Little history of photography share your opinion about photography

508 • 1931

make it any easier to use the charm of old photographs, available in fine

recent publications, 3 for real insights into their nature. Attempts at theoretical

mastery of the subject have so far been entirely rudimentary.

And no

matter how extensively it may have been debated in the last century, basi-

cally the discussion never got away from the ludicrous stereotype which a

chauvinistic rag, the Leipziger Stadtanzeiger, felt it had to offer in timely

opposition to this black art from France. "To try to capture fleeting mirror

images," it said, "is not just an impossible undertaking, as has been estab-

lished after thorough German investigation; the very wish to do such a thing

is blasphemous. Man is made in the image of God, and God's image cannot

be captured by any machine of human devising. The utmost the artist may

venture, borne on the wings of divine inspiration, is to reproduce man's

God-given features without the help of any machine, in the moment of

highest dedication, at the higher bidding of his genius." Here we have the

philistine notion of '"art" in all its overweening obtuseness, a stranger to all

technical considerations, which feels that its end is nigh with the alarming

appearance of the new technology. Nevertheless, it was this fetishistic and

fundamentally antitechnological concept of art with which the theoreticians

of photography sought to grapple for almost a hundred years, naturally

without the smallest success. For they undertook nothing less than to legiti-

mize the photographer before the very tribunal he was in the process of

overturning. Far different is the tone of the address which the physicist

Arago, speaking on behalf of Daguerre's invention, gave in the Chamber of

Deputies on July 3, 1839. 4 The beautiful thing about this speech is the

connections it makes with all aspects of human activity. The panorama it

sketches is broad enough not only to make the dubious project of authen-

ticating photography in terms of painting—which it does anyway—seem

beside the point; more important, it offers an insight into the real scope of

the invention. "When inventors of a new instrument," says Arago, "apply

it to the observation of nature, what they expect of it always turns out to

be a trifle compared with the succession of subsequent discoveries of which

the instrument was the origin." In a great arc Arago's speech spans the field

of new technologies, from astrophysics to philology: alongside the prospects

for photographing the stars and planets we find the idea of establishing a

photographic record of the Egyptian hieroglyphs.