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Edições Edição nº6 The eye, its powers and the photographic camera: 19th century ideas of "automatism"
Edições Edição nº6 The eye, its powers and the photographic camera: 19th century ideas of "automatism" | The eye, its powers and the photographic camera: 19th century ideas of "automatism" |
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| Autor: Margarida Medeiros | |||||||
| 02-Jul-2007 | |||||||
Página 2 de 5 The first scientific ideas about retinal images, according to Bill Jay, would have been written by William Scoresby, about which there is an abstract on the volume “Abstracts/Reports of the British Association for the Advancement of Science”. He speaks about the persistence of images in the retina, after seeing persistently an object and closing the eyes and employs the term “photograph”[1]. But in fact, Scoresby doesn’t seem to be talking about fixed images in the retina, but of those images that are kept in the retina for a certain period of time. He is not talking about “the last image” obtained but of the experiments of a new branch of science, that of the physiology of the eye and of the study of different layers that were being observed inside the living eye by that time. The retina becomes the microcosm man has been said to be, and that we are fearfully and wonderfully made may be better realized now than in the old time.”[4]
It was only in 1877 Franz Boll that discovered that the retina contained a red pigment, which he called visual red and later “visual purple” or “rodhopsin”. This discovery contested the commonsense about the eye’s physiology, which maintained that inside the retina there was nothing but opaque grey. In the same year, Wilhelm Kuhne dedicated himself to experiments on “optograms”, the name he gave to the image that remained in the retina after the animal — he used rabbits or frogs — was decapitated. Kuhne thought that if the retina bleached with light it would be possible to obtain an image and fix it, if it would be the last one seen[5]. He did made at least an image upon the eye of one of these rabbits, and it was published like this, showing the squares of the window Kuhne had been showing to the rabbit just before he decapitated it:
Over a couple of months he worked on these tests, and he went after the eyes of a condemned man. He got the eyes just after the man had his head severed off and ran to the lab with them to develop the desired image; but he has got just this one, which he never could identify with anything palpable:
 Although these experiments did not keep so long the attention of Kuhne, he dedicated seriously during some time, having conclude, finally, that the eye was to be seen not as photographic camera, but as an “entire photographic workshop”[6]. Maybe it was not so stressing to Kuhne the idea of making a photograph with eye, as just to investigate about the photochemistry of the retina and to understand the migrant pigments of the live retina. Something, meanwhile, was already in the air about eyes, photographs… and dead bodies, since twenty years before. Around 1857, and before any scientific investigation had been yet brought to light, newspapers began to talk about the possibility for the human eye to take a picture, and so, the increasing interest in the physiology of the eye seems to turn out the interest in the photography to the interest on the eye itself (or in the image inside the eye). In an issue of Notes and Queries of 1857, an amazed journalist asks: “What is the meaning of this (…)? Are our friends ‘over the water’ hoaxing us, as is their word, or is there a shade of truth in the details of the experiments said to have been made?” In the meanwhile, whilst he defies incredulity, he gives us all the account: The astonished and intensely interesting fact was recently announced in the English papers of a discovery, that the last image formed on the retina of the eye of dying person remains impressed upon it as on a daguerrean plate.”[7] In 1963 William H. Warner, a photographer, wrote to a lieutenant of Scotland Yard telling about an experience he has done with a cow: after he has removed the eye of the dead cow, he found the squares of the pavement of the bowery inscribed in the retina of the animal. Following this discover, he wandered the policeman, recalling a recent crime committed in London, if it wouldn’t be useful to check the retina of the dead person. Exchanges of serious letters about this possibility were changed between the two, as Bill Jay has already given the account[8]. At the time of Warner’s worries, correspondents of Americans The Littel’s Living Age and the The Manufacturer and the Builder[9], and also a significant number of British newspapers had come along with the matter.
But what really matters in this story is not so much to find the exact beginning –which more or less impossible – as to underline its modes of appearance, its multiple tentacles. They seem to be a symptom of a desire more than the fruit of an empirical observation, which should be grounded on experimental methods, as it was the up-to-date on positivist science. This tale addresses, at the same time, the obscure invisible world of nature – a supposed, or imagined, “ophthalmic” workshop – and the expectations about a body-machine’s rationality, like the camera, which can register the truth of what have been seen by the simple movement of the eye over the object that is in front of it[10]. As the body becomes more and more explored, new features are also expected, sometimes coming from technological myths. It is between these contradictory ideas that the optography tale was built. It speaks to us about the unseen (the deep rooted visual purple in the retina) and the overseen (the crime). It shows, at the same time, an action that is being done by the victim (an overacting) and the product of violence, an action provided by the murderer. [1] According to the report Scoresby would have demonstrated that “on closing the eyes gently, with the head kept steady as when gazing the image or picture was seen, or, as the author expressed it, ‘photographed on the retina’ (…) Pictures of a window were retained for an hour, whilst breakfast was taken and other objects pursued.. By means of partial black screens, pictures were composed out of different portions of an illuminated object, and curious dislocated representations of a statuette, or multiple figures were obtained (…).” Abstracts, Reports of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1854, Liverpool, vol. xxiv, pp 12-13.
[2] For an overview and sources on the study of Vision, cf. Nicholas Wade, A Natural History of Vision, Cam., Mass., The MIT Press[1998]1999; for discussion of the role of the ophthalmoscope in science of vision and on the models of comprehension of the retinal images, cf. N. Wade, “The eye as an optical instrument: from camera obscura to Helmholtz perspective”, Perception, 2001, vol.30, pp 1157-1177; C. Richard Keeler, “The Ophthalmoscope in the Lifetime of Hermann von Helmholtz”, Archives of Ophthalmology, vol. 120, FEB 2002, pp 194-201; Jutta Schickore, “Misperception, illusion and epistemological optimism: vision studies in early nineteenth-century Britain and Germany”, British Journal of the History of Science, 39(3):383-405, Set. 2006. [3] Wade could resume the impact of the ophthalmoscope: “New experiments could now be performed on vision, and its study could, in fact, be transferred from the natural environment to the laboratory, where the methods of physics could be applied. The eye had become a subject of exact science with its demands for experimentation and measurement. It was now an optical instrument in the true sense of the term, having once been a symbol of mystery. See N. Wade, “The eye as an optical instrument…”, 2001. [4] W.S. Bird, “The Photography of Vision”The Photographic Journal /Journal of the Photographic Society, New Series, 1.-3, p. 23.5.1879, 96. Some widespread publications like Good Words or All The Year Round were publishing articles about the ‘powers of the eye’. In 1862 the last one publishes an article entitled “The eye-its structure and powers”, were an extended synopsis on ‘the state of art’ of eye’s knowledge is done, beginning by a philosophical consideration: “Although all parts of human body have been created by the same Divine Hand, and they exhibit the same useful and marvelous adaptations for the human use, the human eye prevails over them all as the body’s light, being the organs trough witch we get acquaintance with the minuscule and the enormous, with the biggest and distant work of the Creator.” In All the Year Round, 1862, pp. 170. Arthur Evans, in his paper “Optograms and Fiction” (see Modern Fiction Studies xx (3 #61), Nov. 1993, 341-6) makes a direct approach between ‘optography’ tales and the invention of the ophthalmoscope. [5] In the section of “Visual purple”, Kuhne explains: “Since normal vision is evidently only possible so long as a balance is constantly maintained between the bleaching of the visual purple of the rods on the one hand, and the purpurogenous activity of the retinal epithelium on the other, it is obvious that one can only expect to obtain permanent optograms when that balance is destroyed, either by the epithelium, in spite of its continued functional activity, being insufficient again to colour the rods, or in consequence of circumstances which prevent the epithelium from performing its functions.” W. Kuhne, On the photochemistry of the retina and on visual purple, [trad. by M.S. Foster] ed. with notesby M. Foster, 1878: 83. [6] “The retina, so long as it is maintained in its natural connections with this epithelium, resembles not so much a photographic plate as a whole entire workshop, in which the operator, by bringing new sensitive material, is always renewing the plates, and at the same time washing out the old image”. W. Kuhne, On the photochemistry of the retina and on visual purple, 1878: 12. [7] Notes and Queries, #92, Oct. 3, 1857, p. 268. [8] The Photographic News, vol. vii, nº 244, 8 Maio,1863, p. 226. Cf. also Bill Jay, Cyanides & Spirits, 1995. [9] The Manufacturer and the Builder, Baltimore, vol. 2, Issue 10, October 1870; The Littel’s Living Age, New York, Fifth Series, vol. 63, April/May/June 1877. The list of little news, letters on the subject wandering upon it, greater articles explained a whole plot about ‘retinal images’ of the murderers related with serial crimes exhausting, repeating each other frequently from Corriere della Siera on Florence, Italy, to the New York Times or The Morning Post (London). [10] If we follow the analysis of another photographic myth that was spread out more or less the same period (the tale of the ‘image-on-the-glass’), at least in America, by Barbara Allen, we have to consider also the ‘mystery’ that photography plates must have constituted at that time, thus contributing to the most fantastic ideas about parallels between photography and other ‘devices’, even found in the human body’s interior. Allen begins her paper to stress the idea that we have to look upon not to grope for historical. “monogenetic beginnings”, but rather to identify “ the circumstances out of which the forms developed in order to account for the specific features of characteristics they display”. Cf Barbara Allen, “The “Image on Glass”: Technology, Tradition and the Emergence of Folklore”, Western Folklore, vol. 41, nº 2 (Apr. 1982), pp 87. |
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