The photographer can vicariously take others to places they would not normally venture, communicating spaces, objects, and bodies outside of ordinary experience, offering a proxy experience of viewing as if another of their selves could have been there, at least retrospectively, at least two-dimensionally.

Pioneering photographer Félix Nadar shot his photographs of the Paris sewers between 1861 and 1864, an underground system created during the nineteenth-century modernization of Paris commanded by Baron Haussmann for Emperor Napoleon III.¹⁶⁹ Above ground, great avenues cut their way through old neighborhoods. Below ground, sewers engineered by Eugène Belgrand efficiently removed liquid detritus from the now hygiene-proud city.¹⁷⁰

Before then, says Walter Benjamin, recording a quote from Victor Hugo, the people of Paris referred to the sewers, which also doubled as catacombs and ossuaries for remains of the dead, as the “Stink-Hole,” the “fetid arches. Nothing equaled the horror of this old voiding crypt, … cavern, grave, titanic molehill, in which the mind seems to see prowling through the shadow … that enormous blind mole, the past.”¹⁷¹

Benjamin’s Convolute Y,^§MS0b collated for his great unfinished work on Paris in the nineteenth century, was on photography. Here he quotes from Nadar’s book, When I was a Photographer, and his “splendid description of his photographic work” in the sewers.

With each new camera setup, we had to test our exposure time empirically; certain of the plates were found to require up to eighteen minutes … I had judged it advisable to animate some of these scenes by the use of a human figure – less from considerations of picturesqueness than in order to give a sense of scale, a precaution too often neglected by explorers of this medium and sometimes with disconcerting consequences. For these eighteen minutes of exposure time, I found it difficult to obtain from a human being the absolute, inorganic immobility I required. I tried to get around this difficulty by means of mannequins, which I dressed in workman’s clothes and positioned in the scene with as little awkwardness as possible.¹⁷²

Nadar sent Belgrand twenty-three of his photographs, and Belgrand immediately ordered a second set.¹⁷³

“For the first time,” says Benjamin of Nadar’s sewers, “discoveries were demanded of the lens.”¹⁷⁴ The use of mannequins by Nadar is telling. His photographs required people, not only in order to offer scale and perspective, but for the essential anthropomorphism of the photographer’s program. This was a space into which the viewer was unlikely ever to venture. Its others, the object of the viewing self, were the anonymous worker, keeping the sewers operational, and the absent engineer Belgrand whose design was the ultimate source of animation in the scene. The mannequin not only underlines the anonymity of a worker, the fact that there was no need that their image be personified; they also indicate the conditions of othering that are the nature of photography. “The absolute, inorganic immobility … required” by Nadar was a function of time exposure; in regular light, the effect is created in the fraction of a second of the open shutter.

Hence the transpositions from self to other: Nadar’s I/eye becomes I/eye of the view constrained by the two-dimensional, of-an-instant, entity-at-the-expense-of-action biased eye/I of the viewer. Nadar’s I/eye transposes by admiration the vision of the famous engineer. Nadar’s mannequin prompts appreciation for the workman who keeps the sewers working; I the viewer could have been that other, though I am not, and I know not his identity. Self to other, these are not simple polarities, they are positions where the one is ever able to have been the other. They are vectors of transposability.

Then there are things: the tunnels, the machines, the unhygienic waste water. These are not simply objectivized “it.” They are self- and other-like, metaphorical arteries and veins that clear the urban body. But more literally, more directly, these things are in an intimate relation to their personhood, whether that be an I or they, a self or other.

The tunnels’ having-been-designed prompts us to credit M. Belgrand, Baron Haussmann, and Emperor Napoleon III. Their having-been-built prompts us to credit anonymous underground tunnel builders. Their operation prompts us to acknowledge the workers referenced as mannequins in Nadar’s photographs. The miasmic flow of waste prompts us to acknowledge the people defecating, urinating, flushing, and washing their bodies. We also recognize the social concept, others in the plural and the general. The sewer is a social precondition for healthy life, a gift of modernity, a promise that the consequences of our elemental bodily functions will be managed for us systemically, remotely, while demanding minimal agency on the part of our selves.

This is how we gain insight into impossible spaces, objects, and bodies, how we see into the practically unseeable. (The sewers of Paris are not totally unseeable. Today, there is a museum of the Paris sewers in a sewer itself that can be entered from a service stair beside the Seine. To insist on the technical marvels of treatment and hygiene, waste water flows past the displays.)

In the same way, medical imaging allows us to see into our own selves, creating views that are impossible without surgery or mortal danger to the patient. When the x-ray or the MRI image is presented to us, it seems that we have become other, and our bodies made thing-like. Which indeed we have by fiat of photograph, at once and at the same time our body as self, other, and thing.

“Technological reproduction,” Benjamin tells us of reproducible images, “can place the copy of the original in situations which the original itself cannot attain. Above all, it enables the original to meet the recipient half way.”¹⁷⁵

Microscopes and telescopes, and the images taken for the epistemic record by the experts who are able to use them, tell us things we could never otherwise have known or seen. Things inaccessible to visible experience become mundanely real to us. They mean empirical things that would not have been possible without the affordances of the photographic image. They transpose self, other, and thing in fantastic and previously impossible ways.

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¹⁶⁹ Félix Nadar, 1900 [2015], When I Was a Photographer, translated by E. Cadava and L. Theodoratou, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 75–96.

¹⁷⁰ Shao-Chien Tseng, 2014, “Nadar’s Photography of Subterranean Paris: Mapping the Urban Body,” History of Photography 38(3):233–54, p. 247.

¹⁷¹ Walter Benjamin, 1999, The Arcades Project, translated by H. Eidland and K. McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 412.

¹⁷² Ibid., pp. 673–74.

¹⁷³ Adam Begley, 2017, The Great Nadar: The Man Behind the Camera, New York, NY: Tim Duggin Books, p. 133.

¹⁷⁴ Walter Benjamin, 1939 [1999 ], “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” pp. 14–26 in The Arcades Project, edited by H. Eidland and K. McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 6.

¹⁷⁵ Walter Benjamin, 1936 [2008], “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” pp. 19–55 in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, edited by M.W. Jennings, B. Doherty and T.Y. Levin, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 21.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 232–234. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Félix Nadar’s "When I was a Photographer" §MS2.2.2c