Archaeology of the Photograph by Ali Hossaini Introduction Billions of photographs are taken every year, more if we count each frame of cinema and video. Cameras are our constant companions. We bring them into the bedroom and the public square, and through them we savor, or mourn, momentary joys of the past. At the same time, cameras serve authority. Mounted on ceilings, airplanes or satellites, they spy on events below, threatening the outlaw with a visual record. Though cameras are products of advanced industry, photographs have found their way into almost every living culture. They are a universal language, one that crosses the boundaries of nations, of time, and even those between media. Something like the photograph has been with us for centuries. Renaissance painters used the laws of perspective to create optically correct images, and their successors invented the camera obscura as a way of automating that arduous process. Since then, cameras have been adapted to the needs of laboratories and studios, and, most recently, to the digital environment. Virtual reality is only the latest phase in the development of optics, the science of light and sight. How‹and when‹did photography emerge? Convention says in the nineteenth century, specifically in the 1820s, when Joseph Nicephore Niepce discovered light-sensitive chemicals that would capture the image projected within a camera obscura, a dark box. The first photograph, which now resides at the University of Texas, was taken from Niepce¹s window in Le Gras, France. This barely visible courtyard was made by spreading a photosensitive bitumen, or asphalt, preparation onto a pewter plate. The exposure time was several hours. After an early death, Niepce was followed by other inventors, notably Louis Daguerre, Henry Fox Talbot and Scott Archer, who refined his invention. Once established, the medium gained enormous popularity, and, after some debate, it acquired its present name, photography, a Greek phrase that means ³to draw with light.² Most historians trace the origin of photography to the camera obscura, meaning "dark room," introduced in the late sixteenth century as an aid to artists. At that time, vanishing point perspective held sway over the creative imaginations, and Giancarlo della Porta and others praised the device as a short-cut to proper technique. Cameras were soon found throughout Europe and its colonies. Before being taken up by artists, cameras were neither well-known nor particularly sophisticated, though they had long been used for scientific investigation. The first mention of a camera, or rather the pinhole effect that makes it work, dates to the fourth century, when a philosopher asked why a wickerwork will project images of the sun during an eclipse. The first systematic use of the pinhole effect can be dated to the tenth century, when the scientist Ibn al-Haytham used large, darkened rooms to investigate the nature of light. After al-Haytham's experiments became known in Europe, they established the optical tradition that led to Renaissance perspective and the portable camera. Not everyone would trace the photographic image to the Renaissance. If we identify the medium with a specific industrial process, one that involves lenses, plates and chemicals, then it is clearly a product of modern times. Many analyses of photography depend on the automation and instaneity, the apparent magic, of cameras, and to remove these factors, to say the camera is inessential, would topple them. But this definition is fallacious, and its limitations have obscured the real origins of photography, the history that explains its role in culture. An analogy will help explain what is at stake. What if we identified locomotion only with automobiles, ignoring the carriages, buggies and wagons of the past? We could describe the origins of locomotion in a straightforward and seemingly logical way, as the history of the automobile. But when discussing its significance, we would be forced to treat the development of roads, trade and cities as "pre-locomotive," and not entirely relevant to the subject at hand. Similar issues are at stake in the history of photography. Cameras are simply the most visible development of optical drawing, and the shortcomings of traditional approaches show when they are applied to television and digital animation. Each of these media trade in photorealistic images, but they have been progressively decoupled from cameras. Television eliminated film, replacing it with phosphors, electricity and magnets, and computers have eliminated cameras, allowing us to generate an optically-correct space from a memory disk. In a sense, we have circled back to the Renaissance, when artists and engineers used the laws of perspective to generate worlds from their imagination, fusing the techniques of art and science. Our definition of photography must be flexible enough to accommodate all these developments. It must, following optics, be able to assimilate the worlds of painting, cameras and computers, underpinning our practical understanding of perspectival images with an account that describes their emergence and formal relations. There is one constant that remains throughout the media described above. However it is drawn-whether with pencils, lenses or electricity-a photographic image displays numeric data according to the laws of perspective. Before the camera, artists measured the space of their frame, defined it proportionally, and painted within strict parameters. Lenses now perform these tasks automatically, as the numbers engraved on the focusing ring of the camera show. From them one can read the distance from the focal plane to the subject, and the depth of field, or range of focus. In computers these measurements take the form of a coordinate system that corresponds to three dimensional space. Although this system is now called Cartesian, it descends from the grid used for perspectival projection in Renaissance painting. The photographic image is, thus, considerably older than Niepce's invention, as perspective is almost 500 years old. It was developed early in the fifteenth century, when the artist Bruno Brunelleschi began applying the rules of geometric projection to paintings. Brunelleschi¹s technique spread throughout Europe after his friend Leon Battiste Alberti promoted it in his 1435 publication On Painting. In a very real sense, Alberti both inspired and prepared the world for photography. He did not just explain perspective, he argued for it on philosophic, religious and practical grounds. To him, art needed to reflect reality, the world as it is and was meant to be, and perspective, which produces realistic images, showing things as we would see them, harmonized with the vision which was part of our natural endowment. For Alberti, like many other thinkers, nature was ordained by the divine, viewed as a text open to interpretation and distortion. Alberti described paintings as windows on the world, extensions of our eyes that reached across the barriers of space, time and even fiction. A painting was to show things as they appeared, or would appear, to an observer. To achieve this, generations of artists studied optics, progressively refining its principles-hence the derivation of perspective from perspectiva, the Latin word for optical science. Cameras reproduce what lies before them in perfect perspective, and Alberti's theories founded both our practical and philosophic understanding of camera images, and of photography. If we offer a formal definition of the photograph, one that does not specify how the image was made, then it is clear that we can consider Renaissance painting, or any other process of perspectival imagery, as a kind of photography. We might say that photography means "drawing according to the rules that govern light" rather than "drawing with light." The former definition includes the latter, but opens the analysis and, more importantly, the history of the medium up to a broad range of cultural artifacts which our eyes see as similar: perspectival and photorealistic painting, the pictures within a camera obscura, photographic prints, cinematic projections and, finally, several burgeoning categories of digital imagery. The relations I draw among the various arts of perspective would be intuitive to the technician, to the working photographer who also uses computers, or paints in traditional perspective. In keeping with this, my analysis has relied on the historical practices associated with optics, not on modern theories that describe what photography or perspective is. I will not refer to contemporary theorists because their work is irrelevant to this discussion. They have neglected the deep history of optics, a science which matured 2,300 years ago, and their theories are similarly truncated. Photography did not happen all at once, as some miraculous by-product of the industrial era. It is instead an assemblage, a weave, of elements that came together gradually over millennia, beginning when humans first began to explore and quantify the nature of visible space. Under the optical definition, it takes no leap to trace photography back to classical Greece. And earlier. Euclid's Optics is taken as the definitive start of optical science, but only because it eclipsed earlier efforts. It actually culminated a long tradition of geometric investigation that was firmly embedded in Greek philosophy. But geometry did not begin in Greece. Rather, it is a product of Mesopotamia, developed as a skill necessary to the founding of cities. Thus, we should not take Renaissance painting as the primal form of the photograph, as its characteristics came to be much earlier. From the standpoint of technology, there is a definitive line from digital technology back to cameras to perspectival painting to the optical sciences, particularly cartography, and from there to the practical geometry of early civilizations. And, at a surprisingly early date, there appear artifacts that have a familiar feel-we can understand their import even without deciphering their script. Those are the survey maps drawn by the scribes of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt. In appearance and meaning, they resemble the common aerial photographs of today. Surveying, in all its many forms, is the key to understanding photography. The first chapter of this book deals with the forces that led the Sumerians to build cities, insofar as they are relevant to land surveying, and the second discusses the technical evolution of surveying in Mesopotamia and Egypt. A central theme of these chapters, and the book, is an image that permeated the thought of Sumer and its successor civilizations, including our own. That is belief in a sky god, a stellar deity who the Sumerians assigned to particular cities or regions. From a political standpoint, sky gods were the organizing principles of emergent states. Priests claimed that their gods "owned" large tracts of land, and nominally the entire city. Through this ideology they were able to rule city-states at will, by-passing the unwieldy democracy of tribes. But, as urban civilizations evolved, they articulated the qualities of the sky god, abstracting the notion of ownership and reassigning it as a form of privilege. Social classes developed from the sky god, as rulers accrued wealth by directing the labor of others, and the preservation of property became one of the primary goals of the state. Myths and graven images portray the constant vigilance of sky gods, who perceived all that happened below them. Yet, even as it conditioned the populace to service an elite, the sky god presented a set of problems to would-be leaders. To rule they needed the faculties as well as the sanction of an all-seeing deity. Even as a group, unaided individuals could not decree boundaries, organize construction projects and keep an acute awareness of events within their domains. Without an overseer, property will be overrrun. Effaced boundary lines were one of the major problems faced by early civilizations, and both political and technical solutions were constantly being offered to rectify them. Since they could not fly above the land-as government officials now do-early rulers solved their problem with the ground-based survey, along with methods of recording and archiving data. Surveying was crucial to management because it allowed scribes to supervise estates and construction projects from afar. No less than today, information was the lifeblood of the early state. Photography is the fulfillment of the sky god. Hovering above the land, sky gods reinforced early government, justifying the obedience and tribute paid to rulers. When devotion failed, fear could prevail-since the gods saw everything that happened, they could punish misdeeds. This divine vision found its expression, it material realization, in the survey of land, which allowed administrators seemingly magical access to distant times and places. Since the time of Sumer, surveillance technology has steadily advanced, keeping pace with and stimulating investigations in geometry, optics and analysis. Photography is an outgrowth of this process, and the camera is a surveillance device, a powerful means to ownership and government. Networks of cameras, some earthbound and others in the heavens, record human affairs, subjecting our actions to the rule and wrath of law. Although surveying is by no means a dead art, aerial photography has become one of its many techniques, gaining in importance with the advent of computerized geographic information systems, known by their acronym GIS. The third chapter explains the "truth" of photography. The courts of law and science accept the testimony of photographs, treating them as a concrete and institutional form of memory. Cameras, we say, tell the truth because they cannot evade it, and, within certain limits, a camera will portray whatever is in front of it. The obvious fact that cameras tell the truth is supported by the laws of optics, which were codified by philosophers in classical Greece. The content of these laws has changed, becoming vastly more sophisticated, but their spirit has not. Further, despite centuries of philosophic inquiry, our understanding of knowledge and truth may not be substantially more advanced than that of the ancients. Early science has been surpassed in the modern era, but many of the questions it raised have just as much significance today, particularly those regarding truth. Ancient optics was an offshoot of geometry, which the Greeks imported from their neighbors in Mesopotamia and Egypt. The Babylonians were particularly adept at mathematics, but, as far as we know, neither they nor the Egyptians questioned its validity. Accepting measurement and calculation as innately-or perhaps obviously-true, they routinely used survey documents in legal disputes, treating them as objective evidence. As the Greeks urbanized, they learned mathematics and applied it in much the same way, as a means to creating and sustaining a civil order. But, as the movement called philosophy gained momentum, they also subjected it to a critical scrutiny, one that revealed formal relationships among numbers and equations. Mathematical theory arose from a combination of political and logical elements. Querying the truth of statements took on the form of cross-examination, one sustained by a binary logic. Either something is, or it is not. From this realization came methods of proof that enabled philosophers to transform geometric equations into elegant and powerful theorems, a development that sustained prolonged advance in the sciences. Using geometric theory, the Greeks improved the techniques of surveying, using them to map heavens and earth. Astronomy and cartography joined geometry and optics as the earliest sciences to mature, and Greek philosophers borrowed notions from the civil state to a new mode of understanding, natural law. By elaborating on the concept of property, rightful domain, and the procedures of the law court, critical inquiry, they redefined truth according to formal principles, creating the logical foundations of science. Optical truth was, and is, subject to these principles, and, abstract as they are, they echo their origins in the vision of the sky god. The fourth and fifth chapters describe the evolution of the grid of representation. It might be helpful to conceive of the grid as the framework of Euclidean space, one that resembles an ordinary piece of graph paper. Grids are implicit in every act of measurement and calculation, and they are often explicit in the work of surveyors, designers and urban planners. If imposed on a medium, they generate a space of reproduction, allowing for the precise transfer of information from an analogous space. This quality is most obvious on a map. Cartographers draw an imaginary grid on the earth and sky, using it to structure their measurements. Their data can then be plotted on a corresponding grid, resulting in a consistent reproduction of the earth's surface. Less visible is the grid used by perspectival painters, which appears only at a formative stage. And the grid is totally dematerialized in the workings of cameras and computers, though it is no less present. Reproduction tells only half the story of the grid, however. Technologies of representation greatly empower those who wield them, and surveyors have always been in the employ of the civil order. The state set out to alter the landscape, to configure it in the image of property, and it did so through the survey. By manipulating the data presented by surveyors, administrators could plan projects by operating on the imaginary space of representation. Surveyors could then transfer these plans to the land, laying out boundaries, foundations and roads with clarity. Photographic technologies have always operated this way, as a means of recording and a means of imposing-in this way neither knowledge nor truth are neutral, since both are a means to ownership and control. Photography is thus part of the general project of architecture, part of humanity's effort to produce its own environment. Cameras, we should not forget, are also projectors, and the movie theater is but one stage in the effort to create and control our reality. Digital technology is taking us to the next stage, one which immerses us in an artificial environment, projected from our own minds. As history shows, photography emerged from the cascade of effects that gave birth to civil states, specifically the technologies of surveillance and design. Though ancient surveyors never left the ground, they used practical geometry to attain an aerial vantage, to view the world as it appears from the sky. The estate maps of Sumer have evolved into the camera-based media of today. Whether drawn on clay, paper or a screen, whether transmitted through cuneiform, lenses or electronic code, the same information has always coursed through the infrastructure of urban societies. Modern graphics may be more complicated, and often bent to personal use, but, like the ancient gods and their surveyors, the camera eye ultimately serves a particular order, a particular vision. In its evolution photography has supported the redesign of our environment and the growth of hierarchy, architecture, science and mass communications. The medium is autobiographical and creative, representing the human urge to grasp things, to possess and to change them. No matter where it is aimed, the camera reveals our world, not just as it is, but as we wish to see it. Mail to Ali Hossaini