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Inventing the Literary Prehistory ofPhotography: From Francois Arago

to Helmut Gernsheim

Francois Brunet

This paper provides an overview of a trend in photo-history that has, from 1839 tothe late twentieth century, sought to uncover, or indeed to invent, literary ‘pre-monitions’ of the invention of photography. The paper focuses primarily on twohistorians of photography, Francois Arago and Helmut Gernsheim. The productionof a ‘literary’ prehistory of photography is interpreted as denoting a wish to counter-balance its association with science.

Keywords: photography and literature, photographic prehistory, historiography,

Francois Arago, Helmut Gemsheim

The history of photography has often been described as the battlefield of ‘science’ and

‘art’. This article is dedicated to another duo, less belligerent perhaps, but equally

fundamental, which we might call ‘photography as science’ and ‘photography as

literature’, and which I would gloss as fact and dream, reality and pleasure, serious

and playful, evidential and legendary, perhaps even as descriptive and narrative. This

duality need not be envisioned as a dichotomy but as a dialectics; and this dialectics

gives much of its appeal to the field of photographic criticism, where, somewhat

miraculously, it is acceptable to speak on both sides of the divide. Without elaborat-

ing on this general perspective, this paper will explore some moments in the history

of so-called literary premonitions of photography.1 My main contention is that the

production of these premonitions – for they did not arise naturally in the historio-

graphy, let alone in the invention process itself – often responded to the perception of

a lost balance between the two basic polarities of ‘science’ and ‘literature’.

Before focusing upon the nineteenth century, I shall begin with a contemporary

and little-known French example. I am referring to a 1990 book by Odette Joyeux, a

retired actor, which was entitled Nie�pce – Le troisieme œil (Nie�pce, The Third Eye). In

itself, this rather commercial publication, intended for the general reader, written by

a former star with some literary ambition but no previous experience or competence

in photographic history, is an interesting example of the literary penchant of the

history of photography. Claiming to be a ‘life of Nice�phore Nie�pce’, this book warns

its reader on its title page that it combines ‘the evidence of dates and events’ and ‘the

freedom of imagination’.2 Thus, this biography of the inventor of the truthful image

placed its own task and genre under the aegis of romance – suggesting that, by 1990

in France, Nie�pce had become a mature enough topic to be treated in the same

popular way as, say, D’Artagnan was by Alexandre Dumas in The Three Musketeers.

But there is more to this particular example.

This article is a revised version of the talk I

presented at the conference Literature and

Photography: New Perspectives, organised

by Julian Luxford and Alexander Marr in

honour of Graham Smith at the University of

St Andrews, 25–27 May 2007. Some of the

materials discussed here, along with several

illustrations, have been published in Francois

Brunet, Photography and Literature, London:

Reaktion Books 2009, 20–33.

1 – For stimulating discussions of

photography’s prehistory and the history of

the photographic dream, see Geoffrey

Batchen, Burning with Desire: the Conception

of Photography, Cambridge, MA: The MIT

Press 1997; most recently, Italo Zannier, Il

sogno della fotografia, Collana: Skira 2006, a

book that brings to light several hitherto

unnoticed forerunners and brilliantly re-

explores the alchemical connection (I thank

Annalisa Vio for bringing this book to my

attention). See also the classic anthology of

sources on the prehistory of photography

edited by Robert A. Sobieszek, The Prehistory

of Photography: Original Anthology (Sources

of Modern Photography), New York: Arno

Press 1979.

2 – Odette Joyeux, Nie�pce – Le Troisieme œil,

Paris: Ramsay 1990, title page.

History of Photography, Volume 34, Number 4, November 2010

ISSN 0308-7298 # 2010 Taylor & Francis

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In the prologue, set in 1816 and meant as a foretaste of the ‘birth of photo-

graphy’, Joyeux describes ‘a man’ ‘seeking his solitary dream’, ‘watching the sun’, and

pointing his camera’s ‘big round eye’ to a ‘point of view that will become historic’.

This man – Nie�pce, of course – is surrounded in his laboratory by strange devices and

chemicals, stranger blueprints for his various inventions, and a great many books.

One book is singled out very emphatically:

But all these witnesses of his labours did not supplant the significance – one mightsay the charm, in the magical sense – of one small book laid, quite conspicuously,on a pedestal table [gue�ridon, a round table on a central foot that has beenassociated with the evocation of spirits]. Its title: Giphantie. Its author: Tiphaignede la Roche. An old little book from the previous century. A book of wonders.

Nie�pce’s childhood caught hold of this work. His imagination was notcontent with being charmed by its magic, its implausibility. The child sensedin them a kind of anticipation. A book of fiction that opened the way to reality.Among all the miracles told [in this book], flying in space, underwater explora-tions, one struck him more than any other. This was a kind of revelation[re�ve�lateur i.e. ‘developer’] for the little boy, who wished he could paint anddraw as well as so many members of his family did. But his awkward hand gavehis mind an intense curiosity. [. . .] The book of wonders, though it may nothave educated him, opened up ad infinitum the horizon of his dreams, of whichone only eventually would direct his life.3

The book, which is claimed here as the source of Nie�pce’s dreams, is the French novel

Giphantie by Tiphaigne de la Roche (1760). It is, and has been for a long time, a ‘classic’

among the literary premonitions of photography – although not of French literature. In

fact, its status as ‘premonition of photography’ constitutes today its main claim to fame

(along with other similar ‘prophecies’ included in it, such as a giant mirror prefiguring

satellite television). This status is based on a short passage in Chapter 18 (‘The

Tempest’) mentioning the discovery, by ‘the elementary Spirits’ who people the land

explored in this imaginary voyage, of ‘a subtle material by means of which a picture is

formed in the twinkle of an eye’, a picture that enables the Spirits to ‘fix the fleeting

images’ reflected by sunbeams on ‘all polished surfaces’. This passage has been quoted in

the French literature on the invention of photography since Mayer & Pierson’s La

Photographie (1862)4 and, since Josef-Maria Eder (1895), has reached the international

historiography. Helmut Gernsheim labelled this passage ‘a remarkable forecast of

photography’, noting that it may have been inspired by another narrative of an

imaginary voyage, Les Aventures de Te�le�maque by Fe�nelon (1699), which described

the production of ‘ineffaceable images’ by frozen water in a basin of gold or silver.5

To my knowledge, there is no evidence that Nie�pce or his family owned, read or

even knew of this book, which was relatively obscure at the time of its publication.

Clearly, the connection invoked by Joyeux is based on ‘freedom of imagination’; but

its strategic position as a kind of emblem for Nie�pce’s whole project, and the

emphasis on Nie�pce’s own imagination as a child, on his reading and absorbing

Giphantie as a kind of inspiration for heliography, are all the more striking. Joyeux’s

book, in 1990, surfed on the wide renewal of interest in the history and especially the

invention of photography that occurred in the late 1980s in connection with the

sesquicentennial of Daguerre’s announcement, marked in France and elsewhere by a

number of large-scale exhibitions, publications and conferences.6 Ironically or not,

this imaginary and largely apocryphal biography of Nie�pce thus came to offset what

many in the field perceived, around 1989, as a decisive moment for the history of

photography – a moment when one could finally sense a true progress, if not of

‘definitive’ knowledge, at least of serious scholarship.7 To be sure, Joyeux’s book had

little success and certainly did not hamper the later progress of the photo-history

field. What remains significant, however, is the resurgence, in a context of increasing

scholarly rigour (and innovative scientific recreations of pioneer processes), of a

‘literary’ prehistory of photography – of a narrative that foregrounds not only a

literary source but a whole ‘literary’ method and context for the invention, presented

3 – Ibid., 8.

4 – Mayer and Pierson’s incorporation of

Giphantie into the history of photography

was based on a popular work of scientific

history or, rather, literary history of science,

significantly entitled ‘The Old-New’. See

Edouard Fournier, Le Vieux-Neuf. Histoire

ancienne des inventions et de�couvertesmodernes, vol. I, Paris: Dentu 1859, chap. 3,

18–21. Fournier, in turn, based himself on

the reprinting of the original in a local

magazine, which quoted the 1760 text. See

La Mosaıque de l’Ouest (1846–1847), 234;

and Charles-Francois Tiphaigne de la Roche,

Giphantie, 1st part, Paris: Durand 1760,

chap. 18, La Tempete, 131–5. I owe this

bibliographical information to Andre�

Gunthert. Mayer and Pierson’s account was

quoted in numerous subsequent nineteenth-

century French texts on photography, such

as Gaston Tissandier, La Photographie, Paris:

Hachette 1882, 10. A modern reprint of

Giphantie is to be found in an anthology of

utopian literature: Voyages aux pays de nulle

part, ed. Francis Lacassin, Paris: Laffont

‘Bouquins’ 1990. It is also found online.

5 – Helmut Gernsheim, The Origins of

Photography, London: Thames & Hudson

1982, 23 – which is the source for the English

quotation given above.

6 – See, for France, the conference

proceedings Les multiples inventions de la

photographie, Actes du colloque tenu a

Cerisy-la-Salle, 29 September–1 October

1988, Actes des colloques de la Direction du

Patrimoine n� 5, Paris: Ministere de la

Culture 1989; and the exhibition catalogue

by Michel Frizot et al., 1839, La Photographie

re�ve�le�e, Paris: Centre National de la

Photographie/Archives Nationales 1989. See

also proceedings of the conference at the

J. Paul Getty Museum, 30 January 1989:

Photography: Discovery and Invention,

Malibu, CA: The J. Paul GettyMuseum 1990.

7 – I remember Paul Jay, the founder and

curator of the ChalonMuseum and himself a

life-long devotee of Nie�pce’s biography,

lamenting to me about Joyeux’s book, in

1990: ‘and to think of all the effort we have all

made to correct the legends of photography’.

See Paul Jay, Nie�pce, Genese d’une invention,

Chalon-sur-Saone: Socie�te� des Amis du

Muse�e Nice�phore Nie�pce 1988.

369

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as the fruit of a child’s fancy rather than that of a scientist’s or technician’s reasoning.

This coincidence of the demands of scholarship and the appeal of fiction was

certainly not new; what is significant is that, by 1990, the literary prehistory remained

appealing enough to warrant the publication of a largely fraudulent account.

The most fundamental locus of the opposition (or, once again, the dialectics) of

‘photography as science’ and ‘photography as literature’ is, in my view, the pro-

tracted Franco-British battle over the ‘true’ inventor of photography, which among

other things was a battle about its prehistory – about how to write a cogent narrative

of the invention’s genesis. I ought to stress here that I do not read this opposition in

national terms, as if it pitted ‘science’ or ‘seriousness’ on one side of the Channel

(presumably France) and ‘literature’ or ‘playfulness’ on the other (presumably

England, with important Scottish ramifications) – although Arago, his clan, and a

whole French tradition after them did viewWilliamHenry Fox Talbot and even John

F.W. Herschel as amusing amateurs. What I am stressing, instead, is that the peculiar

sequence of events that started with Arago’s disclosure of Daguerre’s process on

7 January 1839 at the Acade�mie des Sciences and with Talbot’s immediate counter-

communication in London crystallised the need for both (and for all) contenders to

the title of ‘inventor’ to produce a plausible narrative of their inventions.

Furthermore, in these competing narratives, the alternative and complementary

demands of ‘fact’ and ‘fancy’ or ‘science’ and ‘literature’ were treated, on either

side of the Channel, in significantly diverging ways. The argument I have developed

elsewhere is that Arago and Talbot both recognised the ambivalence of the invention

between fact and dream or science and magic but ‘resolved’ this ambivalence in very

different, indeed opposite, ways.8

To simplify a complicated matter, Arago, in a somewhat overbearing rationalist

posture, took pains to distinguish between the positive invention, a verifiable and

repeatable fact, and the ‘old dream of mankind’ that had nourished and preceded it.

He took pains to stress, before the French Parliament, that ‘the dream has just been

realized’ – in other words, that the invention was not – no longer – a dream.9

Meanwhile, he was also the first, in the same speech, to relate this ‘dream’ to the

literature of alchemy, and to literature pure and simple, when he alluded to ‘the

extravagant conceptions of a Cyrano [de Bergerac] or a [John] Wilkins’.10 It seems

that Arago was exploiting that foil of darkness or legend to highlight the superior

power and clarity of the alliance of scientific discourse and inventive genius. More

pointedly even, Arago insisted further in his speech on the ‘unexpected’ as a source of

inventive progress, and gave the example of ‘some children accidentally [placing]

two lenses in opposite ends of a tube’ and thereby inventing the telescope.11 In his

1840 commentary on the daguerreotype, Edgar A. Poe picked up on this bit of

rationalist mystique and insisted: ‘it is the unforeseen upon which we must calculate

most largely’ – thus clearly indicating his reliance on Arago’s speech.12

As for William Henry Fox Talbot, he would certainly not have disagreed with

Poe’s trust in the unforeseen. His phrasing of photography’s dialectics, however, was

quite different. With a distinctly more Romantic and also more eclectic background

– including, most importantly, the fact that he was both inventor and commentator,

unlike the highly impractical Arago – Talbot insisted in his early writings, and most

remarkably in The Pencil of Nature, on the solidarity of dream and fact, ‘fancy’ and

‘method’, ‘magic’ and ‘deduction’.13 Accordingly, Talbot located the prehistory of

photography not in some anthropological, collective phantom, but – at least in part –

in his private ‘musings’ and desires, especially in the famous Lake Como episode.

And, as is well known, the very project of The Pencil of Nature was permeated with

the dialectics of science and literature and most beautifully inaugurated the colla-

boration of photography and writing.14 In sum: inmany ways, Talbot – and after him

an English-speaking tradition – gave free rein to an oscillation between ‘science’ and

‘literature’ that Arago – and after him a French tradition – preferred to censor, or,

more precisely, to domesticate. This, of course, reflects a larger epistemological, or

cultural, Franco-British divergence.

8 – See, on this episode, my narrative in

Francois Brunet, La Naissance de l’ide�e de

photographie, Paris: Presses Universitaires de

France 2000, 57–156; and a subsequent

elaboration of the literary opposition

between Arago and Talbot in Brunet,

Photography and Literature, 22–44; see also

Beaumont Newhall, Latent Image: The

Discovery of Photography, New York:

Doubleday 1967.

9 – I am quoting from the text known as

‘Arago’s Speech to the Chamber of

Deputies’, which was published in

Daguerre’s ‘manual’. L.-J.-M. Daguerre,

Historique et description des proce�de�s du

Daguerre�otype et du Diorama, Paris:

Alphonse Giroux 1839 (repr. La Rochelle:

Rumeur des ages, 1982). The quote on ‘the

dream’ is on 11. A slightly different version

of Arago’s ‘report’ appears in English

translation, in an abridged form, in Alan

Trachtenberg, ed., Classic Essays on

Photography, New Haven: Leete’s Island

Boooks 1980, 15–25.

10 – Arago, in Daguerre, Historique et

description. Cyrano de Bergerac was the

famed author of a Voyage dans la Lune

(Journey to the Moon) published in 1657.

John Wilkins, bishop of Chester, first

secretary of the Royal Society, published in

1638 and 1640 two books about ‘the

discovery of a world in the moon’, and in

1641 a treatise on cryptography entitled

Mercury, or The Secret and Swift Messenger,

which was well known in the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries; I thank AlexanderMarr

for this identification. See Brunet,

Photography and Literature, 24, for

illustrations from these classic works of

fantasy.

11 – Arago, in Trachtenberg, Classic Essays,

22.

12 – Ibid., 38.

13 – See W. H. F. Talbot, ‘A Brief

Historical Sketch of the Invention of the

Art’, ibid., 27– 36.

14 – See Brunet, La Naissance, 139–56; and

Brunet, Photography and Literature, 37–44.

370

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From Arago’s academic historiographic efforts to late-nineteenth-century pop-

ular narratives of the invention,15 it seems, particularly in France, that the mounting

scholarly investigation into the prehistory and genesis of photography not only did

not extinguish but often integrated or at least fostered literary embellishments and

excavations. This phenomenon, of course, is verified in the nineteenth-century

historiography of technology at large, construed as a gallery of wonders and quasi

magical revelations and transformations. At stake here was the urge to reconcile the

emerging power of science with a common culture; this effort, in the nineteenth

century at least, typically took the form of narrative and romance. But photography

was peculiar in that, as Jennifer Green-Lewis has shown, it seemed to call into

question the ‘agency of creation’ – human or natural – and therefore was easily

turned into an emblem for aesthetic discussions, especially in the British Isles.16

Among these French literary elaborations of the prehistory and genesis of

photography, and leaving aside the treatments of photography offered in main-

stream and highbrow literature,17 I propose to identify several distinct genres, or

sub-genres:

(a) Biographical accounts of the French inventors dramatising ‘accidental’ or‘serendipitous’ circumstances leading them to major breakthroughs in theinventive process, and forming together an Arabesque tale, in Poe’s sense, ofmiraculous discovery (Nie�pce’s accidental experiments with the bitumen,Daguerre’s silver spoon, a mysterious ‘visitor’ to the optician Lemaıtre, etc.).18

(b) Narratives of unrecognised inventions and inventors of photography (the longlist of which is still expanding today19), typically striving, as Talbot and Bayardfirst did in 1839, to counter the institutional weight of the French Academy’ssanction of Daguerre and Nie�pce by biographical or autobiographical mem-oirs. In such memoirs, these unrecognised fathers inevitably cast themselves, orwere cast by biographers, as claimants and adversaries of the official, academicnarrative, and more often than not as literary personae (a most egregious casebeing the French Brazilian inventor Hercules Florence; but the list is by nomeans limited to French people).

(c) ‘Dissertations on photography’ (to use the title of an 1864 essay by AlexandreKen), ‘scientific recreations’20 and journalistic anecdotes of photographic life,such as the critic Francis Wey’s 1853 article ‘Comment le soleil est devenupeintre’ (‘How the Sun Became Painter’21), which often included semi-fictionaltreatments of the dawn of photography.

(d) Among literary premonitions properly called, I have already alluded to thesuccess of the invention of Tiphaigne de la Roche as a precursor of photo-graphy, which first became widely known in Mayer and Pierson’s 1862 treatiseon photography; that is, a few years before Victor Fouque published his Ve�rite�sur l’invention de la photographie (1867), a work of rehabilitation of Nie�pceagainst Daguerre that, by contrast, was on the side of ‘serious’ scholarship.Another appealing source was the alchemical literature.22

In the works of Mayer and Pierson, Louis Figuier, or Gaston Tissandier, as in

many professional and popular compendia on the art of photography – in France but

also in Britain and elsewhere – one senses the urge to counter the scientific or

academic account of photography with a reservoir of legends, perhaps to humanise

it, but also to suggest photography’s universality: as project, allegedly grounded in a

transhistorical and transcultural ‘dream of mankind’; as culture, rhetorically unify-

ing, under the guise for example of its endless ‘applications’, the rapidly diverging

professions and discourses of science and literature, as well as, of course, science and

art. Incidentally, the de-emphasising or even debunking of academic discourse by

literary anecdote probably also served a semi-conscious political purpose, namely the

goal, shared by many photographers and photographic commentators in the nine-

teenth century, to keep photography a layman’s or a poor man’s art; but this is

another subject.23

15 – Such as the Epinal comic strip poster on

‘The History of Photography’ (1880s)

studied by Michel Frizot in ‘L’invention de

l’invention’, in Les multiples inventions de la

photographie, 103–8.

16 – Jennifer Green-Lewis, Framing the

Victorians: Photography and the Culture of

Realism, London: Cornell University Press

1996.

17 – Several French literary historians have

recently discussed the presence of

photography in nineteenth-century French

literature: see especially Philippe Ortel, La

Litte�rature a l’ere de la photographie. Enquetesur une re�volution invisible, Nımes: e�ditions

Jacqueline Chambon 2001; and Je�rome

The�lot, Les inventions litte�raires de la

photographie, Paris: Presses universitaires de

France, 2004. On French literary images of

science and their magical resonances, see

Yves Vade�, L’enchantement litte�raire: e�criture

et magie de Chateaubriand a Rimbaud, Paris:

Gallimard 1990.

18 – See Andre� Gunthert, ‘L’inventeur

inconnu, Louis Figuier et la constitution

de l’histoire de la photographie

francaise’, Etudes Photographiques, 16

(May 2005), 6–18.

19 – See Sylvain Morand, ‘1839: hasard ou

de�terminisme ine�luctable?’, in Les Multiples

inventions de la photographie, 53–8; see also

the new precursors claimed by Zannier in Il

sogno.

20 – See Cle�ment Che�roux, ‘Les re�cre�ations

photographiques. Un re�pertoire de formes

pour les avant-gardes’, Etudes

Photographiques, 5 (November 1998), 72–96.

21 – Francis Wey, ‘Comment le soleil est

devenu peintre. Histoire du daguerre�otype et

de la photographie’, Muse�e des Familles, 20

(July 1853), 289–300; one of the illustrations

from this article is reproduced in Brunet,

Photography and Literature, 26.

22 – This particular genealogy, which

originated in Arago’s 1839 report, deserves

further comment; there are interesting

suggestions in that direction in Zannier’s Il

sogno.

23 – See Brunet, Naissance, esp. 220–7.

371

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So far I have dwelt mostly on the French tradition, and its fashion of fore-

grounding the ‘imaginary’ or ‘legendary’ part of photography’s past against its

reduction by academic discourse – an academic discourse that had defined itself,

in part, by its ability to extricate itself decisively from ‘literature’. I have also

suggested, although much too briefly, that in the English-speaking world – at least

in the British Isles – as shown by a whole lineage of photographic authors from

Talbot, Herschel, and, of course, Sir David Brewster to H. G. Wells and Arthur

Conan Doyle, the interplay of ‘photography as science’ and ‘photography as litera-

ture’ was more spontaneous (and often more concrete and more fruitful). To close

these fragmentary remarks, I will turn to a significant twist in the construction of

photography’s prehistories, associated with the German-speaking historiographical

tradition from Hermann Vogel and Josef-Maria Eder to Helmut Gernsheim.

At the risk of oversimplification, I would define this twist, first of all, as the

exponential expansion of photography’s prehistory, which in the last version of

Eder’s history (1932) occupied more than a hundred pages and definitely pushed

back the chronological and geographical limits of the photographic project. Eder not

only showed that the principle of the camera obscura had been transmitted from

Aristotle through medieval Arab optics. He also found a premonition of photo-

graphic chemistry in some particularly obscure verses by the Roman poet Statius

(first century AD). Gernsheim similarly devoted a long first chapter to ‘the prehistory

of photography’ and included therein many literary sources going back to ancient

times. Other historians have found similar premonitions in classical Asian texts.

More significant, however, than this documentary expansion is the fact that in Eder,

as in Gernsheim, the French rationalist hiatus between ‘dream’ and ‘fact’ is resolved

to the point of becoming invisible, as if there were a seamless continuity between

Statius, Alhazen, Bacon, della Porta, Fe�nelon, Newton, and so forth, and Nie�pce or

Talbot.

In Arago’s narrative, and even more clearly in Figuier’s or Tissandier’s, the

literary prehistory is a foil, or at least a backdrop, serving to highlight the uniquely

successful and uniquely modern achievement of technology and its scientific guar-

dian angel. In Eder and in Gernsheim, literary and other premonitions become

elementary stepping stones in a process that is presented as transcending space and

time, indeed transcending matter. Ironically, for a historiographical tradition that

has often been labelled ‘technical history’, the material and technical elements of

technology tend to become secondary and the history of photography’s invention

becomes that of its discovery – the slow and continuous unveiling of an idea, indeed

of a human archetype. This tradition, relying primarily on textual sources that it

reads with equal patience and seriousness, thus tends to abolish (only in part, of

course) the explosive character of the announcements of 1839, and, by the same

token, the marvellous dimension that motivated nineteenth-century ‘literary’ treat-

ments of photography. If, to quote Helmut Gernsheim, ‘the circumstance that

photography was not invented earlier remains the greatest mystery in its history’,24

then the narrative of its invention – whether autobiographical and Romantic

(Talbot) or patronising and rationalist (Arago) – becomes a futile tale. But as

Joyeux and Zannier remind us, the sheer force of the event is still enough to motivate

both the exhumation of old tales and the writing of new ones about photography’s

birth.

24 – Gernsheim, The Origins, 6.

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