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characterized modernity.
21
As he puts it: 'The photograph becomes
a central element not only in a new commodity economy but in
the reshaping of an entire territory in which signs and images, each
effectively severed from a referent, circulate and proliferate.'
22
Crary
explicitly compares the photograph to money, both being homo-
logous forms of social power in the nineteenth century, and 'totalis-
ing systems for binding and unifying all subjects within a single
global network of valuation and desire'.
23
(The capacity to produce
a number of images from the same negative made the photograph
more mobile, but only in a limited sense. Other technological
solutions were needed to allow photographs to be reproduced in
large quantities, and thus to circulate widely and freely. Attempts
to transmit pictures by telegraph were made as early as
, but
were not of high enough quality to succeed commercially. In the last
quarter of the nineteenth century a number of methods for cheaply
producing printing blocks from photographs were developed, which
were rapidly and enthusiastically adopted by newspapers. The most
famous and successful of these techniques was halftone, developed
by Frederick Ives of Philadelphia in
1843
1883
and refined by Max and
Louis Levy a decade later.)
According to Crary the development of photography is enabled
by a rupture in understanding concerning the physiology of vision,
in which the corporeality of the observer becomes of account in the
act of seeing.This also laid the ground for research into the 'persis-
tence of vision'. This derives from work done in the early nineteenth
century into after-images, which showed that images persisted in the
optic nerves after what was being looked at was no longer visible.
One result of this research was a proliferation of optical devices,
which exploited persistence of vision to create the illusion of move-
ment. These included the kaleidoscope, the phenakistiscope, the
zoetrope (illus.
) and the thaumatrope. These devices are digital in
that they divide the continuous motion involved in an action into
discrete elements. They clearly anticipate and prepare the ground for
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