FUTURES

Exposure, Art, Bodybuilding
Nikolai Vogel
In the beginning was the light. Welcome! But how to go about
recording light in our collective memory? Light in the Chauvet cave,
in the Lascaux cave or the Apollo 11 cave – light that flickered
there, thousands of years ago, that was rendered into drawings
covering the crude cave walls, illuminating a dark world, so-tospeak.
Wait: so where are we in this?
Fastforward some 30.000 years. In the early 19th century,
painters took their pigments and easels outdoors and set them
up in the middle of fields, pastures, and winding country roads,
working with all their might to preserve the day by the honest light
of the sun. They were hoping to coax the wind, the waves, the
rolling fog and the quiet mist onto their canvases. Of course there
were always tricks, like keeping up the 100 % plein-air appearance,
yet creating the final painting in the comfort of the studio. And
then – drumroll, please – photography emerged! Here, light was
borne from the darkroom. Literally, a light-image on light-sensitive
material. Remarkably, the only way to create a photographic
likeness is to provide an initial darkness from which it can emerge.
The universe of all things visible passes through a pinhole into
the hollow, cavernous interior of the Camera Obscura. Hundreds
of years ago, it was used to look at the source of all light, the
source of all seeing: the sun. Then there was Heliography, a coat
of tar-like Bitumen on pewter plates and a tremendous exposure
time of eight hours. Onto the first practical form of photography,
the Daguerreotype: polished copper plates made light-sensitive
by iodine and bromide vapors, which were then exposed in the
camera and developed with mercury vapor. One of a kind images
in blackened silver, mysterious and luring with their metallic sheen.
Then there was the salt print followed by the Calotype – the first
negative – which made it possible to produce multiple prints
from image. This marks the birth of modern photography. So much
for photography, but that’s not all. The development culminates
with the half-tone print, the first raster image process, used for the
mass distribution of photographs in book printing, and invented,
incidentally, in Munich. And light was inscribed onto the parchment
of memory. But what about sound? It, too, had to be preserved. It
started with a hog’s bristle attached to a membrane. Sound waves
focused upon the membrane caused the bristle to move, inscribing
a visual recording onto a lamp-blackened medium. A soundcamera…
Then Edison’s phonograph. A sound-writer that could
play back the sounds it had transcribed, a talk machine, a tinfoilwrapped
cylinder onto which a needle inscribed the sound waves.
Voila. Tainter and Bell then basically added wax and began
making records. The first thing their creation could be heard to
proclaim was “I am a graphophone and my mother was a phonograph.”
And then there quickly arose the question of how to
produce these technologies so that any-and-everyone could
record their own voice and their own pictures. Wait: so where are
we in this?
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