Beyond Ocular Vision
In August 1835, a camera obscura looked towards the light emanating from a latticed window at the home of William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877). This ‘looking’ fixed an image onto a piece of light sensitised paper, a process that saw Fox Talbot create one of the very first ever photographic images. In April 2017,1 an array of telescopes across the globe ‘swivelled, turned and stared at a galaxy 53 million light years away’.2 This ‘staring’ created the very first image of a black hole. The first photograph of the unphotographable — the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy. Whilst 182 years of photographic and scientific development and achievement separate these events and images, they hold deep synchronicities across light, time, and space and act as marker points for the beginning and potential ‘end’ of the photographic medium.
In his 2009 book The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography, writer and curator Lyle Rexer states that ‘photography is not a looking at or a looking through but a looking with’.3 By extension of this position, we can look with the physical properties of black holes, utilising them as a mode to examine the photographic medium itself. The concept of aligning of photography to a black hole can trace its roots back to the proto-photographic experimentation of Anglo-French inventors such as Talbot, Nicéphore Niépce (1765–1833), and Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851), whose early endeavours throughout the late 1820s through to the 1830s in ‘fixing’ an image draws parallels with the gathering together of clouds of disparate dust and gas in the formation of a star — the root state for the majority of black holes. In February 1835, Talbot, who was experimenting with creating and capturing light onto light sensitive paper using a photogram, wrote in a notebook entry: ‘In the Photographic or Sciagraphic process, if the paper is transparent, the first drawing may serve as an object, to produce a second drawing, in which the lights and shadows would be reversed’.4 Here, Talbot identifies the characteristics of the negative/ positive technique which he would later pioneer and champion through the creation of his Calotype process. A process that, thanks to the relative ease by which repetition was achievable, would eventually see the negative/positive process supersede the Daguerreotype as the primary photographic method, paving the way forward for analogue photography.
Arguably, it was this process development that contributed to the then explosive growth of the photographic medium, creating the very first steps on the path to where we stand today: an age of photographic ubiquity. Talbot’s tiny photogenic drawings were like particles of dust in the formation of a star — what was once tiny and singular grew into something huge and multiplicitous as it bound together with other dust particles. If Talbot’s lattice window image at the onset of photography draws comparison to the formation of a giant star, are we now at the point in the medium of photography where this star is collapsing and forming into a black hole? John Wheeler, the eminent American theoretical physicist came up with the term ‘black hole’5 in the 1960s, but it’s important to note that a black hole is not actually a hole. Rather, it is a concentrated mass of extremely dense matter that is formed when a very large star, or clusters of stars, die. This death occurs when all of the fuel that feeds the nuclear processes required to generate the heat, light, and pressure to maintain its being is used up. This causes an implosion that leaves a very small core of such overwhelming compression that it creates a gravitational pull so powerful that nothing, not even light, can escape.6 This core is known as the singularity — a mysterious zone of incalculable density that is both unknown and unseen at the heart of every black hole.
Surrounding this dense core is the event horizon, a boundary between the seen and the unseen, the light and the dark, and the known and the unknown — once passed, there is no escape. The liminality inherent within the event horizon makes it a rich area in which to explore the affinity between black holes and photography. Like the boundaries of a camera lens, the event horizon both reveals and conceals. Utilising the black hole as a metaphorical viewfinder to look upon the medium of photography we see that ‘blindness also happens alongside seeing — that is, it happens while we are seeing’.7
Around this event horizon is a visible zone called the accretion disk, which is made up of matter and plasma that is travelling exceptionally fast. As well as feeding the black hole and allowing it to grow,8 the accretion disk throws out light. Without this accretion disk a black hole would remain invisible, remain unphotographable as it is this light outline that the M87 black hole photograph captures.
What we are actually seeing in the black hole image, is not the black hole itself, but rather its shadow. This sciagraphic9 image harks back to the earliest days of photographic emanations — where the play between areas of light and dark were just as coarse, unfocused, and tremulous. Resembling the cameraless photographic experiments of the 1830s, the M87 black hole photograph simply records the light and dark, with scant detail outside of these two opposing states. This binary image, resembling an enormous photogram,10 shows us the light that is just about to cross over into the black hole and will, due to the enormous gravitational force of the singularity, never be seen again. The transitory and elusive light captured harks back to proto-photographic experimentation, where images could not yet be fixed and would rapidly fade from view.11 In studying the accretion disk of a black hole, we see another paradox outlined — to see a black hole, an area in space/time that is invisible, we must look for an expanse of light. Likewise, the interplay between light and dark is a central, dynamic and co-dependent relationship within photography, from its very inception to the current day.
The quest to take an image of a black hole is fraught with difficulty — the M87 galaxy is 53 million light years away from earth and thus 53 million years in the past. As well as this phenomenon being incredibly distant, it is also unfathomably large — scientists working on the Event Horizon Telescope calculated that they would need to build a telescope ‘the size of the entire Earth’12 in order to create an image with sufficient resolution. A workable solution saw the construction of eight telescopes scattered across six different locations throughout the world to achieve the sufficient size through a ‘virtual’ array. It is important to note that the telescopes in the Event Horizon Telescope are not seeing visible light in an ocular sense, rather, they are observing radio wavelengths that sit outside the visible spectrum.13 These eight observations created five petabytes of data which took approximately
eighteen months14 to crunch into a cohesive image of just a few hundred kilobytes. Whilst the virtual array provided an enormous amount of data, there remained huge gaps in the information, due to the telescopes’ disparate points across the globe. According to Katie Bouman, a postdoctoral fellow and imaging specialist with the Event Horizon Telescope, this meant that there existed an “infinite number of possible images that [were] perfectly consistent with our telescope measurements”.15 The role of the imaging analysts working on the Event Horizon image was therefore to develop algorithms that filter through the noisy data to create an image as free as possible from bias that was most ‘reasonable’.16
Whilst certain elements of the M87 black hole photograph were captured through non-ocular means, it is the inherent visibility and visuality of this image that made it a scientific breakthrough. Black holes were only proven beyond doubt in 2015,17 and this confirmation was achieved through ‘blind’ or ‘indirect’ observations that made use of non-visual gravitational waves. This breakthrough confirmed the existence of black holes ‘but that’s not the same as looking at a black hole’.18 The significance therefore of the M87 black hole photograph lies in its ability to translate this invisible phenomenon into a visible image that can be read by human vision. This process of attempting to piece together a cohesive image from ‘an incredibly small number of measurements’19 is likened by Bouman to that of a forensic sketch artist working with limited descriptions to create a picture of a face. In this intense algorithmic processing of the image, computers were fed a massive collation of source images that ranged from simulations of black hole images, actual images of non-black-hole phenomena from space, as well as regular human snapshot imagery.20 This range of source material was to test the algorithm to try to ensure that there was no bias in the image and that the final outcome held true to the observational data.21
The methodology behind the black hole image marks the transition from what Cartier-Bresson famously declared as the ‘decisive moment’,22 from a singular point of view from a single actor, the photographer, to a new territory defined instead by the multiplicity of views, the algorithm. As we continue to observe this exponentially expanding movement, we will see the transition from ‘image(s), to image systems’.23
However, whilst the algorithmic image seems very removed from the traditional relationship of photographer/subject/viewer, and lies within the realm of non-human photography, we can see that human-centred vision still holds pre-eminence. Earlier non-visual detection of black holes existed outside of human sensory capacity. The M87 black hole photograph assembled this proof into an image that could be ‘seen’ and therefore understood by human eyes. In 1990, art historian Jonathan Crary cautioned, that ‘most of the historically important functions of the human eye are being supplanted by practices in which visual images no longer have any reference to the position of an observer in a ‘real’, optically perceived world’.24 Fast-forward almost 30 years and we can see that whilst there is an increasing use and influence of non-human modes of creating and capturing images, vision is not being ‘severed from a human observer’,25 but rather reinforced in it.
Whilst created before the widespread prevalence of the idea of non-human photography,26 Australian artist Jackie Redgate’s 1989 series, ‘Untitled, Vase Shape’ draws attention to the complex relationship between representation and human vision within photography. Through mimicking the shape of a photographic infinity screen and placing a vase shaped sculpture within it, both of which are painted a velvety matte black, Redgate’s work speaks of photographic vision and its failure. Her actions make the objects barely visible and almost impossible to photograph, a decision that makes the work very much dependent on the human presence of the viewer in the exhibition space. Like the M87 black hole photograph, Redgate’s work pairs human and non human vision together and sets out a collaborative quest for us to attempt to see the invisible and resolve the ‘complicated’ relationship between human and non-human vision. Akin to a black hole, Redgate’s work cannot be seen directly, but must instead be indirectly observed through the lights and objects around it. Thus, the work hints at the contemporary condition where the photographic medium stands at its own Event Horizon, characterised by an ever-increasing mass that consumes so much media space that it too becomes hard to see – its boundaries slipping outside the range of the viewfinder.
The quest to use the camera to extend human vision beyond ocular capabilities is one rooted in the earliest incarnations of the medium continuing throughout photography’s history. From American scientist John W Draper’s first Daguerreotype of the moon in 1840, to English astronomer Arthur Eddington’s capturing of a solar eclipse in Brazil in 1919, an event that helped proved Einstein’s general theory of relativity; through to the modern day and the M87 black hole photograph.
Whilst revelatory, the M87 black hole photograph’s significance is not confined to its scientific merits, it was also culturally profound. For a brief moment it halted the endless scroll of the world’s photographs and made us pause. It made the front page of nearly every newspaper around the world, becoming an image of wonder at a time of image exhaustion. From the standpoint of photographic ubiquity, it was an image of something that supposedly could not be photographed27 at a time when everything can, and is, photographed. This image punctured the fabric of space and time in image making to give us the unique opportunity to use it to ‘see’ the journey of photography so far and ponder where its ultimate destination could be.
The current discussion around the ontology of photography is a vigorous one. In After Photography (2009), theorist Fred Ritchin uses the term ‘hyperphotography’ to describe the malleability of the digital photograph and how it is more osmotically susceptible to be wedded to other ‘metamedia’. Ritchin charts the ending of analogue photography’s ‘static recording’,28 characterising the current and future of the medium as a sort of ambient and everywhere photographic world — a hyperphotography. Despite the book’s title, Ritchin does not describe a finite and static end of photography, but rather a process of ending. Photography, he says ‘is both ending and enlarging’.29 This dual distinction of ending rather than an end, combined with the idea of an enlargement, is one that aligns with the physical properties of a black hole.
In his 2008 work Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History, writer and photographic scholar Geoffrey Batchen speaks to the ending of the idea of photography as a discrete medium: ‘... photography as a separate entity might well be on the verge of disappearing forever, even as the photographic as a rich vocabulary of conventions and references lives on in ever-expanding splendour’.30 Again we encounter the idea of both an ending or a disappearance concurrently with the idea of an enlargement. The idea of this disappearance of the medium aligns the invisibility of a black hole to the ubiquity of photography.
As stated by Ariela Azoulay, now is an ‘era in which it is difficult to conceive of even a single human activity that does not use photography’.31 The ubiquitous photographic act is so commonplace and produces so many images — it has been reported that 1.2 trillion photographs were taken on smartphones in 2018 alone — it can disappear as a distinctive action due to its all-pervasiveness. Attempting to look at the current output from the medium of photography is akin to attempting to look directly into the sun — we are blinded by its sheer intensity and scale. This overwhelming sense of ubiquity is eloquently shown by Penelope Umbrico in her ongoing work Sunset Portraits from Sunset Pictures on Flickr (2006–ongoing). In this series, the artist collects images of sunsets, which are the most photographed subject on the photo-sharing site Flickr. Each time the work is exhibited, Umbrico notes the amount of hits she gets by using the search term ‘sunset’ within Flickr, using this number to form part of the title. Over the course of a decade this saw Umbrico’s work shift from ‘541,795 Suns (from Sunsets) from Flickr (Partial) 01/23/06’ (2006) to ‘30,240,577 Suns (from Sunsets) from Flickr (Partial) 03/04/16’ (2016), a 56-fold increase that articulates the expansive growth of both the taking and sharing of photographic imagery on the internet.
These millions of sunset pictures blur into nothingness due to their sheer volume and weight. The expanding scale that Umbrico charts exemplifies the voluminous state of the medium of photography and leads us to question, what happens to photography when it exhausts its fuel like a dying star?
In his 2000 work Towards a Philosophy of Photography, theorist Vilem Flusser outlined the phenomena of ‘redundant’ images:
As inhabitants of the photographic universe, we have become accustomed to photographs: They have grown familiar to us. We no longer take any notice of most photographs, concealed as they are by habit; in the same way, we ignore everything familiar in our environment and only notice what has changed. Change is informative, the familiar redundant. What we are surrounded by above all are redundant photographs.32
Flusser’s sense of the concealed nature of photography further strengthens the ties between the medium and the inherent invisibilities of black holes. Furthermore, Flusser’s notion of redundancy is tied into photographic ubiquity, or as artist and writer Chris Wiley eloquently puts it, photographic ‘exhaustion.’ Writing in Frieze magazine in 2011, Wiley discusses the contemporary photographic landscape noting the irony of how ‘the moment of greatest photographic plenitude has pushed photography to the point of exhaustion’.33 Like a giant star that has used up all of its fuel, has photography reached such a supermassive weight that risks a potential collapse in on itself, creating such a powerful gravitational pull that it draws everything around it towards its darkened core?
When considering this idea of a powerful darkened core, Ritchin’s concept of hyperphotography re-emerges. What he thought of as an osmotic zone of photographic-everywhere, could instead be interpreted as a super-powerful centre that is forcibly dragging other media that surrounds it into its nexus. Not ‘After Photography’, but more photography beyond the medium of photography. In their book On the Verge of Photography (2013), Daniel Rubenstein and Andy Fisher affirm this contention when they speak about how instead of being superseded by VR, 3D Cinema and holographic gaming, the ‘humble photographic image’ has instead become the ‘hinge between...physical and digital modes of existence’, an essential and vital part of ‘ocular centric culture’.34 The humble, delicate, and paper- bound photographic image from its beginning in the mid-nineteenth century now lives most of its life in an ephemeral state of computer code – a scrollable state where our fingerprints no longer can cause harm to its surface. Despite this new supporting infrastructure, we remain wedded to its core content delivery mechanism which retains enormous power — the singular, made for human eyes, image.
The M87 photograph shows us a silhouette, an absence, a shadow that is only visible and delineated by the light from the matter that surrounds it. This idea of securing a shadow is one that returns us to Talbot, who described his efforts to create a fixed photographic image as ‘the art of fixing a shadow’;35 and in the case of black holes, we are trying to secure the most elusive and mysterious shadow of all. This image is so remarkable, not only because it adds weight to Einstein’s theory of relativity, but it is a photograph of the absence of light. The opposite action to that of Talbot in his study when pointing his camera obscura at the window where light was emanating. Where Talbot relied on the shadows of the walls and that details of latticed window’s ironwork to give form to the light, the scientists of the Event Horizon Telescope project instead relied on the light thrown out by the accretion disk to give form to the darkness of the black hole. Whilst they may be inverted, they confirm the inherent positive/negative relationship that ties them together, a dynamic that echoes the duality of the idea of a beginning and the idea of an end. This end is not to a singular static stop, but rather to a process of ending and a transition into a new unknown. The charting of the medium on this precipice is like observing an event horizon — a one-way road to the centre of a black hole where there exists a play between light and dark, the visible and the invisible, expansion and contraction, and the known and the unknown. At a time in the history of photography where we are swamped with photographic imagery, it makes sense that we look for images of the unseeable. Flusser may well view this quest as a response to the ‘challenge to the photographer: to oppose the flood of redundancy with informative images.’ When facing image exhaustion, there exists a desire to turn away from the glut of visible phenomena — cats, food, ourselves, that perfect sunset — and seek out a more elusive target, that which cannot be seen. This quest for the invisible echoes the current state of the photographic medium, where the medium itself is becoming ever expanding, but yet, paradoxically invisible.
Image above: William Henry Fox Talbot, Latticed window negative, August 1835. Photograph taken by the author
at Fox Talbot Museum at Lacock Abbey, November 2018.
1 Whilst the ‘black hole photograph’ was unveiled in April 2019, the data collected to ‘take’ the image occurred in April 2017.
2 Shep Doeleman - EHT Director, Centre for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian. National Science Foundation/EHT Press Conference Revealing First Image of Black Hole, 2019. 7:15. Link
3 Lyle Rexer, The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography. (New York, NY: Aperture Foundation, 2013), 11.
4 Larry J. Schaaf, Out of the Shadows: Herschel, Talbot & the Invention of Photography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). Schaaf quotes Talbot from his notebook ‘M’ in an entry marked 28 February 1835.
5 A John Achibald Wheeler and Kenneth William Ford, Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics (New York: Norton, 1998), 229.
6 Dr Amanda Bauer, Dr Alan Duffy. NASA/JPL-Caltech, “007 | Black Holes Don’t Suck,” Sound, ABC Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, April 11, 2017), https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/cosmicvertigo/007-black-holes-dont-suck/8433934.
4:05.
7 James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing, 1st Harvest ed, A Harvest Book (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1997). 205.
8 Dr Priyamvada Natarajan, “What Would It Be Like To Fall Into A Black Hole? : Short Wave,” NPR.org, accessed July 8, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/05/19/859158971/what-would-it-be-like-to-fall-into-a-black-hole
9 Sciagraphy can be defined as the study of shadows. William Henry Fox Talbot (1800 - 1877) called his early photographic experimentations a “Sciagraphic process”. Larry J. Schaaf, Out of the Shadows: Herschel, Talbot & the Invention of Photography (NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1992). Schaaf quotes Talbot from his notebook ‘M’ in an entry marked 28 February 1835.
10 A photogram is a cameraless process where light is directed directly onto a light sensitised surface.
11 Before John Herschel’s invention of ‘hypo’ in 1839, photographic images could be made upon light-sensitised paper but would disappear from view as they could not be ‘fixed’.
12 13 Bouman, “Black Hole”, 3:57 and 4:37.
14 Dan Marrone, National Science Foundation/ EHT Press Conference Revealing First Image of Black Hole, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnJi0Jy692w. 20:24.
15 16 Bouman, “Black Hole”, 6:06 and 6:34.
17 In 2015 by the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) in the United States.S., which detected gravitational waves of a black hole.
18 Dr Matthew Middleton, “Black Holes: Seeing ‘the Unseeable’ – Science Weekly Podcast,” 10:23, presented by Hannah Devlin and produced by Graihagh Jackson, The Guardian, April 26, 2019, Science, https:// www.theguardian.com/science/audio/2019/apr/26/ black-hole-image-event-horizon-telescope-science-weekly-podcast.
19 20 21 Bouman, “Black Hole”, 5:45 and 10:41.
22 Henri Cartier-Bresson and Clément Chéroux. Images à la sauvette: photographie par Henri Cartier-Bresson, 2018.
23 Katrina Sluis, Guest lecture at University Technology Sydney, May 12th, 2020.
24 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1990). 2.
25 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1990). p. 1.
26 In this case, I’m referring to the idea on non-human photography as elaborated by Joanna Zylinska, who breaks down the non-human photographic realm into three main categories, photographic images devoid of people, images produced via non-human means (such as drones, Google Street View etc) and photographs that are not for human eyes, such as QR codes.
27 Black holes, due to their immense gravitational pull, warp space/time and ensure nothing can escape them - not even light. Hence, they should be impossible to photograph. In the case of the black hole image taken by the Event Horizon project, the black hole is surrounded by light from matter swirling around the edge of the black hole, which creates a ‘halo’ effect that defines the area of the black hole.
28 29 Fred Ritchin, After Photography, (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009), 141 and 15.
30 Geoffrey Batchen, Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History, (Cambridge, Mass, MIT Press 2002), 109.
31 CFP: Ubiquity: Photography’s Multitudes (Rochester, 26-27 Apr 18). In: ArtHist.net, Nov 4, 2017 (accessed Sep 29, 2020), https://arthist.net/archive/16660
32 Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion Books, 2000). 65.
33 Chris Wiley, “Depth of Focus.” Frieze, Issue 143 (November 2011), accessed August 20, 2019. https://frieze.com/article/depth-focus
34 Daniel Rubinstein, Johnny Golding, and Andy Fisher, On the Verge of Photography: Imaging beyond Representation (Birmingham, UK: ARTicle Press, 2013), 8.
35 William Henry Fox Talbot, “Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing, or the Process by Which Natural Objects May Be Made to Delineate Themselves Without the Aid of the Artist’s Pencil.,” in First Exposures, Writing from the Beginning of Photography, by Steffen Siegel (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2017), 105–16.
36 Flusser, Philosophy, 65.
