Peter Geimer

Bilder aus Versehen
Eine Geschichte fotografischer Erscheinungen
VOLUME 178

Surprises from the Darkroom

The history of photography is often recounted as a series of triumphant innovations. Practitioners developed better and better technologies and techniques, producing more and more accurate pictures. Yet this story of steady progress is crossed from the start by a history of interference, of irritation or accident: the devices and chemicals acted up, pictures melted, became stained in the developing tray, or disappeared behind inexplicable clouds and hazes. What was supposed to remain invisible—the medium of transmission as such—came to the fore, impossible to overlook.

Peter Geimer narrates the history of these photographic apparitions. In the first decades of photography, the photographic image needs to be defended against an ever-changing cast of technological demons. Around 1900, photographers begin to capture invisible objects—radiations, spirits, thoughts—and suddenly can no longer tell with certainty whether the resulting pictures show natural phenomena or effects of the photographic process itself. Distant galaxies or dust on the lens? A likeness of Christ or coincidental apparitions in the developing tray? Finally, artists like Strindberg, Polke, and Araki start deliberately disregarding the rules of the craft in an effort to bring the aesthetic dimension of accident to light. The disturbance is the scene where the question of the truth of photography can be asked afresh and in a new way.

Peter Geimer (b. Kettwig, Germany, 1965) is chair of modern and contemporary art history at Freie Universität Berlin and has been director of the DFG Center for Advanced Studies “BildEvidenz. History and Aesthetics” since 2012. In 2022, he was appointed director of the German Center for Art History (DFK) in Paris. His research foci include the theory and history of photography, the visual representation of history, the “art and cultural history of the thing (relics, remnants, stuff),” and the history of science.

Another book by Peter Geimer in the series: Derrida ist nicht zu Hause. Begegnungen mit Abwesenden (FUNDUS 205, 2013)