Documents 1: August Strindberg on Natural and Cameraless Photography

June 30, 2025

What is a document? A lesson, a specimen, a fragment of evidence—perhaps even a warning. Our blog series “Documents” is dedicated to bringing texts from outside the Anglophone world into renewed scholarly circulation through critical translation.

In the Nascent State: August Strindberg on Natural and Cameraless Photography

We seldom question the received notion that photography owes its defining features to the confluence of the camera obscura and a light-sensitive surface. We only have to reach for our phones, which still carry a nineteenth-century version of that little black box with a piece of glass in the front and a concealed sensor behind it. This ubiquitous reality has made the camera itself appear as metonymic of photography, more so than the photosensitive surface (which has become partly obsolete with the advent of digital photography); it has also rendered marginal—or “alternative”—other forms of photo-imaging that do not depend on a camera, such as photograms, chemigrams, or even X-Rays.

Yet, this has not always been the case, for even early photographic inventions, such as Fox Talbot’s photogenic drawings from the 1830s, could imprint an image of nature without using a camera or lens. In the 1890s, Pictorialists and amateur photographers in France breathed new life into the debate over whether lenticular mediation hindered photography’s pursuit of more artistic (i.e., pictorial) results. Whereas some, coveting the blur distinctive to painting, advocated for the complete removal of the lens and a return to the more primitive pinhole camera or sténopé, others, like Frédéric Dillaye, decried the move as superfluous, underscoring that “sans objectif, la photographie n’est plus la photographie”[1] (Without lens, photography is no longer photography). Somewhere on the margins of that milieu, the Swedish author August Strindberg (1849–1912) wrangled with those technical problems from the perspective of an entirely different frame of mind. Whether he was at all aware of the debates waging in France is not clear.

Born into an increasingly photographic world, Strindberg was deeply invested in various photography experiments throughout his life. At the time he began writing his naturalist autobiography The Son of a Servant (1886 to 1909), he also crafted his own image through a set of self-portraits, twenty-five in 1886—portraits of himself as a writer that echoed the works of Nadar—and later, the series of “psychological portraits” of 1905/06 that consisted of life-size close-ups of his head, enlarged with the help of photographer Herman Anderson. In 1886, Strindberg also envisioned an ethnographic collection of photographs of French peasants and panoramic pictures of the French countryside taken from a moving train that were to accompany his writings; however, the book, Among French Peasants, was published in 1889 without illustrations.

At the time when photographers in Paris debated whether an artistic approach to photography should privilege the sharpness of the lens or the blur of the sténopé, Strindberg was not so much concerned with the aesthetic question and more with how the lens stood in the way of nature doing its own work. In his essay On the Action of Light in Photography,[2] whose primary concern was the newly discovered X-ray images, he wrote the following:

The sound from an instrument in a nearby room reaches my ear all the better if the door is open than if it is closed! By analogy, light ought consequently to have a stronger effect in a camera if it does not have to pass through a solid medium—like a glass lens.[3]

“Analogy” is more than a rhetorical device here, for the author was at the time deeply invested in all manners of experimentation, from alchemical solutions to the search for sensory organs in plants, whereby the idea of correspondences in the natural world was his idée fixe. His equation of X-ray technology with sound, for instance, while disregarding the fact that electromagnetic radiation has more in common with visible light than with sound waves, was driven by a mystical motivation that Strindberg later wrote about in Inferno (the memoir about his mental breakdown), his Occult Diary, and A Blue Book. Be that as it may, Strindberg’s distrust of the lens as a hindrance to directness was not without merit, and it pushed him to engage in a progression of experiments to remove this obstacle, from creating his own sténopé with a cigar box, whose tiny opening was made with a needle[4] to the cameraless images he made in the winter and spring of 1894 and named “celestographs”: coated Lumière plates that, nakedly exposed to the starry sky, were thought to have captured the night sky through what Strindberg termed “dark light rays.”[5]

When stared at long enough, these images do seem to resemble, however vaguely, the iridescent panorama of a clear night. Spots, dots, and stains remain as the traces left by celestial bodies, accentuating the darkness behind. All of them are blurry. And yet, Strindberg was so convinced of the success of his experiment that in 1895 he sent samples to Camille Flammarion at the Société Astronomique in Paris, looking for scientific recognition. However, despite being acquainted with Flammarion and becoming a member of the Société that same year, the images did not spark any interest or response, which might explain why he only published their written account in magazines dedicated to the occult sciences later on. The reason for this rejection was simple: the celestographs were most likely chemigrams, images whose shapes were caused by the chemical reaction of the sensitive plate upon contact with dust and other atmospheric particles—a rather earthbound process. Unbeknownst to the author, the analogy, while a sort of warped mirror, was more physical than he would have expected. Or as Douglas Feuk has put it:

What is splendid about [the celestographs] is precisely that they offer this kind of dual view, whereby the starry sky and the earthly matter appear to move within and through one another. And scientists do in fact believe that this is precisely the way things are. All elements heavier than hydrogen and helium are created by nuclear reactions in the interior of stars, and are hurled out into space particularly during gigantic supernova eruptions. Almost every atom that goes to make up our earthly world—rocks, plants, human beings —must once have been inside exploding megastars, and thus in a dizzyingly material sense we do in fact consist of astral matter.[6]

Deep time notwithstanding, a celestograph, then, may be thought to be, in all its alchemical echo, an image of the universe. To that, one might add another layer of correspondence, namely, that a photograph, as Ronald Kay suggested, can always be thought of as a geological phenomenon in miniature.[7]

While Strindberg’s celestographs have been reappraised by critics, most notably Feuk, Clément Chéroux, and David Company, the implications of his overall practice for photographic theory are still largely unexplored. The following documents, each published originally in French in 1896, connote the extent to which Strindberg’s vision of photography gestures toward something like an unmediated poiesis, from cameraless photography to a more-than-human optical unconscious, as it were. The first excerpt (Text I), on natural photography, first appeared in French as the fourth chapter of Sylva Sylvarum (1896) and was later published in l’Hyperchimie: Revue mensuelle d’alchimie, d’hermétisme et de medecine spagyrique of the Societé alchimique de France, as well as the sixth chapter of Inferno. The second excerpt (Text II), which outlines the steps through which Strindberg achieved his celestographs, was also published in French in May 1896, in l’Initiation: Revue philosophique et indépendante des Heutes Etudes. Read together, these documents still resonate strongly in our time as an invitation to reconsider what we have accepted photography to be. This was as valid a question in the 1890s as it is now, when advances in digital photography and machine vision—whose very existence is predicated upon a photographic pipeline of indiscriminate sourcing—have become linked to the development of optics, especially mirrorless and lensless imaging, further abstracting computers’ mediation of our visible world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1: Excerpt from The Head of Death (Acherontia atropos): Essay on Rational Mysticism 

The common bleak, which dwells at the water’s surface, almost in the open air, has silver-white sides, and only its back is tinged with blue. The rutilus roach, which seeks the shallows, dyes itself sea green. The perch, dwelling in the middle depths, has already darkened, and its flanks are adorned with black wave-like stripes. The tench and the flounder, rooting through the silt, have taken on its olive-green color. The mackerel, which thrives in the upper regions, copies the movement of the waves on its back, as a painter of seascapes would. But the golden mackerel rolling amid the swells of the sea, whose spray breaks the rays of the sun, has passed through the paint beneath the rainbow, which is imprinted upon a background of gold and silver.

What is all this if not photography? On its silver plate of silver chloride, bromide, and iodide—as seawater is believed to contain these three halogens—or on the plate coated with silver-infused egg white or better gelatin, the fish condenses the colors refracted by the water. Submerged in the developer, magnesium or ferrous sulfate, the effect in the nascent stagebecomes so energetic that heliography is produced directly. And the fixer, sodium hyposulfite, must not be far away for the fish, which lives in the sodium chloride and sulfates and which, moreover, comes with its own sulfur supply.

Is this more than a metaphor? No doubt about it! Granted, the silver of the fish scales is not actual silver, but seawater still contains chlorides, and a fish is almost nothing more than a sheet of gelatine.

 2: Excerpt from Scientific and Philosophical Notes

IV. A mirror laid on a table, and the moon was reflected in it like a round, yellow image, which at the time struck me as strange.

Given that a flat surface reflects an immense light source like the moon from every exposed point, the round image I perceived must owe its shape to the visual apparatus itself.

Wishing to clarify this question—and curious to know how the world might appear liberated from my deceptive eye—I undertook the following experiments:

Exp. 1. — A Lumière plate, without a camera obscura, without a lens, was submerged in the developer and exposed to the moon for forty-five minutes.

I removed the plate from its bath, exposed it to diffuse light, and fixated it. The result: in the center of the plate, a dark cloud with a honeycomb pattern of light.

Sometime later—in the spring—I was walking through a ravine, the eastern side of which was still occupied by a mound of snow, bathed in the rays of the setting sun. The surface of the melting snow bore the same honeycomb imprints as those traced by the moon on my photographic plate.

During a journey through Bohemia, amid melting snow, I observed that the snow retained the same imprint of those cell patterns—hollow circles or irregular hexagons.

I exposed the mirror to the full moon’s rays, and the tin plate beneath the ice returned to me the same honeycombed network, which still remains.

Exp. 2. — I exposed a Lumière plate, without camera or lens, to the setting sun for three seconds, and the image I received bore no resemblance to that of the moon. The entire plate was covered with small flames.

Exp. 3. — I exposed a Lumière plate, without camera or lens, directly to the starry sky, pointed toward Orion. The plate showed an even surface with countless bright dots of different sizes.

Reflections. — Why do the sun and the moon not appear on the plate as they do in the mirror, as distinct and defined shapes?

It must be the eye, and its construction, that determines the formation of these glowing disks.

But are not the sun and the moon round themselves?

Wishing to understand where I stood, I sent paper copies to the French Astronomical Society, along with a memoir, which now sits in the archives—still awaiting a reply.

V. On Direct Color Photography

In 1892, while placing a stand with a magnet in front of an ordinary photographic device, I received, in the developer, the yellow color of the wooden base and the red color of the magnet’s minium coating.

The developer was an icogène compound, therefore a derivative of coal, and related to aniline dyes.

The colors vanished in the fixer, as usual.

My thoughts turned to Vogel’s eosin plates, which are isochromatic, and I imagined these plates as the foundation for color photography, since aniline has the property of assuming all colors.

Thinking further, I said to myself: If I remove the camera lens, the effect of the rays should be more potent, since they don’t have to expend the energy of passing through a medium like glass.

I removed the lens and replaced it with a diaphragm pierced with a pinhole.

The result: the photograph I got showed a man standing in front of a window and a landscape below. The man’s figure appeared as if seen through a stereoscope; the landscape was rendered as vividly as the figure. And, better still, the man’s white coat with blue stripes was reproduced such that the white was bright and the blue dark. Thus: complete isochromatism.

Then I thought: A polished silver plate exposed to iodine vapors reveals the colors of the spectrum according to the intensity of the iodine’s attack.

Therefore, by exposing a silver plate in the camera without a lens, and developing it under iodine vapors during exposure, the effect in statu nascenti ought to achieve the goal.

Due to poor equipment, the result was inconclusive.

On the contrary, a Lumière plate exposed without a lens rendered a landscape with complementary colors, so that the trees appeared wine-red, and so on.

Experiments to be conducted:

1. Expose a silver plate in a lensless camera, using only a diaphragm with a pinhole; the plate should be immersed in a glass vessel chosen for its absorption spectra, filled with chlorine water.
2. The same, but with the development of chlorine gas.
3. A polished steel plate—which takes on various spectral colors under heat due to oxidation—should be exposed in an oxidizing liquid, in a camera with a pinhole diaphragm.
4. Reverse the procedure and expose a chlorinated or iodized plate or paper, immersed in a solution of silver salt, to obtain the effect in statu nascenti.

Translator’s Notes

1. For treatises written on the removal of the lens, see: Colson, La photographie sans objectif; Assche, “La photographie sans objectif.” For its counterargument, see Dillaye, La théorie, la pratique et l’art en photographie.
2. The alchemical principle “As above, so below” derives from the Emerald Tablet, a Hermetic text popularized by occult circles in the nineteenth century. It is an abbreviated formula of the axiom “Quod est superius est sicut quod inferius, et quod inferius est sicut quod est superius” or “That which is above is like that which is below, and that which is below is like that which is above” (Steele and Singer, “The Emerald Table,” 486).

Notes

[1] Frédéric Dillaye, quoted in Martin, “Faire du flou par la netteté.”

[2] Om ljusverkan vid fotografering is dated in Paris, February 20, 1896, and was first published in Goteborgs Handels- och Sjöfarts Tidning in Swedish on March 11, 1896.

[3] Strindberg, “On the Action of Light in Photography,” 162.

[4] Feuk, “Dreaming Materialized,” 119.

[5] Strindberg, “On the Action of Light in Photography,” 164.

[6] Feuk, “Dreaming Materialized,” 126–27.

[7] Kay, “On Photography: Time Split in Two,” 123.

Works Cited

Assche, Comte d’. “La photographie sans objectif.” Photo-gazette, July 25, 1892: 161–63.

Chéroux, Clément.  L’experience photographique d’August Strindberg. Arles: Actes Sud, 1999.

Colson, René. La photographie sans objectif. Paris: Gauthier-Villars et fils, 1891.

Dillaye, Frédéric, La théorie, la pratique et l’art en photographie. L’art en photographie avec le procédé au gélatino-bromure d’argent. Paris: Librairie illustrée/Jules Tallandier, 1891.

Feuk, Douglas. “Dreaming Materialized: On Strindberg’s Photographic Experiments.” In Strindberg: Painter and Photographer, edited by Per Hedström, 117–30. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.

Kay, Ronald. “On Photography Time Split in Two.” Translated by Osvaldo de la Torre. ARTMargins 2, no. 3 (2013): 123–30.

Martin, Pauline. “Chapitre VI. Faire du flou par la netteté: le problème de l’objectif pictorialiste” In La flou et la photographie: Histoire d’une rencontre (1676-1985), 161–204. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2023.

Steele, Robert, and Dorothea Waley Singer. “The Emerald Table.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 21, no. 3 (1928): 485–501.

Strindberg, August. “On the Action of Light in Photography.” In Selected Essays, edited and translated by Michael Robinson, 160–64. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Strindberg, August. Selected Essays. Edited and Translated by Michael Robinson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.