First Photograph(s)
A project proposal for a darkroom and wall installation composed of 320 folded photograms that serve as a response to, and attempt at, reproducing the bewildering experience of encountering Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s Heliograph from 1827, often considered and promoted as “the first photograph.”
My interest in creating a reproduction of the experience of the Heliograph stems from learning about the official and institutional experiences of its reproduction. I was struck by the many and varied ways that one individual, Helmut Gernsheim, and several institutions (Kodak, the Harry Ransom Center, the Getty Museum) have attempted to document, display, promote, and make it photographically legible.
Wish me luck! Still diligently applying to artist residencies and seeking the resources, time, and funding to make this happen. One day…
Proposed Grid of 320 Unofficial First Photographs
Three overlapping questions regarding the role of place in the production (and/or reproduction) of an image
What does the image of a view from a window in France in 1827 look like to the eyes and hand of Helmut Gernheim, who made a pencil drawing of it over 100 years later, in order to make sense of what he was seeing?
What does the image of a view from a window in France in 1827 look like in London in 1952, when Kodak was tasked with reproducing the image as a silver-gelatin print?
What does the image of a view from a window in France in 1827 look like in Los Angeles in the early 2000s, when the Getty Museum took their turn at photographing the image-object using digital technologies?
Official Documentation I
At the heart of my project proposal and intervention are the three official images associated with the object. The first is a drawing by Helmut Gernsheim that expressing his own subjective encounter of the image reflected on the pewter plate.
I’ve not read about this, and I’m sure someone (maybe even Gernsheim himself) has recognized this too, but I’ve always found this drawing so humorous, since it comes as an ironic and historical reversal to the personal and technological frustration with drawing (via the camera lucida) that spurred William Henry Fox Talbot to begin his own experiments with fixed images in the 1830s.
“Helmut Gernsheim. Drawing of Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s View from the Window at Le Gras. February 20, 1952. Pencil on paper“. Image and caption via Gernsheim Collection, Harry Ransom Center and The University of Texas at Austin.
Photography History and Theory
Jae Emerling, Routledge, 2012
“...what is widely considered to be the “first” photograph or “Image taken from Nature,” Niécephore Nièpce’s “View from the Window at Gras” (1826-7) disappeared for over fifty years. From 1898-1952 the whereabouts of this small “heliograph” (sun-writing), which was taken with a camera obscura from the upper-story of Nièpce’s summer house in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France, on a plate of polished pewter coated with bitumen of Judea, the cap removed for an eight-hour exposure time in full sun—and only then an image. But it was lost. Even after its rediscovery by the photographic historian Helmut Gernsheim in an attic in London, this “origin” remains irreproducible. Any version of this image that we see today, in textbooks or online, is a translation; it barely resembles the original, if there is one.”
Official Documentation II
The other two images are the photographs of the Heliograph in 1952 by Kodak and in the 2000s by the Getty and Ransom Center. Kodak’s version is presented as a “pure” photographic image, one cropped and floating without evidence of material support (but notably manipulated by Gernsheim afterwards with his own watercolor brushwork and in the spirit of his earlier drawing). In contrast, the 2000s version seems to reduce image-ness and Gernheim’s wish for legibility in order to promote the work’s object-ness.
“Helmut Gernsheim & Kodak Research Laboratory, Harrow, England. Gelatin silver print with applied watercolor reproduction of Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s View from the Window at Le Gras. March 20-21, 1952”. Image and caption via Gernsheim Collection, Harry Ransom Center and The University of Texas at Austin.
“The World’s First Photograph”
Barbara Brown, Head of Photograph Conservation
Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
The University of Texas at Austin
WAAC Newsletter, 2002.
“This most famous reproduction of the World’s First Photograph was based upon the March 1952 reproduction produced at Helmut Gernsheim’s request by the Research Laboratory of the Eastman Kodak Company in London. The pointillistic effect is due to the reproduction process and is not present in the original heliograph. The Kodak reproduction was touched up with watercolors by Gernsheim himself in order to bring it as close as possible to his approximation of how he felt the original should appear in reproduction.”
Official Documentation III
To my mind, this figurative and literal zooming out from the image space to the object space feels like an institutional recognization of the changing cultural stakes involved in maintaining the preciousness and singularity of “The First Photograph”.
“Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s View from the Window at Le Gras. 1826 or 1827. Photo by J. Paul Getty Museum”. Image and caption via Gernsheim Collection, Harry Ransom Center and The University of Texas at Austin.
A Response
I live in Austin and have seen the Heliograph at the Ransom Center many times. The experience is never straight on and direct as Gernsheim’s drawing or the Kodak and Getty images show (strict linear perspective being an early hallmark and apothesis of the photographic medium). It’s unruly. Instead, the viewer has to move and refocus frequently, and think in oblique and indirect ways in order to make a mental and highly personal picture of this Heliograph.
In contrast to the official and technological attempts—including Niépce’s—to reproduce and fix the experience of a view, I’m interested making a work that reproduces my fascination of a viewing experience.
Proposed folds and planes for individual photograms.
Unofficial Documentation: Five Folded Photograms
It’s this physical and performative reaction to light, angle, and reflection towards this image-object—unruly, multiple, and ultimately sensuous—that I want to acknowledge and recreate.
1 Second Exposure. Silver Gelatin Print. 8”x10”.
The images delineated by the creases and facets on the surface of each photogram materialize and reflect the ambiguity of the Heliograph.
2 Second Exposure. Silver Gelatin Print. 8”x10”.
Rather than separately acknowledging image-ness, object-ness, or preciousness, each folded print operates simultaneously as an image-object of little value, and expresses—individually and in aggregate—the multiple planes and perspectives of an entire encounter.
5 Second Exposure. Silver Gelatin Print. 8”x10”.
Each photogram is individually folded and formally references the common darkroom use of B/W paper test strips—and furthers my interest in pushing the expressive capacity of tools like histograms, color charts, and indexes away from measurement and towards metaphor.
9 Second Exposure. Silver Gelatin Print. 8”x10”.
I would like to present the finished work as a matrix of 16 photograms by 20 photograms, repetitive and multi-scaled in its imagery, analogue and tactile when viewed up close, digital and pixellated from afar, large and formally stable, but arranged in tension with the disorienting and hard-to-decipher nature of experiencing the Heliograph first hand.
17 Second Exposure. Silver Gelatin Print. 8”x10”.
Digital Color Checker
I see this project proposal as the monochrome complement to my other large grid color project. The dream scenario would be showing both of them in the same exhibition space!
