When I ponder about photography, I often consider its function as a medium and its relationship to its time rather than photography itself. Perhaps photography is one of the most important media defining the 20th century; when the daguerreotype was invented in 1839, it was undoubtedly the leading scientific technology of its time.
Like the invention of photography, this period produced a variety of ideas that would become the foundation of the 20th century. Marx's “The Communist Manifesto” was published in 1848, and Darwin's “Origin of Species” in 1859. The light of intellect through innovative science, was the same light that was fixed on the surface of glass negatives through the camera lens.
At the same time, it means that mankind has accepted that human vision on our retina is inferior to the optical purity of a lens in terms of accuracy. Therefore, it is clear that photography functioned as a medium to present “evidence that the object exists”. Something overlooked by the human eye, is recorded on a photograph. These ideas and technologies, born and refined in the late 19th century, interacted with each other to create most of what we in the 21st century still consider common sense.
However, the light of these intellects also illuminated the unacknowledged dark side of humankind. If communism and evolution are the positives of the picture, spiritualism, which arose during this period, corresponds to its negatives. Madame Blavacky, the founder of Theosophy, was born in 1831. She was probably one of those who tried to explore the new frontiers found by new intellects like Marx and Darwin, but with a completely different approach. If one is suspicious of Theosophy, then I can point to a psychology that has undergone more scientific verification. Sigmund Freud was born a little later, in 1856, but his period of activity is precisely the period of these intellectual transformations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and Freud's discovery of the unconscious was one result of the exploration of humanity in the light of the intellectual explosion of the late 19th century.
It goes without saying that the general function of a photograph is to accurately capture the subject. This has been the expectation of mankind since the days of the camera obscura. If the object is captured in the photograph, it can be said that the photograph proves the existence of the object. Perhaps in the 21st century, this premise will be lost, but at least until the 20th century, this premise was not lost. The fact that an image appears in a photograph is scientific proof of its existence. Even if it was invisible to the human eye, the light of science through the lens of a camera could capture it.
Even today, photography is one of the final means of confirming scientific theories, as evidenced by the fact that the definitive proof of the existence of atoms is a photograph taken by IBM in 2009. In this sense, the photographs taken by those spritualists from the end of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century were proof of their belief that the invisible must exist. Even if most of them are fakes, judging from today's photographer's point of view.
Take a look at “The Perfect Medium : Photography and the Occult,” published by Yale University Press in 2005. It documents the human desire for the invisible based on very scientific and logical practices.
A wife who passed away before him. A child who was struck by illness at an early age. Or a parent we can no longer see. These invisible beings float around us, sometimes embracing the living as if they are nostalgic for the past.
Or an intellectual quest to communicate with the supernatural. To bring the oracle of Delphi back into the modern world. This fundamental human desire has probably been forbidden in the Christian world for over a thousand years. In the name of science, these prohibitions were lifted and recorded as “fact.” Curiously, the explosion of scientific knowledge in the second half of the nineteenth century led to the release, in the name of science, of the more primordial, paganistic and shamanistic desires latent in the ancient strata of humankind.
Intellectual inquiry in science and photography have the same roots. And their mutual influence on each other has formed our intellectual system of the 20th century. But we must not forget that at the edges of that system are areas that have now been abandoned. And photography has a deep connection with that realm. It is a gaze that goes beyond the “proof the object exists” to see the invisible, something that humans have tried to see through mediums since time immemorial.
Standing in front of trees in the darkness, I search for the presence of something invisible. There must be “something” lurking there that our ancestors saw in the past. A statue standing in a park in the middle of the night secretly harbors a soul because it resembles a human figure. Behind the artificial light of the flash lurks the paradox of human rationality and irrationality. The pre-modern delusions and superstitions that should have been discarded in the age of the Enlightenment have come back to life through the device of the camera, and are about to tell us something.
