Vampire Mythology and the Photographic Process

Recently I have started to teach as Visiting Lecturer at the Photography course of the Royal College of Art in London.

As a result my thinking swerved ever so often around the fundamentals of the phenomenon of the photograph. It’s history, processes and general involvement in the human condition. In broad strokes I tried to explain to myself what a photograph actually is?!

Here now I want to follow one train of thought about its past. It came to me, while thinking about the photograph as coming into existence only in darkness, on the dark side of a two-way hole. In the photographic process the image of something in the world is projected up side down into a small dark chamber. In one of its earliest forms on a glassplane covered with light sensitiv silver salts . It’s a delicate matter to create a photograph as it is destroyed to blackness when exposed to long to the violent bombardment of photons send out by our nearest star.

The earliest photographs are taken by Niepce and later by Daguerre and Fox-Talbot. Curiously the period of swift inventions of different photographic processes falls in exactly the same period as the popularisation of vampire stories in Europe . The first one being “The vampyre” by the physician John William Polidori in 1819. The vampire in his story is a middle aged count that seduces young women to then drink their blood , which helps him to prolong his undead existence. No photographic processes are showing up in the story, but this can’t be surprising, because the first photograph will be taken only 1827 by Niepce and then 1835 in much better detail by Daguerre. Only after the invention of the photograph certain characteristics seem to infuse the vampire mythology.

The processes I have in mind are the extreme sensitivity to light by both : The photographic film and the Vampire. If any of them is exposed to light too long, they are destroyed. Another aspect concerns the appearance. The ghost character of the photograph: showing in effect the imprint of something that has been and is no longer. In its own way it is undead. On the more material side, silver plays a role in both contexts . In vampire stories as poisonous to the creature , in photography as the element that is crucial for creating a light sensitive substance out of its salts.

The upside down character of the photographic image , projected onto the back of the camera box correlates with the upside-down as a signifier for evil . Language and symbols upside down or backwards have been used to signify evil. The vampire incorporates the upside down character in its animal form in some of the mythology :The bat. In Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” he descends a wall of a castle head down like a lizard.

The hole and the act of piercing a hole is a central part of the vampire narrative and at the same time the hole is crucial for the process of photography. The vampire leaves small holes in its victims, who it empties out. In effect it creates Camera Obscuras made of hollow bodies.

Some of the inter relations might seem far fetched, but in its accumulation and in respect to the similar historic timeline I suspect a cultural cross fertilisation from the knowledge about photographic processes into the mythology of the vampire story. The open source character of Daguerres method created a surge in interest and involvement in making photographs. It rose into the public mind. The French Gouvernement had asked Daguerre and Isodore Niepce to publish all their findings without patent in return for a state pension. They took up the offer and many interested citizen started to reproduce the process Daguerre had developed.

At the same time in 1835 the first modern mirrors were invented by Julius von Liebig . He had found a way to apply a thin layer of silver to a glass plane. When turning the plane around a highly reflective surface had formed. The first photographs with their layers of silver iodide were very closely related to mirrors.

As it’s well known the Mirror also found its way into the Vampire myths.

The Vampire Mythology was and is arguably so successful as it allows reinvention and development of new aspects. So it’s not surprising that in its beginnings it had been infused by the very popular semi magical processes of the just invented medium of photography.

Some thoughts on vases and cups

A short article on the important role cups and vases played in human culture, technology, economy and understanding.

A cup is an universal object. Something ancient with qualities to be found in almost every living thing. As a form it resembles the cell. The body. It’s opening is facing up to the sky . Always. Often when filled with fluids it mirrors images of the sky.

The size of a cup is related to the hand. When held together two hands can hold almost the same amount of fluid.

Bottles have a mouth . Drinking is like kissing. As kissing is a form of ritualised feeding through the mothers mouth. Their is a sexual aspect to touching something with your lips. In history cups and grails took on functions in rituals.

They combine three important aspects of life : they hold food or water, they face up to the sun , the light , they create order through membranes and resist entropy.

Cups and time

When cups came into existence time began for humans . A cup proposes a standard , a measure. The world becomes measurable. A cup connects visually time with space. It hands time to people away from the sky where it had been for millennia. Only the Sun and the Moon made time visible before. Now pouring out a cup is a measure for time, that works independently of the sky.

The cup as aggressive metaphor

In recent times the dominant economic structure has been the consumer society economy. Here the cup has become the metaphor that is applied on to everything. This happens on the background of trying to make everything measurable, consumable and therefore tradable. The qualities of the cup/vase have become an aggressive doctrine.

Human culture, technology and civilisation would be impossible without the existence of cups or vases, but we have to be careful not to fall under the dictatorship of the cup.

Infinity

 

 

“Infinity is just not what it used to be” , Acrylic on Canvas, 2010

two thirty in the afternoon

state of mind…at 2.30…

(written for the Royal College of Art catalogue 2014 )

Agatha Christie made sure that nobody ever saw her writing. She didn’t have a study or specific space where she would work, but instead placed her typewriter on the kitchen table after the children had left for school and she had cleared the dishes. By the time when everybody returned home her typewriter had disappeared again and she would be in the middle of making tea. At least this is what I read.

At 2.30 in the afternoon I start shrinking. A little bit like hulk, who slowly looses his anger and turns back into a small naked man. I have to prepare for a quiet, powerful and invisible portal that is awaiting my mind to cross through daily at around this time. It’s school pick up time. Behind the portal awaits another world: Tedious, structured, exhausted, obeying, with tied shoelaces , brushed teeth, money in bank accounts, hands shivering, stairs, flag poles and homemade pizza. A world strange and deterministic. Slowly it opens its wings and around 4 pm it stands in front of me glorious, cold and all engulfing with fingers, tasting sweet as jelly babies. I rehearse one last time and dissolve once again like fizzing aspirin. A small naked man, fairly happy, mysteriously normal.

The gaps that were wide open during the morning have disappeared, the world is solid again. It has to be. I exchange words with people that look like my parents; I look like my parents. I am boring, serious and use the word “No” during every other breath. At least that is how my son describes me. It doesn’t help that I try to explain the dialectic virtues of using the word “No” and what Hegel thought of it. At 4.30 pm I look at a tree and don’t see the tree, but only a symbol of a tree. While before entering the portal the world was breathing a complex, surprising and somewhat paradox pool of light and words, it now had collapsed into textbook symbolism and the logic of cause and effect. It wasn’t always like that and isn’t always like that, but like a pendulum that is kicked, after a while it starts steering the same course again. Its monkey business ! I explain to myself . Biology. The work that has to be done is to kick the pendulum, to create unbalance and take a glimpse through the gaps of matter and mind that open up in the process.  After all, it is said that it has been a tiny unbalance that had created the universe. Now it is drifting back into vast and cold balance. The process we call time. I piss on time, I throw rocks at it and grapefruits. Recently I noticed the portal getting tighter. Clearly soon I wont be able to pass through it anymore. I just hope I will be on the right side of it, when it happens.

Markus Vater

Glance

Today I said goodbye,

quick as a swallow,

I looked back

and my glance was stretched,

and stretched

like a rubber band

until it ripped.

Under my eyes tangle

some bits now,

hard to say what they are,

if you don’t know the story.

©Markus Vater