, she is regularly contributing to Leonardo Journal Reviews. She teaches at Danube University in Krems and was recently a visiting fellow at Central European University (CEU).
Email: anaperaica@gmail.com
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