Michal Sapir
Cryptography in Artificial Light:
Poe's Stories and Nadar's Stills


In the beginning of the second half of the nineteenth century, the 

French photographer Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, or Nadar, as he was 

widely known, was engaged in several pioneering experiments with 

the limits of photographic representation. As a portrait 

photographer he was one of the first to utilize the new medium's 

vast commercial potential. He was also a champion of 

experimentation in aeronautical technology, and in 1858 took the 

first aerial photographs from his hot-air balloon. In 1862 Nadar 

expanded his experiments into the underground realm. After 

experimenting in his studio with magnesium as a source of light, 

he descended into the Paris catacombs to produce the first 

photographs ever taken on location in artificial light. Two years 

later, after further refining his technique of electrical 

lighting, Nadar descended again, this time to photograph the 

Parisian sewer system.



The beginning of the second half of the nineteenth century also 

saw the introduction into French intellectual circles of another 

experimenter with the underworld and the limits of representation, 

the American poet and short story writer Edgar Allan Poe. Between 

the years 1852 and 1867 Poe's works were translated into French 

and published by Charles Baudelaire. Baudelaire's project 

established Poe's tales of tombs and secret writings as an 

important source of influence for the emerging new generation of 

late nineteenth-century French writers.



The subterranean was at the time a privileged locus of meeting for 

issues of technological progress, knowledge, and representation. 

As Rosalind Williams explains, the notion that truth is hidden 

beneath the surface of things was a prevalent epistemological 

assumption in the nineteenth century, when, following scientific 

and technological developments, "excavation became a central 

metaphor for intellectual inquiry" (23).1 However, at the same 

time, Williams observes, the same scientific and technological 

developments contributed to the gradual creation of a concept of 

the subterranean environment as a completely artificial and 

constructed enclosure (10). Williams's description suggests that 

in the course of the nineteenth century, the developments in 

subterranean technology produced a paradoxical attitude towards 

the accessibility and representability of hidden truth: the closer 

one got to it by digging deeper under the surface, the farther one 

was displaced from it by ever-expanding surfaces of artificial 

mediation.



A similar paradoxical attitude was produced by developments in 

photographic technology in the same period. Rosalind Krauss 

observes that early photography was made under the assumption of 

"the inherent intelligibility of the photographic trace" (42). It 

assumed that the photograph functions as an indexical trace, 

supplying "the manifest presence of meaning" (35), with light 

functioning as "the conduit between the world of sense impression 

and the world of spirit" (37). But at the same time Krauss finds 

in early photography a budding ambivalence towards this 

assumption. She observes that in Nadar's work, for example, 

photography was also staging its own condition as "a field of 

physically displaced signs" (46), that is, as consisting of 

cultural rather than natural signs.



The similarity resides in the spatial dimension of Krauss's 

observations. As she notes, the photograph was seen as both "a 

conduit" and "a field": the one a receptacle suggesting purposeful 

movement in depth, the other a surface suggesting relational flat 

movement. This ambivalence has to do with the function of the 

photograph as text, as emerges from Krauss's discussion of a 

chapter in Henry Talbot's book The Pencil of Nature. In this 

chapter, entitled "A Scene in a Library," Talbot juxtaposes a text 

and a photograph which seem strangely unconnected. In the text he 

speculates on the possibility of photographs taken with "invisible 

rays" (50) revealing the activities that occur within a "darkened 

chamber" (51). The photograph, in turn, shows two loaded 

bookshelves in a library (49). For Krauss, this juxtaposition 

demonstrates a conception of the photograph as a conduit towards a 

spiritual meaning beyond objective appearances: photography will 

penetrate not only the darkness of the chamber, but also the 

obscure regions of the human mind (42). But this juxtaposition of 

photograph and text can also be read as pointing to the 

limitations of photography as a form of mediation. As Krauss 

points out, "as the container of written language, the book is the 

place of residence of wholly cultural, as opposed to natural, 

signs" (41). Thus, the book's conductivity, as in turn its 

photograph's conductivity, are put into question. Both stop short 

at the surface of signs--a flat field of words on paper, "volume" 

flattened out into volumes in the library--without accessing the 

signified. In the photograph as well as in the paragraph, the 

stereometrical space of "the real" becomes a flat "field of 

physically displaced signs."



Nadar's project of photographing the catacombs and the sewers of 

Paris can be seen as an attempt to put Talbot's speculations into 

practice. He descended into the "darkened chamber" par excellence-

-the burial cave, the crypt. Like Talbot's imaginary photographer, 

he attempted through the use of photographic technology to expand 

the limits of display and put the secret occurrences within on 

exhibit. But, again like in Talbot's example, Nadar's results were 

only a displacement of the alleged truth of the crypt onto a flat, 

culturally-constructed textual surface. As such, as we will see, 

Nadar's photography of crypts--his cryptophotography--behaved just 

like Poe's writing of crypts--his cryptography. When truth is 

assumed to be hidden in the depth, the story and the still behave 

in a similar way: instead of illuminating a secret space, they 

only manage to put on display another secret, another piece of 

(encoded) writing. As I will suggest later, this refutation of 

both writing and photography as vehicles to a hidden truth was 

contemporaneous with the emergence in the late nineteenth century 

of new and different kinds of media and of a different notion 

about the space of truth.



Let us first examine Nadar's subterranean project. For a Parisian 

in the nineteenth century, the descent into the catacombs was a 

descent into the highly revered realm of the dead. According to 

Philippe Ariès, the building of the catacombs in the eighteenth 

century was emblematic of the Parisians' growing indifference 

towards the dead, an indifference which culminated in the 

destruction of all the city's cemeteries and the transportation of 

the remains to underground depositories (499-500). By the late 

nineteenth century, however, the Parisians had developed what 

Ariès calls "the cult of tombs" (542); "in one century the cult of 

the dead has become the great popular religion of France" (543). 

This obsession with the space of death was also expressed in the 

great popularity of deathbed photography at the time.



Nadar, however, "rarely accepted commissions for...deathbed 

pictures," in spite of their growing popularity (Gosling 13). For 

someone who had always displayed a keen sense of business, and who 

was, moreover, known especially for his portrait photography, this 

seems odd. Perhaps Nadar was somehow aware of the problem of 

photography which Roland Barthes describes in Camera Lucida as the 

presence of "flat death" (92). The deathbed photographs of the 

poetess Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (1859) and of Nadar's friend 

Victor Hugo (1885), two of the very few exceptions to Nadar's 

avoidance of the subject, can testify, perhaps, to some of the 

frustration involved in such an undertaking . In both, bright 

light floods the frame in an almost desperate attempt at 

revelation, and the camera approaches the body from the side and 

headwards, as if an intimate friend were sitting at the bedside of 

the dying person to hear the last words or even to touch the body. 

But in both pictures there is nonetheless an atmosphere of mute 

and secretive remoteness, an opaqueness and a failure of 

disclosure. Behind the resistant façade there is no available 

recess, only the blank flipside of the flat photographic print.



And so Nadar turned his attention to what lies behind the façade, 

to the underworld. In 1862 and 1864 he embarked on his two 

projects, photographing first the Parisian catacombs and then the 

city's elaborate sewers. In his memoirs from 1900, Quand j'étais 

photographe, he recollects these two projects in the chapter 

"Paris Souterrain." He begins with the catacombs. Here is how he 

describes his expectations from the project: "The underground 

world opens an infinite field of operations, no less interesting 

than the tellural surface. We are going to penetrate, reveal the 

arcana of the most profound and secret caverns.... The catacombs 

of Paris...have their confidences to share with us" (145-46). This 

passage demonstrates how Nadar's attempt to reveal secrets in 

depth is ultimately blocked by the impervious two-dimensionality 

of representation, by the "infinite field of operations." After 

all, Nadar himself admits that the catacombs are pictorially 

boring, and that their appeal exists only within language: "The 

picturesque quickly exhausts itself here, the aspects are not 

varied.... This mysterious word-catacombs excites curiosity on its 

own accord.... A few steps in these undergrounds and the curiosity 

is soon satisfied" (137-38). And so, actually, the catacombs are 

the precise opposite of death, to which everybody goes but from 

which no one returns to disclose its secrets. The catacombs, on 

the contrary, are "a place where everybody wants to go and to 

where no one returns" (138).



As it happens, it is really his own technological light-

operations, and not the darkness of the death realm, that interest 

Nadar. He opens the chapter with a fictional dramatization in 

which a Parisian lady is introduced by him to the "dangerous" and 

"shadowy" underworld passages: "You don't know the catacombs, 

madame; allow me to conduct you there," he says (124). Note that 

it is his mundanely human hand that will serve as conduit here, 

not the mystical index-finger of light. In the description that 

follows, the salient characteristic of the underground world is 

its chaotic nature. Hierarchical order is disrupted: the text is 

heaped with various words signifying "heap" or "mess"; the body--

social or physical--is subject to "the egalitarian confusion of 

death" and is "disintegrated, dispersed" (129); endless lists 

enumerate names ("Condés and Contis, Soyecourt and Vendome, Le 

Rochefoucauld, Créqui, Rohan, Montmorency, Vilars, 

Blacas...Durand, Legrand, Petit, Lemaitre, Berger, Lenoir or 

Leblanc" [131]), titles ("the cardinal Dubois, Marguerite de 

Bourgogne with the provost Marcel, Perrault, the architect 

storyteller, the Marshal of Ancre..." [131]) and body parts 

("ribs, vertebra, sternums, wrists, tarsi, metacarpus and 

metatarsus, phalanges, etc." [129]). It all boils down to what 

Nadar calls "the nothingness of the human thing" (129) and a 

"conclusive and universal abandon" (137). But the visitors, the 

excursionists, as he calls them, are not going to be implicated in 

this chaos: "counted at the entrance to be recounted at the exit, 

they only dare within perfect security by the restrained itinerary 

that is conferred to them in the ossuary" (126). The dead 

themselves, the visitors are assured by a Latin inscription on the 

door, repose '~beyond these boundaries" (128).



And so, to be recounted again, or to be made visible, the contents 

of the catacombs must be transformed from their chaotic heaps and 

stuffings into the orderly flatness of a time-table: "here is the 

light, the sun, life, which chase behind us like a painful, even 

tedious dream, the memory of this funereal excursion. We, now, 

redescend in order to work" (138, emphasis mine). Nadar embarks on 

the first ever subterranean attempt at photography in artificial 

light. How artificial is this artificial light? Well, the first 

attempts back at his studio in 1858 involved about fifty Bunsen 

batteries, and produced plates which were "harsh, with clashing 

effects, opaque blacks and without details." The pupils, in 

particular, were a problem: "either extinguished by an excess of 

clarity, or brutally pricked, like two nails" (141). To perfect 

the results, he needed a second fire-box of softened light, 

excavating the shadowed parts. The solution was "using white 

screens as reflectors, and finally a double play of large mirrors 

reverberating intermittently the luminous fire-box on the shadowed 

parts" (141-42). With such an echoing game of reflectors and 

mirrors we begin to see, indeed, the infinite field of operations 

on which the project takes place. But that isn't all. When the 

operation moved to its actual location, the narrowness of the 

subterranean passages forced a large part of the equipment to be 

left outside, on the street level. Long cables were passed 

underground through small shafts or man-holes. The removal of the 

generator caused major communication problems as there was a 

considerable lapse of time between the giving of orders and their 

reception. This often imposed an exaggerated development of the 

conductor wires, and at each displacement Nadar had to feel 

empirically his time of exposure. Again, it is important to note 

how the whole notion of the conduit has been displaced from a 

bridge between the world of the senses and the world of the spirit 

into a chart-line from one world of the senses to another.



But the extent to which the project of artificial light really 

involved artificiality becomes even clearer in the following 

passage:

	I've judged it good to animate some of these aspects 
	with a person, less from a picturesque point of view 
	than in order to indicate the scale of proportions, a 
	precaution very often upsettingly neglected by 
	explorers. For the eighteen minutes of exposure-time 
	(fr. pose), it was difficult to obtain the absolute, 
	inorganic immobility from a human being. l tried to 
	get round the difficulty by using manikins, which I 
	dressed in working-clothes and arranged in the mise en 
	scene; this detail did not complicate our job. (156)
	
But it sure did complicate the representational status of the 

photographs thus obtained. After all, this is a perfect example of 

the Orphean plight, as it is understood by Blanchot: in the Greek 

myth Orpheus is allowed to lead his dead wife Eurydice back from 

Hades into the light of day, provided he never turns back to look 

at her while they are still in the underworld. For Blanchot 

Orpheus is the artist, whose work is to bring death--the 

profoundly obscure point toward which art and desire tend--into 

human perception. But Orpheus can only give this point form, 

shape, and reality in the day, by turning away from its essential 

darkness, in other words, by misrepresenting it: "Orpheus is 

capable of everything...except of looking at the center of night 

in the night" (171). Nadar, according to this reading, is a modem 

Orpheus: like him, he went down to the underworld to retrieve a 

being into the human realm. But the being, once brought to light, 

became a dummy. All Nadar can bring back from the underworld by 

using artificial light is the truth of the artificiality of this 

light. His photographs, calibrated to fit the human scale of 

proportions, remain only aspects, exterior façades, mise-en-scènes 

of representation. The thing represented itself remains outside of 

the picture, whose flipside is, again, only a blank surface.



Recoiling, Nadar suddenly cuts short his account of the catacombs 

project in the middle of "Paris Souterrain." "We are going to pass 

on the catacombs," he says, and turns instead to "recognize the 

admirable human labor in the sewer system" (144). Here, as well, 

there is use of artificial light and artificially dug man-holes. 

And, interestingly enough, the sewers are all about conduits: 

canals, rails, wagons, pipes, tubes, etc. But these are the 

conduits of human technology, and in their circular network they 

lead nowhere but to their own starting point, the Grand Collecteur 

which gathers all its arteries to dispense the water right back 

into the Parisian drain system. In this system, proper measures 

are carefully taken: poisonous odors, traffic collisions, and 

putrid floodings are duly prevented. And in the rapid descent that 

Nadar's narrative stages into the filthy, fluid, monstrous depth 

of the earth, "the black rendez-vous with the immense nothingness" 

is averted at the last minute, as "we finally retreat" (152). 

Nadar remains safe on the game-board of his "field of operations."



Nadar spent three consecutive months in the catacombs and the 

sewers of Paris. Then after producing one hundred plates, he 

stopped, "with regret in spite of everything, for the work was not 

yet altogether complete" (157). Why did he stop? He says that 

urgent matters called him back to his studio on the boulevard des 

Capucines, but mainly that in the catacombs he was given to the 

outer-limits of resignation and arrived at the farthest ends of 

his patience. The experience was obviously frustrating, but Nadar, 

even as late as 1900, is not able to formulate for himself the 

causes of his frustration.



Let us now turn from Nadar's stills to the other experimenter with 

tombs and cryptography, Edgar Allan Poe. In Poe's stories there is 

a constant slippage between the spatial sense of "crypt"--a dark 

enclosure-- and the linguistic sense--a code. Everything in his 

tales is enclosed within one kind of receptacle or another: a 

bottle, a box, a chamber, a coffin, a vault, a building. The 

recurring pattern is that of the mystery of the locked room, or, 

if you will the darkened chamber--the camera obscura. A case is to 

be opened. Or, rather, a case is to be solved. And herein, 

precisely, lies the slippage, between the spatial case and the 

narrational case, between the set of coordinates and the field of 

affairs. In "The Cask of Amontillado," for example, Fortunato is 

lured by the promise of a fictive cask to his real encasement in 

the narrator's family vaults. This "real" spatial emplotment 

itself, however, only lures the reader to the termination of the 

fictive plot drawn up on paper by Poe himself. "The Facts in the 

Case of M. Valdemar," to take another example, deals, like many 

other tales, with the Orphean paradox of bringing the space of 

death into language. In the Greek myth, once taken into the world 

of the living, all that remained from Eurydice was the flat fact 

of her ineffable death. Likewise, Valdemar seems to utter the most 

impossible utterance of all--"I am dead." But it is also the only 

possible thing for him to say in his case. When the darkened case 

of the tomb becomes the illuminated case of language, we can only 

get flat death: "I am dead."



Similarly, as Derrida has observed, in Poe "everything begins 'in' 

a library" (qtd. in Rosenheim 389). Derrida puts the word "in" in 

quotation marks because, like in Talbot's photograph, the library 

easily slips from a camera obscura--"our first meeting was at an 

obscure library"--to the flat pages of a book--"the same very rare 

and very remarkable volume brought us into closer communion" 

(Selected Tales 108). The same movement occurs in the very title 

of the story, "Murders in the Rue Morgue." The murders occur "in" 

Morgue street, which is a spatial place of storage for dead 

bodies, but also an archive of literature and press cut-outs. And 

then there is "The Purloined Letter," which takes place in a 

"little back library, or book-closet, au troisième" (201), that 

is, on the third story of Dupin's building, or, perhaps, in the 

third story in the Dupin series. For, eventually, everything also 

ends "in" a library: there are no actual three-dimensional cases 

in Poe's tales, but only upper cases and lower cases, letters 

written on the page.



Shawn Rosenheim links this process of flattening to Poe's interest 

in cryptography: "the narrative form of the detective 

stories...emerges indirectly out of the understanding of 

signification Poe first articulated in the essays on 'secret 

writing"' (376). According to Rosenheim, Poe creates in the 

stories an artificially flattened world in which the detective can 

find one single, verifiable meaning because nothing is hidden 

behind the surface, and because a strict indexical relationship 

has been pre-established between appearances and behaviors (382). 

Consequently, Poe's letters have no depth--only two sides. They 

become dead letters, which reach no destination, attesting only to 

the fact of their own existence. Finally, they reveal "Poe's 

reluctant realization that every decoding is another encoding, and 

that the crypt of the letter can't be penetrated in an attempt to 

extract its immanent meaning" (381).



Consequently, in its emphasis on the materiality of language, its 

figurativity, its multiplicity of forms and meaning and its 

endless potential for puns, Poe's work, like Nadar's photography 

as it is described by Krauss, "stages...its own condition as a 

field of physically displaced signs." In "The Man of the Crowd" 

the narrator is engaged in a project not unlike that of Nadar's. 

He attempts to illuminate, via acute observation and professional 

acumen, a certain subterranean realm. By the artificial light of 

the gas-lamps he follows the subject of his investigation, only to 

find himself circulating and retracing his steps in an urban 

labyrinth. Back at his starting point in front of the D Hotel 

(which is, by the way, the residence of the Minister, Dupin's 

cunning rival, in "The Purloined Letter"), he finally realizes 

that, like some books which don't permit themselves to be read, 

"there are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be 

told... And thus the essence of all crime is undivulged" (97). 

Dupin, the great cryptographer, remains duped.



What then, is the connection between Nadar's crypt-photography and 

Poe's cryptography? Friedrich Kittler writes in "Gramophone, Film, 

Typewriter" about the media revolution that came about in the late 

nineteenth century. This revolution was prompted by the double 

spearhead of, on the one hand, the invention of the typewriter, 

and, on the other hand, the invention of cinema and of the 

phonograph. The typewriter terminally severed writing's alleged 

connection to a sensuality beyond the symbolic (113). One could no 

longer subscribe to the 1800s' Romantic supposition that the book 

is a material conduit to "the realm of the dead beyond the senses" 

(107). Instead, in the 1880s Mallarme was able to state that 

"literature does not mean anything but that it consists of twenty-

six letters" (114). Cinematography and phonography, in turn, with 

their ability to record time indexically, took over the task of 

representing that realm of the dead which was now outside the grid 

of the symbolic (110).



As Kittler observes, this waning of the grammatological monopoly 

over what constitutes the real was a direct consequence of the 

same invention that made artificial lighting possible: 

"Electricity itself has brought this to an end" (110). He, 

however, leaves photography out of this particular picture. 

Indexical but not able to store time, it had consequences, he 

writes, only in the aesthetic domain and not in terms of the 

constitution of the real (104). But if photography cannot be said 

to have been fighting alongside the cinema and the phonograph in 

this media revolution, the study of Nadar and Poe may have 

revealed its affiliation, conversely, with the typewriter's ranks. 

The dates seem right--the typewriter was introduced to Europe in 

1865 (Kittler 113). One might say that photography (especially 

with the help of artificial light), although not really heralding 

the representation capacities of the later media, nevertheless 

facilitated their conquest by undermining its own claims to an 

authenticity beyond the limitations of writing. In Nadar's 

experiments we may be witnessing photography staging its own 

failure to be anything but a coded, grammatological writing, and 

thus underlining the lack of the element of time in its formula. 

In a dialectical movement, photography can thus also be seen to 

undermine the monopoly of writing by exposing its self-referential 

coded nature.



Nadar's and Poe's cryptography in artificial light hints at the 

new conception of the space of truth that the new time-sensitive 

media will both depend on and make possible. The enigma of Nadar's 

exhibits lies in the depth: between the lines of the visual 

information, the spatial crypt remains a blind spot, unavailable 

to display. His solution, on the other hand, what he does put on 

display, emerges not from some dark profundity, but from the 

intermittent reverberation of light in a system of white screens 

and large mirrors. The puzzle of Poe's cryptograms also consists 

of such a system of echoes: concocted by human ingenuity, it can 

therefore be resolved by human ingenuity ("Secret Writing" 116). 

But "the mental features discoursed of as the analytical are, in 

themselves, but little susceptible of analysis" (Selected Tales 

105); in the dark recesses of the crypt, the enigma of the spirits 

still persists.



Carlo Ginzburg suggests a way of conceptualizing the changing 

ideas about enigmas and solutions in the late nineteenth century. 

His formulation seems to reinstall the assumption of depth and 

conductivity. Ginzburg defines the epistemological model of 

"symptomatology," examples of which he finds in Morelli's art 

connoisseurship, Freud's psychoanalysis and Sherlock Holmes's 

detection methods. In this model, "marginal and irrelevant 

details...provide the key to a deeper reality, inaccessible by 

other methods" (87). The efficacy of such a key depends on the 

assumption of depth, and of the existence of a conduit between the 

surface and the hidden recesses: "Reality is opaque; but there are 

certain points--clues, symptoms--which allow us to decipher it" 

(109). But this assumption of depth becomes suspect in Ginzburg's 

text itself when, in the course of one page, the volume becomes a 

book, and the portentous points become deflated ink dots: from 

"deciphering," the symptomatological practice becomes that of 

"reading," and, finally, turns into "the invention of writing 'the 

book of nature"' (89). It seems that Ginzburg's detective does not 

realize that the traces he follows are only his own footsteps.



What emerges from Nadar and Poe, conversely, is a conception of a 

time-governed, provisional truth, a truth which is not exposed in 

its authentic depth, but is rather invented and read into the 

surface relationships between horizontally-expanding signifiers.2 

The terms of Kittler's discussion suggest that he too associates 

the end of writing's rule with a spatial movement from three-

dimensional volume to a multivalent field of operations. In terms 

that recall Nadar's intermittent reverberation of light he 

describes Alan Turing, the Enigma man, who in 1950 invented his 

"universal discrete machine," the conceptual basis for all 

computers. Later, Konrad Zuse, another computer pioneer, was to 

echo Poe's assertion in "Secret Writing" when he said: "With this 

form of brain it has to be theoretically possible to solve all 

puzzles that can be mechanically dealt with, regardless of the 

time required" (qtd. in Kittler 117).



Furthermore, although Kittler insists that the new media of 

cinematography and phonography are able to store noise, residue, 

and waste-dimensions of the real which cannot be symbolically 

encoded in writing-he admits that nonetheless they too end up 

proving that "the content of each medium is another medium" (111). 

It seems that they too cannot quite escape Nadar's predicament in 

the catacombs: "From the real, nothing more can be brought into 

the daylight than what Lacan had presupposed in its being given--

nothing" (114). Perhaps this is so because, to some extent at 

least, these media are still a form of writing, as is suggested by 

their names (104), as well as by the words Kittler himself uses to 

describe their emergence: "something had to stop not writing 

itself" (103).



The crucial difference, according to Kittler, is that the new 

media of the 1880s and 90s constitute a different kind of writing, 

a "writing for machines" (115), which takes the passing of time 

into account. The added dimension here is not the third, but the 

fourth: this writing expands not vertically in space, but 

laterally, in time. The media revolution, Kittler says, leveled 

all messages to the surface (or interface) of information, and 

left spirit, as it were, out of the picture (115). Volume has 

become first a typed page and a photograph, and then a recording 

tape and a movie screen: the flat but fluid, labyrinthine network 

of "integrated circuits" (117). Such mechanism is already hinted 

at in Nadar's and Poe's cryptographies. If media, as Kittler 

writes, "are always already flight apparatuses into the other 

world" (112), then these cryptographies can be seen as early 

contributors to the making of the latest modern version: the flat 

flight-simulator.