Traces of/by nature: August Strindberg's photographic experiments of the 1890's

Traces of/by nature:August Strindberg’s photographic experiments of the 1890’s Katharina Steidl IWM Junior Visiting Fellows’ Conference Proceedings, Vol. XXIX © 2011 by the author Readers may redistribute this article to other individuals for noncommercial use, provided that the text and this note remain intact. This article may not be reprinted or redistributed for commercial use without prior written permission from the author. If you have any questions about permissions, please contact the IWM. 1/18 Traces of/by nature:August Strindberg’s photographic experiments of the 1890’s The following paper centers on August Strindberg’s photograms of the 1890’s and their relation to an attributed capacity of photography – its apparent ability to capture a picture automatically, without human interference – and the nineteenth century conceptualization of photographic objectivity which followed from this attribution. Strindberg’s notions of nature and chance play a crucial role in this relationship and are related to the way in which the photogram can be seen as a medium located between science and art. At the same time, this paper considers the connection between technical innovations like photography and concepts of sensory perception and the extent to which photography shaped the possibilities and limitations attributed to the human senses. In the case of the picture-producing technique “photogram”, an aspect of 19 th century photography, the technology revealed hidden or unseen phenomena in the world and was therefore regarded as a kind of substitute to human vision. I argue that the photogram, as a cameraless and lensless variation of photography, had a formative role in the conceptualisation of photography, which thereafter stuck with terms such as “contact”, “impression” or “trace” for describing the referential status in photography theory. The photogram’s tactile qualities gave it a central role in the science and parascience of the nineteenth century, shaping the so-called medium-specificity of the photogram as an artistic principle. Pictorial ambiguity August Strindberg, the Swedish playwright, essayist and novelist, who lived between 1849 and 1912, is as outstanding artist in many respects. In the 1890’s he not only devoted himself to the natural sciences (almost ceasing his literary writing entirely), but he also sustained another major interest, in his experimentation with photography.[1] Besides explorations in the field of chemistry, optics and astronomy, he was interested in botany and alchemy. Strindberg’s most important writings in the field of natural sciences are his speculative research reports, entitled Antibarbarus (1984), which were published in letter-format and questioned the predominant classification system of the elements; and the more essayistic work Sylva Sylvarum (1896), which challenged the “big disorganization” and the “infinite interrelation” in the world.[2] At the end of his life, he published his four-volume strong Blue Books (Blå Böckerna).[3] These contained short entries often in dialogic form, which examined various fields, such as mathematics, religion, biology, history and photography, and tried to elaborate an overall structure of analogies in the manner of Emanuel Swedenborg’s theory of correspondences. Though he did not achieve great professional success with his experimentation, he was, in fact, more interested in the experimentation process itself. He had begun to explore photographic techniques in 1865, a time when amateur photography had not yet been established. 2/18 Besides his acquisition of the first available box-camera, invented by George Eastman, Strindberg produced his own cameras consisting of a simple box with an uncut lens or pinhole camera. In the following text I am not focusing on Strindberg’s poetic writings, but entirely on his photographic – or, more precisely, on his photogramatic – work of the 1890’s. This makes it possible to take a close look at the specific possibilities of the photogram, its connection to photography and the powers it was attributed with as a result. Figure 1: August Strindberg, Photogram of Crystallisation, c. 1892-1896, 12 x 9 cm, The Royal Library, National Library of Sweden, Stockholm. 3/18 Figure 2: Walter E. Woodbury, Photographic Amusements, Boston 1922, 9th edition. I am particularly concentrating on two groups of photograms, both produced without a camera or lens – a choice which reflects Strindberg’s mistrust in the photographic apparatus, which led to a certain distortion and aberration in his view. The first example, shown in figure 1, is one of six photograms made between 1892 and 1896 in which a “drawing” of an almost-white structure on a light brownish background emerges. In the lower part of the picture, two holes and a square-edged contour rupture the almost unvarying horizontal lines. In the upper part, irregular but mostly vertical lines graduate into shorter ones, cut off by a bigger, wave-like line at the border of the picture. Somehow this picture is reminiscent of natural forms: the structure in the lower part, for example, is reminiscent of the intersection of earth, with the upper part suggestive of wildly growing plants. But what is there actually to see? What has left its imprint on the photographic surface? 4/18 From his writings and letters we know that Strindberg used saline solutions on glass plates, which crystallized when exposed to heat or cold. After this, he impressed the result directly onto photographic paper. Photogramatic experiments like this are inspired by hoar frost and ice-ferns, a popular subject at that time which Strindberg himself noted in several passages.[4] In a letter to Per Hasselberg of 1892, he wrote: “I have returned to my crystal aggregates which I photograph directly by printing straight from the glass slides on which the crystallization has been carried out. And these aggregates – frost-flowers – have opened up perspectives into nature’s secret places that have astounded me.”[5] Experiments with crystallization, for scientific research or for the simple amusements of producing “very delicate photographic images”, were described in various contemporaneous articles.[6] This topic was a part of the scientific popularization movement of the nineteenth century, seen, for example, in the photographic amateur book Photographischer Zeitvertreib by Hermann Schnauss (first published in 1890), or in Walter E. Woodbury’s Photographic Amusements of 1896, which describes “the many beautiful phenomena of nature that can be studied by the aid of photography” (figure 2). [7] The interesting thing in describing snow and ice crystal photographs as photographic amusement lies in its potential to generate pictures inspiring human imagination to see concrete forms, which can be clarified with Woodbury’s diction of these phenomena as “natural phenomenon in ice”, “delicate lace-like edging” and “floral design”.[8] The importance of photography’s ability to picture snow and frost patterns lies in the fact that these patterns can be transformed from their ephemeral state – in which they would quickly evaporate and disappear – into a fixed state. On the other hand, photography’s attributed potential to reveal an authentic image of the object – one which the naked eye looking through the microscope would interpret, in this case, as symmetrical and regular forms – exposes asymmetric or imperfect shapes in the photographic picture. This changed perspective, coupled with photography’s so-called “mechanical objectivity”, generates a different set of assumptions concerning the nature of snow crystals.[9] For Strindberg the fascinating fact in his photograms were the crystal formations reminding him of living matter. Influenced by his interest in the occult, the pictorial ambiguity of the crystals as they metamorphose into forms of plants, water, earth formations and so forth, was suggestive and belonged to his imagination to see similarities in real things.[10] According to Strindberg, these crystallizations arose from the crystal’s remembrance or resurrection of its ancient form. He therefore asks if it could be possible that water, running through animate and inanimate things many times, remembers earlier stages of living and dead matter in its crystalline formation.[11] 5/18 Figure 3: August Strindberg, Ein Blaubuch. Die Synthese meines Lebens (A Blue Book), 1st tome, German Edition, Munich 1920. 6/18 Figure 4: Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge, Der Bildungstrieb der Stoffe. Veranschaulicht in selbständig gewachsenen Bildern, Oranienburg 1855. This belief in the “image-making instinct”[12] of nature is reflected in a short notice in his Blue Book, entitled “Reincarnation”, in which Strindberg describes nature’s potential to generate similarities in organic or inorganic forms, such as the crystallized acidity of a vine resembling vine leaves or the rebirth of a checkered-lily seen in its crystallized ash (figure 3).[13] Another aspect of nature’s image-making instinct is the apprehension of forms in natural objects, transforming an ordinary thing into a natural picture. This was something which occupied Strindberg when he worked in Upper Austria, where a rock is generally known as “Turk’s head”: a photograph of this rock, which he collected in his 7/18 “green bag” (Gröna säcken), is still preserved in the Royal Library in Stockholm.[14] I think that this searching for meaning or relevance in nature, in its creations, and in the surrounding world can be, on the hand, interpreted as evidence of a belief in supernatural occurrences, inspired by a need to explain and unravel everything in nature, and, on the other hand, connected to romantic Naturphilosophie. Reproducing nature – The photogram as second nature In his analysis of Strindberg’s paintings, the art historian Douglas Feuk notes that, because Strindberg believed that nature could generate pictures of itself, he saw his pictures not as representations of nature, but as a part of nature. Therefore his pictures can be identified in their actual process of the pictorial production as a parallel action to nature.[15] In his paintings Strindberg tried to cast the color over the canvas randomly, the visual sense somehow controlled the pictorial production. In the case of his crystallization photograms, he goes one step further, by leaving the glass plate completely untouched: the material of the saline solutions determines the formation of the picture and so its actual emergence is not controlled by the artist’s and is therefore an autopoetical production of chance. This can be compared to the chemist Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge and his autopoietical pictures of the 1850’s: the production of these pictures likewise stands between science and art, involving a chemical method of analysis (paper chromatography) which produces images of “aesthetic beauty” explicitly addressed to artists (figure 4).[16] In this context, Runge discusses his theory of a so-called Bildungstrieb der Materie (a term he adopted from Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s 1781 publication, Über den Bildungstrieb und das Zeugungsgeschäfte), the self-acting power of generating forms and shapes, which is therefore comparable to the life-force of plants and animals.[17] These examples are important in this context as Strindberg explicitly refers to a concept of a self-generating power which can shape pictures somehow automatically or without a tangible author.[18] This autopoetical aspect gives rise to the idea that they can be understood as natural creations. The direct imprinting process of Strindberg’s crystallizations from a glass plate to photographic paper – the self-acting transformation of the outer world into an image through contact – is reminiscent of William Henry Fox Talbot’s so-called “photogenic drawings”. Talbot was one of the inventors of photography, and described his invention in his book, The Pencil of Nature (published between 1844 and 46), as a kind of better method of drawing compared to the hand of the artist, in which subjectivity can influence the process of “copying” a natural object.[19] As Talbot identifies his photogenic drawings as “specimens” or “items”, it is clear that these pictures were considered to be, as the art historian Carol Armstrong has pointed out, “a natural art as well as a natural thing, something made by nature as well as a piece of nature”.[20] This idea of photograms as natural things, and the valuation of the process by which they are produced as natural, can be associated with Strindberg’s picture process, which I want to clarify via a discussion of the second group of photograms. Imagining the sky 8/18 In the colored photogram, made by August Strindberg in 1894, an overall structure of yellow-golden dots seem to emerge from a brownish surface, with their largest conglomeration visible in the upper part of the picture (figure 5). On the upper right edge, these dots are concentrated into a bigger, spotty area on a bluish background. Another concentration is found in the lower part, also surrounded by a bluish fog. A hint towards how this might be interpreted is given by Strindberg’s title of the photogram: “Celestography”. In 1893, when he moved to Dornach in Upper-Austria, Strindberg produced about 16 of such photograms. These were produced by placing them directly in a basin filled with developing liquid and leaving them under the night sky.[21] Figure 5: August Strindberg, Celestography, 1894, 12 x 9 cm, The Royal Library, National Library of Sweden, Stockholm. 15/18 August Strindberg, in: Okkultismus und Avantgarde. Von Munch bis Mondrian, Frankfurt a. Main 1995, p. 132-135; Michel Frizot, L’âme, au fond. L’activité photographique de Munch et Strindberg, in: Lumière du monde, p. 193-198; Clément Chéroux, L’ expérience photographique d’August Strindberg. Du naturalisme au sur-naturalisme, Arles 1994; Douglas Feuk, Strindberg: Paradiesbilder – Infernomalerei, Hellerup 1991; Per Hemmingsson, August Strindberg som fotograf, Åhus 1989; Ture Rangström, Photogenie – Photogenique. August Strindberg und die Photographie, in: Angelika Gundelach (ed.), Der andere Strindberg. Materialien zu Malerei, Photographie und Theaterpraxis, Frankfurt a. Main 1981, p. 247-290. 2. August Strindberg, Antibarbarus I oder die Welt für sich und die Welt für mich, Berlin 1894; Id., Sylva Sylvarum (1896), in: Natur-Trilogie, ed. by Emil Schering, München 1921, p. 173-332 3. August Strindberg, Ein Blaubuch. Die Synthese meines Lebens, ed. by Emil Schering, vol.1, München 1920. 4. August Strindberg, Sylva Sylvarum. Das Seufzen der Steine, in: Emil Schering (ed.), August Strindberg, Natur-Trilogie, München 1921, p. 237-268; id., Neue Kunstformen! Oder der Zufall im künstlerischen Schaffen, in: Verwirrte Sinneseindrücke, p. 30-38, 35f, 138; Cf.: Gustav Hellmann, Schneekrystalle: Beobachtungen und Studien, Berlin 1893; Lorraine Daston/Peter Galison, Objektivität, Frankfurt a. Main 2007, p. 156ff. 5. Michael Robinson (ed.), Strindberg’s letters, vol. 1, 1862-1892, London 1992, p. 366368, 367. 6. Anonymus, Crystallisationsdruck, in: Photographisches Archiv, 9, 167/168, 1868, p. 348. 7. Walter E. Woodbury, Photographic Amusements, including a description of a number of novel effects obtainable with the camera, New York 1896, p.73ff; Hermann Schnauss, Photographischer Zeitvertreib, Leipzig 1890, (4th ed. p.17ff); Cf.: Herbert Molderings, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy und die Neuerfindung des Fotogramms, in: id., Die Moderne der Fotografie, Hamburg 2008, p. 45-70; Clément Chéroux, Les récréations photographiques. Un répertoire de formes pour les avant-gardes, in: Études photographiques, vol. 5, 1998, p. 73-96. 8. Woodbury 1896, pp. 75, 78. 9. Daston/Galison 2007. 10. Eva-Maria Siegel, Okkultismus und Avantgarde, intermedial. Bemerkungen zum Werk August Strindbergs um die Jahrhundertwende, in: Hartmut Kircher/Maria Klanska/Erich KLeinschmidt, Avantgarden in Ost und West. Literatur, Musik und Bildende Kunst um 1900, Köln 2002, p. 271-295. For ambiguity as aesthetic paradigm in art: Verena Krieger et al. (ed.), Ambiguität in der Kunst. Typen und Funktionen eines ästhetischen Paradigmas, Köln 2010. 16/18 11. Strindberg, Sylva Sylvarum, p. 244ff. 12. Feuk 2001, p. 123. 13. Strindberg, Ein Blaubuch, p. 380. 14. August Strindberg, Inferno, in: Ann-Charlotte Gavel Adams (ed.), August Strindbergs Samlade Verk, 37, Stockholm 1994, p. 206. Quoted after: Dario Gamboni, “Dieses Schillern der Eindrücke freute mich…”. August Strindberg und unabsichtliche Bilder im Paris der 1890er Jahre, in: Gerhart von Graevenitz/Stefan Rieger/Felix Thürlemann (ed.), Die Unvermeidlichkeit der Bilder, Tübingen 2001, p. 173-186, 179. 15. Feuk 1991, p. 28. Concerning the term ‚second nature’ compare: Norbert Rath, Zweite Natur. Konzepte einer Vermittlung von Natur und Kultur in Anthropologie und Ästhetik um 1800, Berlin 1996. 16. Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge, Zur Farbenchemie. Musterbilder für freunde des Schönen und zum Gebrauch für Zeichner, Maler, Verzierer und Zeugdrucker. Dargestellt durch chemische Wechselwirkung, Berlin 1850; Id., Der Bildungstrieb der Stoffe. Veranschaulicht in selbständig gewachsenen Bildern, Oranienburg 1855. Cf.: Friedrich Weltzien, Vom Bildungstrieb der Stoffe. Oder: wie sieht Lebendigkeit aus?, in: Armen Avanessian et al., Vita aesthetica. Szenarien ästhetischer Lebendigkeit, Zürich/Berlin 2009, p. 31-44. 17. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Über den Bildungstrieb und das Zeugungsgeschäfte, Göttingen 1781. 18. Cf. Strindberg, Nisus formativus oder unbewußter Bildtrieb, in: Ein Blaubuch, p. 211. 19. William Henry Fox Talbot, The pencil of Nature, ed. by Barnett Newhall, New York 1969. Even Stri ndberg imprinted the blossom of a hellebore on photosensitive paper, which unfortunately did not survive. Cf. Strindberg, Über die Lichtwirkung der Fotografie. Betrachtungen aus Anlaß der X-Strahlen, in: Verwirrte Sinneseindrücke, p. 122-130. 20. Carol Armstrong, Cameraless: From Natural Illustration and Nature Pri nts to Manual and Photogenic Drawings and Other Botanographs, in: Ocean Flowers. Impressions from Nature, New York 2004, p. 87-165, 94f. 21. Cf. Per Stam, Naturvetenskapliga Skrifter II, August Strindbergs Samlade Verk Band 36, Stockholm 2003, p. 416ff, Appendix. 22. August Strindberg, Über die directe Farbfotografie, in: Verwirrte Sinneseindrücke p. 119-121, 119. 23. Procès-verbaux des séances de la Société astronomique de France, 1895, p. 29. Cf. Peter Geimer, Bilder aus Versehen. Eine Geschichte fotografischer Erscheinungen, Hamburg 2010, p. 115, note 187. 17/18 24. August Strindberg, Über die Lichtwirkung bei der Fotografie. Betrachtungen aus Anlaß der X-Strahlen, in: Verwirrte Sinneseindrücke, p. 122-130, 128. 25. Cf. Vreni Hockenjos, Phantom, Schein, Traumbild. Zur visuellen Wahrnehmung bei August Strindberg, in: Walter Baumgartner/Thomas Fechner-Smarsly (ed.), August Strindberg. Der Dichter und die Medien, München 2003, p. 236-252. 26. Quoted after Fechner-Smarlsly 2007, p. 39. 27. Strindberg, Über die directe Farbfotografie, p. 119f. 28. Strindberg, Der Himmel und das Auge, in: Verwirrte Sinneseindrücke, p. 117-119, 117. 29. Cf. Fechner-Smarsly 2007, p. 33. 30. Strindberg, Der Himmel und das Auge, p. 118. 31. Daston/Galison 2007. 32. Quoted after Geimer 2010, p. 113, note 181. 33. Kathrin Busch, Artistic Research and the Poetics of Knowledge, in: Art & Research. A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods, vol. 2, n. 2, 2009, http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n2/busch.html (19.10.2010). 34. William Henry Fox Talbot, Photogenic Drawing. To the Editor of the Literary Gazette, in: Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences, &ct, 2 nd of February 1839, nr. 1150, p. 73-74, 73. 35. Strindberg, Neue Kunstformen! Oder der Zufall im künstlerischen Schaffen, in: Verwirrte Sinneseindrücke, p. 30-38. 36. August Wilhelm Schlegel, Berliner Vorlesungen 1801-1802, in: Vorlesungen über Ästhetik, vol. 1 (1798-1803), ed. by Ernst Behler, Paderborn 1989, p. 258. Quoted after: Friedrich Weltzien, Describing Landscape – Experiencing Nature. August Wilhelm Schlegel’s Conception of ‘Selbstthätigkeit’ and Aesthetic Judgement, in: Erna Fiorentini (ed.), Observing Nature – Representing Experience. The osmotic dynamics of Romanticism 1800-1850, Berlin 2007, p. 205-219, 213. 37. Quoted after Dario Gamboni, Potential images. Ambiguity and indeterminacy in modern art, London 2002, p. 29. 38. Cf. Otto Stelzer, Die Vorgeschichte der abstrakten Malerei. Denkmodelle und Vorbilder, München 1964. 39. Peter Geimer, Image as Trace: Speculations about an undead Paradigm, in: differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol. 18, n. 1, 2007, p. 8-28, 8. 18/18 40. Sybille Krämer, Was also ist eine Spur? Und worin besteht ihre epistemologische Rolle? Eine Bestandsaufnahme, in: id. et al., Spur. Spurenlesen als Orientierungstechnik und Wissenskunst, Frankfurt a. Main 2007, p. 11-33, 16. 41. Sybille Krämer, Immanenz und Transzendenz der Spur. Über das epistemologische Doppelleben der Spur, in: id. et al., p. 155-181. 42. Cf. Geimer 2010, p. 17. 43. Ibid., p. 18. Preferred citation: Steidl, Katharina. 2011. Traces of/by nature: August Strindberg’s photographic experiments of the 1890’s. In: Modernities Revisited, ed. M. Behrensen, L. Lee and A. S. Tekelioglu, Vienna: IWM Junior Visiting Fellows’e Conference Proceedings, Vol. 29.