This publication is made possible by the Brigitte

Schenk Gallery, Cologne, to mark Derek Ogbournes

exhibition, The Museum of Optography.

The Shutter of Death

An Investigation into Optography

Derek Ogbourne

The Shutter of Death

An Investigation into Optography
Copyright Derek Ogbourne, 2007
This publication is made possible by the
Gallerie Brigitte Schenk, Cologne.

All Rights Reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form,
by photocopying or by any electronic or mechanical means,
including information storage or retrieval systems,
without permission in writing from both the copyright
owner and the publisher of this book.
The Shutter of Death
An Investigation into Optography
Copyright Derek Ogbourne, 2007
ISBN 0-9554796-3-0
First Published March 2007

ISBN 0-9554796-3-0

First Published
by Lulu.com

Printed in the UK for Lulu.com

The Shutter of Death

An Investigation into Optography

Contents

The Shutter of Death, Derek Ogbourne............................................ 5

Optography, Evangelos Alexandridis.............................................. 8
The Optograms of Dr. Evangelos Alexandridis..................................10
The Human Optogram......................................................................18
The case of Erhard Gustav Reif....................................................20
The Eye as Inscription Device in the 1870s:
Optograms, Cameras and the Photochemistry of
Vision, Richard L Kremer................................................................. 31
Email conversation between
Derek Ogbourne and Thom Kubli.................................................... 48
A Retinal Tattoo of Light, Susana Medina........................................ 52
Retinal 140, Derek Ogbourne.......................................................... 55
The Dal Tape (Transcript).............................................................. 106
Drawings by Derek Ogbourne........................................................ 110
The eye and the Camera, Khne with his optogram...................... 116
Optography: A Technology of Perception, Ali Hossaini........... 118
My Debt to Optography, Richard Niman.......................... ...... 144
Musings on Optograms, the ideal death, the ideal work of art
and the Museum of Optography, Paul Sakoilsky......................... 148
The Museum of Optography, Installation shots............................ 158
Hymn, Video Transcript, Derek Ogbourne..................................... 164

optogram /optogram/ (optogram) The retinal image formed

by the bleaching of visual purple
under the influence of light.

www.thefreedictionary.com

Optography \Op*togra*phy\,
n. [Optic + -graphy.] (Physiol.)
The production of an optogram
on the retina by the
photochemical action of light on
the visual purple; the
fixation of an image in the eye.
The object so photographed
shows white on a purple or red
background. See Visual
purple
www.dict.die.net

The
Shutter
of
Death
Heidelberg 2007

It all started about seven years ago. It was a small article in a Time-Life
book that got me obsessed about optography:
A Jesuit Friar called Christopher Schiener made an amazing observation
in the mid 17th Century whereby he had observed an image laid bare
on the retina of a frog, a faint, fleeting record of what the eye had been
fixed on at the moment its owner had died. It was rumoured it became
possible to fix this image and create what is termed an Optogram. (TimeLife, 1970)

Soon after reading the above, I contacted the Institute of
Ophthalmology, London. They knew nothing about the phenomena but
this did not stop me wanting to know more about optography. To my
amazement, I found very little at the time. Although the image of the
killer in the dead mans eye has held steady within popular myth since
the 1860s and James Joyce, amongst other writers, makes reference
to optography in Ulysses, the Internet had only one article: Optograms
and Fiction by Dr. Arthur B Evans. This still left me unsure up until very
recently as to whether these strange traces of the external world could be
produced at all.

Just prior to my new interest in all things optographic, I had been
working on a project with the artist Brian Williams called Frankensteins
Kitchen, an art project that was about making a living self-sustaining
sculpture, or a form that had properties that behaved like a living system.
It was a natural evolution from my painting onwards to gravitate towards
the organic, the physical, the close up, as well as the persistent fascination
with very small units of time, all clearly present in the recent drawings and
videos.

I came to a dead end with my research and my desire to actually
produce optograms came to a halt mainly down to ethical grounds in dealing
with grant bodies and institutions. At that point, my grant applications were


alluding to an intent to actually produce

optograms. My recent acquisition of
two rabbits, Jessica and Cinnamon,
now offers tantalising possibilities, but I
have a conflict of intent, I dont think you
should kill for arts sake.

Six or so years passed, many
video works.

In June 2005, I was in an art
show at the Brigitte Schenk Gallery,
Cologne. On telling one of my fellow
participating artists, Thom Kubli, about
optography, by some sort of morphic
resonance it turned out that his mother
had met the scientist Dr. Alexandridis
when he had had a crash in the snow
with some friends right in front of her
house in Heidelberg.

This rekindled my interest
in optography after a few years of
sabbatical. I wrote to Dr. Alexandridis, Old Bruchsal Prison 1880s
I gather probably the only person alive
now who has actually produced optograms. He kindly agreed to see me
with Thom in Heidelberg. We were now like fans (see conversation on
page 48).
The Physiologist Wilhelm Khne had made the first and most successful
visually identifiable optograms recorded as drawings in the late 1870s in
Heidelberg. He had also obtained the only known Human Optogram in a
nearby town of Bruchsal (see page 18).

My trip was set at long last. I was an artist explorer, a detective
bringing form to the formless. Being a romantic I wanted to go where it had
all happened.

In early June 2006, I made a visit to the University City of Heidelberg
with the intention of documenting further my research into optography and
its main protagonists.

My mission in Heidelberg was twofold: to visit Dr. Alexandridis
in order to establish once and for all whether it was really possible to
produce optograms and to investigate The Human Optogram, a rather
amorphous drawing recovered by George Wald in 1953. This led me to
the small town of Bruchsal where a young man (I now know his name
was Erhard Gustav Reif) was executed in 1880 for murder. His retina was
extracted by Khne and the optogram revealed. I traced the old prison
and the site where the guillotine was placed and I interviewed Dr. Erich
Viehfer, the curator of a prison museum nearby in Ludwigsburg, and
a local historian, Thomas Moos, in Bruchsal. I learnt that the process
of obtaining optograms was straightforward and not rocket science but

more akin to an amateur photographic lab with red safe light. I left with
a borrowed set of four optograms made in 1975 by Dr. Alexandridis that
appear in my Museum of Optography shows. The Human Optogram story
was and still is a detective story about a man, Erhard Gustav Reif, who
after his wifes death had killed his two children in the Old Rhine faced his
death without a concept that an artist a hundred and twenty-seven years
later would be remotely viewing his last moments and seeing the last thing
he saw as he, with remorse of his crime, ceased to be. His retina, drawn
by William Khne, appears in this book and is the only human optogram
available.

My research has continued in London with the generous assistance
of Alexandra Veith, a librarian at The Medical Library in Heidelberg, who
passes me little gems of archival material every now and then.

The Museum of Optography is a series of art shows that explore
optographys visual extrapolations, playing with myth, romanticism,
science and perception towards a body of work that constitutes a visual
and auditory archive, some elements of which appear in this book.

What fascinates me about optography is that the optogram exists
within the fine line between being and not being. It is within every gaze that
contemplates death. We imagine death, we imagine when and where. This
project is about imagination and death. As a poetic metaphor, optography
suggests a series of associations: the eye is a camera; the eyelid, the
shutter, the moment of retreat into the internal, the virtual and eventually,
a real death moment. It was apt that the mode of execution in Bruchsal
was by guillotine, the fall of the blade echoing the fall of the shutter. The
dying gaze captured in the instant of separation of head from body. How
close was Barthes to the truth with his Camera Lucida, where he equated
photography with death.
To produce optograms now is to kill the myth. Therefore the
ambiguity becomes more interesting, although as I have mentioned earlier
the process is very simple, albeit unpredictable with result.

The Shutter of Death started as an alternative way of presenting
the hundred and forty retinal drawings I had produced in two sketchbooks
for the first of my Museum of Optography shows at the Brigitte Schenk
Gallery, Cologne, and the Carter Presents Gallery, London. This edition is
part of a work in progress, to which hopefully more work will be added at a
later stage. Books have to go to press and the research is continuous, so
this is a snapshot from varied disciplines approaching the same subject,
a subject that is complicit in the blink of an eye. These insights into the
various histories that form the myth and the reality of the optogram are
from the following contributors: a scientist, Dr. Evangelos Alexandridis;
a historian, Professor Richard Kremer; a philosopher, Dr. Ali Hossaini; a
fiction writer, Dr. Susana Medina, and artists Paul Sakoilsky, Thom Kubli
and Richard Niman. Thanks to all for contributing to this book.
Derek Ogbourne, 2007


Optography
Optography results from the bleaching of the rhodopsin in those
areas of the retina that have been directly affected by light. Rhodopsin
is a light sensitive chemical substance by which the rods of the retina
can distinguish in twilight between bright and dark. Bright spots in
an optogramm correspond to the area where the rhodopsin has
been bleached by light, dark spots designate the sector in which
the rhodopsin is still intact. Unlike photography where the film is
produced as a negative, optography generates a positive. A bright
object appears bright, whereas darker motifs result darker because
of the lower bleaching effect of dark colours.
About 130 years ago, the physiologist Willy Khne (1837-1900) from
the University of Heidelberg discovered this phenomenon by accident.
On the retina of a frog, he was able to detect the image of a gas flame
the frog had been staring at for a while before it was killed in the
laboratory. To confirm his observation, Khne conducted subsequent
experiments with rabbits. In a dark room, he placed the animals in
front of a bright window for a certain amount of time, killed them and
removed still in the dark their eye bulb. The image of the window
appeared clearly on the isolated retina as a bright quadrangular spot.
Khne called this image optogramm.
By the middle of the 20th century other scholars were also able to
obtain optogramms on animal retinas. The possibility to uncover
previously seen objects on the retina of a creature especially inspired
the imagination of criminologists. In the mid-1970s they contacted
the ophthalmic hospital of the University of Heidelberg requesting
whether and to what extent it would be possible to detect objects
or men on the retina of a murdered person, that this person had
seen immediately before being killed. We considered this to be a
very interesting question and revived Khnes research to clarify the
conditions on which an optogramm could be obtained.
Like Khne, we also used rabbits for our experiments. We
anaesthetised the animals and located them in front of a screen on
which patterns rich in contrast were projected. After a certain amount
of time we killed the animals in the dark, only using illumination
available in a photographic darkroom. We quickly removed their eye
bulbs and detached the anterior part of the eye and the vitreous.

The rear part of the bulb with the retina was put into a 14% potassic
alum solution for 24 hours. After that we isolated the retina, tightened
it on a ball that had the same dimensions as the eye bulb, and let it
dry in the dark.
The original optogramms are not very light-resistant. Therefore we
took photographs of the results that show the patterns the rabbits
had been looking at. For this experiment we also used a portrait of
Salvador Dal as pattern that I had drawn with a black 1,5mm pencil
on white paper. In this case we took a coloured photograph of the
optogramm.
The criminologists, however, had to abandon their hope to see the
image of a murderer on the retina of his or her victim. Although
this remains a theoretical possibility, it is impossible to obtain an
optogramm that would be usable for forensic purposes. The creation
of a readable optogramm depends on a multitude of prerequisites
that can be provided only in a laboratory. And how many murderers
oblige their prosecutors by working under laboratory conditions?
Evangelos Alexandridis, Heidelberg

The Optograms of
Dr. Evangelos Alexandridis,
Heidelberg,1975.

Optogram 1
75

10

Optogram 1
75

11

Optogram 2
Salvador Dal

12

13

Optogram 3
Salvador Dal 2, photographed in daylight.

14

15

Optogram 4
Checkerboard Pattern

16

17

The Human Optogram

George Wald, !953

In the nearby town of Bruchsal on

November 16, 1880, a young-man was
beheaded by guillotine. Wilhelm Kuhne
had made arrangements to receive
the corpse. He had prepared a dimly
lighted room screened with red and
yellow glass to keep any rhodopsin left
in the eyes from bleaching further. Ten minutes
after the knife had fallen he obtained the whole
retina from the left eye and had the satisfaction
of seeing and showing to several colleagues a
sharply demarcated optogram printed upon its
surface. Khnes drawing of it is reproduced
here. To my knowledge it is the only human
optogram on record. Khne went to great pains
to determine what this optogram represented. He
says: A search for the object which served as
a source for this optogram remained fruitless,
in spite of a thorough inventory of all the
surroundings and reports for many witnesses.
The delinquent had spent the night awake by
the light of a tallow candle; he slept from four
to five oclock in the morning;
and had read and written, first
by candlelight until dawn, then
by feeble daylight until eight
oclock. When he emerged in
the open, the sun came out
for an instant, according to
a reliable observer, the sky
became somewhat brighter
during the seven minutes prior
to the bandaging of his eyes and
his execution, which followed
immediately. The delinquent,
however, raised his eyes only
rarely.

Sec3:18

Investigations from the Physiological Institute of

The University of Heidelberg.
William Khne, 1881.

Portion of text from the chapter: Anatomical and physiological

observations of the retina showing the human optogram.
19

20

The opening page of the trial of Erhard

Gustav Reif in Karlsruhe, Germany, 1880
for murder.
The 31 Year old from Hausen was
beheaded by guillotine on the 16th
November at 8am in Bruchsal Prison
Courtyard, in front of a crowd of 70 people.
After the death of his wife he had drowned
his two youngest children in the Old Rhine
at Maxau, Germany.
Ten minutes after the blade had severed
Reifs head from his body, Wilhelm Khne
extracted the left eye to reveal the only
known human
optogram.

21

22
A typical Bruchsal Prison cell of the 1880s.

(Above) The Guillotine that was used on Erhard.

23

(Below) Bruchsal Old Prison today.

24

Cutting of the Karlsruhe newspaper no. 271 of Tuesday

November 16th, 1880.

Chronicle of Baden
Karlsruhe, Nov. 14th. Through the sentence of the Assize Court
of Karlsruhe Sept. 30th 1880, Erhard Gustav Reif of Hausen,
who on July 27th 1880 drowned his two youngest Children in
the Old-Rhine at Maxau, was sentenced to the death penalty for
double murder. According to former ordained law corresponding
to this Country each death penalty needs its validity by rule of
law corresponding to its sovereign County. These provisions are
annihilated by the Reich- Strafprozeordnung1 that has come
into effect since October 1st, 1879 as criminal procedure, now
the execution is only permitted once the resolution has been
dictated by the Head of State not to make use of the prerogative
of mercy. In the above mentioned Assize Court the case heard
by a court jury is now the decisive question, if in the social
circumstances of the criminal, in the acts and circumstances of
this horrible crime a reason can be found to apply mercy instead
of the law in face of the claims of criminal jurisdiction and the
judgement of the court, has been negated and according to
the highest decision of the Ministry of State on the 9th of this
month, the petition for mercy by Reif has not been followed.
This decision was communicated to Reif today. The execution
of the death penalty will be effected on Tuesday 16th of this
month, at 8 oclock in the morning, in the courtyard of the jail of
Bruchsal.

After October 1, 1879 there was a new code of criminal procedure

which was called Reichs-Strafprozeordnung.
1

25

Karlsruher Zeitung, November1880.

26

Karlsruhe, Nov. 17th. The execution due to repeated murder and

sentenced to death of the iron founder Erhard Reif from Hausen, took
place on Nov.16th at 8 oclock in the morning in the courtyard of the jail
of Bruchsal. The execution was according to the decree of April 12th
1856 to the extent that the regulations had not been cancelled by the
German Code of Criminal procedure. The act assisted by paragraph
486 St.V.D. of the criminal procedure of designated persons. The
Administration was in the hands of the Public Prosecutors office.
Punctually at 8 oclock the assigned participants entered, getting
to an elevated position right next to the guillotine, while Erhard Reif
entered accompanied by a priest. Reif who lately had shown a sincere
regret about his crime, seemed tranquil, prepared and listened, without
any expression, to the repeated reading of his sentence which included
the prerogative of mercy by the Ministerial Head of State. Afterwards,
the public processor took a black bar, broke it in two and threw it at
Reifs feet with the words: Your life has finished, may God protect your
soul.
The priest prayed with Reif and told him that however horrible his
crime had been, he should trust in Gods mercifulness. Then the public
processor passed Reif on to the executioner with the order to effect the
death penalty. Reif stepped firmly on to the guillotine without making
a sound of pain or complaint while he was buckled to the board. The
priest stood beside him until the hatchet had fallen.
The whole act, which lasted about a quarter of an hour, while a
bell rang, was closed with a prayer. Apart from the court personalities,
70 persons were present.
a

Investigations from the Physiological Institute of

The University of Heidelberg.
William Khne, 1881.

28

Observations
for Anatomy and Physiology of the Retina
By
W. Khne
1. Retina of Humans
On Nov.16th 1880 in Bruchsal after the execution was carried
out on a healthy 31 year old man there was the opportunity
to explore a fresh retina, whose function was proved exactly
before death. Three Minutes after the hatchet had dropped
and separated the head below the medulla oblongata,
no more reflexes were produced by the body, not even a
sudden contraction of the anterior muscles of the thigh, (knee
phenomenon). During the Enucleation of the eye, violent
and disturbing movements surrounding the eye still could
be seen. The preparation happened in a weakly illuminated
room, behind a screen of red and yellow glass. About 10
min. after death, the retina of the left eye (the right eye
was reserved for other purposes) and after drilling the pupil
and after removing under saltwater the remarkably loosely
clasped vitreous humour, until the Equatorial cuts were
completely preserved, with the back side turned towards
the top side. With the exception of the macula lutea and
its nearest surroundings appeared the bacillus level evenly
light pink,
a little lighter as with dark eyes, though
intense
enough, to recognize in the lower
outside
parts, a sharp-limited Optogramm,
w h i c h
could be demonstrated before several
colleagues. The form of the tiny picture
was like
this, of 2 and 3-4 mm side length;
as
the
rod cell which showed itself entirely
within the colourless space, suggesting that this is not a
Pseudooptogramm. On this cloudy autumn morning the
figure remained visible for about 5 min.

29

A straight jacket once used to constrain prisoners in Bruchsal.

The difficulty of obtaining a clearly defined optogram was
highlighted by Dr. Alexandridis. To obtain satisfactory results
the blood circulation has to be cut of for the head. Death
by hanging or being constrained hightens the possibility of
success in producing an optogram.

30

The Eye as Inscription Device in the 1870s:

Optograms, Cameras and the Photochemistry of Vision

Richard L. Kremer

31

In April of 1877, the Berlin newspapers were filled with reports of a particularly
gruesome murder. Frau von Sabatzky, a seventy-two year old widow, had
been killed in her shop by someone who horribly mutilated her body and then
escaped without leaving a clue as to motive or identity. By offering a large
monetary reward, the police had persuaded bystanders to name many suspects
who were duly arrested and questioned. But the newspapers also noted that
an entirely new forensic technique had been used in the case: To leave no
stone unturned, the police photographed the eye of the body immediately
after it was found, for as is known, scientific authorities claim that the final
image seen before death is imprinted on the victims eye. Despite particularly
favourable circumstances, however, the image gave no clues. The case
remained unresolved.
The new forensic tool, which apparently could not identify Sabatzkys
murderer, was the recent discovery of what Willy Khne called optography. In
the rods of the retina a colored pigment had been found which rapidly bleaches
to become transparent when illuminated by light. Varying intensities of light
produce varying degrees of bleaching, so that an image passing through the
dioptric (lens) apparatus of the eye could literally be fixed on the retina, just as
the film in a camera fixes the image arranged by its lens. The eye, in 1877,
had become a complete camera, and not only the police were fascinated by
the new technology. As R. Steven Turner has shown in a survey of nineteenthcentury physiological optics, nearly ten percent of all publications in that field,
from 1875 to 1879, were devoted to the study of this new pigment, called by
Khne visual purple (later rhodopsin). The optogram, or image fixed on the
visual purple, had taken the worlds of police science and physiology by storm.
In this paper, I want to explore the significance of this discovery within
the larger patterns of change in the life sciences of the nineteenth century. In
addition to examining the reductionist intersections of physics, chemistry and
physiology in this case study, I will suggest that especially Khnes presentation
of the discovery reveals two other equally important intersections: the longstanding effort to model physiological explanation on mechanical systems, and
the emergence of a new moral economy of science in which a new type of
objectivity is being imported into the practice of physiological optics. After the
optogram, the eye became not only a camera, but also an inscription device,
to use Bruno Latours and Steve Woolgars term, which could directly inscribe
the phenomena of vision without the intervention of the subject whose eye was
being investigated or the experimenter arranging the phenomenon. Before
considering these latter two intersections, however, let me sketch briefly the
steps by which visual purple and the optogram appeared on the stage of
sensory physiology in 1876-77.

It was not Khne but the young Franz Boll (1849-1879), since 1873
extraordinary professor of comparative anatomy and physiology in Rome, who
in November of 1876 announced the best discovery that I have yet made- a
light-sensitive pigment in the retina. Bolls initial contexts were histological and
physical reductionist.

32

He had begun his university studies at Bonn under Max Schultze, the leading
microscopist of the 1860s who had explored morphological structures of the
retina, especially the rods and cones. From 1871-73, Boll had worked as
an assistant to Emil Du Bois-Reymond in Berlin and had published important
physical and histological studies of the electric torpedo fish. In addition, Boll
had spent one semester (summer 1868) studying with Hermann Helmholtz
in Heidelberg. In Bonn, Boll had explored microscopically the nerve endings
in teeth and glands; in 1871, he tried by means of dioptric experiments on
compound eyes of amphibians to determine where the light-sensitive layer is
located in the retina. In 1876 he returned to these issues, seeking to confirm
Heinrich Mllers 1853 suggestion that the rods and cones are the end organs
of the optic nerve. Significantly, Boll in his early researches had devoted little
attention to physiological chemistry.
While preparing frog retinas for these in vitro histological investigations,
Boll accidentally and to his considerable astonishment noticed a purplish
red pigment which bleached transparent about 40 to 60 seconds after the
retina had been removed from the living frogs eye. Microscopic examination
revealed that only the rods contained the bleachable material. At first, Boll
attributed the bleaching simply to the death of the retina. But after finding
that the time required for complete bleaching varied dramatically between
clear and cloudy days, he reversed himself and concluded that ambient light
rather than death prompts the bleaching. Indeed, retinas removed from the
eye and kept in complete darkness could preserve for up to twenty-four hours
their reddish hue, which then would disappear in seconds upon exposure to
bright sunlight. Boll also found that live frogs, placed in sunlight before being
sectioned, had their retinal pigment bleached. Further experiments on live
frogs, placed first in bright light and then in darkness before having their retinas
removed, showed that the bleaching process was reversible, that the reddish
colour again appeared on rod ends which had been restored to darkness. As
a final proof that the pigment in question was light-sensitive, Boll exposed only
a narrow strip of a retina to sunlight, and found that only that strip, and not the
entire retina, bleached transparent. In other words, he fixed an image on the
retinal pigment, the process Khne soon would christen as optography.
It is, however, not merely these findings but Bolls public presentation of
his discovery that is especially important for our purposes. From the beginning
Boll assumed that the objective change of the rods by light unquestionably forms
part of the [subjective] act of seeing. This was a very bold claim since Boll could
not find any visual pigment in the cones, those retinal elements concentrated
in the centre of the eye where humans see most acutely. Furthermore, even
the reality of a light-sensitive pigment might seem implausible, since as Boll
admitted numerous histologists before him had failed to find the element in
their studies of the retina. To legitimate his claims Boll thus sought to situate
his discovery within several broader contexts: the so-called Young-Helmholtz
theory of trichromatic colour vision, Du Bois-Reymonds physicalist program
of physiological investigation, an epistemological tradition relating sensations

33

to external objects, and an artistic tradition of histological illustration.

These contexts provided not only the language and concepts but also the
experimental space in which Boll initially presented and then experimentally
explored his discovery.

First, Boll asked whether the bleaching process depends on the
wavelength of the light striking the retina. Further experiments on frogs
kept in variously colored containers revealed that the longer the wavelength,
the shorter the exposure time required for bleaching. Boll grouped his
wavelengths into three sets of colored lights, and suggested that these
groups might be identical to the three basic colors of the Young-Helmholtz
theory. In an unfinished essay published posthumously in 1881 by DuBois Reymond and Helmholtz, Boll began to work out a grand scheme for
correlating three anatomical elements in the retina (rods, cones, pigment
epithelium) with the tripartate color sensors required for Helmholtzs theory
of color vision. By linking the bleaching pigments to the Young-Helmholtz
theory then being hotly contested, Boll thus created a significance for his
discovery which extended far beyond its immediate histological context.

Second, Boll asked whether the change in color of the retinal pigment
was a photochemical process, resulting from inherent chemical alteration
of the material or a photophysical change arising from optical interference
effects produced by the well-known layered platelets at the end of the rods.
Bolls reported experiments seemed to favor the latter alternative: ultraviolet
light did not bleach the retina, unlike the photochemical case where such
rays do expose photographic film; physical pressure on the rods (simply
squeezing the cover glass over the slide) could instantly erase the red color;
and Boll, admitting his general ignorance of physiological chemistry, found
that he could not extract the active substance from the rods with any standard
chemical reagent. Yet he also reported that a yellow pigment in oil droplets
located in the retina appeared to regenerate the visual red, a fact which,
he ambiguously stated, made the photochemical theory of light sensation
extremely probable. Despite these conflicting accounts of the mechanism
behind the bleaching of the red pigment, Boll nonetheless concluded that
he had proved for sensory organs, as had Du Bois-Remond for muscles,
that the physiological states of rest and activity correspond to very specific
material, physical, chemical and anatomical changes. Boll thus explicitly
linked his find to Du Bois-Reymonds program.

Boll also tied his discovery to the long-standing question of the
relationship between material changes in sensory organs and the quality
and nature of the sensation produced. According to what Boll called the
interpretation theory of Johannes Mller and Helmholtz, the objective
nature of the sign and the way in which the mind interprets the sign were
not identical but only symbolically related. Yet the discovery of the retinal
pigment, Boll asserted, seemed to support an identity theory in which a
definite and necessary relationship existed between mental representation

34

and material processes in the sensory organs. That is, Boll seemed at least
implicitly to be aligning himself with Ewald Hering and against Helmholtz in
the battle between nativism and empiricism which during the 1870s had
been rocking sensory physiology. Although visual red might provide support
for Helmholtzs theory of color vision, it also could reduce the role of mind
which Helmholtz had made so central in his views of the visual process.

Finally, by means of the illustrations which accompanied his essays
on the red pigment, Boll situated himself within an earlier anatomical
and histological visual tradition which Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison
recently have described as the presentation of ideal images. Tracing this
tradition through anatomical atlases of the eighteenth-century, Daston and
Galison suggest that these image makers sought to depict not any particular
individual but rather a normative, perfect, ideal speciman. By means of
judgment and art, such enhanced images were intended to enable viewers to
see the essentials or universals rather than the particulars of nature. These
visual representations embodied both ontological and ethical commitments-about what nature is and about the responsibility of the observer to distill
the ideal nature from the messiness of experience.

From the beginning Boll had worried about the credibility of his
reports and about how to convey the essense of his discovery. He admitted
that when attempting to demonstrate the pigment in freshly prepared frogs
retinas to Berlins scientific elite-- Helmholtz, Du Bois-Reymond and Nathanael
Pringsheim--he had sacrificed in vain nearly half a dozen frogs before the
desired phenomenon appeared. Boll called in other prominent witnesses
also to authenticate his discovery. The Rome professor of physics, Pietro
Blaserna, confirmed the hue of the colored glasses Boll used as filters to
illuminate retinas with nearly monochromatic light. And Boll publicly thanked
the well-known Berlin sculptor, Louis Sussmann-Hellborn, for assisting in
my experiments, and for completing the plate after the determination of the
observed nuances of color. Writing privately to Du Bois-Reymond, Boll
admitted that Sussmann-Hellborn could better identify the hues than could
Boll, and that a division of labor between preparer and artistic interpreter
[knstlerischer Darsteller] was required. Indeed so problematic was this
determination of hue that Boll even changed his mind on the color of the
retinal pigment, calling it purplish red in his first announcement and then
red in his subsequent publications.

The illustration Boll presented with his paper reflects a similar
concern to stabilize the experimental situation (see Fig. 1). On a single
engraved plate he presented rectangular colored swatches of the hues
assumed by the retinal pigment at various stages of its bleaching process.
He also offered drawings of cross sections of frog retinas, depicting
microscopically magnified views of the rods (albeit in a rectangular rather
than circular format which he would have seen through the microscope) and
painted to show their colors after being illuminated by various monochromatic

35

lights. Bolls images seemed designed to assist other histologists in seeing

what he had seen under his microscope. Significantly, the optograms which
Boll described in his text are not illustrated on the plate, and indeed congruent
with his avoidance of chemical practice and language, Boll never employed the
metaphors of photography to describe the visual pigment. Bolls illustrations,
rather, remain firmly within the tradition of ideal visual representation. After
viewing an unspecified numbers of frog retinas, Boll or his artist engraved
diagrams to represent the ideal retina as it bleached during exposure to light.
The histological context of such illustrations would have been immediately
apparent to Bolls readers.

Given the prominence of the contexts into which Boll placed his
discovery, his announcement not surprisingly unleashed a flood of publications
on the light-sensitive pigment, the majority of which issued from Khnes
physiological institute in Heidelberg. Unlike Boll who saw himself as an
histologist, Khne was a leading physiological chemist. He had studied
chemistry with Friedrich Whler in Gttingen and with Carl Lehmann at Jena,
spent time in Paris with Claude Bernard, and explored the chemical nature
of the protoplasm with Ernst Brcke and Carl Ludwig in Vienna. From 186168, he had directed the chemical laboratory in Virchows Berlin institute for
pathological anatomy and produced an important textbook on physiological
chemistry. At Heidelberg since 1871 (as Helmholtzs successor), Khne had
devoted himself primarily to the chemistry of digestion, especially to a study
of the enzymes (he coined the term in 1876) of the pancreas. Thus Khne
placed the colored pigments of the retina within a photochemical rather than
the more varied contexts of Boll. In the first reports of his research on Bolls
discovery, appearing already in January of 1877, Khne deployed the language
and techniques of photography and made the optogram (or the photogram),
which he soon learned to fix chemically so that it could be preserved and
easily displayed in classroom demonstrations, the central feature of his public
presentation of optography.

Over the next several years, Khne and his associates at Heidelberg
thoroughly explored the behavior of visual purple as they called the pigment,
using chemical, spectrographic and comparative methods.
Unlike Boll,
they quickly managed to extract the active substance from the rods with a
chemical reagent (bile salts). By closely following the bleaching process, they
suggested that several additional light-sensitive substances are produced
sequentially, each of which can be reconverted to visual purple by contact with
oil particles located in the pigment epithelium of the retina. Furthermore, they
systematically looked for visual purple in many vertebrate and invertebrate
species, and found some species entirely lacking visual purple, the individuals
of which nonetheless see quite well. Neither Khne nor anyone else could
find any light-sensitive colored pigments in the outer layers of the cones.
Furthermore, live frogs whose visual purple was completely bleached still
seemed able to distinguish colors. Additionally, at Khnes encouragement,
the Swedish physiologist, Alarik Frithjof Holmgren (who also had studied with

36

Du-Bois Reymond and Helmholtz) found that photochemical processes in

the retina did not correlate with the electrical behavior of the eye. Already
in 1865 Holmgren, seeking to extend Du Bois-Reymonds claim that every
stimulus of tissue linked to the nervous system produces a deviation in electric
potential measured across that tissue, had measured what he called the
retinal current, a tiny electrical potential between the front and rear surfaces
of the retina which varied when the tissue was abruptly bathed with light (work
that had attracted no attention before Bolls discovery). In 1878 Holmgren
found that such voltage deviations occur even in retinas with totally bleached
visual purple, and that slowly bleaching retinas produce no variation in the
potential. Physicalist that he was, Holmgren chose to privilege the electrical
over the photochemical as the objective sign of subjective sensation, and
concluded that visual purple could stand in no essential connection to the
nerve impulses which begin the visual process.

All of these investigations forced Khne, in a 1879 review article, to
abandon his initial optimistic assertion that visual purple alone held the key
to the secret of nerve stimulus by light. Instead, he now proposed a more
comprehensive and speculative optochemical hypothesis to describe how
the arrival of light in the retina might initiate nervous stimulation. Essentially,
Khne hypothesized three types of substances to be sought in the retina:
visual substances, visual excitants, and selective filters. Visual substances,
which may or may not be colored, are chemically decomposed by the action
of light. Visual excitants, the products of these decompositions, stimulate
the protoplasm of the visual cells (rods and cones) and thereby start nervous
impulses. Other colored pigments in the retina may act as selective filters
by absorbing various wavelengths of incoming light before they reach the
visual substances. The discovery of visual purple, Khne concluded, had
demonstrated the viability of such an optochemical hypothesis, even if one
could no longer claim that visual purple was the only visual substance, or
even if it was such a substance at all.

To develop this optochemical hypothesis, Khne in 1879 proposed a
comprehensive research program for analyzing the behavior of the illuminated
retina. Its methods were to be exclusively objective, even if the optogram
itself as a technique of analysis would become significantly less important
since some visual substances might be colorless and thus could not be
explored via visual inspection. All subjective or self-observational techniques
were to be abandoned. However well our conscious sensation is suited to
recognize and judge [ermessen] excitatory processes in the sensory organs,
nonetheless all subjective investigation of sensation remains incomplete and
one-sided until it is connected to objectively recognizable processes in the
stimulated organ. For the next few years, many such objective studies
issued from Khnes Heidelberg laboratory: spectral studies of the hues of
various chemical products in the retina; chemical analyses of substances
produced in the active retina; and electrical measurements of currents
in the retina under conditions of illumination and darkness. Khne thus

37

emphatically rejected subjective vision studies, that tradition which made

human verbal reports about visual experience the essential phenomenon and
extended from Helmholtz and Hering back to Johannes Mller, Jan Purkyne
and Goethe. Indeed, despite the obvious similarities between his studies of
bleaching and regeneration in visual purple and Herings chemical theory of
vision (based on chemical processes of assimilation and dissimilation),
Khne only once mentioned Herings work and steadfastly refused to situate
his work amidst the polemical discussions of Helmholtzs and Herings
theories of vision.

This desire for objectivity in the study of vision also appears in
Khnes public presentation of the optogram. Initially he offered only verbal
reports rather than visual illustrations of his short-lived optograms, appealing
to the authority of a competent witness--the Heidelberg chemist, Robert
Bunsen--to bolster the veracity of his descriptions.
In his first lengthy
report, not published until May of 1877, Khne described in great detail the
experimental circumstances under which he could produce sharply-focused
optograms and warned even the most experienced observers that they
might well face difficulties in attempting to repeat Khnes procedures. That
is, Khne freely admitted that optography, despite its promise of objectivity,
represented a very unstable experimental situation. It was in the same paper
that Khne published the first optographic images, the crudeness for which
he apologized. The illustrations could not be exact [genau] as is desired for
visual scientific representation since no artist had been able to guarantee
the trustworthiness of drawings of such rapidly changing phenomena. And
when optograms were fixed chemically and dried, their convex surface made
it technically impossible for a direct mechanical reproduction of the image
onto a printed page. Unlike photography, which by the 1870s had developed
techniques so that a single negative could produce myriads of identical positive
images, Khnes optogram (much like the original daguerreotype) could yield
only one unique image which could not be mechanically multiplied. Khne
was thus forced to represent his optograms by employing an artist or making
his own drawings. That is, he had to redraw his images for his readers,
just as Boll had done for his microscopical cross-sections. As seen in Fig.
2, Khne published only simple geometrical images captured on the retina,
for which he again apologized: It cannot be the duty of physiological optics
to bring optography to such a perfection as it might acquire in the skilled
hands of a professional photographer. I could not, however, deny myself
the pleasure of treating optographically a few complicated objects, such as
the garden side of the laboratory here and a human portrait. These latter
optograms, however, Khne never published.

Khnes ambitious optochemical program met little success over the
next several decades. After the initial burst of publications which explored
the phenomena of visual purple, interest in the subject wanned by the mid
1880s. Khne himself abandoned the topic after 1882, directing his attention
back to the chemistry of proteins and digestion. By 1900 a critical review of

38

knowledge of visual substances concluded that the program outlined by

Khne twenty years earlier had reached reached a dead-end. No additional
retinal pigments had been found which might be candidates for visual
substances. And searching for non-colored visual substances, especially
in the cones, seemed impossible because such variable and probably shortlived substances could not be easily observed. Light-induced morphological
changes--phototropism--in the cones had been observed, but these could not
be related to chemical changes. The reviewer in 1900 thus concluded that
in relation to knowledge of visual substances very little has been learned.

Despite this enigmatic state of Khnes optochemical program
by 1900 (only in the 1970s did the chemistry of photoreceptor cells in the
retina again become a major research topic), the episode of visual purple
reveals, I think, two important features of late nineteenth-century physiology.
First, a kind of technological reductionism can be seen in Khnes quest for
optography. For Khne, the organism and its internal processes operate
not only according to physical and chemical laws but also like the machines
of the nineteenth century. Many historians have noted, for example, how
machines such as the steam engine, telegraph, or electrical induction
apparatus became analogies for physical or physiological explanations.
Khnes optograms completed, very literally, the metaphor of the eye as
a camera. Already in the seventeenth century, Kepler and Descartes had
discussed the dioptric apparatus of the eye as a camera obscura and
illustrations comparing the optical geometries of the eye and the camera
obscura had appeared. And shortly after the invention of photography,
some physicists had sought analogies between photochemical processes
on silver iodide plates and retinal action. Now Khne had added film to
the camera-eye, or more precisely, an entire photographic factory in which
workers upon command repeatedly prepare new light-sensitive material for
the film and simultaneously wipe out the old image. The language and the
concepts of photography, for Khne, became the language and concepts of
optography.

Yet the camera was more than a conceptual metaphor for Khne. To
regularize and standardize the production of optograms, Khne constructed
a rough analogue of the camera obscura--a darkroom equipped with sodium
lamps and a light funnel in the ceiling into which half-meter square glass
plates bearing geometrical images (or even negatives of human portraits,
reputedly Helmholtzs) could be inserted. With this device, Khne could
precisely control the light intensity, time interval, and images to which he
exposed retinas, either in vivo or in vitro. Although the funnel held the
image to be reproduced, unlike the opening in the camera obscura through
which an externally produced image passes, Khnes device nonetheless
made the eye (with its dioptric apparatus and retina entact) a literal and
active component in a large camera (see Figs. 3 and 4). Unlike the more
abstract cases recently analyzed by Norton Wise in which nineteenth-century

39

machines mediate in various ways between societal contexts and the

generation of scientific knowledge, in Khnes darkroom the phenomenon
under scrutiny was inserted directly into a machine and became a working
object only as part of that mechanical system. In this sense, no conceptual
analogies were required to mediate between Khnes optograms and the
camera obscura.

Yet at least one moral structure implicit in the camera obscura did
appear in Khnes quest for optography. As Jonathan Crary has argued, since
the seventeenth century the camera obscura represented a discursive order
of objectivity in which images were considered to resemble their objects
perfectly and observers were sovereign, private and completely separated
from the external world of objects. As noted above, Khne emphatically sought
to enter this discursive order. His objective physiological optics represented
a dramatic break from the subjective approach to that discipline which had
become increasingly dominant during the course of the nineteenth century.
Starting perhaps with Goethes Farbenlehre (1810), continuing through the
often non-reproducible self-observations of Purkyne and canonized finally
by Helmholtzs widely influential Handbuch der physiologischen Optik (185667), the subjective approach had made the study of human vision paramount
in physiological optics, for only human subjects can report what they see. In
this tradition, the principal working object was the verbal report of human
sensory experience, the final product of a series of steps: external stimulus visual system - subjects mind - verbal report. Even though observers tried
to reduce the terminological ambiguities in verbal reports to a minimum (e.g.,
instead of saying I see red one would say this hue appears identical to
that hue), words alone increasingly became too problematic for evaluating
the ever more complex theories of vision generated in the Helmholtz-Hering
controversies of the 1860-70s. Khnes proposed solution was to remove
the human subject, to replace the verbal report with the inscripted diagram
produced directly by the visual system of an animal. In optography, the
phenomena draw themselves without human intervention.

Indeed, Khnes repeated exhortations to convert the study of
sensory physiology to determinations of objectively verifiable reactions in
the stimulated organ nicely mirror what Daston and Galison have called the
turn to noninterventionist or mechanical objectivity in nineteenth-century
science. The scientific observer in this new moral regime withdraws in
self-restraint from all judgment, interpretation or even sensory testimony,
so that nature can speak for itself, safe from all frauds, system builders
or idealizers. Khnes optogram, I think, represents this noninterventionist
objectivity on two levels. He sought to remove the subjects mind from the
study of vision, so that visual processes could be explored without verbal
intervention by the subject. And by inscribing itself directly onto a graphic
trace, the visual pigment could be recorded without any intervention by
the experimenter. Like Ludwigs recording kymograph or Mareys grapho-

40

cinematographic methods, Khnes optograms captured and fixed in time

and space fleeting phenomena--chemical transformations of the active
retina.

The photograph, as Daston and Galison note, became the
nineteenth-century emblem of noninterventionist objectivity, a new moral
regime which swept through the sciences, both physical and social (witness
the importance of photographs in Cesare Lombrosos so-called criminal
anthropology). In the final paper he published on photochemistry, Khne
described a sharply-focused optogram he had found traced on the retinal
pigment of a criminal executed by guillotine. Yet to his dismay, Khne could
not relate the image preserved on the eye to anything the unfortunate man
may have seen immediately prior to his death. Criminology once again did
not benefit from optography. Nonetheless, Khnes ascetism was complete
at least within the physiological and moral realms. Unlike Ludwigs and
Mareys technologies, which required complex techno-mechanical devices
to mediate between nature and the graphic trace, Khnes optography
required no intermediate machine. The eye, for Khne, had become its
own inscription device, creating a visible trace directly on itself. Rather than
mechanical objectivity, Khnes moral regime might more accurately be
called physico-chemical objectivity, a place where neither the experimentor
nor the experimentors apparatus intrudes. The optogram had become the
supreme emblem of noninterventionist objectivity.
Revised draft, 1 June 1994
Cf. Arthur B. Evans, Optograms and Fiction: Photo in a Dead Mans Eye,
Science-Fiction Studies 20 (Nov 1993), 341-61.
Cf. http://www.derekogbourne.net/modules/articles/article.php?id=8
(22.7.06)

41

Fig. 1: Bolls swatches (Figs. 1-3) and illustrations of retinal cross-sections

(Figs. 4-7), colored in the original. Reprinted from Boll, 1877a (fn. 8), between
pp. 2-3.
42

Fig. 2: Khnes first published optograms. Reprinted from Khne, 1878b (fn.
23), Pl. 1.
43

Fig. 3: Camera obscura. Reprinted from Athanasius Kircher: Ars magna lucis
et umbrae in mundo, 2d ed. (Amsterdam 1671), p. 709.

44

Fig. 4: Khnes optographic chamber, as described in Khne, 1878 (fn. 21),

pp. 232-33; Ewald/Khne (fn. 28), pp. 374-75.

45

FROGS EYE AS A CAMERA

The smallest camera in the world
which has actually taken pictures
is doubtless the eye of the frog. It
has been found that if a frog is kept
in the dark for some time the retina
of the eye on being dissected is found
to have a purple reddish colour which
fades away or becomes bleached on
exposure to day light. If the eye is
placed in front of a window and left
there exposed for some time,
and then fixed in a four per cent
solution of alum the optogram is
partially fixed and retains an inverted
picture of the window with its cross
bars as pictured on the retina. It is
claimed that by a similar photographic
process the last picture or image
retained by the eye of a dead
man or animal may be preserved.
Boys Life, September 1920.

46

An obviously fake optogram attributed to

Dr. Vernois, (An inverted eye and socket)
but it is unclear as to whether or not this
image was sent to Vernois by a fellow
correspondent Dr. Bourion, who claimed
it was photographed from the retina of
a murdered woman on June 14th 1868.
Dr. Vernois apparently attempted many
optograms without much success.

47

Me

e-mail conversation
21st March 2006

Thom Kubli

48

Hello Thom
How are you? Hope you remember me from Brigittes show last year!
I might be coming to Cologne sometime in Easter after I have visited
Heidelberg for research for my new project. (see attachment).
I need to find somebody who knows the Heidelberg area who can help
me gain access to the University Libraries. I am trying at this end via my
University but its difficult and mainly slow.
I also want to visit a place called Bruchsal and its Prison. This is the place
where the only know human optogram was obtained from a beheaded
convict. I have the image!
If you e-mail me your phone number I can ring you
All the best
Derek Ogbourne
Hey Derek,
Surely I remember you, good to hear from you.
About Heidelberg I could try to ask someone there.
What I probably would need is the exact date when
you want to work there and a biography saying youre
a famous artist and dearly respected professor.
What I can do is forward the material and try
to make a connection as soon as possible. -no guarantee.
Anyway if youll come by Cologne lets go for a beer.
Looking forward to see you.
Hows Susana doing?
Best wishes
thom
(second answer)
Hello Derek,
I just made it to really read your paper. thats amazing.
It sounds like a forensic print matrix. Also one could imagine
how criminologic literature could be rewritten by a last
picture of your executioner.
As mentioned a bio would be helpful, but I forwarded it
and hope for the best.
Best wishes
thom

49

Thom
Any luck with contacts in Heidelberg?
Derek
Dear Derek,
You mentioned Mr. Alexandridis. If it is the right person, he lives
in Heidelberg and my mother knows him. (not very well but they met before)
He might be the one who could know where to find what youre looking
for and he might be able to give you access to the library.
You just can say you have the telephone from frau kubli and
maybe hes very much interested in the project.
What you think?
My mother is sending me the address later and Ill forward it to you.
You probably have to act soon to make sure hell be around when
youll visit Heidelberg.
best
Thom
Derek,
Heres the address/number. It might make sense to try to call him
tomorrow morning around ten/eleven and explain him your project.
youre not announced so far, so you might have to talk him into
your work. Just be charming as you are so it wont be a problem.
As I said before you can say you have the number from my mother
He possibly might remember the name.
Anyway he seems to be a person with wide knowledge that has interests
in many things so it could be interesting to meet him anyway.
If for some reason it doesnt work with Alexandridis let me know soon.
Then it would be good to know at what date you definitely will be in
Heidelberg so my mother will try to talk to the director of the libraries
to find an agreement. (no guarantee).
Best wishes
Thom
Dear Thom
Wow brilliant!!! It would be amazing if it were the same guy - although I did a
web search on the name and there were many entries under this name but
mainly in the US. I think it is an eastern bloc name or even Greek? Have you any
idea? Is he an academic - Bio? Maybe we are destined to meet just because
of the name.
Best Derek

50

Derek
I hope he is the one. As I just googled he worked in the opthalmic
hospital in Heidelberg and he wrote books about ophthalmology.
Hes emeritus now. My mother just told me she got to know him as
he had a crash in the snow with some friends right in front of our
house. They came in to wait for the police and had some coffee at
our place. My father was scientist too and Heidelberg is not a big
place, so he might remember.
Hey, I hope this works out!!
Thom
Thom
It could well be him!!!! Is he old?
Best
Derek
Derek
It is him!
Thom
Thom
How can you be sure?
Derek
Derek
actually I have no clue, I just have the feeling hes the
person youre looking for, if not, pretend you want to
meet him for some other reason and record it.
you can sell it as parallel universe documentary drama.
Thom
Derek
Great at least we know its him.
Thom
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51

A RETINAL TATTOO OF LIGHT by Susana Medina

A millisecond divides life from death. Or is it an attosecond? Or a femtosecond?
The beheaded lose consciousness in two seconds, if the blade cuts through
the neck in one go. The brain has enough oxygen stored for the metabolism
to persist for seven seconds after the head is cut off: the eyes flicker, the
mouth might still move. On the 16th November 1880, Erhard Gustav Reif was
decapitated in Heidelberg. His wife had died and he had killed his two sons,
perhaps an act of desperation. If the future didnt exist for him, it didnt exist for
his children either.

A physiologist received on execution the warm head. He had come
across a phenomenon that he termed optography. Under a cluster of special
circumstances, the retina recorded the last image seen before death. By
chance, he had first discovered this phenomenon on the retina of a frog. He
then experimented on rabbits. He now had a human specimen to experiment
with. He went to his laboratory and prepared the dead mans retina with light
sensitive chemicals. An image emerged. It was a geometrical, asymmetrical
and abstract image. It looked like some steps. With all probability, it was the
steps that went up to the guillotine. He drew the image. This drawing became
the only human optogram available.

A hundred and twenty years later, an English artist in London
becomes fascinated with optography. He likes the idea as an idea. He finds
a poetic dimension to it. He closes his eyes and imagines a tattoo made out
of light imprinted on the flesh of the retina. The eye as a camera that actually
records the last image before death. The retina as a film where the image that
separates life from death is imprinted, not in negative form, but in positive
form. He finds that very little has been written about the subject. He finds
out about the beheaded man, Erhard Gustav Reif. Is an optogram really a
scientific fallacy? Is it possible to produce them?

He then becomes involved in other ideas. Optography fades away.

Four years later, he goes to an art show in Cologne with his wife, a
writer. He is part of this art show. He talks to another artist from there about this
and that, and keeps in touch with him. In an email, he mentions that a doctor
in Heidelberg produced some optograms in the 1970s. He mentions the name
of the doctor. The German artist says the name rings a bell. A flurry of emails,
ensues. The German artist knows him. He crashed his car in the snow outside
his mothers countryside home, in Heidelberg.

Coincidences. Chance pressing against the English artists temples.
He goes to Heidelberg, the place where all this happened. It is a university
town. He investigates. He walks along the river taking pictures and goes to
a disco at night-time with some kids from the hotel. He visits the man who
produced optograms from a couple of rabbits in the 1970s.

The English artist becomes fascinated with the idea of producing
optograms. It is the scientist in him that wonders about it. He thinks of science
with its scientific fads and fallacies, as a branch of the arts. He could get a
52

rabbit and fake an optogram. Faking an optogram becomes a more interesting

option. Violent images of a chase after a rabbit run through his head. Fur,
grass, speed, fear. The images are disjointed, theyre visually haunting, they
transmit a disturbing chaos of textures and give the video-piece the right
edge: tension, a sense of menace.

Back in London, he finds one day a big rabbits cage in the street.
It is another sign seducing him in the right direction. He should get a couple
of rabbits. He disinfects the cage. He goes to a pet-shop and gets a couple
of white rabbits with grey blotches here and there. He buys them plenty
of treats. He finds out what they like to eat. He feeds them greens, fresh
grass, fennel, dandelions, pears, they love pears and raisins, but youre
supposed to give them sweets with moderation. He visits the rabbits three
or four times a day in the garden. At night time, he makes a hot-water bottle
so they keep warm. His wife also visits them and indulges them with sweet
fruit. Sometimes they visit them together, especially at night-time, nocturnal
visits.

His wife is a writing machine. She sits at her desk and writes.
She sways between various writing pieces, her own obsessions and her
husbands obsession about optography. The living-room has become an

embodiment of her husbands obsession. It has become an optography

archive, as her husband prepares for his show The Museum of Optography.
She likes fleeing to the garden, where her husbands obsession takes
on a different hue by putting her in unexpected contact with nature. The
rabbits are boisterous, unpredictable, athletic. They are enigmatic ciphers
of life. She likes to watch them hopping around, zig-zagging. It is a magical
moment. Like entering a gigantic hallucination, where city-life doesnt exist:
only vibrant grass, bushes, twigs and hypnotic rabbits.
53


The man videos them. He looks at them, thinking their eyes can see
in every direction. He could actually make an optogram. It is the scientist in
him that thinks this. Peeling the retina, finding the ultimate organic image. It
is impossible to handle them, to catch them. Survival has made them timid
and swift. In the cage, they dig holes, tunnels, eat their own droppings and
shred the litter newspapers. When theyre let out of the cage, theyre in their
habitat. They graze, spin around, explore a branch, nibble on unsuspected
weeds and make extraordinary leaps where their body hovers horizontal in
mid-air, about one metre from the ground.

He is spellbound.

The 6th of February in 2007 the whole garden is thick with snow.
Theyre built for snow, these rabbits. Theyre both white with grey blotches
here and there, the perfect camouflage amidst snow and broken twigs. The
woman lets them out of the cage. One of them is scared. The other one
merges with the snow. She calls her husband. Come down with the videocamera, you must video this, its idyllic she yells through the landing.

He comes down and videos the ground covered in snow, the rabbits
relishing this strange event. He then videos his wife eyes wide-open saying
to the camera:
If it wasnt for the drawing of the last image seen on the retina of a beheaded
man in 1880, we wouldnt have bunnies, we wouldnt be enjoying this idyllic
moment.
Optogram and rabbits travelling slowly across time from Heidelberg to London, he says. Chaos theory in slow-motion.
What was the name of the beheaded man? the woman asks.
Edhard Gustav Reif, he says.

The gaze of the woman is immersed in the splendid snow: Somebody told me that the tunnel of light that people who have a near-death
experience see, its just the way the brain shuts off. The brain is designed to
switch off with an apotheosis of light.

Its a good way to die.

Heaven is in the brain.

They look at each other. Then at the fixed eye of one of the rabbits.
Its greyness is immense. Static. And the eyelid is surrounded by minute eyelashes. The rabbit captures the dilated pupil of the English artist surrounded
by hazelnut iris, twitches its nose rhythmically and runs away through the
snow. Fast.

54

55

56

Retinal 145
A wall mounted piece with 145 retinal drawings some of
which appear in the following pages (enlarged for the
purpose of this book).
Museum of Optography, Derek Ogbourne,

57

58

Retinal 145

59

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I found these watercolours in Heidelberg University Hospital, Opthalmic

Library, the artist was unattributed.
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I found these watercolours in Heidelberg University Hospital, Opthalmic

Library, the artist was unattributed.
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A: Alexandridis, 45
G: Gala, 81
D: Dal, 77
(Rather chaotic tone on Gala + Dals part)
G: Digam
A: Hello, hello, is that Gala?
G: Yes. Who is this?
A: My Name is Evangelos Alexandridis, I am scientist from Germany. I have a request for Mr Dal that I think he would be interested in Can I talk to him ... is he there?
G: Well can you tell me something more, whats it all about?
A: Id like to speak with Mr Dal about optograms, Its kind of experiments Ive done to fix the retinal image at the very moment of
death.
G: Well, eh, just a minute. Just one second. Ill get him (Gala and
Dal in the background indistinct).
Pause background noises
Dal picks up the phone
D: Quin es. Who is this?
A: Hello, hello, Mr Dal, this is
(Overlapping above)
D: Who is this?
A: Mr Dal this is a Evangelos Alexandridis,
D: (Interrupting) Yes this is Salvador Dali, Yes, yes.
A: My name is Evangelos Alexandridis Im a scientist, a physiologist, Mr Dal I am making experiments that, that I call optograms.
D: I cant, Mr Alexandridis, I cant hear you very well. Can you
speak up?
A: MsHello is that (Telephone beep) Mr Dal can you here me
now Mr Dal?
D: Yes, yes, yes that is fine.
A: Yes, as I said before I want to introduce a kind of experimental
process that is called optography this is the very special method
to create pictures out from an image that is preserved in the dead
animals eyes by the very moment of death.

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D + G: Gala speaks to Dal in the background (Dal is briefly

distracted)
D: Photograms, what are these photograms?
A: No, no, no, no. Its not called photograms, its called
optograms. ts a certain scientific method to preserve the retinal
image, post-death. So what it is I can take photos with living
eyes!
D: But Mr Alexandris ... Where did you get my number?
A: Oh Mr Dal, I have to apologise, I currently wrote to you.
D: Did you? Eh, eh, wait a moment. Yes, yes I do remember
something like this
(Dal looks for the letter)
D: Your name again?
A: My name is Alexandridis. I work at the University of
Heidelberg.
D: Momento.
(Dal looks for the letter speaking with Gala).
D: Yes, it is here, we havent opened it. Mr Alexandridis what do
you want of me?
A: Mr Dal Im working, Im working on optograms and I thought
you might me very interested in what optograms are because
I know your artworks have so many eyes in and I thought
would like to see my images and maybe then we could create
optograms together. And it might be a new, new accent of your
wonderful works.
D: If this is true, what you say, this does interest me er a bit
but er, I have er, read about this somewhere. But er Why are
you doing these optograms?
A: Mr Dal, I can assure you that it is absolutely true what I
told you because the police here in Heidelberg asked me to
investigate whether the image in a dead mans eyes could
reveal the murderer after a crime. So, my experiment was with
an animal. My experiment was with rabbit. I want you Mr Dal
to choose an image as the last picture in a rabbits eye, in a
condemned rabbits eye.
D: Eh, I see eh Mr Alexandridis, can you wait a minute?
A: Yes, yes Mr Dal.
D: Wait five minutes, and you ring me back in five minutes.

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D: Can you do this?

D: OK, yes, five minutes. Thank you Mr Dal, five minutes.
D + A put the receiver down. A calls D.
Phone rings.
D: Dgame?
A: Hello Mr Dal, its Mr Alexandridis again.
D: Ah yes, now, now um Mr Alexandridis. Carrying on from what
we were talking about a minute ago, I think um I would like you
to write down, I have here an image but you have to write it
down. Can you get a pen or something and write what I say .
A: Yes, Hold on a moment, I get a pen
(Alexandridis looks for a pen)
A: OK Mr
D: (Interrupts) Do you have a pen?
A: Dal, I am ready . I have a pen, yes OK
Pause
Dal Plays God
God plays Dal
No, I tell you what, this is better:
Dal is God
God is Dal
Dal is Dog
Dal is God
Is Dal God
Is Dal Dog
D: Have you written this down?
A: Yes, Mr Dal I think Ive got it.
D: Then you have my image.
Thank you Mr Alexandridis, good bye.
A: But Mr Dal, Mr Dal you cant hang up the phone. What am I
supposed to do now?

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Rabbit machine MK.1, Derek Ogbourne, 2006

Rabbit machine MK.2, Derek Ogbourne, 2006

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Homage to Eadweard Muybridge, Derek Ogbourne, 2006

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Still from Untitled Video Piece (9 mins). Derek Ogbourne 1999.

Here we have a single monitor with two viewpoints. One shows us our protagonists
eyes (bottom left) caught in an act of exploratory attack and its object of offence
(above left). The other viewpoint (right, not shown here) shows the concealed object
of attack, the inner eye. Layers of insulation (metal, latex rubber, water and concrete)
that surround the attacked are broken down by the external force eventually to expose
the inner viewpoint (A tiny ccd camera) peering back at its attacker. Finally the inner
being is destroyed, leaving the attacker to ponder the deed.

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Explorers of Darkness
Derek Ogbourne, 2006

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The structure of the eye compared to the camera

(Wald, 1953). Courtesy: Ali Hossaini.

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William Khne,1837- 1900

His Rabbit optogram,1878

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Optography and Technologies of Perception

February 26, 2007

Ali Hossaini

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Introduction
Optography is the art of making photographs with an eye. Or is it the
technology of making photographs with an eye? Does anything at all hinge
on this distinction, particularly if the eye in question once belonged to a
human being? The expressive potential of this gruesome craft, one where
eyes replace cameras, has never been fully explored, though it captured the
popular imagination after Victorian experiments revealed that it was, indeed,
possible. No one seriously maintained that artists should wield eyes as
yet another tool for expression. Yet optography could have forensic value.
What if the eye fixed the last instant of a persons life, for instance, the
moment when, frozen in terror, they confronted their own murderer? Such
an image, called an optogram, might be captured by photographic processes
whose goal, justice, overcame the revulsion of dismembering a cadaver. As
an art, optography has little to offer, but when we consider the medium as
a technology, it leads us down a path that is rich with interest because it
touches on some of the deepest issues we confront as a species.

Jules Verne popularized the idea that optograms could solve crimes
in Les Freres Kip. Vernes story was a mystery, but it is not happenstance
that optography has an air of Mary Shelley, of retro-scifi, about it as well.
Shelley conceived of Dr. Frankenstein, the original mad scientist, at a time
when science seemed prepared to reduce organisms to mechanisms.
Frankenstein was the logical outcome of Cartesian philosophy, a school of
thought that reduced animals to mechanico-physical laws, and that had later
inspired the French philosopher de la Mettrie to publish the suggestively
named book Man a Machine. Shelleys Frankenstein combined these
insights with a key lesson of the Industrial Revolution: a smart designer
ensures that machines have interchangeable parts. If men are machines,
then why cant our bodies be cobbled from spare limbs, rebuilt, and, as
legions of science fiction authors have since speculated, applied to other
purposes?

Medical science has largely caught up with fiction. Body parts are
traded among people, mechanical implants are common, and we are moving
ever closer to integrating machines with our organs of perception. Far from
being an oddity, the optogram is instead an early paradigm for progress in
cybernetics, the discipline that studies communication and control systems,
especially as they pertain to the integration of biology and technology. The
cyborg, an amalgam of humanity and technology, has fueled the imagination
of science fiction writers for decades, but it has become an accepted reality
since the mid-twentieth century, as prosthetics have replaced everything from
hips to eardrums. The humdrum character we ascribe to these device should
not blind us to their status as miracles when they were first introduced.

Nor should we be so arrogant as to forget early stages of progress.
Eyeglasses were introduced in the 13th century, and they are far more
significant interventions than anything developed since.1 To advance
further, I need to make a brief digression into historiography. As a matter of
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convenience, scholars ascribe developments to a particular era, for instance,

the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Industrial
Revolution. Reality is not tidy, neither now nor in the past, and we should not
ignore the developments that led to the emergence of these larger trends
- although I would argue elsewhere that historical labels should be used
only as convenient handles, not as an absolute taxonomy. Getting back
to eyeglasses, these devices meet the classic definition of a cybernetic
system. They introduce a sophisticated interface between wearers and the
natural environment, one that greatly augments their natural abilities. Yet
they were introduced in the Middle Ages, hardly a time that we associate
with cybernetics. In the face of this, are we being anachronistic, as some
scholars may charge? Or should we alter (or drop) our historical taxonomies
in the face of facts?

A person who wears eyeglasses has integrated a mechanical
element into their perceptual system, and these man-machines have
entwined their daily living into the vast array of optical systems used to
manage our world. Historically the use of lenses in spectacles stimulated
the development of the pinhole apparatus into the camera obscura, and
from thence the photographic camera.2 Technologically they have adopted a
functional element of cameras, and the fact that both eyes and cameras rely
on lenses points to the end product of an optogram, the biological analog
to a photograph. We may not use optography, but its possibility forms a
boundary condition that frames our analysis.

Eyeglasses have become far more effective during the last seven
centuries, but there were few innovations in this direct interface until the
past couple decades. Surprising progress in neurology have advanced the
cybernetics of vision far more quickly than anyone anticipated as late as the
1990s. We have long known that eyes and cameras are structurally similar--which is why anyone could think to make optograms---but breakthroughs in
research on the visual cortex have brought them closer to interchangeability.
Like the rest of the brain, the visual centers function as an electrical grid.
This grid is composed of neurons, each of which communicates with its
neighbors by ion releases that can be detected and stimulated with delicate
electrodes. Neuroscientists have possessed this direct interface with the
brain for decades, but now, with the assistance of powerful computers, they
are beginning to understand the physiology of thought. It is tantamount to
understanding the brains internal language. Detection and stimulation
run parallel to communication and control, the functional elements of a
cybernetic system, and electrodes are trading more information with the
brain, interfacing mental activity with growing sophistication. Scientists are
developing ways to read intentions and feed information directly to the brain,
without the mediation of sense organs.

Recent experiments show great promise. Neural implants promise
to bring sight to the blind, via electrodes embedded into the retina, optic

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nerve or the visual centers of the brain. Crude but effective results have
already been obtained. Some work involves repairing the retina by forming
a new electronic bridge between eye and optic nerve. Other work, more
interesting from our perspective, involves replacing the eye with a camera.
Researchers have tested such systems, evoking simple visual responses in
their blind subjects. Neural and computational science are both advancing
rapidly, and it would not be surprising if practical visual prosthetics were
available within a few decades.

Mary Shelley was prescient in foreseeing that our knowledge of
anatomy, and a host of other medical disciplines, would progress to the point
where we could cobble together new bodies. Dr. Frankensteins monster
was made of spare parts borrowed from corpses. Such technologies
may seem frightening when taken to extremes, but the transplant of limb,
organs and even faces has saved quality of life for many people. And
artificial body parts have been a logical extension of our treatment of the
body as mechanism. My drift here is to point out that Shelleys paradigm
also applies to our perceptual and cognitive faculties, that is, to eyes, ears
and even our thoughts. That is, it has a cybernetic dimension. But mental
prosthetics derive from a completely different tradition than artificial limbs
and organ transplants. They are not based on mechanics; rather they are
technologies of perception, or devices that couple, complement or replace
our senses. Photography is a prime example of a perceptual technology,
seeing as it reproduced many of the qualities of vision with a device that is
structurally similar to an eye. Optography raises the question from another
approach. By taking an eye, and using it as a camera, it points to the brute
physical basis of vision, something that is very close to thought itself.

The similarities between eye and camera are not simply coincidence.
Instead they are the product of convergent evolution, an example of two
systems that have independently arrived at a similar design through facing
the same problems. For the most part convergent evolution occurs in
nature, but, as biologist George Wald discusses in Eye and Camera, an
article published in Scientific American in the 1950s, this example of the
phenomenon occurred in the organic and technological systems related
to vision.3 Unlike artificial joints or hearts, or cochlear implants, which
have been based on detailed study of organic models, cameras developed
independently of the branch of classical optics devoted to eyesight - the
apprehension of visual scenes. These theories were based on speculation
about the physiology of vision. Early prototypes of the camera, a simple
pinhole apparatus and later the camera obscura, derived from the study of
perspective, a mathematical treatment of the products of vision or, simply,
the pictures of the world that intuitively populate our heads.

Wald uses optography as a touchstone for a discussion of physics
and chemistry, showing how cameras and eyes deal with light in similar
ways. Here I am using it as the starting point for a discussion of history,

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specifically as a way for understanding technologies that exploit vision.

Mostly based in optics, and other geometric modes of representation, these
technologies of perception fulfill broadly cybernetic goals in contemporary
societies across the globe. Under the rubric of media, we know a great deal
about photography, cinema, television and digital imagery. But scholars have
yet to uncover the evolutionary basis of these media, relating the imperatives
of biology to those of technology across history. These technologies did not
arise spontaneously. They are the product of ancient trends, and they relate
to the biological endowment of humanity, not treated abstractly but when it
confronts the reality of specific environments. We can accept the convergent
evolution of the eye and camera, of the brute resemblance of retinal and
photographic images, but we have to wonder what forces propelled the
evolution of cameras. How did such technologies of perception arise? And
what do they say about the societies that developed them?
****

My goal here is to explain the historical conditions that gave rise to
photography and related disciplines like cinema and television. These are
media technologies, and we are used to dealing with them as culture, but
they are also systems of communication, essential to maintaining social
stability and, less lightly, control of society. Thus they have a strongly political
dimension. Beyond that they are optical systems that function as visual
prosthetics, giving artificial perceptions of distant people, places and events.
We are so acclimated to these synthetic experiences that only critical theorists
have explored the implications of a projected vision, or television, that today
provides the bulk of knowledge to a majority of people in the world.4 By
this definition, still photographs operate as a kind of television, and the later
technology is functionally implied in the former. There are broad imperatives
in these technologies that make no sense from a philosophic perspective
(or even seem nave, anachronistic, determinist or otherwise unsavory), but
that make perfect sense in the context of evolution, which presents them as
survival strategies that form advantageous niches in the effort for survival.
The impact of these technologies of perception is enormous. Imagine what
your knowledge of the world would be if it were limited to handmade pictures.
As we shall see, these horizons would shrink even more if eliminated the
accurate perspectival drawings that have pervaded Western civilization since
the Renaissance.

In the work that follows, I abandon the philosophic framework that is,
in universities, a popular way of explaining the development of photography.
This is not the place to argue against what is commonly called critical theory,
but I offer instead an analysis based in biology and the history of technology.
The development of cameras, and related them to their social purposes,
finding that they are both used to organize bodies in space. By linking

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history, technology and biology a schema arose that explained, with great
coherence, the forces that gave birth to technologies of perception, and
that later impelled them to develop with increasing sophistication. Such a
schema may bear the name of theory, but I resist the idea that theories are
possible in humanist inquiry. Philosophy long ago passed the mantle of truth
to science, and what I am to present here is a story, one that rings true not
because it is repeatable, but instead because it is verifiable and useful.
Technologies of Perception Defined
What are technologies of perception? They are mechanisms designed to
enhance human performance. Some technologies, firemaking for instance,
add new capabilities like cooking, but many others have their origin in an
activity that humans can perform without assistance. The lever, for instance,
applies force more efficiently, allowing people to lift more with less effort.
Technologies of perception increase the sensitivity, range and stability of
our sensory organs. Sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste have all to some
degree been enhanced or replicated by machinery. Here we are concerned
with vision, a sense that was studied intensely, and fruitfully, in ancient times.
This long period of study has resulted in an immense array of visual devices,
many of which are vital to civilization. One of the most obvious of these
devices, the camera, is the subject of this essay as it is the basis for photography, the discipline that arches over the occult practice of optography.

Technologies of perception have had an effect beyond enhancing
sensory power. They have also overturned the ontology of perception.
One of the fundamental problems of philosophy has been deemed the
paradox of other minds. How do we know other minds exist? We only
know the contents of our own mind. Other people act like us, but, for all
we know, other people may not possess the same mental contents as we,
we and us being in this case me, the sole sovereign of my perceptual
field. While most people assume they resemble the people around them,
and we now have good scientific reasons for doing so, philosophers and a
psychotic fringe of humanity have actively explored the paradox. Without
solving the paradox, technologies of perception turn the problem inside out
by making objective perceptual judgments. The paradox underscores the
difference between subjective and objective experience, upon which turns
the boundary between inner life and communication. And it underscores a
fundamental quality of technologies of perception: that they are systems of
communication as well as ways of objectively experiencing the world.

The paradox of other minds arises because we cannot directly share
the contents of our experience. Instead we have experiences that we try
through words, pictures, music and other media to express to othersothers who apparently have the same kind of mind as ourselves. For instance,

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say we are looking at a piece of wood. Is it long or short? Choosing one

word over the other is a judgment that depends on gamut of factors ranging
from ones own size to the speakers expectation of the listeners needs.
Subjective judgments are based on processes internal to an individual, and
we can see why we might, as a group, want to overcome them. Imagine that
you are looking at piece of wood because you are part of a housebuilding
team. If someone asks for a long piece, what are the chances of delivering
the right length? Clearly you need prior agreement on the meaning of long,
a convention you may not be able to accurately reproduce each time you cut
the wood. And single word allows for little variation. Here is a case where
we need objective perceptual judgments that supersedes the vagaries of
individual experience. To use the language developed above, you need to
replace your subjective experience with an objective measurement. with
an objective measurement. By using the latter, which you access through
a mechanism that enhances your natural faculties of perception, you can
perform objective judgments that can be accurately communicated.

Objective judgments derive from external processes, what we might
call algorithms. While they do not solve the paradox of other minds, they
negate its practical effects by introducing a technology that embeds objective
judgments into a system of communication. My description may make these
processes sound complicated, but in fact they are part of everyday life. One
of the simplest examples of such an algorithm is a graduated measuring
stick, what is commonly called a ruler. Carpenters equipped with saws
alone would have an impossible time building a structure of any size,
but when equipped with technologies of perception, that is, rulers, levels
and other tools of measure, they can efficiently erect large, complicated
buildings. In this case the directives long and short are augmented by exact
quantities that can be cut with precision.

The example of housebuilding neatly captures the processes that
make for a successful technology of perception. It builds on an organic
faculty of judgment, the ability to estimate length, and then it applies
a system of measure that makes that faculty far more accurate. Such
measurements are themselves part of a larger scheme, say the plan of a
house, which is used to organize a group of builders who must coordinate
themselves to execute the plan. The measurements play the role of vision
in the builders collective. The analogy is closer than it may appear. The
eye perceives distance as a function of visual rays, rays of light, and rulers
mimic the visual ray in their straightness. And measurements, like eyesight,
are insufficient to guide us in the world. Both rulers and eyes feed into a
larger system of organization based on geometry, one that lets us calculate
physical relationships based on distances and angles.

These calculations enabled by rulers and similar devices may seem
either trivial or abstract, too lacking in distinctive qualities to have had much
impact on culture. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In fact, the impact of technologies like rulers has been immense. Without them we would
still be living as tribes in simple dwellings, with little in the way of technology,
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science and, perhaps to our benefit, social hierarchy. Our natural faculties
of perception are sufficient for us to survive as a species, living in small,
collectively organized bands. Such a situation curbs the growth of
hierarchical social organization, and the enhanced ability to coordinate our
activities that comes with hierarchy, because our ability to manage largescale processes is limited.

In the next section I will describe in more detail how technologies of
perception enabled the development of the complex, urban societies that are
commonly called civilizations. They have done so by enhancing our ability
to communicate, specifically by enabling us to share percepts as objects.
Humans have always lived as collectives, but, with the rise of perceptual
analogs, or measurements, we began living corporately, that is, as classes
with distinct functions in the social body. We have done this by externalizing
the mechanisms of perception, by using applied mathematics to generate
information about our environment. Measuring sticks are the simplest of
these tools, but, since their invention several millennia agowhen they were
considered an advanced technology that required considerable training
they have been joined by a plethora of devices ranging from cameras to
lasers.
Common to these technologies is their reliance on geometry and
light, the relations of which are summed up in geometric optics. Our eyes
exploit these same principles. Like the muscles, sinew and bones that
use leverage to move, eyes are mechanisms whose function is modeled
in physics, at least so far as the retina. The retina functions as a physical,
historical and epistemological terminus because it is the point where light is
absorbed by the body and translated into invisible neural impulses. It is the
site where the mechanistic model of the optogram meets the physiology of
the brain, and, once the retinal image was discovered, the frontier of visual
science passed from classical optics to modern neurological science.

Geometric optics is one of the triumphs of classical science, which
itself was based on metaphors where illumination stood for knowledge. Vision
remained a mystery until the retinal barrier was breached in the 19th century,
and a growing understanding of the physiology of visual perception joined
the new science of neurology.5 Some 20th century critics have associated
this phase with the overturning of the paradigms of classical science,
particularly the assertion that vision is based on light, but the revolution, if
we can call it that, was temporary. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century,
the entire chain of mystery has been unlocked. The workings of vision lie
exposed, and we are close to developing a complete technical intervention
in our perceptual faculty. Part of that intervention rests in classical optics,
the camera, and the rest in that of modern neurology. Not long ago, neurally
induced vision was the stuff of fiction, but successful experiments in electrical
stimulation of the visual cortex have been conducted over the past several
years. Future readers of this essay may already take such technologies for
granted.

To get back to my simplest analogy, technologies of perception, like
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levers and screws, extend the range of our physical faculties. Levers and
screws operate on mechanical principles that are defined by Newtonian
physics, and visual technologies like the camera operate on geometric
optics, also called Euclidean optics or classical optics. Needless to say,
neural induction has a later pedigree, but it still relies on the older science to
structure the information it passes to a conscious brain. These technologies
may be so fascinating that we see them as pureto study them is to satisfy a
deep curiosity about the world and about ourselves. The latter may be true,
but their foundation is political, and they have had a profound impact on the
organization of society, and the status of individuals within it. The pursuit
of pure knowledge is an individual, not a social motivation. Civilization,
science, private property, social hierarchy, the concentration of wealth and
power in an elitenone of this could have happened without technologies of
perception, starting with the simple measuring rod. Objective judgments are
essential to forming corporate hierarchies, and, while these greatly enhance
our ability to coordinate activities, they demand a sacrifice of autonomy that
is our birthright. They are systems of control as well as communication.
When subject to hierarchies, to objective judgments developed by distant
managers, individuals can be reduced to dull mechanical roles. In its brutal
reductionism, the optogram captures the essence of bureaucracy, of the
tendency to treat humans as instruments within a mechanism.
The Origins of Technologies of Perception
I need to begin this section with a note on method. While we are discussing
phenomena that might be considered culturalphotographs, video and
the likeor more broadly technologicalas in the cameras and other gear
used to make these images, the broadest context of my analysis is biology,
specifically the theory of evolution. This does not mean that I aim to import
the principles of biology and evolution into the humanities. Rather I think
biology should form the boundaries of cultural or historical analysis, as
human activities taken in their sum points to the perpetuation of individuals
and the species. We should measure our conclusions against the fact
that we are animals who confront a daily struggle for survival, not against
an idealized picture of pure inquiry. Like other primates, we are animals
who band together to survive, coordinating our action through thought,
communication and leadership. Are more sophisticated than other animals?
Yes. Have we transcended biology? We answer yes to this question only
at our own peril, as we shall see in the concluding section of this article.

It is necessary to make a philosophic point before discussing the
origin of technologies of perception. Pictures are the defining product,
though by no means the only product, of such disciplines. As photography
shows, technologies of perception can create realistic pictures, ones that
mimic what we see. But though they can be used to create supremely

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realistic pictures, we should distinguish photography, and other optical

arts, including perspectival painting, from the general category of naturalist
representation. Technologies of perception developed in tandem with urban
civilization, and they represent a mathematical approach to representation
based on optics. Naturalist painting originated much earlier in time, long
before civilization emerged, as the paintings of bison and other animals in
the caves of Lascaux show. Like naturalist paintings today, the paintings
of Lascaux were created by the studied effort of individuals. Technologies
of perception are executed as systems, and they are based in social
networks. Although we can speak of them as separate from civilization as
a matter of analysis, perceptual technologies are inherently part of it, and
vice versa. To understand them we must understand their context, as they
are interdependent with the material, social and psychological systems that
constitute civilized life.

Civilization arose in several regions of the world autochthonically,
that is, without the influence of other civilizations. So far archaeologists have
concluded that such pristine cultures developed in Mesopotamia, Egypt,
China, Mesoamerica, Peru and a few other places. Every civilization shares
certain characteristics: monumental architecture and civil design, largescale agriculture, practical geometry, records keeping, centralized religion
and social stratification. We can treat these characteristics separately,
for instance, by writing a book on pyramids or the habits of the elite, but
they are substantially interdependent. It is impossible to design a pyramid
or lay out a city without geometry. It is impossible to develop geometry
without records keeping and social classes, including a management elite,
to provide coordinated labor. Large scale projects require concentrations
of labor, which leads to concentrations of population or what we call cities,
and feeding a city requires a specialized class of farmers. Managing a city
requires division of labor, which requires records keeping, which requires
elite education, which requires social stratification. 6 And so on.

Technologies of perception developed from the imperatives of design
and records keeping. Conceiving of large buildings, pyramids, ziqqurats
and temples, and developing large estates is beyond the capacity of human
imagination. Or we can imagine such things, but only in feathery terms.
We cannot frame in our minds the exact dimensions of such structures, and
further present the quantities and types of materials necessary to maintain
them, let alone lay their measurements to the ground, then call up, over a
period of years, the number of laborers required to build them along with
the food and other resources required to sustain the laborers.7 When the
imperatives to build these structures arose, to build the estates, temples and
cities that started humanity literally on the path to the moon, our ancestors
invented mechanisms to assist in planning and organization. These
technologies of perception augmented their natural faculties, extended
their powers of representation, imagination and communication, and they
allowed early civilizations to create social organizations of unprecedented

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power by creating corporate bodies that subsumed individuals to limited

roles.

It is worthwhile to examine the difference between corporate and
collective bodies. This is a point where evolutionary biology serves as a
boundary condition of my analysis, and, appropriately so, because this is
the point where the evolutionary convergence between eye and camera
began. Any organized group of people is a collective, but in political terms
a collective is organized along democratic principles that recognize equal,
or roughly equal, worth among all members. Corporate bodies are quite the
opposite. They are organized hierarchically, with power flowing from the top
to the bottom, and they generally have far more specialization of roles than
collectives. Collectives honor egalitarian principles, while corporate bodies
honor their own elites. Both forms of organization exist today, but humanity
has, for most of its existence, been organized on collective principles. We
call these collectives tribes. Corporate bodies arose at a distinct historical
juncture, the beginning of civilization, and since then they have achieved
dominance in human affairs through the development of states. States
arose independently with every autochthonic civilization, but their earliest
appearance was in Mesopotamia about 6,000 years ago. From now on I will
confine my discussion to developments in Mesopotamia, not only because
it was the first civilization, but because it began a chain of development that
led through later civilizations in Egypt, Greece, Rome, Iraq, Italy and France
to the modern photographic camera.

In Mesopotamia civilization developed in response to environmental
change, among other factors. When human populations entered the region,
rain was abundant, and it was possible to farm, hunt and gather without
organized effort. Several thousand years ago the Fertile Crescent began
to dry, and people were forced to cohabit in increasingly small areas.
Anthropologists speculate that new forms of political organization developed
as a response to the environmental and social challenges. Mesopotamian
farmers invented intensive irrigation to overcome aridityand productivity
grew despite the unfavorable conditions. Political elites emerged to
coordinate irrigation, and also to police the rising number of conflicts that
came with population density. New technologies, new forms of political
organization and new forms of material organization appeared during the
course of a few centuries, after which a set of disparate tribes had come
together in cities like Eridu, Ur and, much later, Babylon. After V. Gordon
Childe, this period around 6,000 years ago is called the Urban Revolution,
and it is the point where history begins.8

It is impossible to map the emergence of civilization to a linear
process. Civilization arose from a constellation of forces, and, in each
region that it arose, the balance of these forces is different. But, like all
human creations, it developed from the interaction of a particular physiology,
in this case, that of a primate who evolved to survive in small bands, in
the terrestrial environment. Urbanization proved that at least one of these
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boundary conditions could be overcomeor evolved beyondand that is

our restriction to living in small bands. By living in larger groups, corporately
organized townships, our ancestors greatly enhanced their chances of
survival, with the result that humans have colonized most of the planet.9
Conditions in Mesopotamia 6,000 years ago encouraged people to achieve
an unprecedented population density while developing practices that were
exported to neighbors, who urbanized in turn. The process that led to the
Urban Revolution was a feedback loop, the primary elements of which were
given earlier: growth in population mirrored growth in agriculture, buildings,
mathematics, planning and social stratification. The process took centuries
for its first results, but today, several millennia later, most of humanity lives
in urban societies.

Technologies of perception were an integral factor in the feedback
loop that led to the Urban Revolution, and they have played an essential role in
civilization ever since the first cities arose in Mesopotamia. I have noted that
urban civilization is organized along corporate principles. (But, to appease
anyone that thinks I am being absolutist, I recognize that collectives still
exist, and still exert influence, even in the most rigidly corporate societies.)
However, the corporate state in unnatural, in the sense that we lack the
cognitive faculties to coordinate our activities so closely without assistance.
To put it in popular terms, we are naturally free, not as a grant from someone
but simply because no human being, on their own, has the capacity to follow,
analyze and manage a large group. Our physiology limits us to living in
small bands, and we did so until we figured out ways of circumventing our
evolutionary limitations. Agriculture was invented several thousand years
before urbanization, but it was practiced on a small scale because, from
a cognitive standpoint, we have just enough mental capacity to manage
the land required to feed a family. Creating a surplus by sending masses
to an estate required a mechanism for comprehending large tracts of land,
calculating its productivity and ensuring the resources to exploit the land
were properly managed. It required what we might call an overmind, what
the ancients called a god. Since such a mind did not exist, its functions were
created with technology.

Welding a corporate body from a tribal collective required
mechanisms that extended our perceptual and cognitive faculties. Managing
cities and regions that supported them, the contadora, required rulers to
comprehend vast areas and teeming resources, far more than supported
by our natural mental capacity. Technologies of perception reduced these
expanses to compact numbers and drawings that could be reviewed without
directly comprehension of their subject. Surveying was the first technology
of perception, and the first tools to extend our perceptual capacity were the
graded rods, cords and sighting tools used to measure surface area. Like
perception itself, technologies of perception have physical and cognitive
componentsthey are an ensemble of functional structures coupled to

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methods of judgment. Thus surveying tools accompanied the development

of a new discipline, geometry, that made sense of the measurements
gathered by surveyors.

Schoolchildren learn the basics of geometry today, but, at the
beginning of civilization, these simple tools were equivalent to todays
supercomputers. The impact of surveying may be greater than that of
any other disciplinewithout it we would have no roads, no architecture,
no cities. Nor would we have private property and the legal and political
edifices that function on top of it. Surveying has been elaborated by new
technologies like lasers, and advances in mathematics, but it is still practiced
for the goals developed in Mesopotamia: the regulation of a class system
that efficiently exploits resources. On inspection it is the basis of global
civilization.
The Automation of Vision
Land surveying began a process where our visual sense, and the judgment
associated with it, was automated. Automation is generally considered to
be a recent phenomenon, a product of the Industrial Revolution, but we
should consider what automation is. From an economic perspective, it is a
way of saving labor by assigning complex tasks to machinery. But this is not
the only way of comprehending automation. To understand how processes
came to be automated, we should also approach the subject ontologically
and historically. Both these vantages call for a more sophisticated view of
machines, what we might call for the purposes of distinction, a mechanism.
When considering what a machine is, we can define it as a device, a physical
thing, but lets approach that device from a conceptual rather than material
perspective. So we can have virtual machinesno relation with Turing
devicesthat function mechanically but through the disciplined actions of
humans. In this view, mechanisms have a conceptual basis, and we can
use that definition to understand how and why automation emerged as a
force in history.

In the previous section I made a distinction between collective
and corporate forms of social organization. Collectives rely on group
decision-making, not (necessarily) because of democratic beliefs, but (also)
because they lack the technical means to coordinate themselves more
tightly.10 Primary examples of collectives are tribes, who as a rule lack
technologies for managing the information necessary for centralized rule.
Corporate organization is a latecomer in evolutionary terms, arising only
in the past several thousand years of at least a million years of human
existence. We are familiar with the corporate mode, as it is the primary
form of government in our world, including democratic states that rule via
representative legislatures, appointed judiciaries and market economies
dominated by large businesses.
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Corporate government was first seen in the early states of
Mesopotamia. I am not asserting that anything as sophisticated as modern
bureaucracy existed then. But the primordial form of modern civilization
did, and the structures introduced at that timesocial hierarchy, civil
planning, measurement systemscontended for dominance with collectivist
organizations in a process resembling natural selection. So cultural evolution,
and technological evolution, largely supplanted biological evolution in the
human species.

I am here specifying the kind of societies that would develop
automation. Machines are not a natural consequence of human culture,
and we have lived without them for most of our million year existence. Once
introduced, however, they generate efficiencies, and even new ecological
niches, that let the cultures that wield them replace cultures that do not. The
schism between developed and non-developed peoples has driven history
for the past several thousand years, and while it is now unfashionable to
make moral distinctions based on level of civilization, particularly since
societies can adopt the ways of their neighbors, the indices associated with
civilization for the most part mirror evolutionary success.

Automation did not emerge full-blown during the Industrial Revolution.
Instead it derived from the fundamental systems that underlie civilization,
systems based on mathematical allocation of resources, specialization and
other abstract forms of planning. It is associated with the rise of objectivity
as I defined it earlier.11 As civilizations developed from tribal collectives, a
process that took centuries, rulers confronted issues of scale. Individuals
lack the perceptual and cognitive resources to plan large-scale projects
on their own. Consequently there was an increasing reliance on objective
judgments, algorithms and measurements. Put simply, rulers needed
rulers, that is, would-be kings need objective systems of measure to govern
in a meaningful way. With such system, individuals could be integrated
into corporate bodies that managed large-scale resources. As a matter of
course, these corporate bodies generate hierarchies where individuals have
more or less influence depending on their specialty.

The first forms of corporate rule, what we now call bureaucracy,
appeared in the city-states of ancient Sumer. Sumerian city-states were
governed by high priests, then kings, who dominated their region through
military and economic might. The latter was ensured by government
ownership of large estates, the first example in history of legal owned
property. These estates were well beyond the capacity of an individual to
comprehend, so it fell to surveyors to measure them, then present leaders
with a virtual image of their domains. The first surveyors were priests,
and surveying itself was a high technology, a seeming act of magic to the
uninitiated, so the priests were venerated by the masses. This is why I count
surveying as the first technology of perception. It replaced a subjective
exercise of our facultiesthe ability to judge surface areawith a far more
powerful mechanism of judgment, practical geometry. And it resulted in a

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virtual image, cadastres and maps, that replaced natural experience and let
its holders dominate society. Veneration was only part of their hold on the
population.

Since the rise of early states, corporate organizations have vastly
extended the range of the human species. Underlying this success is
the ability of corporate bodies to coordinate large numbers of people and
resources. I have noted that cultural evolution has outpaced biological
evolution since the onset of civilization. Its difficult to fathom the implications
of this statement, but the issue of machine evolution has become a serious
topic in popular and scientific circles. Are machines evolving into something
like organisms? If so, is the medium for this factories, the Internet or both?
The possibility of framing the question forms a boundary for our analysis,
and it also provides a way of describing the how concepts like mechanism
and objectivity translate into historical forces. Finally it takes us to the basic
question of this article. How was the convergent evolution of eye and camera
possible? What social impulses arose, deep in history, to lead our species to
develop optical technologies that can replace eyes?

Let me summarize what I have so far proposed. At the beginning of
history, civilizations developed, and they faced scaling issues that forced them
to develop corporate modes of social organization. Corporate organizations
depend on centralized management, to put it nicely, but management of
large expanses of land, people and resources required technologies that
could augment our natural faculties. Clever priests invented technologies of
perception, starting with surveying. These technologies allowed corporate
hierarchies to flourish. After six thousand years, and considerable resistance,
mistakes and other setbacks, the corporate mode has won out, dominating
both humanity and, to a large degree, the natural world. At the same time,
we have begun to worry that the mechanisms created to assist us have
themselves begun to evolve, perhaps towards a world that subordinates or
eliminates humanity. The issue of machine evolution is not trivial, and the
elimination of humanity need not result from a slave revolt. A future historian
may one day look back and see that humanity, as a matter of evolutionary
course, systematically changed the physical environment of the Earth to be
more hospitable to machines than to itself, thus making way for the next
phase in the development of intelligence.

If we call the camera a machine for seeing, then its evolutionary
frame is clear. Corporate organizations are mechanical systems for
managing information and resources. Early mechanisms used tools, but
these tools were not necessarily assembled into autonomous machines.
Instead they were wielded by trained humans, surveyors, who methodically
gathered information in the field, then reassembled it into objective images
that gave a virtual image of the landscape. A span of six thousand years
separates the invention of surveying and that of cameras. Am I guilty of
anachronism? Hardly. Surveyors are still active today, operating on much
the same principles as their archaic forebears. And cameras descend from
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those operations, those first technologies of perception, fulfilling ideological

dreams first set forth by Sumerian priests.

Sumerian city-states were governed on the basis of divine ownership.
Each city belonged to a particular deity, and that deity was associated with
a star or planet that gazed on its property. The concept of an all-seeing
celestial owner, a sky god, gave early states a powerful impulse that
continues to this day. Tribal cultures dont assign such primacy to a single
god, and the social force of this concept demonstrates the ideological and
technological underpinnings of corporate organization. First, the assertion of
a supreme being, the sky god, who owns everything below it. This assertion
has resonated through history in the person of priests, kings, presidents
and other superiors who control the vast mass of humanity. Second, the
celestial vantage of sky gods. Metaphorically they represent the top of the
social hierarchy, and throughout history the imprimatur of sky gods has been
given to leaders. Sky gods also represent a strategic position, the aerial view,
that lets leaders inspect their domains. Without such a view, management is
impossible. Throughout history surveyors have provided rulers with just this
vantage, the vision of the gods, as I have called it elsewhere, and civilization
has depended on this information as its lifeblood.

The concept of the sky god offers a way of integrating the six
thousand years that separate surveying from cameras, because it is the
evolutionary path upon which cameras developed. Needless to say, the
evolution of cameras was a complicated process, but it can be summarized
as follows.

Surveying led to the development of geometry in Mesopotamia,
Egypt and Greece. Greek engineers and artists developed sophisticated
instruments for studying geometry, and their investigations led to the
discovery of practical optics, in the form of perspectival painting, and
theoretic optics, encapsulated in the theorems of Euclid. Optical science
reached a high point in the work of Claudius Ptolemy, after which is was
forgotten until its revival by the Arab scientist al-Kindi, who introduced the
pinhole apparatus, an early form of camera obscura, as a research tool.
Investigations into the functioning of the eye and the pinhole effect continued
during the Golden Age of Islam, reaching a peak in the work of Ibn alHaytham, who offered the first mathematically accurate explanation of how
a pinhole lens works. Europeans discovered optics through translations of
Arabic works, and the theoretic discipline along with research tools like the
pinhole apparatus became standard parts of the European curriculum.12
At the beginning of the Renaissance, a study group that included Bruno
Brunelleschi and Leon Battiste Alberti studied a copy of Claudius Ptolemys
Geography, a treatise that includes a perspectival method for representing
spherical shapes in two dimensions.13 Shortly thereafter, the two introduced
the technique of vanishing point perspective to European art, culminating
trends that had been brewing in the previous century. A century later the
camera obscura was introduced, marrying what had been a research tool
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to popular representation, and it was rapidly improved with the addition

of lenses that had, for two centuries, been used only for the purpose of
correcting human vision. During the Industrial Revolution, inventors devised
a way of chemically fixing the image in a camera obscura, and a new form
of mass media was born.

Where does the sky god fit into this? The long development of
the camera seems to diverge from the political impulses that gave rise
to surveying, but in fact it hews closely to the class system that informs
civilization. Surveying gave rise to the numerous arts and sciences that rely
on geometryarchitecture, sculpture, perspectival painting, cartography
and all of these have been used in the service of elites. We praise the great
art of the ancient world and Renaissance as the highest forms of aesthetic
expression, but these works also expressed political, social and religious
ideologies with great force. We should not impose the Romantic ideal of
the sovereign artistic genius on history, nor should we take it too seriously in
our own time, seeing as it is primarily used a marketing tool rather than an
accurate reflection of the creative process.

Focusing now on photography, where has the evolutionary
convergence of eye and camera brought us? Photography was invented in
the 1820s. Within a few decades cameras were being carried by balloons,
then by airplanes for purposes of aerial surveillance. By the 1960s they had
become regular fixtures on orbiting space satellites. Today aerial imagery is
a standard element of governance, used for everything from fixing property
lines to ocean management. Look at a survey map, then look at an aerial
photograph of the same area. They contain much the same information, and
it presented in the same geometrically accurate, orthogonal form. We have
always relied on eyes in the sky. Like surveyors, cameras realize the sky
god through technology, and we use the information they produce to govern
our complex societies. Earlier I noted that corporate societies resembled
machines, primarily because both are organized on mechanical principles.
Because these mechanisms are embedded in living human societies, they are
subject to natural selection, and thus follow a natural course of competition
and elaboration. I argue that even a simple technology such as ancient
surveying is a form of automation, based on the fact that surveyors apply
mechanical processes to their craft. If we accept this argument, then we
can comprehend the context for more sophisticated systems of automation
to develop, until we arrive at the convergence of natural and technological
systems. The camera is a mechanical eye, and the corporate societies of
today have ample uses for it.

Here we have arrived at a boundary condition, a point where biology
meets technology, and it is reasonable to ask what comes next. Vision was
the first sense to automate, but others, notably hearing, have followed in the
past century. Cognition is on the engineers work bench now, and leaders
rely on expert systems to make decisions far more than is acknowledged.
We generally think of machine intelligence, or machinic life, as a reflection
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of our individual selves, but, should such an entity emerge, it would be more
accurate to describe it as a descendent of human societies, because we
long ago ceased to be individuals who are autonomous products of nature.
Beyond Nature: A World of Our Making
Optography forces us to consider our nearness to technology. Even atheists
recognize the divine Orphic element, the life force that makes us spiritual
as well as physical beings. Ethics is based on such a presumption of
spirituality, something we express, in ordinary terms, as the innate value of
human beings. (And animals, too, in our slowly expanding ethical compass.)
Materialists try to reason their way around this hard moral fact, but the only
people who treat other people as material are psychopathsand they often
do so with the most charming moral justifications.

But chances are the materialists are right. Philosophers have long
argued that machines wont be able to read thoughts, but, by analyzing
brainwaves with computers, scientists are discovering the semantic
correlates of physical thought. These technologies are being used to help
paralyzed people communicate, but they have clear application in legal and
political settings, too. Privacy advocates are concerned already. We need to
prepare ourselves where the boundaries between organisms and machines
has evaporated, as we are much farther along than we admit.

I am not prepared to predict the future. Many people have already
written on the subject of cybernetics and how artificial life may evolve. At
the same time, the past has remained relatively unexplored.14 Do we really
think such tremendous progress was made only in the past few centuries,
since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution? I have already questioned
the utility of eras and, specifically, the historical junctures that underlie them.
These are treated extensively by postmodern scholars, who, following
Michel Foucault and Jean-Francois Lyotard, have rejected grand narratives
of history. It is unfortunate that contemporary scholarship is so wedded to
these concepts that it condemns alternative approaches as nave.

But alternatives are necessary to understand the convergence of
eye and camera, which is the product of an evolutionary process that can be
tracked over millennia. This is convergence is precisely the kind of grand
narrative that contemporary scholars attack out of the box. In response I
argue that its foolish to reject an account based on a non-scientific theory,
that is, one which cannot be verified according to objective criteria. What
works for the subject at hand, I propose, is a holistic approach that flies in
the face of the unverifiable critical and postmodern theories that dominate
the academy. However, Im not proposing the story of optics as yet another
theory. Im trying to undermine the notion of theory altogether, as it applies
to the humanities. Rather than develop a theory (something I think should
be confined now to science, which has actual criteria for validation), scholars

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should strive to develop coherent narratives that relate past, present and
future through rigorous factual research. And lets not get too precious about
whether facts exist. By confining our narratives to definite thingsthe use
of surveying, the application of geometry to the visual fieldwe can avoid
misstatement.

In my proposed method the foreseeable future functions as a
boundary condition on the present. It is an analytic assumption rather than
a prediction, and its used to shed light on the past. Optography points to
such a boundary, a threshold that demands that we seek linkages among
past events. This is not the same thing as historical determinism, as if
the development of optography from optics, and the convergence of eye
and camera was inevitable. Of the several autochthonic civilizations that
emerged, only Sumer led to cameras, though all possessed surveying and
practical geometry as a matter of course. Simultaneously the evolution of
cameras is a given if societies were to achieve a certain order of complexity
every industrialized nation has adopted cameras as necessary for social
cohesion. The practical consequence of this, which we are on the verge
of witnessing, is the complete integration of cameras into the fabric of our
experience. Already we assimilate most of our experience of the world via
cameras, whether through television, magazines, newspapers or our own
snapshots. Imagine how little you would see without any of these products.
Cameras augment our eyes massively, and soon they could replace them
altogether. Retinal prosthetics are available. After these crude technologies
improve, as they surely will, wont they confer more advantages than eyes?
Right now the cameras mimic eyesight, sitting close to the eye socket. But
how convenient would it be to have them swivel on top of our heads, switch
to telescope mode, or take a feed from the outside of a car or airplane?
Beyond that, as William Gibson described in Neuromancer, we could use
such technologies to enter a new environment altogether, a virtual reality
constrained only by our imagination. Natural eyesight might one day play a
secondary role next to the technologies of perception that have augmented
it for the past six thousand years.

There is another device that has the same structure, but different
function, than eyes. That is the projector. Projectors work like cameras in
reverse. Rather than absorb images lit from the front, they extrude images
lit from behind. They contain their own light source, and they work better
when the conditions of seeing are reversed. Theaters are dimly lit, if at
all. Projectors are based in the same apparatus, the camera obscura, as
photography, but they were perfected earlier when inventors combined
the box with hand-painted slides in perspective. The result was a virtual
environment that delighted audienceswith motion induced by deft
transitionsand became mass market entertainment in the 18th and 19th
centuries. Magic lantern shows and other optical media like dioramas fell
from popular acclaim after cinema appeared, but they are properly the
ancestors of film shows.
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Projectors are late inventions, but they too have ancient
precursors. Most of the ancient scientists who studied eyesight adhered to
extramissionism, the idea that eyes project sensitive rays into the world. It
is these rays that see, bringing back vital information to the brain. There
are many arguments against the theory, notably the fact that we see distant
stars, but the ancients associated it with Euclids Optics (which is otherwise
substantially correct), and it persisted until the Middle Ages. Its still around
in some form. George Waldstein discusses how the idea survives in popular
culture as Supermans X-ray vision, and, though we no longer associate
projection with our eyes, we use projectors, our eyes running in reverse, to
produce immersive worlds.

Projection reverses the flow of perception. It doesnt perceive worlds,
it produces them, and in so captures an essential function of humanity, one
that forms the cusp between biological and cultural evolution. For most of
its existence humanity lived in harmony with nature. Such harmony was
no idyll. Our ancestors lived on the edge of extinction in tiny, scattered
populations. Agriculture changed that situation, allowing stable population
growth, and urbanization, the advent of civilization, put us in even less
precarious circumstances. We have successfully colonized most of the
planet, and our problem is too many humans, not too few.

What are the factors that led to this extraordinary change of luck?
Clearly agriculture is the main factor. Farms refocus the productive energy
of nature, creating environments that favor human needs. The secondary
factor lies in the reorganization of human society that accompanied
urbanization. The shift from collective to corporate organization created
efficiencies that allowed enormous population growth. Tribes gave way
to elitist states based on property. Technologies of perception were
central to this process, as I discussed above, and surveying was the
original technology of perception. Surveying was not only first. It was
also the ancestor of the entire range of visual technologies, generating the
technical basis for applied and scientific optics. From surveying onward
these technologies enabled people to automate processesWhat are the
factors that led to this extraordinary change of luck? Clearly agriculture is
the main factor. Farms refocus the productive energy of nature, creating
environments that favor human needs. The secondary factor lies in the
reorganization of human society that accompanied urbanization. The shift
from collective to corporate organization created efficiencies that allowed
enormous population growth. Tribes gave way to elitist states based on
property. Technologies of perception were central to this process, as I
discussed above, and surveying was the original technology of perception.
Surveying was not only first. It was also the ancestor of the entire range of
visual technologies, generating the technical basis for applied and scientific
optics. From surveying onward these technologies enabled people to

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automate processes It is easiest to outsource these tasks to machines, but

their original source is the disciplined action of trained humans using tools.
The archaic states of Sumer developed the earliest social mechanisms, and
these systems have, with starts and setbacks, evolved into the mechanized
societies of today.

The projector also represents the convergence of machines with
human faculties. But in this case the convergence is more poetic than
biological. The projector resembles a physical eye, along with outdated
notions of how eyes work, but it functions like our minds eye, the internal
faculty that presents both the material world and the worlds we imagine.
Imagination is the real force of history, the impulse behind material progress,
and it calls the other half of our story into play.

Technologies of perception play two roles in history, but I have so far
only discussed one. Eyes and cameras are instruments of perception, serving
to represent the world with geometric accuracy. But each are functional units
of larger systems, and the goals of these systems is to survive in the world,
to manipulate it, not simply to know it. Within the framework of evolution,
the system where humanity is ultimately defined, survival is of greater import
than knowledge. Put more accurately, knowledge serves the advance of
the species towards greater numbers and more diverse ecological niches.
Culture is one such innovation, as it not only has propelled our species
into new regionsdeserts, the Arctic, outer spacebut also has enabled
us to develop new opportunities for reproduction. Other animals have to
adapt through long generations of evolution to colonize new regions. With
the advent of culture, humans have applied technology to adapt, first by
augmenting our bodies with clothing and small tools, then by adapting the
environment through buildings and public works.

Farming, fishing, houses, factories, cities and a host of other
innovations have freed us from seasonal vagaries of nature, if not our
dependence on the Earth. Our ability to build the vast complex of civilization,
this second nature, depends on surveying. Surveying was first used to
manage farms, growing them into estates, then to design buildings, which
grew into cities, then to manage roads, which rationalized the design of
cities, and created national systems of roads, aqueducts and canals to
manage resources.15 Surveying is comprised of two parts, measurement
and mathematics, and in ancient times these components developed into
architectural and civil design, perspectival painting, cartography, navigation
and optics along with the base discipline of geometry. We distinguish pure
sciences like optics from applied technologies like perspective, but in reality
the technologies have preceded the sciences, and advances in science
have been applied towards technical ends. Desire drives progress. And
desire has an evolutionary basis, linking us to the fundamental goals of all
living beings. It is rooted in survival, framed by the imagination, and realized
by technology.

The convergence of eye and camera has been driven by societies
that have sought ever greater control over themselves and their environment.
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The eye is part of vision, itself part of a larger cognitive faculty, the brain, that
functions as the command and control center of human bodies. Surveying
embodied the visual facultyperception and imaginationin a discipline
that civilization invented at its beginning. As civilization has grown, the
goals of surveyingthe acquisition and management of propertyhave
elaborated into more and more facets of our natural faculties, and new but
related disciplines have been invented. Yet these functions have developed
in parallel: perception and imagination, acquisition and management,
vision and design, communication and control. Seeing is the first stage of
conquest, and, as our technologies have advanced, so has the ambition of
our control. Our ancestors worked to control the land, the space in which
we dwell, but the newest technologies allow control on a much more intimate
level. Prosthetic eyes are a godsend to the blind, and they would be a great
convenience to the rest of us. But they would also create political dilemmas,
as the subjective faculty of vision becomes replaced by synthetic objects.

I mentioned earlier that freedom derives from the natural autonomy
of our senses. This is because a group of humans in nature have only
limited capacities for command and control. Our senses and language
prevent tight coordination, and this limitation preserves a high measure
of autonomy for individuals. Civilization overcame the natural resistance
to dictate by developing disciplines for coordinating large-scale projects,
notably surveying but also a host of other accounting techniques. Surveying,
accounting and other disciplines fed social hierarchies with information,
projecting the decision-making processes once reserved for individuals into
a corporate system. There is a distinct difference between tribes and states,
between collectives and corporate organizations. While the actual transition
from one to the other is marked by a complicated and lengthy process, we
can define an actual historical and epistemic juncture at that divide. On
one side lies tribes, on the other nations. Once the state started evolving,
its forms proliferated wildly, each competing for dominance. The principles
of governance developed for states have also been applied to business,
religion, education and other activities. What they have in common is
objective roles, rules and procedures for their participants, a system that
enables efficient exploitation of resources.

Efficiency is the factor that introduced evolutionary conditions into
culture. Culture and efficiency may have even played a role in prehistory,
as some scientists speculate that cultural expression gave modern humans
an advantage over Neanderthals. It certainly played a role in the rise of
civilization. Early states had setbacks, but the past 6,000 proves that
surveying, accounting and other adjuncts to bureaucracy have superior
survival characteristics. It is a brutal fact that states have thrived at the
expense of tribes, who have all but disappeared.

Civilization is now entering a new phase. Think about the moral
overtones of the word civilized, which were present in the earliest writers
who belittled the tribes at their border. Civilization has since the beginning
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been a project to tame the savage, to subdue the state of nature. Farms
formed the natural first stage of this project, but we associate the rise of
civilization not with farming, which can be managed by tribes below a certain
scale, but with cities. Cities banished wilderness altogether, creating a
tidy predictable human world. (Im going to ignore the foolish ecological
consequences of this project.) For 6,000 years this world has advanced in
scope and sophistication, and now its reaching new frontiers, namely the
human psyche. For all our civilization, and reliance on objective media like
magazines, films and television, we still rely on our own visual systems,
untamed and autonomous, for input. This works well enough. But, as an
evolutionary system, our civilization is bound to experiment with new forms,
as some organization or another may gain advantage through them. It is
only natural, in a perverse way, for civilization to colonize vision itself.

As I write this the convergence of eye and camera is becoming
complete. Every few months there advances in retinal implants, eventually
there will be interfaces directly to visual centers of the brain. Cameras and
eyes will be interchangeable, and, at that point, when eyes are no longer so
necessary and sacred, the art of optography may finally emerge. Another
convergence will mirror that of eyes and cameras, that of projectors and
the imagination, and our world may resemble the cyberspace described by
William Gibson. In cyberspace, phantoms and reality merge, imagination can
be perfectly realized without the limitations of nature. So the old distinction
between subject and object dissolves as well. Objectivity resides well within
the subject, with consequences that seem bizarre. Such a system would
enable the perfect dictatorship since perception, the very shape of the world
as it appears to anyone, could be completely controlled. Yet imagination
would also be unleashed, with resources to fulfill everyones desire inherent
within the system. (For brevity Im leaving aside questions of other senses
and of the body itself, which must continue to reside somewhere.)
Is the ultimate corporate system I have just describedthe incorporation
of individuals into a single perception machinedifferent from the current
world-system? The majority of humanity now lives in cities, and its most
influential sector has done so for millennia. We rely on media for most of
our experiences, certainly for the ones that govern our aesthetic and political
lives. As long as we accept a photograph or television broadcast as reality,
it may as well be pumped into our brains. Science fiction writers have been
scorned, but we owe the field respect. From Mary Shelley to Jules Verne
to William Gibson, they have consistently posed questions of who and what
we are based on reasonable assumptions about the advance of technology.
As civilization continues to progress with disregard for nature, humanity will
face existential challenges of great magnitude. In this essay I have tried
to outline the history of some of these challenges, along with a philosophic
approach to meeting them.

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Endnote:
My method consciously opposes the dominant trends in
contemporary scholarship. But, rather than attract reproach, I hope to inspire
readers to engage the world directly, with a practical eye and without the lens
of theory.
Endnotes
1

A Venetian law book from 1300 refers to roidi da ogli, little disks for the eyes, and in1306
sermon Friar Giordana of Pisa reported that the art of making eyeglasses was scarcely twenty
years old. Reported in A History of Technology, Vol. III. Ed. Charles Singer et al. Oxford
University Press: New York, 1958.
2
See Gernsheim, Helmut and Alison. The History of Photography from the Earliest Use of the
Camera Obscura up to 1914. London: Oxford University Press, 1955, p. 10, and Kemp, Martin.
The Science of Art: Optical Themes in western art from Brunelleschi to Seurat. New Haven,
Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1990, p. 189.
3
Wald, George (1953) Eye and Camera in Scientific American Reader. NY: Simon & Schuster:
555-68.
4
For instance, Marshall McLuhan outside the mainstream of academia, and Jean Baudrillard
and Paul Virilio within it.
5
In Techniques of the Observer (MIT Press, 1990), Jonathon Crary details the development of
physiological optics in the 19th century.
6
For a standard account of how civilization started in Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica, see
Adams, Robert McCormick. The Evolution of Urban Society. Chicago: Aldine Publishing
Company, 1966.
7
For a concise overview of archaic management techniques, see Archaic Bookkeeping by
Nissen, Hans, Robert K. Englund and Peter Damerow. Chicago: University of Chicago Press:
1993.
8
Childe, V. Gordon. The Urban Revolution. TPR, Vol. 21, no. 1, 1950
9
My arguments for a informational approach to the formation of civilization, and for its expression
in social hierarchy, is based on an article by Kent Flannery where he argues that social
hierarchy creates efficiencies in social management due to improved information processing.
See Flannery, Kent. The Cultural Evolution of Civilizations. Annual Review of Ecology and
Systematics 3, 1972, pp. 399-426.
10
Again this relates directly to Kent Flannerys account of the informational efficiencies inherent
in social hierarchy.
11
Lewis Mumford argues persuasively for a mechanist approach to civilization in much of his
work, notably The Myth and the Machine: Technics and Human Civilization. Harcourt, Brace,
Jovanovich: New York, 1966). Mumfords work is outside todays academic mainstream, as a
matter of style rather than substance in my view.
12
David C. Lindberg describes the development of optics in several works. For an overview, see
Theories of Vision from al-Kindi to Kepler. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.
13
For the complete argument supporting this thesis, see Samuel Edgerton, The Renaissance
Rediscovery of Linear Perspective. New York: Basic Books, 1975.
14
For instance Ray Kurzweil in The Age of Spiritual Machines.

145

MACULA LUTIA OR YELLOW SPOT WITH FOVIA CENTRALIS

146
AREA OF ACUTE VISION.

147

DEREK OGBOURNE, 2005

MY DEBT TO OPTOGRAPHY
BY RICHARD NIMAN (artist and opera singer)
Before I begin I want to make it plain that I am speaking here as an artist and
perhaps also as a sometime writer of crazy things - which is how I have
described myself in one of my own writings: also maybe as a bad typist on an
old-fashioned typewriter. So far as I can see my status as a former singer in
operas, as I find myself described here, gives me no authority whatever on the
subject of optograms - unless of course knowledge of images on retinas will
help me in future to reach my bottom Cs - or alternatively capacity to reach a
bottom C will enhance my knowledge of retinas.

As I understand it, the study of optography was embarked upon in the
nineteenth century and continued into the twentieth century and perhaps even
into present times, in order to ascertain and preserve the image of what human
beings and other creatures last see at the point of death. My own personal
slant on this is that no matter how reliable or unreliable optography may be
in securing and preserving these images for posterity, say in police work for
instance in identifying murderers, my introduction in recent months to this
subject has opened up for me certain other allied or associated subjects, to
which perhaps I should have paid more attention in earlier times. One of these is
the exact nature of sight or vision; the other is the nature of death - in the sense
of what death is as an experience, particularly as a visual experience. For this I
am grateful.

It is, I believe, common knowledge that the business of seeing is not
just what the physical eye, including the retina, can achieve. All the research
that has gone into optography is doubtless invaluable - but it is the way in which
the brain interprets the image on the retina that really clinches the deal - and
indeed often determines the way which we behave in response to that. For one
thing we all know that what we may be looking at a given point in time is turned
upside down in or on the retina - but then the brain turns the image the right way
up again. This of course is common knowledge - but the consequences of this I
find somewhat surprising. In fact what we are seeing is not actual things in the
outside world but messages transmitted by our brains. True these messages
may have a direct relationship with the objects of our gaze - but they are not
exactly the same thing.

I, myself, suffer from a mild form of vertigo; perhaps most of us do. Thus
if for some strange reason I found myself on the rafters of a tall cathedral looking
down into the weIl below, or if for perhaps a less strange reason I were on the
edge at the top of a skyscraper looking downwards, I would feel fear, if not terror,
and my behaviour would be tempered with caution at the very least. This is one
of the ways in which what we see in what I call the fullest sense of the term
conditions the way we behave - as mentioned in the last paragraph. By way of
corollary, if I were looking at photographs of downward views from the ceiling
of a cathedral or from the top of a skyscraper, I doubt I if would experience the
same fear. Why is this so? Is it because in the first case I know there is a very
steep drop from my point of vision (which I could actually fall into) whereas in the
second case I dont feel this as strongly because I know it isnt real; or isnt it
148

real because a camera is only a machine programmed to record certain

things in certain ways? It does not think, it does not feel, it does not know
- whereas when we see in the fullest sense of the term, we do all of these
things. Personally I would and do very much support research into optography
and into the function of the retina because without this one cannot go on
to understand the other mental aspects of seeing; nevertheless, one has
to concede that optography does have its limitations. After all the physical
retina is no more than a kind of biological or zoological camera.

As an artist I have often wanted to make two-dimensional works
such as drawings, paintings and collages which made you when you looked
at them very much aware of the real space depicted in them. On occasion I
wanted to make people feel the kind of terror that they might have feIt had
they in actuality been looking down from a great height. This is what I believe
is called illusory space.

I also wanted in such works to make people aware of things that
werent immediately apparent when you looked at the real world; sometimes
in this sense to make abstract art. The artist, Wassily Kandinsky, was aware
of this when he made a distinction between the visual world and the visual
field - between objects, people and things encountered in the real outside
world and what we make of them in our private inner world as expressed and
externalised in the form of art.

I think it would be fair to say that over the past 30 years or so I
have been a maker of bizarre images whether in two-dimensional or threedimensional form - and similar things could be said of my writings. Initially I
thought of myself, and possibly flaunted myself, as a surrealist; that is until
about 10-12 years ago, when I met in London, where I lived, a group of
people who styled themselves as surrealists and held themselves out to be
absolute experts on what was surrealist and what was not. On the whole I
found them pompous, dogmatic, stick-in-the-mud and dog-in-the manger.
As might be imagined, my relationship with them less than satisfactory. So
finally I was more than happy to put plenty of blue water between myself
and them, contenting myself with the notion that it was perhaps better to
be a good artist and a bad or non-surrealist than a bad artist and a good
surrealist. However, my recent encounter with optography has made me
realise how close I am still in ideas and outlook to at least certain major
aspects of surrealism - and again for this I am grateful. A year or so ago
met the celebrated collector of surrealist works and jazzman, George Melly,
at a private view of art works by the recently deceased English surrealist,
Conroy Maddox. There Melly in a talk about Conroy described surrealist
art works as ones which depict the point at which dream and reality meet. I
dont believe this is an original statement coined by George Melly, but I feel
it, nevertheless, to be true - as weIl as possibly a weIl known maxim. This
certainly I think does happen in the works of the surrealist artist, Salvador
Dal - and it is interesting, perhaps even significant, that it was a portrait of
Salvador Dal that the scientist, Evangelos Alexandridis, who did so much
work on optography, showed to rabbit before killing it and taking its retina for
149

research. Whatever Alexandridis personal beliefs in that direction, Dal

must have held to the surrealist tenet that everything is governed by the
subconscious, which can manifest itself in dreamlike form. Dal may have
had his differences with the other surrealists, led by Andr Breton - but, as I
understand it, these were differences largely over politics, which ultimately
led to Dals expulsion from the Surrealist Movement. Nevertheless, so far
as I can tell, his paintings and other art works continued to manifest his
belief in the subconscious and the dream.

This now leads me to deal, as I have previously indicated, with
the issue of death. About 9 years ago I actually witnessed the death from
cancer of the bowel of my younger brother. Having been called to the
hospice where he was housed, I was told he was on the point of dying. I
was also told to hold his hand and say something to him - as according to
the nurse hearing is the last of the senses to go. I did precisely that as he
lay thrashing about and heaving on the bed. His eyes were wide open - but
I doubt if he was really seeing anything in the ward as he seemed barely
conscious. True one might have been able, once he had died, to get off his
retina images of say the ceiling of the ward, of the end of the bedstead and
so on - but was he really seeing these? I doubt it. Where was my brother
at that point in time? What kind of world was he inhabiting? Of course one
can only speculate - but I think that world was probably more like a dream
- or at any rate say akin to a surrealist painting.
150

Occasionally I have come across people who claim they have had an out
of body experience. In other words they had died temporarily and can
remember what it was like when they were dead. I am inclined to be very
sceptical about this - but again what they described smacked very much
of surrealist imagery.

In conclusion I want again to repeat my support for researches into
optography and for any exhibition in this connection. If these have helped
nothing and nobody else, they have certainly helped me to understand
myself.

Opposite page: Whose dream is it anyway?, Richard Niman, 2007

151

a.

piece of work
b. LIMITLESS

instructions:
choose textwork/tattoo a and/or b., typeface & colours/s.
bare skin, feel needles and ink penetrate, become a piece
of work, limitless, and/or a limitless/piece of work.

paul sakoilsky
30th july 2006

152

Paul Sakoilsky
Musings on Optograms, the ideal death, the ideal work of art
and the Museum of Optography:
Derek Ogbourne and Paul Sakoilsky, a dialogue,
9.12.06, Kilburn, London.
Introduction.
The thing that struck me concerning Derek Ogbournes Optography project,
when he spoke of it, and ever since, having had an ongoing commentary
on his developments, was its obsessive nature. Let me say from the
outset, I mean this here as a compliment. The desire and application is
encyclopedic.

The Optogram and Optography, whose history this book and show
delineates, as far as its projected practical usage, in the field of criminology,
was a scientific end-game. Yet, as Ogbourne uncovers in his research, the
Optogram, the fixing of the last image seen at the moment of death on the
retina, via photographic process, is a real thing. It can, and has been done.
Again, as his research in Heidelberg uncovered, the human optogram, is
also a reality. This brings an all-too-human tragedy into the Museum. This
maybe the one and only verified example. It was created by Khne in the
late 1800s, from the retina of a freshly guillotined murderer. As The Shutter
of Death reveals, it is also, relatively, not such a complicated process.

Taking an arcane subject on which, prior to this project, little
was known outside of literary and apocryphal references, Ogbourne has
single handedly, created what is, what surely must be, the archive on the
subject.

One would not want to call this referentiality, so much as hyperreferentiality. Here, everything refers to everything else. One is reminded
of Duchamps Great Glass project: work/text/experiments/research.
Ogbournes The Shutter of Death/Museum Of Optography, is part science,
part detective story, part history lesson, part psychogeography, but always
already, simultaneously, art. Here one sees at work, an almost Promethean
drive to know all, and somehow or other bring all under the gaze, into the
praxis/art, which is not to be distinguished from the former, but to be seen
as an extension in real space, a pause, a plateau: a book, an exhibition.

One cannot help but love grand ambitions and undertakings.

153

Dialogue - -9.12.06
Paul Sakoilsky: [] The show at Brigitte Schenk Galerie, when is
that? [Opens March 29th 2007]. So then, theres this cut-off point, as
regards research?
Derek Ogbourne: Its ongoing - its probably a series of exhibitions where
it expands

[] In the end, its a dead end; in that sense, I call it the shutter of
death. Once it happens, it happens, and thats it. Youre left with an image
and the only aura it has is the moment of production [...] You know, an
optogram is an organic image, caught in flesh. The analogy of the eye and
the camera is often made but this actually does it. And that kind of intrigues
me. The fact that it really is that last glimpse of existence. I summed it up
quite well when I said: When musing or imagining death, youre looking
across a room and then you close your eyes, you cut off your visual stimuli.
What you then rely on is the memory of what you last see - that is the
image. But the image is almost meaningless.

[] The idea of the window. Light coming through the window,
this was Khnes main subject in his drawings of optograms. Its quite apt,
seeing that the first photograph, by Nipce, was of a window. The window,
and analogously, the soul - its where light comes into a dark box, which
is like the eye itself, although the window doesnt really have a lens. So
then you have the camera obscura, and that whole link throughout. Its
almost strange how the idea of the camera and the eye analogy was only
really realised quite late in history, that always surprised me. I found out
recently that Khne had an assistant, who also produced over a hundred
optograms; and there was an optographic chamber. (See Richard Kremer,
Fig 4 on page 43)

The idea of Optography in the late 1860s was rife everywhere,
especially within the photographic world, the photo magazines and the
media. And then only later on did scientists come in and say, were going
to prove once and for all, whether this can be done. There was always a
confusion with the criminologists, the police. They seemed to think that the
image was captured on the cornea rather than on the actual retina. There
are so many stories about it. There was a buzz about it all over the world
... It seems strange to be researching something from the past, something
that is pseudo-science. This is always something Ive been into. I have got
a great collection of old pseudo-science books...
Well, I have spoken with you about this before: its in-utility. Its
completely useless ... useless in a sense that allies with art. Is the
Optogram useless? Its non-utilizable, for what it was meant to be,
what it promised for criminology. Its an end-game, a scientific endgame?
Yes, youre right. But our fascination with the myth of the image in the dead
mans eye forever sparks the imagination.
154

But its of no use?

Its of no scientific use, its obsolete science. Im interested in its in-utility,
but also in the fantasy that in the future there might be some application for
it. The perfect artwork for me would be to produce a work of art and to win
the Noble Prize for science at the same time. That would be the perfect
artwork for me. Doing good, but also creating a great art work at the same
time. To do good, to make progress for mankind, to get the Noble Prize for
discovering something, and that thing is a work of art. I never understand
why there isnt a Noble Prize for art?
For literature ... it must have been how it was set up ... Lets return
to what you were saying about death a minute ago; and then I really
want to bring this round to whats actually going to be shown in the
gallery? Obviously, its going to change in some ways from now till
then. Youre still processing it all. But how are you going to actually
show it? (Because much of this other stuff will be covered in the
rest of the book). Then, to try and talk about some of these topics, in
relation to your work, if you see what I mean? But prior to that Id like
to return to what you were saying about the concept of death again.
Do you recall? We have said it before, about the shut-off point?
The shutter of death? The moment you close your eyes, you enter an
internal, mental world that remembers that moment when you had your
eyes open. Thats where you imagine death.
I dont know about this. I think death is unimaginable.
Yes, of course its very difficult to imagine death itself. I am talking about
imagining the lead up to death- the last thing you see. For example, when
you come close to death, lets say, a near miss on a bike with a bus, and
you immediately recall the event, the images that flash before you are the
last things you would have seen before you died. Its a strange event.
On the other hand, death, or my being-towards-death, or to try and
figure death is, by its very nature, impossible. To conceive of my own
death? I can conceive of death, of my own death, I know that I will die,
but I cannot conceive (conceptualise) death.
The only thing that you know is the last thing you do see. Its fascinating
to imagine the last time the world enters your retina. The image might be
banal. The Museum of Optography is to do with imagination. This is why
Retinal 140, the small little retinal drawings, are imagined death scenes.
Half of them are romantic landscapes is how we want to die. We dont
want to have a violent death, a miserable death; we dont want to have a
boring death. We want to actually be looking across a beautiful landscape
and end our way like that. I wanted to do this piece where I collected a
bit like in the film Cinema Paradiso - endless shots of people saying Im
going, Im going, laying in their death bed, looking out of a window, and

155

the suns coming through, and the wind, the breeze is blowing gently, and its
their last breath. An extended romantic Hollywood death.
Whats the name, theres the film of your grandmother, wasnt it? Singing
on her deathbed, or very near the end of her life? Convalescing, or not
convalescing? I dont know the exact details, shes obviously really,
seriously old, singing a hymn in bed [The video is Hymn].
It was one of those found a bit of found footage. It was the only footage
I had of her.
Found? Did you shoot it then? You did?
Yeah, yeah. I just pointed the camera at her and said, Go on sing us a song.
And she sang this hymn. Then I started to think about whats she saying.
She was talking about Christ being at her side, as though she was going
to be taken off to heaven, it was like a death hymn. Maybe hymns are like
that? Well, some are. And shes singing this hymn, almost willing herself to
be taken to God. I tried to find this hymn, I went to different priests, and then
I found an audio psychic.
An audio psychic?
They listen to an audio recording and tell you about it. The psychic said
something about my grandmothers dead husband. In the video you get
television as backing track - its a low-quality VHS - and you get this voice
from the television saying, Life, life is very strange, isnt it? This TV intrusion
is in the middle of her singing, and she actually looks like a corpse, shes
literally kind of wasting away. [...] Its funny; I didnt make that connection
[retinal drawings - window - figuring the moment of death, etc.]. But of course
art works in mysterious ways.
But obviously there are a lot of connections running throughout your
various works.
There is a strong connection with my early paintings and the need for
something thats very physical and very human. This is where all my physical
films come in. But its um, the getting inside. The way I think I solved that
was with the close-up, to have intimacy with the subject. And many times
the subject is dislocated form its environment, which allows the imagination
to kick off.

When I interviewed Alexandridis, this was one of the things I talked
to him about. Where does the imagination come into all this? What made
you choose the last things the rabbits saw? One of the optograms he did
has the numeral 75 on it, and Thom Kubli (who assisted, and was there with
me) said, maybe its a kind of occult number or something, basically reading
too much into it. But no, a scientist is a little bit more logical than this. It was
1975, the year he did it. I was trying to wean out the imagination with him.
He chose Salvador Dal for one of the optograms. Thus in The Museum of
156

Optography here is this recorded conversation with Salvador Dal, where

he asks Dal what he would choose a rabbit to see before it dies. And of
course Salvador Dal, being an artist, is full of himself, and suggests he
puts his image, as God. So, the poor rabbit has to look at Dal before he
dies.

Strangely enough, there is a strong surreal element to this
exhibition You could say in many ways, its not a contemporary show at
all. Its like the two drawings Ive made are quite surreal, by chance. Its not
like I usually do surreal drawings, its just these two drawings. Somehow
they came out like that: the guillotined rabbit and the Muybridge dancing
ball; also, in the drawing that Ive done just now, which is of two men that
are exploring a lump of deformity that is just sitting behind the lens of
the eye. Its a drawing I found in Heidelbergs Ophthalmological Library. It
struck me. I just thought it was very beautiful. Instead of the retinal image
being cast at the back of the eye, theres this surreal landscape, thats a
cancer or a tumor. So I have these two explorers that are staking their
claim by putting flag on their conquest. And again, this refers back to film,
to Georges Mliss Journey to the Moon, and even the Fantastic Voyage.
Its very much a metaphor for this project really [...] There has also recently
come to light on microfilm, the original case notes of the criminal that
was beheaded, in the 1880s in Bruchsal, which I visited. This sets up an
archival feel to it, so Im thinking of having a microfiche machine in the
show, and then of course my tiny little retinal drawings will be in a the form
of a large disk, so they will look like a retina as well. The only way you can
inspect them is from a ladder with wheels on.
Like a library ladder.
A lot of the archive material Ive collected will be in the show as well, so
theres an archive element: an archive into Optography. Theres a video
documentary as well that might be expanded. It will be more to do with
the process of looking and finding. You know, finding this elusive thing,
which is elusive in a sense. With optography, the product is so fleeting. Its
quite difficult to produce. The process is just like photography, you have
chemicals and a camera.
You talk a lot about imagination. I didnt quite realise although I
should have known, knowing you, maybe Ive been too busy getting
on with my own stuff how large a part the imaginary aspect, or the
imagination plays in this project. But obviously, at the back of it is
the optogram, especially the human optogram, in the sense that it is
human (as opposed to rabbits). And this is very cold, metallic, you
know, a kind of black night. The actual image on the retina at the
persons moment of death, I would suggest, is actually nothing to do
with the imaginary, or its completely and utterly mechanical? I mean,
is it what the person saw? No, its not what the person saw (at least
not necessarily so). It is whats reflected on the eye, which is a very
157

Still from Struggle, Derek Ogbourne, 1997.

158

Still from Death and the Monument, Derek Ogbourne, 2007.

159

different thing, I would suggest? Its whats cast on the retina, which
is a very different thing from what theyre actually seeing, because the
act of seeing involves the imaginary, which is cut off at the moment of
death. You see what I mean?
Theres a separation between the brain and the eye, even though they were
once seen as part of the same organ. Yes, there is a separation. Its like the
imagination ceases to exist once the optogram is produced.

But this is made by a living person. And the whole process is of
course, absolutely to do with the imagination and how we imagine; its like
detective stories, and the hunt for the elusive image. Thats why I think
photographers of the 19th century were so charmed with it. Because the whole
idea of darkroom process ... the image appears like magic. You imagine what
that white piece of papers going to bring, even though you know what youve
pointed the camera at originally . And yes, in a sense, the actual optograms
Ive got are not particularly miraculous or that exciting Ive never been into
photography at all, its never really got me excited, its always been a dead
moment, that has a coldness, and its a limit as far as its format. Its too much
the mechanical element with photography. Its the same in a sense with the
eye. The optogram is the completely objective eye, as it were. You die and
you dont necessarily have a choice where you die well, you do to a degree.
Thats why, if you choose a nice sunny room and a beautiful image in front of
you, and decide, right, Im going to die looking at this
Surely, you can only choose when you die, if you commit suicide?
Well, its whenever God, or whatever decides when youve got to go, and
thats what youre looking at, whether youre looking at the ceiling or wherever.
Thats why some of the retinal drawings depict literally the ceiling, some of
them are just black, because it would be like that; others are romantic ideas
of how youd die.
Well, then, have you been thinking about mortality while doing this?
All my work is about that. Its about micro moments that separate life from
death. The whole film going up the mountain, Death and the Monument, is
about small moments: the person who edits out the moment before disaster.
The fighting one, Struggle, captures the moment of the blink when the fist
comes towards you. It is about the very sudden, the separation between life
and death. I think I need to get some humour in the next lot of pieces though.
I really do. After finishing Death and the Monument Im going to probably go
a bit wild, make some funny things, something a bit lighter. My work is rather
heavy and dark, and sometimes quite violent. It always somehow gravitated
towards the eye, and hands. Going up the mountain, hands and eyes. Its
all logical really that this has to come now, and that I went from painting, to
sculptures, to performance, then video, to arrive at this point. But always
trying to think of what happens next, thats the hardest thing but it just

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naturally happens almost everything you do. You do tons of thinking, and
then you just do it, and it just comes.
Just doing it, yes, exactly - thinking, just seems to get us more
confused.
But thats part of the whole thing. You know, being confused, can produce
some interesting work about being confused.
Yes, of course.
I did this project called Frankensteins Kitchen that in the end was about
being confused. I had this idea of using methane. Creating something that
was organic, that had the properties of life and was dependent upon the
viewer or participant to keep it alive. And in the end it was a failure. It was
doomed to be. It was more to do with the process of trying to find or discover
a way of creating something that was an analogy to a living being, that,
literally, if it was too hot, or too cold the thing would die. You had to keep
the thing alive. Before that, I did this exhibition with huge condom-coloured
balloons filled with water and suspended from the ceiling, where I tried to
keep these things alive, so theres a Frankenstein thing here. You could say
theres a 19th century, bodily macabre involved ... Now Ive found out that
theres another human optogram. I might find out theres a whole lot more.
I could actually travel the world, and this could turn into a bigger adventure,
and knowing me it could well do. I could travel the world collecting every
optogram in the world. In the end, you say, why the hell am I collecting?
A lot of artwork, and a lot of mine, involves the process of collecting things
-- which is I think a very English pastime. I used to collect stamps. Now I
collect optograms.
I think thats a good close

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Museum of Optography
Installation Shots

Galerie Brigitte Schenk

Cologne
2007

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Exact transcript of HYMN video loop

[Blue indicates background TV]

Edith Elisabeth Ogbourne (1898 - 1996)

Hymn
...Fe...marks to lead me to him
If he be my my guide
[To the bedroom, Dont you dare]
In his hands and feet are imprints
and his side
[I just dont know where to begin]
(Something like)......Finding following......ing..
[It will be if you dont worry about it]
Hes sure to Bless.
(Louder) [Life, Life is very strange]
Life is martyred In he.....

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169

A Million years ago large stands of forests in some

parts of the world began to seep globs of sticky resin.
This aromatic resin oozed down the sides of trees, as
well as filling internal fissures, trapping debris, such
as seeds, leaves, feathers and insects. As geologic
time progressed the forests were buried and the resin
hardened into a soft, warm, golden gem, known as
amber. Amber is the fossilized resin of ancient trees
which forms through a natural polymerization of the
original organic compounds. Most of the worlds amber
is in the range of 30-90 million years old.

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Acknowledgments
Alexandra Veith
Thom Kubli
Bruce Ogbourne
Brigitte Schenk Gallery
Hoor Al Qasimi
Dr. Erich Veihofer
Francesca Piovano
Richard Niman
Hannelore Medina
Jamie Robinson from
Carter Presents
and
Simon Worthington from
Mute Magazine
Special thanks to
Susana Medina for
her editorial
contribution in compiling
this book

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