Vibratory photography

Abstract

Photography is generally not recognised as a vibratory medium, yet this chapter will show that the photographic apparatus was originally understood as a medium capable of both receiving and transmitting thought vibrations, which linked the camera directly to the human nervous system. Perhaps the earliest articulation of this theory can be found in British physician Robert Collyer’s 1843 book Psychography, or the Embodiment of Thought, which argued that thought transference, like photography, was based on the visualisation of information: ‘I was obligated to embody the image[s] … in my own mind, before they could be recognized by the recipients; whose brain during the congestive state was so sentient that the impression was conveyed to the mind similar to the photographic process of Daguerre.’1 Collyer also organised public demonstrations of thought transference, during which audience members were asked to sit opposite a somnambulist and gaze into a bowl of molasses that allegedly reflected the mental images of each sitter into the mind of the other (see Figure 8.1).2 The bowl of molasses thus functioned as both a reflecting lens, which focused the sender’s thoughts, and a developing tray, which enabled the visible manifestation of previously invisible images. Collyer’s 1873 book Exalted States of the Nervous System similarly argued that optical information is transmitted from the retina to the brain via the optic nerve in the same way that images are recorded by a photographic apparatus, yet this book emphasised the vibratory nature of these transmissions: The transmission of an image to the brain through the sense of sight, is effected by the undulations of the ethereal medium, as exemplified in the action of light on the retina. The eye is a perfect camera obscura; the same arrangement of lenses, the identical mode of producing the picture. The choroid coat represents the ground glass on which the picture is focused, from which it is vibrated through the optic nerve to the brain, which is a mass of nervous molecules in their various combinations which produces THE THINKING POWER. THOUGHT is the motion of these particles of nervous matter charged with vitalized electricity.3.