Difference between revisions of "Daguerre's Diorama"

From Dead Media Archive
Jump to: navigation, search
(Black box matinee)
(Black box matinee)
Line 6: Line 6:
  
 
== Black box matinee ==
 
== Black box matinee ==
 
The diorama opened to the Parisian public in 1822, and enjoyed considerable success until in burned down in 1839. Like the [[panorama]], the diorama was a mode of exhibiting paintings that utilized daylight to create or enhance visual illusion. While most lighting technologies were developed in the 19th century to make nighttime as inhabitable as the day, these light-based media gave rise to darkened auditoriums that made daylight exploitable (Schivelbusch 221).
 
  
 
[[Image:paris_diorama.jpg|400px|left|thumb|The Diorama in Paris, woodcut c. 1830.]]
 
[[Image:paris_diorama.jpg|400px|left|thumb|The Diorama in Paris, woodcut c. 1830.]]
  
Rather than displaying a circular painting lit by a skylight to ambulatory viewers, however, the auditorium of the diorama—a cylinder with a single, window-like opening—was instead rotated mechanically, switching the audience’s view from one painting to the next, as its aperture aligned with the illuminated image.
+
The diorama opened to the Parisian public in 1822, and enjoyed considerable success until in burned down in 1839. Like the [[panorama]], the diorama was a mode of exhibiting paintings that utilized daylight to create or enhance visual illusion. While most lighting technologies were developed in the 19th century to make nighttime as inhabitable as the day, these light-based media gave rise to darkened auditoriums that made daylight exploitable (Schivelbusch 221). Rather than displaying a circular painting lit by a skylight to ambulatory viewers, however, the auditorium of the diorama—a cylinder with a single, window-like opening—was instead rotated mechanically, switching the audience’s view from one painting to the next, as its aperture aligned with the illuminated image.
  
 
Lit from a skylight directly above its façade and illuminated from large windows behind, the painting became the object of tunnel vision, with the pitch-blackness of the auditorium funneling the audience’s attention towards the spectacle of light. As Helmut and Alison Gernsheim describe in their ‘‘History of the Diorama,’’ “the spectator’s attention was disturbed by sounds underground,” as the auditorium began to rotate and he or she “became conscious that the scene before him was slowly moving away” (Gernsheim 16). The creaks and rumblings of the medium’s mechanical functionality only temporarily caught the spectator’s attention, as their eyes, for a moment blinded, glimpsed the second painting, “which gradually advanced, until it was completely developed” (16).  
 
Lit from a skylight directly above its façade and illuminated from large windows behind, the painting became the object of tunnel vision, with the pitch-blackness of the auditorium funneling the audience’s attention towards the spectacle of light. As Helmut and Alison Gernsheim describe in their ‘‘History of the Diorama,’’ “the spectator’s attention was disturbed by sounds underground,” as the auditorium began to rotate and he or she “became conscious that the scene before him was slowly moving away” (Gernsheim 16). The creaks and rumblings of the medium’s mechanical functionality only temporarily caught the spectator’s attention, as their eyes, for a moment blinded, glimpsed the second painting, “which gradually advanced, until it was completely developed” (16).  

Revision as of 01:31, 29 March 2010

Patent image of the London Diorama, 1823.

The diorama was a 19th century light-based medium that featured two immense paintings lit from the front and through the back inside an otherwise pitch-black, rotating auditorium. The diorama combined techniques of opaque and translucent painting with methods of manipulating natural light in a live spectacle.

The diorama was invented by the set designer and painter Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (together with the architectural painter Charles Marie Bouton) seventeen years before he perfected the daguerreotype process of photography. While the daguerreotype would, in the words of Daguerre, "fix the objects reflected in a camera obscura" (Daguerre 78), in contrast to the photographic impulse, the effectiveness of the dioramic image depended on the constant movement of light manipulated with shutters and screens both onto and through a semi-translucent painting. The in-formation of light was thus performed and appreciated in real-time, rather than captured and stored for future purpose.

Black box matinee

The Diorama in Paris, woodcut c. 1830.

The diorama opened to the Parisian public in 1822, and enjoyed considerable success until in burned down in 1839. Like the panorama, the diorama was a mode of exhibiting paintings that utilized daylight to create or enhance visual illusion. While most lighting technologies were developed in the 19th century to make nighttime as inhabitable as the day, these light-based media gave rise to darkened auditoriums that made daylight exploitable (Schivelbusch 221). Rather than displaying a circular painting lit by a skylight to ambulatory viewers, however, the auditorium of the diorama—a cylinder with a single, window-like opening—was instead rotated mechanically, switching the audience’s view from one painting to the next, as its aperture aligned with the illuminated image.

Lit from a skylight directly above its façade and illuminated from large windows behind, the painting became the object of tunnel vision, with the pitch-blackness of the auditorium funneling the audience’s attention towards the spectacle of light. As Helmut and Alison Gernsheim describe in their ‘‘History of the Diorama,’’ “the spectator’s attention was disturbed by sounds underground,” as the auditorium began to rotate and he or she “became conscious that the scene before him was slowly moving away” (Gernsheim 16). The creaks and rumblings of the medium’s mechanical functionality only temporarily caught the spectator’s attention, as their eyes, for a moment blinded, glimpsed the second painting, “which gradually advanced, until it was completely developed” (16).

The two mechanized components of the diorama operated by workmen—the lever and cogs that turned the auditorium, and the system of shades and screens controlled by ropes and pulleys behind the painting—were concealed from the audience’s view. “The diorama was a machine of wheels in motion,” Jonathan Crary writes, “one in which the observer was a component” (Crary 113). This comment is telling, because as a component of the machine, the observer was also necessarily concealed. Though the attention of the observer—whose behavior is neatly imagined above by the Gernsheims—was apparently controlled by the effect of tunnel vision, the audience also had to be black-boxed for the (ostensibly mesmerizing) illusion to work. Just as the diorama’s shifting images could not be preserved, its audience, ensconced in the pitch-black core of the artifact, represents a historical blind-spot. As a French artifact, the diorama thus provides an interesting anomaly to both Foucault’s genealogy of the panoptical mode of surveillance, as well as Debord’s designation of the spectacle as “the sun which never sets over the empire of modern passivity” (Debord 119).

Realism and illusion: the divide of the dioramic screen

The patent for the first diorama built in London in 1823 describes the artifact as “an improved Mode of publicly exhibiting Pictures or Painted Scenery of every Description and of distributing or directing the Day Light upon or through them, so as to produce many beautiful Effects of Light and Shade.” As this account indicates, the dioramic picture was both a transparent conduit and an opaque screen, with the effects of light and shade directed both “upon” and “though” it.

The diorama thus operated according to both catoptric and dioptric principles. As Daguerre describes, “the first effect painted on the right or front of the canvas is lighted by reflection…while the second effect—that painted on the wrong side—receives its light by refraction, that is, from behind only” (Daguerre 83). The spectator looks ‘‘at’’ the illusion, the aspect of which is reflected back to them as part of a realistic image of a cathedral or a natural scene. On the other side of the screen, the dioramic operator and/or painter looks ‘‘through’’ the canvas, manipulating light through refraction in order to perform the illusion.

On a semiotic level, the transparent side of the painting was also opaque to those who did not possess the knowledge of “dioramic art” (Daguerre 85). Daguerre did not publicly disclose the secrets of his method until the Paris diorama burned down in 1839 (and the daguerreotype was coincidentally perfected) (Gernsheim __). Painters schooled in the dioramic technique inscribed the back of the painting with functional nonsense, a language of shadow that, in a complete reversal of the painting’s façade, corresponded not the referent of the natural world, but to the forms showing through from the front of the canvas. This secondary inscription would be illegible to the spectator accustomed to representational images. The double-sided screen thus divides the complex knowledge of the practitioner of realist illusion from its witness.

In contrast to the photograph, which, as Walter Benjamin described a century later in his celebration of film, freed the image of the cathedral to “meet the beholder halfway” (Benjamin 220), the image of the cathedral reproduced in the diorama is wrapped not only in the aura of luminosity, but in the aura of an original work authored by a virtuosic artist-scientist.

Moving pictures

The diorama is typically viewed as a proto-cinematic medium. “Culturally and socially it was a kind of forerunner for the cinema,” the Gernsheims observe (Gernsheim 43). “The only difference,” Schivelbusch argues, “was that the painted picture was replaced by a projected and animated picture” (Schivelbusch 219). However, while photographs would fix light in a single image, and motion pictures would create the impression of continuous movement by showing a digital sequence of photographs in rapid succession, the moving pictures of the diorama were produced by the manipulation of analogical light waves in real-time.

Once the shot is captured, film exists independently of and looks the same regardless of the weather. A storm or a sunny day happens either inside or outside the diegesis. In contrast, the diorama’s moving picture—whether the sun setting through the windows of a cathedral, or a storm gathering behind an alpine peak—was dependent on the influence of the sky: the image required the continuous, variable input of natural light. For the operators of the diorama, who actively constructed shifting images with “Light and Shade,” overcast skies were good weather. “The best light for this purpose is a pale sky,” comments Daguerre, though, even with this cooperative weather, “a picture cannot be the same at all hours of the day” (Daguerre 85).

As Siegfried Zielinski writes, “media are spaces of action for constructed attempts to connect what is separated” (Zielinski 7). Excavated from the cinema’s shadow, the diorama is a space of action—necessarily excluded from history’s catalogue of frozen images—that mediated movement and realist painting, science and art, natural effects and cultural spectacle.

References