Daguerreotypes: Fugitive Subjects, Contemporary Objects

DAGUERREOTYPES

DAGUERREOTYPES

Fugitive Subjects, Contemporary Objects

LISA SALTZMAN

University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

Lisa Saltzman is professor and chair of history of art at Bryn Mawr College.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2015 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2015.

Printed in the United States of America

24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-24203-3 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-24217-0 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226242170.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Saltzman, Lisa.

Daguerreotypes : fugitive subjects, contemporary objects / Lisa Saltzman.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-24203-3 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-226-24217-0 (e-book)

1. Photography, Artistic—Philosophy. 2. Photography—Social aspects. 3. Photography—History. 4. Photographic interpretation. I. Title.

TR183.S245 2015

770—dc23

2014044793

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION Daguerreotypes: Fugitive Subjects, Contemporary Objects

ONE Retro-Spectacles: On the Fictions of Contemporary Art Photography

TWO Orphans: On Émigrés and Images in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz

THREE Just Drawings: On Photographs, Fun Home and The Pencil of Nature

FOUR Time Regained: On Stasis and Duration in Contemporary Video Portraits

EPILOGUE

Notes

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Were it not for a stubborn desire to squeeze a few too many disparate sources into a syllabus, this book might never have come into being. That Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre was paired with Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner for the team-taught Graduate Group seminar History and Memory owes at least half its logic to Madhavi Kale, labor historian, postcolonial theorist, longtime Bryn Mawr colleague, dear friend. I am immeasurably indebted to her for the part she played in the genesis of this book, both for her hand in that generative juxtaposition and for her unflagging encouragement as the idea of the daguerreotype took shape and then took hold of my imagination.

If it was in preparing for a seminar that the idea for this book was born, it was only in stepping away from the responsibilities of teaching that it could be realized. That, in the spring of 2012, I had the good fortune to be awarded fellowships from both the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Clark Art Institute meant that I was able to dedicate myself fully to its final research and writing. During the 2012–2013 academic year, I was in residence in Williamstown, MA, at the Clark Art Institute, as well holding an appointment as a fellow at the Oakley Center for Humanities and Social Sciences at Williams College. I could not have imagined a more conducive environment in which to work. To Michael Ann Holly, David Breslin, Deb Fehr, and all those others involved in the unique art historical enterprise of the Clark Research and Academic Programs, I am deeply grateful for all that the year afforded—a beautiful apartment and office, a fabulous library, a run of stimulating seminars and colloquia, two terrific cohorts of fellow fellows—in the fall, Roger Benjamin, Jean Campbell, Nicola Courtright, and Mignon Nixon; in the spring, Claire Bishop, Tom Mitchell, John Peffer, Chris Reed, Mark Reinhardt, and Beat Wyss—and several wonderful new colleagues, foremost among them Jay Clarke, Marc Gotlieb, Guy Hedreen, Liz McGowan, Erika Naginski, and Carol Ockman. So too do I owe considerable thanks to Leyla Rouhi and Krista Birch for the generous hospitality and interdisciplinary conversations that characterized my time at the Oakley Center and further enabled and enriched my year in Williamstown.

There are many others to thank, both individuals and institutions. As is the case with so much of my work, the first public forum for Daguerreotypes was the weekly colloquium in visual culture at Bryn Mawr College. No audience is more engaged or exacting. I am grateful to my Bryn Mawr colleagues and students, both graduate and undergraduate, for their generative responses in that initial forum and in all the conversations that followed, whether in the hallway or in the classroom. In addition to presentations both formal and informal at the Clark Art Institute and the Oakley Center, I presented sections of the book at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in October 2011, and the Kansas City Art Institute, in November 2013, and delivered the kernel of its introduction in the session Photography in Doubt at the annual meeting of the College Art Association in New York in February 2013. Each of these audiences served as an excellent sounding board and helped me to test and refine the arguments and ideas of the project. So too did conversations with a number of friends and colleagues along the way, none more so than Catherine Conybeare, who, in addition to being an invaluable interlocutor, also served as the manuscript’s first and final reader.

Of course, there were also several anonymous readers who, early on, generously read a proposal and introduction and then, nearly three years later, the realized manuscript. Their enthusiasm and expertise, along with that of my faithful editor, Susan Bielstein, were critical to the realization of this book.

Let me conclude with one final note of recognition and debt of gratitude. On May 29, 2013, having realized my goal for the year and sent off a finished manuscript to Chicago, I decided my last act at the Clark, after a valedictory visit to Mass MoCA and a climb (if only by car) to the summit of Mount Greylock, would be to read Michael’s new book, The Melancholy Art. And as I sat on the back porch of the Scholars’ Residence over the course of that late spring afternoon, I was overcome by the ways in which her moving meditation on orphaned images resonated so deeply with so much I’d been thinking about for so many years, but at no time more so than when, during my final months in Williamstown, I was immersed in writing the chapter on W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, to which I had given the working title, Orphans.

I had spent a year finding it vaguely unsettling, even uncanny, that in the final stretch of the drive north from Philadelphia to the Berkshires I would pass a sign on the Taconic Parkway for the town of Austerlitz. In early spring, I even took a detour just to check that there was nothing to link the Columbia County, New York, town to anything in the eponymous novel. (As far as I could ascertain, there was not.) The real serendipity, I came to realize as I read Michael’s book, was the stroke of luck that had landed me in such an intellectually sympathetic surround for that final year of research and writing. At many points in my career, I had felt something of an art historical orphan. But at the Clark, I found a home. That I got to experience its Research and Academic Programs in the final year of Michael’s directorship is something for which I will forever be grateful

INTRODUCTION

DAGUERREOTYPES

Fugitive Subjects, Contemporary Objects

Let me begin with two stories. The first is historical and dates to sixteenth-century France. In this first story, a peasant family travels from its home village to another, forsaking property and patrimony to seek greater prosperity. In the ensuing years, the son marries the daughter of a local family and, after some time, fathers a child. Shortly thereafter, having committed a minor theft, the son leaves the village, abandoning his young wife and newborn child. Some years pass and the son returns. Or so the villagers and his wife and family would seem to believe. On his return, the prodigal son is transformed for the better, fathering more children and helping the family to flourish. It is only after a quarrel over property rights that the family starts to question the identity of this man, at which point he is imprisoned and tried before a court of law. Many, including his loyal wife, insist that the man is no impostor. It is only when the real man hobbles into the courtroom on his wooden leg to claim his rightful identity that the case turns, and even then, many attest that the impostor is a truer, better version of the man than the man himself.

The second story is science fiction and dates to the latter half of the twentieth century. Set in Los Angeles in 2019, this story involves a retired policeman who is mobilized to track and kill an escaped group of slave laborers, bioengineered cyborgs designed to be at once superior to and indistinguishable from their human models. In order to pursue his mission, the detective is introduced to a prototype, a female automaton so sophisticated in design that she does not even know that she is not human. It is only through her submission to a series of rigorous diagnostic tests that he, and, some time later, she, comes to realize that she is only a simulation of a human being. As the detective pursues his prey, systematically eliminating each of the fugitive slaves, he also embarks on a quest that is not mercenary but romantic. By the story’s end, both quests are successfully completed: he’s retired the replicants, and he’s got the girl. But all is not settled. Just as the two are poised to escape from whatever fate might await them, his gaze alights on a tiny origami figurine of a unicorn, the handiwork of a fellow detective. A mythical beast, the subject of his dreams, the presence of the unicorn implies that he, too, may be the product, not of biology, but of technology.

For all their historical distance, these stories share a historical moment. Each premiered to cinematic audiences in 1982. The first took shape with the collaboration of the historian Natalie Zemon Davis as Daniel Vigne’s historical French epic The Return of Martin Guerre. The second, based on a novel by Philip K. Dick, emerged as Ridley Scott’s science fiction cult classic Blade Runner. That shared moment of emergence is not, of course, their only point of convergence. Invested in issues of migration and movement, imposture and evidence, both films feature subjects who contest the limits of their identities. Whether as migrant peasants or slave laborers, their protagonists devise ways to cross variously permeable geopolitical borders. And whether as humans or automata, they strive for that unattainable illusion of coherent subjectivity. If there is one element that might be understood as the crux of each tale—in the former, through its conspicuous absence, in the latter, through its insistent presence—it is the image, the picture, indeed, the photograph, in all of its promise to fix and secure the identity of the human subject.¹

There is no image of Martin Guerre. Embodied cinematically by Gerard Depardieu, whose character is revealed to be an impostor, Arnaud du Tilh, a portrait of Martin Guerre, both the real and the fake, emerges largely through the historical work of Natalie Zemon Davis.² As Davis makes clear in her field-defining work, the texture of everyday life in sixteenth-century rural France is difficult to reconstruct. Where historians typically turn to letters and diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, and family histories to capture certain lives, the vast majority of peasants were unable to write, even to sign their names. Beyond French literary sources, in which villagers were frequently the subject of comedy and peasants generally depicted according to a set of established conventions, the period archive is principally legal, consisting largely of registers of the Inquisition, the criminal court, and the marriage cases tried before diocesan courts. That a judge from the court in Toulouse, Jean de Coras, wrote and published a book, as much literary tale as legal document, about the case involving Martin Guerre, allows Davis to begin to know and imagine something of the personages, the region, and the period.³

Through the mutually illuminating work of archival research and historical imagination, Davis creates a picture of the Daguerre family, peasants who left their Basque village of Hendaye for the Languedoc village of Artigat, where, among other assimilative strategies, they changed their surname to Guerre. From there, she goes on to recreate and imagine a chain of events: the troubled marriage of a young Martin to Bertrande de Rols; Martin’s abandonment of his patrimony, his parents, his wife, and his son and his peripatetic path to service in the Spanish army; Arnaud du Tilh’s return as Martin Guerre; Bertrande’s desire to escape her liminal state as neither wife nor widow; Arnaud’s success and greed; the trials; the actual return of Martin Guerre; and the subsequent fate of each of the principal protagonists, including the Protestant judge, Jean de Coras, who was the author of Davis’s most significant primary source, Arrest Memorable, and was ultimately lynched by a Catholic mob.

If the dearth of certain kinds of materials documenting the lives of early modern peasants makes difficult work for the historian, so too did it present a challenge to the legal system through which that historian best comes to know her subject. In a moment of reflection that echoes her explicit narration elsewhere in the text of the constraints on her own historical project, Davis muses on the limits of the juridical process in the early modern period:

But how, in a time without photographs, with few portraits, without tape recorders, without fingerprinting, without identity cards, without birth certificates, with parish records still irregular if kept at all—how did one establish a person’s identity without a doubt?⁴

Here, in the gray zone between the self-fashioning of law-abiding peasants and the unrepentant fabrications of an impostor, Davis is left to contend with historical and juridical doubt. She does so by offering up a set of practices and technologies, some representational, others bureaucratic, through which one might achieve that obscure object of desire, ontological certainty. Were her subjects fortunate enough to find themselves in a time of identity cards, fingerprints, or photographs, suggests Davis, only then could they know for sure.⁵

Her faith in pictures, in all that visual representation might secure, emerges from the chasm of ontological doubt that is identity in the absence of any structuring image of the human subject, even the one obtained in a glance of self-regard in a mirror. In an attempt to explain the origins of Arnaud’s ruse, Davis performs a thought experiment, imagining that the two men met:

They learn that they look alike, even though Martin is taller, thinner, and a little darker than Arnaud. They hear this from other people rather than observing it, for sixteenth-century villagers do not build up an image of their faces by frequent glances in the mirror (an object not found in a peasant household).⁶

Significant here is less Davis’s conjecture about a set of contingencies and conditions of possibility that may have motivated and enabled the emergent ruse than her statement of simple fact: there are no mirrors in peasant households. There is no visual form, no visual technology, through which to establish a sense of self in visual terms. Martin Guerre remains, in some sense, unknown even to himself as a coherent visual subject. He cannot recognize resemblance because he does not really know what he looks like. He is constituted over time as Martin Guerre, or as someone who looks like Martin Guerre, only by those whose gaze confers, confirms, and then affirms that identity.

As Davis continues her thought experiment, she ventures that even if the two men never met, perhaps some of Martin’s friends took Arnaud for the missing man, occasioning his adoption of his new identity (an identity that, given the reigning laws of marriage, comes to serve the abandoned Bertrande as much as it does the impostor Arnaud). As a means of imagining the possibility that a wife and a family would embrace an impostor as their own, Davis writes that if it was true that he did not look exactly the same as the Martin Guerre who had left . . . the Guerres had no painted portraits by which to recall his features.⁷ If the mirror reflection is the constitutive yet evanescent moment of seeing the self as an image, of forming an idea of the self as and in visual representation, it is in the genre of portraiture that the image of the self coalesces and endures. And if sixteenth-century French peasants lived without mirrors, they certainly lived without painted portraits.

Without the aid to memory that is a picture, be it an image in the mirror or on the canvas, there is little to establish the identity of the man who is, or is not, Martin Guerre, a man who was, given the exigencies of labor and regional migration, already in the process of transforming his identity from the very earliest moments of his disrupted Basque childhood. For Davis, then, the mutability of identity embodied in the ruse of the trickster Martin Guerre is but a more acute instance of the assimilative strategies deployed by his parents; in leaving one region for another and changing their name from the Basque Daguerre to the Languedoc Guerre, his parents were exemplary of migrant peasants who constituted and reconstituted their identities as a matter of daily life. For the art historian, I would suggest that the story of Martin Guerre, as Davis presents it, not only reveals something about practices of identity in the early modern period but illuminates all that is invested in and imagined for images, as emblematized and realized in that quintessentially modern medium and technology, photography. Or, as Walter Benjamin once wrote of photography itself, I would suggest that in the immediacy of that long forgotten moment the future subsists so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it.⁸

If there are no images of the migrant peasant-soldier Martin Guerre, né Daguerre, that is a function of not only the place but the time of his birth. It will be nearly three hundred years before another Daguerre enters the picture, so to speak, or, rather, introduces a form of picturing that ushers in a new era in visual representation, namely, photography. This Daguerre is Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, a designer for the Paris Opera and a co-inventor of the Diorama, a device of wonder that stands as one of the critical prephotographic, and, indeed, precinematic technologies of illusion.⁹ Of course, Daguerre neither invented nor discovered photography. No one did. As Geoffrey Batchen makes clear in his account of photography’s conception, between 1790 and 1839 the ability to have an image inscribe itself on a light-sensitive surface was described by at least twenty different people in seven different countries.¹⁰

Fig. I.1. Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, Boulevard du Temple, 1839.

Thus, even as Daguerre announces his discovery to the public in 1838, and gains official endorsement from François Arago, director of the Paris Observatory, in early 1839, others are at work as well. And while Daguerre fails to acknowledge the work of these fellow scientists in his announcement—and of some he is, indeed, wholly unaware—he does respect the role of another, namely, his collaborator, Joseph-Nicéphore Niépce. Even so, he is quick to explain that M. Niépce, deceased by the time of Daguerre’s dramatic announcement, worked with an antiquated technology, the camera obscura, a device that, on Daguerre’s account, did not give the necessary sharpness and, even more limiting, worked on a material, unlike his own, that was not sufficiently sensitive to light.¹¹ In the aftermath of the loss of his scientific comrade, Daguerre presses on, refining a process that produces an image that is quicker and sharper, boasts more delicate tonal gradation, and delivers, above all, the perfection of the details.¹² To this solution, Daguerre gives his name, calling what is conventionally understood to be the first photographic process the daguerreotype (fig. I.1).

Fig. I.2. William Henry Fox Talbot, View of Parisian Boulevard, 1843. Salted paper print. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

Among the rivals to Daguerre’s claims is William Henry Fox Talbot, who had been working on his own photographic drawings in England and who published, in 1844 in The Pencil of Nature, a Paris street scene that was something of a double of Daguerre’s (fig. I.2).¹³ That the process Talbot pioneered, a paper-based negative-positive system, would supplant the daguerreotype as the common-denominator of photographic practice by the 1850s did little to displace a set of persistent misconceptions about the invention of photography. In some respects, it might be said that Daguerre’s claims to primacy and singularity were embodied in the very properties of the daguerreotype itself, which, unlike subsequent photographic technologies, Talbot’s among them, resulted in a unique, nonreproducible image.