God's Pencil and Other Infernal Machines.

Machine Generated Art in the Age of Machine Consumption.

Joan Fontcuberta, Orogenesis: Derain, 2004, c-print © the artist.

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I. Photographers Without Memory.

“O portrait, bright and wonderful!

Wrought by the sun-god's pencil true;

What grace of feature, glance of eye !

The soul itself beams out from you.

New marvel of a marvelous age!

Apollo’s old, whose art ‘twas said

Rivaled reality, than this

Had never limned a lovelier head.”

— Pope Leo XIII, 1898¹

In 1860, an English bookseller named Edward James Muggeridge was thrown from a stagecoach in Texas, severely concussing him. When he was well enough, he returned to England and enjoyed the care of Sir William Gull, the personal assistant to Queen Victoria. Gull² suggested that Muggeridge take up photography, and so began a series of new identities for Muggeridge — and a series of calamitous events ranging from murder³ to the invention of the motion picture. His inventions in the latter department would become famous under the name Eadweard Muybridge, but his first major contributions to photography⁴ were made under a more grandiose handle: Helios — the Sun God.

Helios tapped a prevailing understanding of photography in the 19th century: the sciences had delivered unto the artist the god-like powers to trace light directly down onto paper. The phrase that everyone from early pioneers to Pope Leo XIII⁵ was “god’s pencil” — and rather than being considered lesser than painting, it was seen as cheating to make art with photography — it was too good, too easily.

To wit, Muggeridge: get conked on the head and wake up a better painter than Michelangelo; name yourself after a deity.

While the technology was embraced for its objectivity, anxiety about the role of humans was never far behind. A characteristic summary admits that, while “there will always be work for good artists, especially in the domain of color⁶ and of historical design,”

“The humblest photographer is now able to preserve for us, and for future generations, minutely accurate records of scenes in distant lands, of the ruins of ancient temples which are sometimes the only record of vanished races, and of animals or plants that are rapidly disappearing through the agency of man.”⁷

The pope may not have sensed it as he blessed the gramophone that recorded him, but the war over mechanical objectivity had begun.