Conté’s Machines: Drawing, Atmosphere, Erasure

Abstract

The most beautiful pages that the human soul has dictated to human genius'. 1 Not one to run shy of hyperbole, this was how photographer and inventor Fe lix Nadar described a text he considered foundational to the modern era, chemist Antoine-Franc ois Fourcroy's 1795 report to the National Convention, Sur les Arts qui ont servi a la de fense de la Re publique, et sur le nouveau proce de de Tannage de couvert par le citoyen Armand Seguin. 2 Somewhat incongruously, these words by Nadar appeared at the beginning of a chapter of his eccentric 1900 memoir Quand j'e tais photographe, which he dedicated to the Belgian photographic pioneer Doctor van Monckhoven, who had died eighteen years previously. 3 'Whatever opinion one might have', Nadar wrote, noting with some affection the pompous tone of French Revolutionary official language, 'it is impossible not to feel a profound emotion before this document of the admirable effort of a people determined not to perish or to retreat under the universe conspiring against them '. 4 What was it that Nadar found so compelling in Fourcroy's report? As Stephen Bann, Eduardo Cadava, and others have shown, Nadar was particularly attuned in his writing of this period to the telescoping of historical time, and to the ways in which past media might reappear to new effect in the present. 5 Often this took the form of reminiscence on the graphic satire of the 1830s, inflected by his early career in lithography, a form of printmaking whose urgent temporality enabled later reflection on the historical possibilities of the still new medium of photography. 6 But Fourcroy's account, written over a century earlier, was seemingly disconnected from such visual concerns. Operating in the present tense of revolutionary conflict, its tone was briskly practical, permeated with a pugnacious sense of patriotic militarism. Indeed, it was preoccupied, for the most part, with leather; shoes, in particular, those most earthbound of objects. Seguin's new tanning procedure, which within a few years made him very wealthy, increased the speed at which boots could be produced for the military, a matter of some urgency in wartime. 7 Recounting this innovation, Fourcroy's text is suffused with muted pride in an ad hoc, makeshift approach to the production of new materials for new objects in a time of crisis, under enormous pressure for immediate supply. As he explained, 'the most important materials necessary to their fabrication didn't exist [. . .] resources had to be taken almost entirely from the soil of the Republic'. 8 Or, as Nadar put it more emphatically: 'We will have it'. 9 It was this responsiveness to the contingencies of the historical moment that provided for Nadar a powerful analogy with the early history of photography, and he found in this heroic generation of revolutionary scientists -the likes of Condorcet, Lavoisier, Monge, Chaptal, Lalande, Vauquelin, and Fourcroyantecedents for the tactical genius of figures such as Doctor van Monckhoven and, presumably, himself. 10 During the French Revolution ropes were made of plants, tar was extracted from peat, and potash derived from soda; in due course, photography too would be improvised, seemingly from nothing.