THE LIQUID TIME OF PHOTOGRAPHY AHMET ERSOY infrastructure — its speed, accessibility, accumulation, and ephemerality in the production and circulation of data — as a rupture or breakthrough in the field of photography, as in all image technologies. We have moved from a period in which photographs were entrusted to the future as singular objects of memory, to one in which they are produced and released into the media ecosphere like fleeting utterances. What often escapes notice, however, is that a comparable rupture took place in the history of photography in the final quarter of the nineteenth century. The introduction in the 1880s of the silver-gelatin dry plate process, which relied on ready-made, factoryproduced plates, eliminated the burdens of preparing photographic plates immediately before exposure, exposing them while still wet, and developing them without delay. This innovation significantly accelerated and simplified the photographic process. The Kodak camera, introduced by George Eastman in 1888 with the slogan “You press the button, we do the rest,” made it possible for anyone to produce photographs without requiring particular skill or knowledge. Emerging within the framework of modern consumer culture, photographic technology reached the height of its commercial potential with the “Kodak box” and the roll film contained within it. From this point on, photography became a “black-boxed” industrial technology for its mass users, something that could be used easily and routinely without any understanding of the device’s internal workings.3 This first rupture, which enabled photographic technology to reach wider audiences and become democratized, also marked the end of the early period often described as photography’s “liquid phase,” during which techniques such as the daguerreotype, calotype, and wet collodion were in use.4 3 For further information on blackboxing as a concept see Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA, 1999). 4 It should be emphasized, of course, that we cannot speak of an absolute or sudden rupture here. Although the Kodak box ushered in a new era in amateur photography, in regions such as the Ottoman Empire the wet collodion process continued to be used commercially well into the early twentieth century. Perhaps photography has been digital from the very beginning. Photography historian Geoffrey Batchen, who has written extensively on the medium’s polyphonic, multicentered invention process, argues that digitality is embedded in the very essence and nature of photographic technology. Drawing attention, for instance, to the photograms that the early pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–77) called “photogenic drawings” (camera-less photographs made by placing objects such as plants or lace directly onto a light-sensitive surface; Figure 1), Batchen emphasizes that the photographic act is fundamentally structured around a binary pattern of light and dark, that is, the presence and absence of light (open/closed; 0/1).1 Media theorist Joanna Zylinska takes this argument a step further, suggesting that the digital nature inherent in photography cannot be reduced to this simple binary logic. In her view, photography, as a technology of recording and transmission oriented toward the mass production, distribution, and consumption of images, has always contained within its structure the defining features of digitality, including immediacy, rapid circulation, and ephemerality.2 Approaches that focus on the production and circulation dynamics of early photography argue that the digital revolution has not brought about as radical a transformation in our modes of perception or in our relationship to photography as is often assumed. My intention here is not to enter into a debate over whether photography is inherently a digital medium. Yet, setting aside certain fundamental and defining aspects of the medium, it is beyond doubt that at specific moments in the history of photography, technological change has produced clear ruptures. We have become quite accustomed to describing the quantitative and qualitative shifts brought about by the digital 1 Geoffrey Batchen, “Electricity Made Visible,” ed. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan (ed.) New Media, Old Media (New York and London, 2006): 27–44. Batchen also notes that during this period Fox Talbot exchanged ideas with the mathematician Charles Babbage, one of the pioneers of the concept of the programmable computer. For further discussion of the photogram technique used by Talbot, see Burcu Böcekler, “Kamerasız Fotoğrafın Kısa Tarihçesi ve Kamerasız Fotoğraf Teknikleriyle Üretim Yapan Çağdaş Fotoğrafçılar,” Art-E: Güzel Sanatlar Fakültesi Sanat Dergisi, vol. 13, no. 26 (December 2020): 576–594. 2 Joanna Zylinska, “On Bad Archives, Unruly Snappers and Liquid Photographs,” Photographies 3:2 (2010): 139–153. Figure 1 William Henry Fox Talbot Lace The Pencil of Nature, 1844, Plate XX
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