In the 1880s, Robinson and Emerson became engaged in a philosophical debate, which pivoted on the problem of how photography should best tell the truth. They debated the issue across the pages of the photographic press and in the lecture halls of the photographic institutions. The argument intensified after the 1889 publication of Emerson's major work, Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art, which was a forthright rebuttal of Robinson's previously published Pictorial Effect in Photography.
It went on for over a year. And it was an affair in which logic gave way to invective, and invective, finally, to out and out mudslinging. It would certainly be no exaggeration to say as 1889 drew to its close that these two photographers hated each other.
I want to go on now to try and unravel some of their very bitter differences beginning with Robinson's theory of Pictorial Photography.
In 1869, Henry Peach Robinson wrote Pictorial Effect in Photography. Pictorial Effect was an immediate success it was translated into French and into German. It was published in the United States. It ran to very many reprints. The photographic world was clearly ready to accept Robinson's propositions or at least to debate them. The stated objective of Robinson's book was to align photography with the plastic arts and particularly with painting.
In order to understand what Robinson was up against in this ambition we have to understand the situation of the plastic arts themselves as they stood at the time. In that period and arguably because of photography Robinson, himself argued the case painting had moved to a position, whereby its images could by conceived of as belonging to the realms of the imagination it had moved towards that pole the pole of the imagination.
Rather than being understood as a medium which represented nature. Painting could be regarded as a creative act. The position was popularised in France by Charles Baudelaire.
A similar position to that of Baudelaire was propagated in England, notably by James, Abbott, and McNeill Whistler. In a famous lecture, Whistler declared that painting need have no necessary connection with the "real world" with nature. In painting then the connection between representation and referent or nature was if not severed placed under extreme stress. These ideas may not have been universally accepted but neither were they illegitimate they had to be accounted for.
So, Robinson's problem was how given a medium like photography which in some quarters at least in some situations could still be regarded as being a reflection of nature how could photography achieve the status of the plastic arts. How could it be aligned with painting?
Well, in Pictorial Effect it becomes apparent that Robinson concluded that there was a difference between painting and photography. And that difference pivoted on the degree of plasticity inherent in the two media. But plasticity as I've tried to argue is itself conventionally determined rather than inherent.
In Pictorial Effect, Robinson analysed the work of a number of exemplary painters and Sir Joshua Reynolds was high on the list. Robinson held up Reynolds' work as an example of what painting should be like. However, when it came to applying Reynolds' techniques to photography, Robinson made an important qualification. After a discussion of a number of Reynolds' paintings, Robinson concluded that in these works there is not one but several competing light sources. The light in Reynolds' paintings in other words did not emanate from a single point that is the place of the sun. And therefore, the representations were "false to nature".
While this was all very well for painting said Robinson, in photography we shouldn't do this. Not we can’t do it but we shouldn't do it. We'll see later that photography could indeed do this. In a similar qualification, Robinson finds that in some of Reynolds' paintings, the horizon is set too low and I quote "too low for such a truthful art as ours".
Photography then was imbued with something which painting was not. Photography had an obligation to tell the truth the truth of nature. On the other hand, photography could and indeed should be creative. While photography couldn't quite be art, it could be artistic. And what underpinned the creative side of Robinson's photography, was his adopted technique of combination printing. Not all of Robinson's photographs were combination printed, but the principle of combination printing, underpinned even those which weren't.
What combination printing entailed, was the splicing together of the sections of several negatives - which were taken at different times, perhaps at different locations the splicing together of several negatives from which was printed a single photograph.
Robinson would then sally forth into nature, in search of the content to fill out his formal arrangement trailing in his wake, would be a substantial caravan of assistants, models, props and pruning equipment. When he happened across a tract of nature, which resembled one of the forms of his sketch, he'd cut away any offending vegetation and then take his photograph. He'd then move on, and repeat the procedure, until all the sections of his sketch were accommodated.
However, despite the nineteenth century equivalent of a chain saw, that Robinson's assistants packed the combinations of nature that he found never precisely duplicated the outlines of his sketch. And indeed, it was important to his technique that they shouldn't do. For Robinson's main innovation was, as he put it, to combine "the doings of nature, with the doings of man". Or in our terms, the doings of men and women, the doings of that ambiguous category the individual the subject.
So Robinson's photographs were a combination in this sense too. The contours of nature never quite matched the contours of his sketch. Nature would by shaped according to the contours of the sketch, but, in turn, the sketch would be modified according to the contours of nature.
Having exposed the photographs, he'd then return to the lab and develop the separate negatives. He'd then carefully align the negatives, in a manner which concealed the joints. He'd then print the photograph, and the result would appear to have been printed from a single negative.
Well - despite Robinson's claims for the input of nature it’s difficult to regard this form of representation as a system which evidences an external truth. Yet Robinson claimed that it did just that. Adopt my technique; said Robinson and your photograph will be quote closer to the truth to nature than nature herself"
But how could a photograph, which evidenced no specific referent because the photographic scene was as Robinson gleefully pointed out simply not traceable to a specific external scene be evidence of the truth of nature?
It could be and it was because Robinson started from the assumption that nature as it existed in its pre-photographic form was not true nature; the truth at this point was unknowable. And this is the key to the whole process. The truth of nature couldn't be accessed simply by looking. What we saw when we looked at nature, was an actuality which had been bastardised.
Nature had been rendered chaotic, explained Robinson, primarily because of the industrial revolution the ravages of society. What we saw when we looked at nature, was a nature compromised by lines of telegraph poles, marching across the horizon canals, cut into the valleys the wild violet had been all but eradicated by agricultural machinery and so had the wild primrose. Robinson gave other examples.
Robinson then started from the assumption that nature in its initial state was chaotic. But true nature, the spirit, or essence of nature - nature as nature should be - could be recovered. Truth, in the shape of essence, or spirit, could be made to materialise on the face of an artistic photograph. The truth unavailable, in actuality in its primary condition, was made to materialise in representation, via the intervention of the artist. The truth, now evidenced in representation, was then projected back onto external nature, as a property which had been there all along, but which wasn't, in the first instance, visible. In this way, photography, the representation, had revealed the truth.
So to repeat the process. The starting point is the assumption that nature in its raw state is unknowable. Nature in this condition was referred too but it wasn't quite a referent not yet. The referent the truth true nature was made to materialise in representation and the result projected back on to as the property of that same external nature now rendered knowable or true.
At this point, it might be worth reflecting on what external nature in its primary unknowable state might be composed of. Because to empower nature with the capacity to modify representation in the way that Robinson allowed the contours of nature to modify his sketch is to seemingly imbue an abstract meaning-less figure with an authority it cannot yet possess. What I propose is that external nature or prosaic actuality as Robinson called it is nothing other than that matrix of social perspectives every possible perspective.
Something is out there, presumed before hand to be an object but whatever it is can only be made meaningful it can only take on the contours of an object by pruning away the extraneous material. The pruning operation is conducted in representation. Representation prunes away extraneous perspectives.
Paradoxically, what Robinson's critics found in his combination prints was the same thing that Robinson himself found in the painting of Reynolds'. In a photograph compiled from ten or twelve negatives taken at different locations it’s difficult if not impossible to control the light source. And Robinson's critics found the place of several curvetting suns in photographs they suspected had been combination printed.
I want to stress that the process that I have been trying to describe this unhinging and reigning of truth this pruning back of perspectives via representation is most emphatically not some sort of huge conspiracy or any type of attempt to deceive. It is the generating system for the fabrication of truths in modernity.
Ok, let’s press on to examine the theory of Peter Henry Emerson. And to note straight away that it, included at its very surface a theory of subjectivity which is only latent in Robinson's thinking.
In 1889, Emerson wrote a book called Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art. In it, he fired a raking broadside at Robinson's techniques. For Emerson, Robinson's antics were vandalism of the worst kind. Not only that, they were infantile. Emerson likened Robinson's technique of combination printing to the pasting of pictures into the spaces prepared for them in a children's nursery book. Under no circumstances, said Emerson should nature be cut up dismembered and re-organised in the way of Robinson. Rather than this, nature should be interpreted.
And again, we are immediately confronted with the proposition that nature, in its found state, is unknowable. It’s likened to a foreign language, which is initially meaningless, meaningless that is to all else but the interpreter or those privileged bilingual few who were what Emerson called artists. When Emerson stipulated that a photograph should be a representation of nature as seen by the human eye he didn't mean just any human eye he meant the eye of the artist. The eye of the non-artist, who he called the operator, was simply incapable of seeing nature.
Not just anyone could interpret nature. It required a gifted individual, who understood the language. Emerson went on to scientifically demonstrate that such an individual could, and indeed did exist.
He used the physiological research pioneered by Feschner Muller, and especially Helmholtz to demonstrate his case. This involved a theory of the separation of the senses and understanding of the workings of the nervous system, and functioning of the human eye all of which Emerson lay before his readers. The upshot of it was that not all individuals were alike; some individuals had a heightened sense of perception. They and they alone, could get at the truth of nature. And these gifted few he designated appropriately enough as "seers". And it didn't matter how many books on composition the photographer read. If he or she wasn't a seer then forget it. The best that such a plebeian could aspire to was the status of an operator. An operator rather than an artistic photographer. I would claim, however, that in modernity, all individuals can be seers; modernity demands it of its subjects.
Having established the fact of an artistic photographer Emerson described the process of interpretation. It was vital, said Emerson, that the artistic photographer should have complete control over both what he called the selection and the execution phases of photography. Rather than cut nature to ribbons and stitch it back together, as Robinson did the artistic photographer would journey into nature and select a scene representative of the whole. He or she, usually he would make the selection expose the plate and then hurry off into the dark-room, while the original impression of the scene, was still fresh in the artist's sensory organs.
Once in the dark room, the artist would develop the negative. And the development phase was absolutely crucial to Emerson. Because it was in the process of development, that the truth of nature was made material. And it was made material by the mediation of the artist. The photographer would manipulate the individual tones of the picture, advancing some, whilst retarding others, by plunging the negative into various baths containing different chemical solutions. It was a matter of fine judgement. But Emerson believed that the photographer could control development to achieve the correct balance of tones, and this balance was an absolutely vital constituent of the truth.
The photograph would then be printed. And only the platinotype process would do. Under no circumstances would the photograph be enlarged, because enlargement enhanced the risk of optical distortion. And the print must emphatically not be re-touched, because retouching introduced manual distortion. The key factor was to protect the truth which the artist had contrived during the development of the negative. Emerson's instructions were nothing if not stringent. But if those instructions were adhered too, then the truth of nature would be revealed.
Essentially, then, Emerson's photography was very little different to Robinson's both were founded on the same premise. That premise is, and I repeat that nature, in its original form is unknowable, it is made knowable in representation, and the resultant truth projected back out as a property of nature. And again like Robinson, there was a degree of creativity involved, a degree of subjective intervention albeit intervention by a very privileged individual. For Emerson, the site of that creative process, the point where the artist exposed the truth was the development phase.
Late in 1889 Emerson appeared to be getting the upper hand in his ongoing bout with Robinson. Emerson could point with satisfaction to the fact that the first edition of his book of which Robinson had written a damning review had sold out. And a second edition was currently at print. But then, fate delivered the knock-out punch.
It came in the shape of a piece of scientific research conducted by two chemists, Ferdnand Hurter and Vero Driffield. And Emerson, whose theory of artistic photography was built on the rock solid foundations of empirical science, took Hurter and Driffield's research very seriously indeed. For what it proved, in its rigorously scientific way, was that the photographer had absolutely no control over the ratio of tones during the process of development. And development, for Emerson, was the crucial site, at which the creator created, or the interpreter interpreted. Development was the very site at which the truth of nature was made material.
What I've tried to suggest, is that in modernity, there are two desires and that photography satisfies both cases. It satisfies the desire for there to be a technology, which proves the existence of an external truth but it must also satisfy the equal desire for subjective intervention for the intervention of the individual the seer in the constitution of that truth.
What Hurter and Driffield's findings told Emerson, was that the site of intervention, and was no longer available that photography couldn't be creative that the process was beyond the control of the individual. Emerson now declared that photography was not an artistic medium at all. It was a purely mechanical process. He issued a pamphlet called The Death of Naturalistic Photography, in which he admitted he was wrong, he'd been wrong all along. He hurriedly withdrew the second edition of Naturalistic Photography from print. He scuttled around the bookshops hurriedly buying up as many of the remaining copies of the first edition that he could get his hands on. For Emerson, it was the end. Although he did soldier on as a non-artistic photographer eventually publishing a heavily revised third edition of his book it was the end of photography as art.
In the event, however, he may have been a little premature. For no sooner had Emerson so severely embarrassed himself in front of the photographic world, than Hurter and Driffield contacted him asking his advice. Hurter and Driffield's ambition was to plot a graphical curve the Hurter and Driffield curve which the photographer could refer to immediately prior to development and which told him or her exactly when to stop the process for a given mix of developer. And at that point the photograph would be true to nature automatically so to speak. Hurter and Driffield, in other words, wanted to formalise their findings by confirming in a practical way that photography was if not a purely mechanical process well a purely chemical process. The truth of nature would be arrived at by a plotting a point on a graph.
There is a postscript to this episode, however. In the third edition of Naturalistic Photography Emerson records the following correspondence:
“The difficulty which we hope to overcome is the decision of the right moment, at which to stop development so that the resulting print will be true to nature. At present, the experienced eye can alone decide the point. The particular problem, the solution of which we should highly esteem your kind assistance, is to decide when a print is true to nature. “
Although Emerson is unclear as to who is addressing who here (Emerson to Hurter and Driffield or Hurter and Driffield to Emerson) the dilemma is the same. The decision of when to stop the process of development is that process governed by a mathematical curve or not the decision of when a print is true to nature is in modernity a subjective decision, with all that modern subjectivity entails. It is a subjective decision which must be seen as being governed by nature itself.
