When "we no longer know which sees and which is seen"
Daguerreotype: a small curation of commentary and images
We didn’t trust ourselves at first, to look long at the pictures… We were abashed by the distinctness of these human images, and believed that the tiny faces in the picture could see us.
(Carl Dauthendey (1819-96), first professional daguerreotype photographer in St Petersburg)
The procedure itself caused the subject to focus his whole life in the moment rather than hurrying on past it; during the considerable period of the exposure, the subject – as it were – grew into the picture…
(Walter Benjamin, A Short History of Photography, 1931)
No matter how artful the photographer, the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the here and now, with which reality has… seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it.
(Walter Benjamin, A Short History of Photography, 1931)
Since the early photographic portrait was the ontological extrusion of its sitter, it revealed both aspects of his visual being. He gazed out from it, as well as appearing within it, and his look showed that he, too, was part of the visible world.
And because the photographic image emerged so slowly in the first decades of its history, and was so manifestly developmental, often changing in tandem with the world, it could not be relegated to the past. It said, “this is,” rather than “this was.”
It consequently… invited its viewers back into the relationship described by Merleau-Ponty: one in which “the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen.
(Kaja Silverman, The Miracle of Analogy, 2015)
Brief story of the daguerreotype:
On January 7, 1839, members of the French Académie des Sciences were shown products of an invention that would forever change the nature of visual representation: photography. The astonishingly precise pictures they saw were the work of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851)…
The process revealed on that day seemed magical. Each daguerreotype is a remarkably detailed, one-of-a-kind photographic image on a highly polished, silver-plated sheet of copper, sensitized with iodine vapors, exposed in a large box camera, developed in mercury fumes, and stabilized (or fixed) with salt water or “hypo” (sodium thiosulfate). (Malcolm Daniel, Daguerre (1787–1851) and the Invention of Photography, The Met ‘Timeline of Art History’)
We know that the first inventors worked to fix images and simultaneously to develop techniques for their mass distribution, which is why the process perfected by Daguerre was doomed from the very outset, since it could provide nothing but a unique image. (Hubert Damisch, “Five Notes for a Phenomenology of the Photographic Image” in October 5)
A wonderful collection of daguerreotype images can be found in Alan Taylor, “The Gift of the Daguerreotype” The Atlantic, 2015.
For more about the process, see Sussex Photo History: the Daguerreotype page.