The Photographic Moment: On Kate Palmer Albers' "The Night Albums"

Kate Palmer Albers | The Night Albums: Visibility and the Ephemeral Photograph | University of California Press | 2021 | 168 Pages

“Breathe normally,” the nurse says to me. When you’re told to “breathe normally,” the phrase itself seems to disappear all normalcy, heighten the oddness of the scene. Between my sternum and navel, she creates indecent trails of lubricant and runs a plastic orb over my chest. Sonic bursts peel off the orb and strike my heart valves, then return back to the orb as newly-pumped data. What appears on the nurse’s console is something like a photograph. Photographs have traditionally been formed from light, but the image she surveys is made of sound. The whole room is sound: the soundwaves of the orb, the click of her image capture button, the thud-woosh of my heart amplified into the room. But it’s the image that matters, and it’s the image that we’re all here for: me as patient, nurse as image technician, doctor as interpreter of the translated sound. The orb lifts from my body and the image disappears. The image is a kind of reference to a photograph that never was, and will become obsolete in time. The file will be stored on a hard drive in the form of 1s and 0s, and recombined into a picture—something like a photograph—only once or twice. It’s a whole process.

Kate Palmer Albers’ latest book, The Night Albums: Visibility and the Ephemeral Photograph, argues that the photograph’s lack of permanence, and the concept of the photograph-as-event, is at the very core of the history of photography. Albers shows that ephemerality is not an unfortunate chapter in early photochemical research or a disruption of the photo’s empirical existence, but a through-line in the history of the technology and form. It entangles the image-object with the phenomenology of vision; the desire to keep or destroy; and the possibilities of social, cultural, or physical visibility. 

All photographs were understood to be ephemeral prior to 1839, when Jacques-Louis-Mandé Daguerre produced his “daguerreotype”—an early permanent photograph printed on a metal plate. Albers points out, however, that Daguerre’s invention marked only one stop on the long journey to creating so-called “permanent” photographs. Photographic research before and after 1839 has attempted to formulate a forever photograph, but each shift—glass negatives, flexible film, color dyes, digital files in the cloud—has unlocked another conundrum, another seed of decay. The search for a long-lasting photographic technology attests to our anxieties about photography’s “lasting instability.” The photo is a wish encoded in an anxious object.

Through the late 20th century, a range of economic wishes in the form of industrial corporations made their way through the rural Kiskiminetas Valley where I grew up. The story of their entry and exit is almost pastiche for the Rust Belt: jobs come, jobs go. The chemical traces and biological disruptions brought to the valley move much slower than economics. The Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) facility, for instance, processed uranium for nearly two decades on the shore of the Kiskiminetas River in Southwestern Pennsylvania. Since the 1980s, investigations and lawsuits have alleged that the mishandling of radioactive substances in the area has caused rare cancers among residents. Culturally, the idea of an invisible nuclear force has taken on an explanatory power: my mother always blamed NUMEC and their pollution for my congenitally-misshapen heart valve. To her way of thinking, I’m the physical manifestation of something unseen. In my own experience, though, any physical proof of NUMEC’s involvement in my body is constructed in diagnostic rooms where temporary images are formed. Clinic as darkroom, perhaps. 

The Night Albums deals carefully with these tensions—what we wish would stay, what we wish would leave, what we wish would become visible, what we wish we never saw. For instance, Albers considers the work of Robert Heinecken, who created a series of unfixed (read: still chemically photosensitive) prints, sealed in manila envelopes labeled “do not open until you understand what is going on.” Though opening the envelope begins the process of destroying the image, without doing so we can never see the print in the first place. Albers is attentive to the emotional charge generated by the interfacing of her desire to view an image and a photograph so prone to disintegration. She doesn’t want to be the one to destroy these moments in time: the moment the photograph depicts as well as the moment of being the last person to see it. Here we glimpse the possibility that seeing a photograph is a destructive wish. These reflections stitch us into the affective and somatic elements of the kind of photo-event theory Albers promotes. 

Following Albers’ analyses, it’s not surprising that some artists turn to the photograph as a means of expressing what else is disappearing. Zachary Norman, also featured in The Night Albums, overlays landscape photographs with visualizations of climate data imperiled by Trump-era policies. In one image, a cloud of almost Hitchcockian pink dots hangs over a contemplative cove. In these works, Albers directs our attention to the interfacing of things we cannot see (greenhouse gases) and things that are at risk of being lost (government science data). With attention to internal states and external pressures, The Night Albums brings the question of photographic ephemerality into conversation with concerns about what the human eye cannot see, as well as the culpability, agency, and desire at work in vision. 

Fundamentally, Albers promotes the idea that photography is an experience of time and (some configuration of) light. It is a performance of wishes and anxieties brought together for a little while, though the time scale of “little while” varies. Importantly, the ephemerality of the photograph is not located only in its physicality (overdeveloping, decaying) but also in its ability to be seen consistently, interpreted consistently. For instance, my friend, John, keeps a photograph of us on his refrigerator from an early 2000s Pittsburgh Pride event. I’m in a white, mod-cut sleeveless dress with 60’s style flowers and a lacy white hat. Green eyeshadow peeks out at least as much as a beard shadow—and what are you to make of it? Is this transgender representation, or the nonbinary archive? At the time the photo was taken, neither term would have been used by me or those close to me to describe my image. I was inside an ambiguity which is perhaps closing, or perhaps shifting to other locations, as the cultural vocabulary of gender description expands. Novelist Isak Dinesen wrote of photos like these, in her aptly-titled essay “Daguerreotypes.” Considering the metallic images, she noted that people of earlier generations saw the daguerreotype as an honest, sober image. By the early 20th century, however, the daguerreotype was a piece of hotel kitsch—imbued by the viewer with sentimentality, perhaps naivety. Directly put, our apprehension of photographs is as ephemeral as the objects themselves.   

In The Night Albums, Albers turns to the work of artists Cassils and Adrian Piper to think through these temporal mechanics of sight. Cassils, responding to a perceived paucity of transgender representation in the archives, enacts a performance wherein they kick at an immense lump of clay with their lean, muscled body. The dark performance space is only illuminated when a flashbulb on a camera goes off, emblazoning the performance on the retina of the viewer in the form of an afterimage. Cassils’ performance deals with the internalization of the image by making a sort of “photograph” inside of our own anatomy. Adrian Piper’s Food for the Spirit, on the other hand, is a series of self-portrait snapshots taken during a period of intense study and solitary meditation. The photos are evidence, to Piper primarily, that she exists in the world. At the same time, they reference an overwhelming internal state of agitation and uncertainty to which only Piper, through memory, can connect. Albers shows that the ephemerality of photographs is mirrored in the ephemerality of phenomenological experience. 

The Night Albums will be of interest to anyone who has read Hervé Guilbert’s essay “Ghost Images” or Caitlin DeSilvey’s 2017 monograph Curated Decay. In Guilbert’s essay, he recalls taking an entire roll of photographs of his mother, only to discover that he had improperly loaded the film and no images were captured at all. What results are blank prints—prints onto which his mind projects text or other images. Crucially, it’s the absence of an image that prompts creative action. Likewise, Curated Decay documents heritage preservation strategies in the United States and Europe, and notes that it is often in the decay—in the using up—of these sites that memory is sustained. For instance, Mullion Harbor is an official heritage site on the Cornish coast whose breakwaters are routinely damaged by storms. Nearby residents disagreed on the path forward for repairing, abandoning, or replacing the breakwaters. DeSilvey points out that it is the decay of the site, its impending collapse, which prompts locals to discuss, remember, and value the breakwaters’ cultural meaning. Albers’ book makes a similar assertion: that the disappearing image is an opportunity to respond and to sustain memory. Albers tells us that these are also opportunities for performance—that is to say, opportunities for collaborative imagining and responding.

Art historian Kaja Silverman argues in The Miracle of Analogy that “Photography develops . . . with us, and in response to us. . . . It will not end until we do.” Albers furthers this argument by suggesting that, perhaps, it is the ephemeral moment of performance that links us with photography. Photographs are physical components of these temporary visual conjunctures, these performances of light and time where seeing is intensified, made purposeful and obsessive. The Night Albums concludes by revisiting early photographs used as key examples in academic histories of the technology—namely Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s Untitled “point de vue” (1827) and Louis Daguerre’s Intérieur d’un cabinet de curiosités (1837). Both images have deteriorated significantly in the nearly two centuries since their creation, and reproductions of the images which circulate in lecture halls and textbooks are heavily manipulated—physically or digitally—to make a clear image appear. Albers argues that the history of photography actively rejects its early objects because they are not “visible enough.” As a result, we are in a poor position to ask what it means for photography to be inherently ephemeral because we have presumed visibility and permanence as indisputable characteristics of the form. By placing these arguments at the end of the text, Albers brilliantly encourages us to revisit the ephemerality of recent photographic works before returning to “the foundation.” She works anti-teleologically here, suggesting that there is nothing about photography that had to be this way. Its permanence wasn’t discovered, it was insisted upon. The command “don’t change,” like “breathe normally,” creates a scene wherein the entropy of life can be perceived. Albers tells us to wait in the scene—be it the clinic or gallery—to find out what’s moving, what’s missing, what’s pulsing inside us.