http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/absencepresence.htm
Articles in Cabinet
Out of the Picture by Lois Kaplan:
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/21/kaplan.php
Darkness Visible by Marina Warner:
"Daguerre had first invented the diorama in Paris in 1822; his later move to invent the daguerreotype follows the logic of the contemporary quest to capture particularity with scientific realism. In some of the earliest photographic images ever made, Daguerre himself, his associates, and followers chose to picture bas-reliefs and busts and other casts. They were exhibiting the fine-grained vision of the new process, its heightened powers of scrutiny (the buttons on the uniform of the microscopic guard standing to attention outside the Louvre in one image), its quiveringly alert sensitivity to different textural gleam and luster (on marble, on plaster, on gilt and on ormolu, on plants’ foliage, on damask upholstery in an interior study ).38 But the later medium also possessed, subliminally, a kinship with “peelings off life,” as the novelist Honoré de Balzac expressed it after having his portrait taken by the new process. He confided in 1841 to the photographer Félix Nadar that he felt that “each body in nature consists of a series of ghosts, in an infinity of superimposed layers, foliated in infinitesimal films, in all the directions in which optics perceive this body.” Balzac felt in consequence that every daguerreotype “was … going to surprise, detach, and retain one of the layers of the body on which it focused. … From then onwards, and every time the operation was repeated, the subject in question evidently suffered the loss of one of its ghosts, that is to say, the very essence of which it was composed.” The new medium possessed the accuracy of lost wax casting, combined with the illusory shadowy worlds of silhouette and reflections in mirrors.
Balzac’s fantasy echoes closely a once highly influential theory of vision, “intromission,” which was eloquently evoked by Lucretius and then developed by Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century; according to Lucretius’s model of perception, every object beams out images “like a skin, or film, / Peeled from the body’s surface … keep[ing] the look, the shape / Of what it held before its wandering … the way / Cicadas cast their brittle summer jackets.”40 These eerie, flying sheddings from physical phenomena, calledeidola in Greek and simulacra in Latin, were also known as “radiant species.” Like a photograph made of light, they both retain material substance of their origin but also reproduce it, as with an “idol,” an effigy, or a copy.41"
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Artists working with these themes:
Martina Mullaney
http://www.yossimilo.com/artists/mart_mull/?show=0&img_num=0#title
Doug Rickard
http://www.yossimilo.com/artists/doug-rickard/?show=0&img_num=0#title
Mitch Epstein
http://www.yanceyrichardson.com/artists/mitch-epstein/index.html?page=5
http://www.mitchepstein.net/work/index.html
Chris Jordan
http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/midway/#CF000313%2018x24
http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/katrina/#reddoor
Wijnanda Deroo
http://www.wijnandaderoo.net/Gallery.php
Sarah Palmer
http://sarahpalmerphotography.com/
Abelardo Morell
http://www.abelardomorell.net/photography/cameraobsc_01/cameraobsc_01.html
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