Misreading Feuerbach: Susan Sontag, Photography and the Image-World

Attention to Susan Sontag’s (mis)reading of Ludwig Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity reveals her agenda in On Photography: to depart from ‘the new age of unbelief’ and return to ‘something like the primitive status of images’ in which an image participates in the reality of the object depicted. For Sontag, photography has reduced the world to its image, yet it is photography that can get us back to ‘reality’. Sontag’s project is more similar to Feuerbach’s than she allows. Like Feuerbach, Sontag argues that human beings have mistaken the copy for the thing itself and, as a result, have created a false division between the copy and the ‘real,’ devalued both the copy and the thing itself, and overlooked the profound ways images affect the world. The other world is to be found, as usual, inside this one. A well-known proponent of photographic objectivity, the physician and Harvard Medical School professor Oliver Wendell Holmes believed photography was a process of visual representation that separated the form of objects from the physical objects themselves. For Holmes, photography was a purely mechanical procedure that copied the world and in which human beings played no role. In ‘The Stereoscope and the Stereograph’, published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1859, Holmes reminds his reader of Democritus of Abdera who believed that ‘all bodies were continually throwing off certain images like themselves’, which strike ‘our bodily organs’ and give rise to our sensations. Epicurus and Lucretius then followed Democritus, writing about forms, or ‘films’, as if they were shed from the surfaces of solids ‘as bark is shed by trees’. These films are visible in mirrors, on the surface of a calm body of water, and ‘by the consciousness behind the eye in the ordinary act of vision’, but, Holmes notes, they have no real existence apart from their source, and they ‘perish instantly when it is Literature & Theology, Vol. AEa. No. ", March AE " , pp. – doi:10.1093/litthe/frp055 Literature & Theology # The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press 2010; all rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org withdrawn.’ For Holmes, the genius of the daguerreotype is that it fixes ‘the most fleeting of our illusions’. He writes, ‘The photograph has completed the triumph, by making a sheet of paper reflect images like a mirror and hold them as a picture.’ He calls this new invention ‘the mirror with a memory’. The notion that the photographed object gives off something that is then captured on paper is not so far off the mark in describing the actual process of reflecting light onto chemically sensitive surfaces by which images were first made. As Alan Trachtenberg describes, during the later 1820s, Joseph Nicephore Niepce and his brother Claude used the camera obscura and sensitised paper to produce pictures for a lithography press they designed. These early experiments produced ‘tonally inversed pictures’, what would now be called negatives. The process of turning negatives into positives was so time-consuming and the resulting images so poor, that Niepce searched for another image making technique. He discovered that a certain kind of bitumen (asphalt) that was usually soluble in lavender oil became insoluble when exposed to light. He covered a bitumen-sensitised pewter plate with a translucent engraving. He then exposed it to light, followed by a washing with lavender oil. The area exposed to light became insoluble, while the area hidden by the engraving’s lines was washed away. The picture was tonally reversed, but the plate could easily be etched to create a positive print. At the same time, Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre was also looking for a way to produce illusionistic images from reflected light. A mutual acquaintance put Niepce in touch with Daguerre. They began a correspondence, sharing ideas about their image making attempts and eventually becoming partners. When Niepce died in 1833, his son Isidore took his place in the partnership. By 1837, Trachtenberg writes, Daguerre had perfected Niepce’s process to produce a highly detailed, positive picture of a corner of his studio. He considered it his own invention and labelled his pictures daguerreotypes. He made the images by polishing and cleaning the silver-coated side of a copper plate. He coated the plate with iodine to create a layer of iodide of silver. The plate was then placed in a camera obscura window before being exposed to a scene or landscape. After fifteen minutes, the blank plate was removed and hot mercury globules were formed over the surface. The plate was then washed with distilled water or soda, and a clear, detailed picture of the scene or landscape would appear. Daguerre writes, ‘The DAGUERREOTYPE is not merely an instrument which serves to draw Nature; on the contrary it is a chemical and physical process which gives her the power to reproduce herself.’ Although the ‘instruments’ and processes of photography have changed, the legacy of the view of photographs as traces of the subjects that stood before the camera and as images made by machines without human intervention, remains. This legacy runs throughout photography discourse and continues 39 SARAH SENTILLES