Rail: But when one looks at Duchamp’s Handmade Stereopticon Slide, can one see it stereoptically? Does it work as a stereograph?
Bowen: It does. I went to the Museum of Modern Art research library to take a close look. When the work was acquired, Duchamp was asked to fill out a questionnaire. In it, he wrote about “the effect,” which I read as both verbal and visual. Visually, the crystal structure is a reversible figure, a 2D/ 3D hinge figure. More specifically, in 2D, it is bistable like Wittgenstein’s duckrabbit or the Necker cube. One sees the duck, or the rabbit, but never both at the same time.
Rail: You can’t see a duckrabbit, right?
Bowen: I’ve tried and no. When the crystal drawings flip, the effect is that you either look down on it or look up at it, but not both together. And so far, I’ve only described the 2D effect, but it also flips in 3D. Since our eyes are approximately 2.5 inches apart, each sees a slightly different view of the scene, and the brain processes them as a 3D stereoscopic scene. If our eyes were to exchange positions, for example, by crossing our eyes, then the world would look like a mold turned inside-out. So Duchamp’s stereograph is both a 2D bistable image and a 3D stereoscopic/pseudoscopic image. It flips, both verbally and visually, in 2D and 3D.
It is also an acknowledged prototype for the Large Glass. That’s the main reason it’s important. According to artist Jeff Wall, who began his career as an art historian, Duchamp’s notes collected in the Green Box and the White Box apply to both the Large Glass and Étant donnés, which is a three-dimensional peepshow-based diagram of a stereograph that happens to be pornographic. Pornographic stereographs were popular in the 19th and early 20th century. Also, as an aside, one of the best known series of photographs by Sugimoto is the seascapes. And similar to Handmade Stereopticon Slide, they are bisected with the sky above and the sea below. Sugimoto is a self-proclaimed Duchampian, so it’s rather likely that Duchamp’s stereo card inspired him.
Rail: Interesting parallel here, because what you’re suggesting is that for Duchamp, the Handmade Stereopticon Slide was generative for a couple of his most important works. And the parallel is that the same stereopticon slide turned out to be incredibly generative for you and probably for Sugimoto and maybe others. Can you say something more about what sparked your young and very strong sense of curiosity?
Bowen: As I mentioned, I had no idea what it was, but first, it drew my attention to stereographs and then to photography in general. And that led directly to experimental cinema. So my interest in Handmade Stereopticon Slide led me to Ken Jacobs.
Rail: Should we go back to the specifics of the book and the various practitioners and artists that you treat in such a rich array, beginning early on with Claudet?
Bowen: Antoine Claudet is a figure from the early history of photography that we don’t think about very much anymore. Yet he is everywhere in the early sources. He learned photography directly from Daguerre and also from William Henry Fox Talbot. He attempted to speed up exposure times for both processes, though he was ultimately unsuccessful with Talbot’s process. He was a chemical engineer, a mechanical engineer, and an optical engineer. In the history of the Royal Society, which was founded by Sir Isaac Newton, he is the only member ever elected as a photographer. Claudet’s election certificate was authored by Michael Faraday, the scientist who brought us from the age of steam into the electrical age. The certificate is cosigned by several other key individuals. Name-checking just a few, there is Talbot, the British inventor of photography, and Charles Babbage, who, working with Ada Lovelace, essentially invented computing, Charles Wheatstone, who explained stereoscopic vision, and Astronomer John Herschel, who, among many things, invented photographic hypo.
These individuals tell us that Claudet invented portrait photography, which seems absurd because how could one person be credited for doing that? Yet Talbot and the others sign his certificate. It means that Claudet made the exposure process for the daguerreotype fast enough to capture a photographic portrait reliably. Then he focused on stereoscopic portraiture. And along the way, he invented many things. By inventing the safe light, he essentially invented the darkroom and made the complex manipulations that photographers performed there possible, because they could see what they were doing. And he was the first to introduce color to photography through hand-tinting. I don’t think we can appreciate how strange it must have been to see black and white photographs in the beginning. It was like seeing into a shadow world.
In addition, Claudet was the first to use painted backdrops in his photographs. And he’s the first to create a photo panorama. He invented the light meter. He pioneered multi-exposure photographs for astronomy. Working with the physicist David Brewster, he pursued photo sculpture, a process that anticipated digital photogrammetry, the concept of taking many photographs of something and creating a 3d model from them. He also wrote 300 articles, and in some of them he argued that photography was a fine art.