Imaging the Invisible
.
I – You move, you lose (Boulevard du Temple by Louis Daguerre)
On a morning that we have good reason to believe was in the autumn – October of the year 1837 to be precise – Louis-Jaques-Mandé Daguerre went up onto the roof of the studio he occupied at number 5 Rue des Marais in the French capital. In the adjacent building was what had been up to that point his best work: the Diorama. Viewed objectively, what was on display there doesn’t seem to have been particularly impressive. And yet, from its inauguration on the 11 July 1822 until its destruction in a fire caused by a clumsy worker on the 3 March 1839, thousands of Parisians and people from all over France flocked to admire this most unique spectacle. The Diorama building was of an exceptional height and had been designed by Daguerre himself. Once inside, its visitors could look upon scenes both natural and urban, as well as various famous monuments: a view of Paris from Montmartre, Napoleon’s tomb on the island of Saint Helena, Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome, even a rural Neapolitan landscape. To do this, Daguerre skilfully played with the layout of miniature objects that stretched back before the viewer’s eyes on an inclined plane for about fifteen metres. In the background, a painted canvas a colossal thirteen metres high and twenty metres wide rose up. The lighting from above contributed to an effect of aerial realism which meant the spectators fell immediately under the impression that they were flying over the landscape on display.
Daguerre was, after all, an illusionist first and foremost. Born in 1787 – on the eve of the French Revolution – into a moderately poor family, he had received a fairly modest education, like most others at the time, and from a very young age he’d taken refuge in a world of illusions he was able to create for himself using crayons and watercolours. By learning the respectable craft of opera set design, he began to acquire the skill of making the spectator believe that the narrow limits of the theatre stage might house a whole repertoire of imagined spaces. The kind of illusion that allowed him to create a theatre stage or the Diorama was, however, on the whole quite rudimentary. Simply put, it was the transposition of a large, even enormous, area into a small space. It was nothing that any minimally gifted painter or architect would not have been able to do centuries ago. For example: Andrea Mantegna’s Camera Picta in the Castello di San Giorgio in Mantua, completed in 1474; the deceptive gallery that Francesco Borromini created for the palazzo of Cardinal Spada in 1632; or, a few years later, the apotheotic ecstasy by which Andrea Pozzo lifted Saint Ignatius into the dome of the church in Rome that bears his name. All these attempts to capture a multiplied reality were nothing more than a rather banal trick, a game of perspective if you will, a trompe l’oeil. Daguerre was not content to merely recreate reality; he wanted to capture it. That’s why, on that October morning, he climbed onto the roof of his studio with a tripod and the instrument that he’d been working on obsessively for years.
To really look at this photograph means to see all sorts of things which are not there but that, in fact, simply have to be there.
It cannot be said that it was his invention. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, his business partner and the person who’d revealed to him the art of what he called ‘heliography’, had died four years earlier. Niépce had been a visionary, but his work had remained in its infancy. By discovering the photosensitive properties of bitumen and spreading it on a metal plate, he had managed to immortalise the landscape as seen from his house in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes. The result was fairly disappointing. In order to capture something with a certain amount of definition, the plate had to be exposed to broad daylight for about twelve hours, and so the sun had had more than enough time to leave improbable shadows on the left, right and most of the central part of the image. Upon looking at it, one must admit to not really being able to see anything: there’s the shape of a tower on one side, another opposite it, two windows and the slope of the roofs. The rest is all black or so diffuse that it could be anything.
Daguerre knew that it was only a matter of time before he could improve this rudimentary technique. All he had to do was find a film with the right sensitivity to reduce all those hours of exposure to just a few minutes. Trying it for years with all possible combinations, he eventually spread a layer of iodine on a silver plate, placed it inside the small box he called ‘the darkroom’ and, after developing it with warm mercury and washing it with water and kitchen salt, managed to get the image that entered through the single hole in the box to print onto the plate. Having spent days locked in his studio without sleep or food and doing all kinds of indoor tests while trying to find the right sensitivity, he finally felt confident that he could go out and hunt for the image of reality waiting for him beyond those four walls.
He placed the box on the tripod and faced southwest to where the wide Boulevard du Temple met the Rue de Saint-Martin. It was early in the morning, and though the city was only just waking up, there was always a hustle and bustle in that faubourg. There was a reason as to why the boulevard was known throughout Paris as the ‘Boulevard du Crime’, and it wasn’t because delinquency was more prevalent there than in any other corner of the capital, but rather because of its concentration of theatres where all manner of lurid things were performed. They were: the Lyrique, the Cirque Olympique, the Folies Dramatiques, the Funambules, the Délassements Comiques, et cetera. Why Daguerre had chosen that set for his Diorama was obvious. It being the very centre of Paris, he knew that he would never lack spectators. At that time, the comics, vedettes and late risers were still asleep, but the cafés and shops were open and all sorts of people were out and about: the raspy voice of a child newspaper seller could be heard close by singing out the news of the day; young boys were carting all kinds of goods up and down the street; and on the cobblestones of the boulevard clopped the constant hooves of the pack horses and of those pulling delicate carriages populated by young ladies of rank who were hurrying to attend the first service of the recently inaugurated church of Saint-Denys-de-Saint-Sacrament.
A painting or a photograph that shows everything is nothing more than one of those icons indicating where the emergency exit is.
In the midst of all this movement, Daguerre noticed a boy no more than eleven or twelve years old who had just arrived and was arranging his tools near the edge of the boulevard. He was a boot polisher. Arranging a two-step stool on the sidewalk, he sat down with a rather battered box full of rags, brushes and pots of bitumen to his right. Before long a customer stopped by. Middle-aged, he wore a long jacket and a short-brimmed hat and was empty-handed. Raising his right leg slightly, he placed his foot on the first step of the stool. Daguerre waited. It wasn’t yet time to activate his device. The changing of the client’s legs would have blurred everything. Taking out his pocket watch, he began to count how long it took the boy to finish the first boot. Neither of them seemed to be in a hurry. The young man raised his head from time to time – no, stay still! – to talk to the customer. The man, on the other hand, maintained a perfect and forced immobile balance – that’s better – with both hands clasped behind his back and his leg nice and still on the stool. The boy worked carefully, spending almost two minutes on the first boot alone. If he took the same amount of time on the second, there would be hope. Then came the change of foot. The customer raised his left leg and Daguerre ran to open the shutter on his darkroom. Though an atheist, he prayed under his breath that the boy would take his time and leave the left boot as clean and shiny as a whistle. Once again, he counted the seconds. Once again, it was almost two minutes. It was still not enough. The exposure had to be extended a little longer. The customer crossed the street and was immediately lost in the traffic of people and other animals. The boy remained seated, moving little, now looking to one side, now to the other. Neither of them knew or would ever know that theirs had been the first two human figures to be immortalised in a photograph. After five minutes of exposure, Daguerre closed the shutter.
.
The image that Daguerre captured that morning from the roof of his studio appears in all the manuals and histories of photography. What is of course usually highlighted is the fact that, for the first time, a human figure – two, in fact – were captured photographically. They were the only two that remained still enough during the exposure time to affect the photographer’s plate. Without doubt, the act has its relevance. But that daguerreotype did much more than that. The sharpness with which Daguerre captured each chimney of each house, the awnings of the shops, the trees and the street lamps, the cobblestone texture of the street and the unevenness of the pavements, each window and each curtain behind each window, is so precise – especially when compared with Niépce’s botch a few years earlier – that what truly catches the attention, what makes the photograph incomprehensible, in fact, is not that two people appear, but that only two people appear. Had there been nobody at all, the whole thing would be a little less strange: a vast deserted avenue which, coincidentally, at that moment, no one was walking down. But the solitary, desolate, almost distressing presence of only two people in the middle of a street where several hundred could comfortably fit turns the photograph into a large question mark. There is nobody else. And this deafening absence calls us, it insists that we recompose the anomaly, that we fill the unacceptable void that challenges our gaze, that we restore to these two solitary people the company that the snapshot stole from them. To really look at this photograph means to see all sorts of things which are not there but that, in fact, simply have to be there. Carts and horses, busy young lads, small groups having fun, people strolling carefree, workers heading off to their workshops. All of this is there in the photograph, though without being quite there. Because, without all of this, the photograph makes no sense. When something like this happens – and things like this happen more often than we think – then the image isn’t merely a banal transposition of reality. It creates a certain reality, of a very particular character, because it has the capacity to go beyond itself. To transcend itself. It is when this happens that an image – a photograph, a painting – begins to be of interest from an aesthetic point of view. The tension between what appears and what (dis)appears is so evident, so irresistible, that it necessarily forces us to ask ourselves questions and provide them with one answer or another. A painting or a photograph that explains everything, that shows everything – no matter how sophisticated its technical quality or workmanship – is nothing more than one of those icons banning us from smoking or indicating where the emergency exit is. It may be of interest from the point of view of what we call ‘art history’ (they’ve developed a new, never-before used technique, or have adopted a new language or way of expressing things, or they’ve subverted a certain way of doing things . . .) but they can hardly provide us with a purely aesthetic experience because they neither challenge nor ask us anything. They simply expect us to contemplate and admire them.
.
Back in his studio, Daguerre watched as the image of the Boulevard du Temple slowly developed on the silver plate, satisfied that his spontaneous actors had played their part well. Both appeared too well outlined, and in the foreground of the photograph, as if they could go unnoticed by anyone. But there was not a soul around them. Not only had he captured them, the two of them and the whole group, with complete clarity, but he had managed to make everyone who had passed by his studio that morning disappear. The illusionist had pulled off his finest illusion.
.
II – Immortalising the dead (‘Un retrat’ by Prudenci Bertrana)
Daguerre’s discovery soon became a state affair. One of the very few people who had access to all the secrets of the formula used by the inventor from the very beginning was the northern Catalan scientist and politician Domènec Francesc Joan Aragó i Roig, born just one year before Daguerre in Estagel, Roussillon, in 1786. Aragó was made secretary of the French Academy of Sciences in 1830, and the following year was elected deputy for the Pyrénées-Orientales in the National Assembly. A renowned scientist, he had built up a formidable name for himself thanks to his studies of astronomy, physical acoustics, fluid mechanics and the speed of light, among other things. Daguerre was wily enough to entrust the results of his discovery exclusively to him. He knew that he needed a spokesman with enough credit to be listened to and taken seriously. Aragó carried out this role perfectly: in January 1839 he presented Daguerre’s plates to his colleagues at the Academy and, in July of the same year, signed the report before the French parliamentary chamber that would allow the invention to be nationalised, granting Daguerre an annual pension of six thousand francs in return. In this way, photography ceased to be a private enterprise and became an asset of national interest which France, with its proverbial grandeur, would then generously cede to the world.
.
We all, on occasion, have a bad day. And when one arrives, it might not be a bad idea to consider Francesc Aragó’s vicissitudes in Catalan lands during the first two years of the Napoleonic invasion. At the beginning of 1806, aged just twenty, the scientist began an academic circumnavigation throughout the Catalan Countries with Jean-Baptiste Biot. His mission was to establish or ratify the geodesic vertices of the Valencian and Balearic coasts which constituted the vertices of the triangulations allowing us to determine, on the one hand, the distances between the islands and the mainland and, on the other, to precisely establish the route of the Paris meridian. To give us an idea of how one might draw straight lines between points that are located hundreds of kilometres apart, let’s imagine Aragó in the Desert de les Palmes (Plana Alta), climbing to the top of the seven hundred and thirty-six metre tall Mount Bartolo. At the same time, one hundred and fifty kilometres over the sea in Eivissa, a large bonfire is lit every evening on the Es Camp Vell hill in the hope that it’ll be visible from Bartolo and, as such, the exact location and direction of the geodesic vertex can be established. In his Histoire de ma jeneusse, Aragó states that he spent six months living in a tent on top of the mountain, his only occasional visitors being a couple of monks from the Carmelite monastery (he refers to them, erroneously, as Carthusians) which still exists today at the foot of the Bartolo. Jules Verne, who knew and admired Aragó well, reproduces the anecdote in a passage from his Aventures de trois russes et de trois anglais dans l’Afrique Australe, though he reduced Aragó’s time on the mountain to just two months. This was, however, only the beginning of a whole series of misadventures that Verne could quite easily have turned into an adventure novel. With his Bartolo mission completed, in 1807 Aragó travels to Valencia where, among other things, he’s shocked to see how the Inquisition is still very much alive, witnessing the trial of a woman accused of practising witchcraft. In Barcelona, he attests to how the Church continues to give asylum to criminals who take advantage of the inviolability of sacred places to avoid persecution by the civil authorities. Finally, his objective was achieved with the determination of the latitude of the geodetic point on Sa Talaiassa, Formentera, and its triangulation with Es Camp Vell, Eivissa, and Mola de l’Esclop on Mallorca. While Biot had already returned to Paris with all the data he had collected, Aragó was still in Mallorca at the beginning of May 1808 when the Peninsular War broke out. Rumours spread among the island’s inhabitants that a French spy was on the Mola de l’Esclop posing as a scientist and providing information to his allies on the continent using light signals. As a result, a gang of locals headed up the mountain to lynch him, but shortly before they arrived Aragó was warned by the skipper of the ship that had brought him to the island and so set off in disguise towards Palma. On his way down, he met the mob climbing up to kill him and, a native of Roussillon and thus conversant in Catalan, he encouraged them not to give up before effusively saying his farewells. It didn’t take them long to realise that they’d been fooled and he was later recognised in the capital. Fleeing from the crowd, he runs up towards Bellver Castle where he begs to be arrested: ‘On a vu souvent des prisonniers s’éloigner à toutes jambes de leur cachot; je suis le premier, peut-être, à qui il ait été donné de faire l’inverse.’ On the 28 July he escapes from prison and manages to catch a boat bound for Algiers. Ten days after his arrival, on the 13 August, he boards a ship crewed by a Greek captain and a very cosmopolitan crew: Jews, Moroccans, Austrians, Norwegians, two lions the viceroy of Algiers was sending as a present to Napoleon and a cage full of monkeys. They set sail for Marseille but on entering the Gulf of Lion after three days of calm travel, they’re boarded by a pirate ship out of Palamós that stops the ship and forces it to dock in the port of Roses on the Catalan coast. There, all the passengers are quarantined in a windmill, then abandoned and now missing, at the foot of the road leading to Figueres. Aragó is in somewhat of a bind. If he’s discovered to be French, he is the enemy. If he passes himself off as Catalan, he’s a traitor who is escaping to France. In a scene worthy of a prodigy of the theatre of the absurd, the judge decides to interrogate him. We have to assume that the windmill was very close to the beach, which means it was somewhere on the current Avinguda de Rhode, most likely around the citadel. So as to avoid there being any contact between the crowd attending the interrogation and the prisoner in quarantine, two parallel ropes were run out from the windmill down to the beach. Within this cordon, Aragó is situated next to the mill, while the judge is down on the beach, the distance meaning that the conversation would have to be shouted. After thoroughly confusing the judge questioning him, Aragó decides to pretend to be a merchant with a gift for languages, capable of speaking any language from any of the countries where he’s done business and, to prove it, he starts singing an Eivissan shepherd’s song interspersed with the mandatory bleating goat noises: ‘Agraciada senyora / una cançó us vull cantar / baaa, baaa, baaa / No serà gaire polida / no sé si us agradarà / baaa, baaa, baaa.’ An Eivissan soldier who witnesses the scene bursts into tears with emotion, assuring all and sundry that Aragó can only be from Eivissa. Aragó then orders the judge to bring in a renegade French officer and engages in a brief conversation at the end of which the soldier concludes with absolute certainty that Aragó is French. The judge doesn’t know where to place him and, before the interrogation ends, Aragó adds that he may even be the son of an innkeeper from Mataró or a puppeteer from Lleida. He saves his neck but, after his quarantine at the mill, he begins an odyssey of imprisonments: a basement in the Castell de la Trinitat, the Citadel of Roses, a floating platform off the coast of Palamós, et cetera. Here he will be questioned again, this time by two civil judges as well as a religious one (‘un inquisiteur’, as Aragó puts it) who have come up from Girona. Yet Aragó had used his time in quarantine at the Roses windmill to send a letter to the viceroy of Algiers, letting him know that his ship had been intercepted and detained by Spanish pirates and – even worse – that this had caused the death of one of the two lions that the African leader had sent to Napoleon. The viceroy’s reaction was nothing but sensational: summoning the Spanish ambassador for crisis talks, he threatened to declare war on Spain if they didn’t allow the ship to continue on its way. The Spanish, at that time, already had far too many problems in the north for them to consider an absurd conflict in the south over a lion and a ship. On the 28 November 1808, Aragó was freed and the ship obtained permission to sail for Marseille when, with the French coast in sight, ‘a mistral gust of extreme violence’ blew the ship off course and dragged it from north to south until it reached the city of Bugia on . . . the Algerian coast. Though he manages to reach Algiers on foot by Christmas Day, he doesn’t obtain permission to leave until half a year later, on the 21 June. With his entire family having already given him up for dead for months, he finally arrives in Marseille on the 2 July – he’d first embarked for Mallorca on the 28 July the previous year, therefore requiring almost a year to make a crossing that, under normal circumstances, would take less than a week.
.
Daguerre’s invention quickly crossed borders. Despite the relatively high cost of the material needed for both printing and developing, professional photographers began to proliferate, earning a living by satisfying people’s thirst for immortality. For the most part, images were taken in interior studios which were carefully decorated with exquisitely decadent scenography. Canvases were hung in the background and painted with trees and mountains while all kinds of utensils and trinkets were used as props. On the floor, draped or painted sheets provided the sensation of being out in the middle of nature. The results tended to fall somewhere between comical and improbable. One of these studio images, taken in the early 1880s, shows the writer Lou Andreas-Salomé sitting on a wooden cart. In her right hand she holds a whip with which she pretends to beat the two men in front of her who are pretending to hold the pole attached to her cart. The men are Friedrich Nietzsche and Paul Rée. The latter poses with undisguised indifference – see how many lashes I must endure for this man! And all so that he doesn’t appear in the photo with Lou on his own. Nietzsche, on the other hand, appears in the photo pulling his usual expression of emphatic recklessness and seems delighted with the idea (which, naturally, is his) that his friend (she is friends with both men, but by this time he already suspects that she’s a little more friends with Paul than she is with him) might give him a few lashes. This is the same man who, a few years later, would have his braggard Zarathustra say, ‘If you go with women, do not neglect your whip’, and would have paid to be with a soul of a model slave and turn himself into a lamb under Lou Salomé’s yoke. The heart has its reasons which reason does not know; we know this in a thousand things. A few years after this photo, when the rupture of the idyllic trio that never came to be had already been consummated and Lou had exchanged Nietzsche’s (two) marriage proposals for a life of sin with Rée, Nietzsche would expectorate his revenge in the form of a book. The Genealogy of Morals is nothing more than a response to a perfectly dispensable and perfectly forgotten booklet by Rée called The Origin of Moral Sentiments. Never before had a love affair produced such a prodigal avalanche of fertile ideas.
A side effect of the emergence and democratisation of photography is that bad taste has now been made available to all pockets.
If the Salomé-Rée-Nietzsche relationship had been born just two or three decades earlier, and if they had wanted to preserve a memory of their tragicomic friendship, they would have had no choice but to commission a portrait from a painter, spending a great many hours on it and – perhaps most importantly – paying an exorbitant price. It is also true that most painters would have refused to paint them in such a pathetic entourage. A side effect of the emergence and democratisation of photography is that bad taste has now been made available to all pockets. It is therefore no surprise that during the last third of the nineteenth century humanity began to have its portrait taken as it had never been able to do before and that this obsession with the proliferation of one’s own image was unleashed, an obsession which today, in the age of selfies and social networks, seems to be reaching its zenith.
The opportunity of accessing a lasting, faithful and economical portrait also opened up possibilities that were, until then, unimaginable. Just a hundred years ago, infant mortality sat at approximately fifty per cent of all births, with childbirth and the first months of life being the most difficult periods. Only once the first year had been survived could grief and fear begin to be allayed. Though most likely restricted to use in the Balearic Islands, in the work of both Miquel Costa i Llobera and Jaume Vidal Alcover, there is a beautiful use of the verb surar (‘to float’) in the sense of ensuring that a child – or any living being for that matter – stays alive. It is both graphic and entirely understandable: when the child reaches a certain age, they already float, they support themselves, and the danger of sinking has disappeared. Yet in the cases when a child did not manage to float, the invention of photography presented the possibility of at least preserving a visual memory of them. If not, then what would have become of the image of a face seen for barely a few hours? Or even for weeks or months. After a very short while, time would make sure to completely erase their features even from the memory of the people who had loved them the most. Is it not difficult for us to reconstruct the physiognomy of people we’d once spent time with but who we haven’t seen for a long time or are no longer with us? Would we be able to make them present if it weren’t for the photographs we preserve of them? Yet, placed in front of the new image-capturing device, the deceased presented an unbeatable advantage in photogenic terms: there was no danger of them moving. Despite the advances made by Daguerre, once the secret of the photographic formula was revealed to the world, multiple image capture systems were used and many of them could only afford materials of rather modest sensitivity. As such, exposure times were still usually very long until at least 1888, when George Eastman introduced the Kodak film which was capable of working in just tenths of a second. Yet Eastman’s film didn’t become widely popular until well into the twentieth century. For modest photographers – with or without a studio – who charged an affordable per minute price, the dead were the perfect match. The fact is that photography was introduced into many homes in the Western world thanks to premature death.
Prudenci Bertrana (1867–1941) left a literary record of this practice in a memorable story called ‘Un retrat’ (‘A portrait’), published in his 1907 collection Crisàlides. A child dies and ‘before the earth covered him forever, [his parents] decided to take his portrait’. They commission a professional photographer to take the picture, but the price he asks is beyond their means. They must therefore resort to an amateur who is willing to do the job for them ‘paying whatever they could, without pretentious exaggerations’. Bertrana rarely makes anything up. He’s the kind of writer who has a fabulous capacity to translate into words a personal experience or related anecdote. In other words, while not reducing any literary merit from his work, he tends to recreate more than create. The scene narrated in ‘Un retrat’ might well have taken place in Girona. Bertrana was still living there when he wrote the story and the contextual elements coincide perfectly: a building with several floors and a flat terraced roof, and ‘the city amidst columns of bluish smoke’. As such, the story describes something that not only could quite easily have taken place in Girona at the beginning of the twentieth century, but that indeed must have happened and reached the writer’s ears. As the funeral procession reaches the door and cannot wait any longer, the father’s efforts to find a photographer become a race against time. When the portraitist finally arrives, he finds that the apartment is too dark to sensitise the plate. Despite more than sixty years having passed since Daguerre’s discovery, the material with which amateur photographers worked required a lot of light for the plate to react. It is therefore decided to carry the cradle up to the roof and into the light of the day to take the desired portrait. And here an almost cinematic Bertrana appears. The reader not only visualises the pathetic ascent up a narrow staircase, one during which the cradle has to be lifted over the railing on each landing, but can also perceive the knocks of the cot, now against the railing, now against the wall, even on the neighbours’ doors (‘whenever the corpse knocked, the doors would open’). Once at the top of the building, and not without the difficulties typical of this type of portrait to keep the cradle in an approximately vertical position without the child ending up on the floor, the desired click – ‘the shutter click’ – is finally heard. And Bertrana concludes: ‘There it was: inside the machine, on the plate, the much desired image had been fixed, the rigid image of a child sleeping an eternal sleep.’
The writer from Girona describes the image of the dead child as a rigid image. But aren’t each and every one of the images we capture photographically equally rigid? Don’t rigidity and photography – death and photography – always go hand in hand?
.
.
Oriol Ponsatí-Murlà is a Catalan professor, writer and translator. He has been visiting professor at Stanford University (2025) and at National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM, 2026) and has published around seventy academic articles, books and book chapters in Catalan, English, French and Spanish. His main research interests include ancient and medieval philosophy, cultural studies – with a particular focus on Catalan intellectual history – and the philosophical dimensions of suicide.
Douglas Suttle is a translator and publisher based in Barcelona. In 2020 he started Fum d’Estampa Press to bring Catalan language literature to an English-speaking audience. The press became an imprint of Deep Vellum in 2025.
To read this and more, buy our latest print issue here, or subscribe to receive a copy of The London Magazine to your door every two months, while also enjoying full access to our extensive digital archive of essays, literary journalism, fiction and poetry.