Light reveals (through heliography for the image, gas lighting and electricity);  it strives to be justification. It illuminates the world of truth.

If the devices used are intended to validate, they also have the power to conceal. Too much light damages the subtle. And if, sometimes, contrast arises, if darkness manifests itself, it is done under the sign of the threat, that of the dark, cosmopolitan alley.

As the dark rises to the surface of the stage, the audience is filled with feelings of fear or mistrust. Light, whether in “oriental” photography or in 19th century French theatre, derealizes the scene—either to both reinforce the feeling of the enigma and reveal only distant and disturbing contours and shadows, or to dehistoricize it.
 

These bodies that are summoned to these multiple scenes made for the West suffer the space invented by a story that overwhelms them. In representations, they are actors who will play sheet music as simple extras, foreign to their own world.

They provide a presence that is only a false interiority of the subject. Whether imposed or conceded, the subjects of photography slip into the folds of the character, the specular body becoming “type”—social and ethnic.

The latter brackets all autonomous activities. In the spectacularization of the world in the 19th century, a tenuous relationship between the unconscious, the role and the actor is thus established.

We know that the theatre at this  historical moment often turns the actor’s performance into an exercise in showing off. Here, we overplay, when photography eliminates the sensory traces of the subjects.

To feigned involvement corresponds the absence of feelings. Because the only thing that counts, in the end, is commemoration through text. What theatre and photography celebrate is the word from elsewhere. The caption accredits and the booklet certifies.

The scene is the place where one can—where one must—see the evidence of the unrepresentable. 

Paradoxically, colonial culture is a connection with the Idea.
 

Photography is a theatrical space. It requires the presence of the absent  person. Here we are facing the other, forgotten and distant. The mission of photography is, after long centuries, to exhume the dead in order to confront them with the living.

Perspective, a Western invention, imposes the image of power through its illusionist strength as the only effect of reality.

The vision of the scene is organized from the ideal point of vanishing lines, called “the eye of the prince”, thus establishing a social position of the gaze. From now on, the spectacular is created within a confined and restricted space.

Finiteness becomes the privileged place of universal drama. In the first half of the 19th century, Western societies pushed the limits of the visible. Thanks to technological progress, they are able to define new  frontiers, as a result of the possibilities offered by advances in optics and lighting.

The irrepressible need to see and show is imposed on other forms of description of the world.

The visual spectacle that is taking place reinforces the illusion of a bipolar world, on the one hand light, and on the other hand darkness. 
 

The function of the visual spectacle presupposes common codes, references understood by all. Obviously, the early calotype, reserved for the intellectual and commercial elite, cannot be compared to the late and more popular postcard. Everything is too much for the holders of “good taste”.

The sense of reality is lost in the hyperbole of an extreme colorization considered vulgar. Melodrama, vaudeville and operetta flourished in an era (the late 19th century) that loved nothing more than the “great show” with its special effects scenographies.

At the same time, new images appear and find an audience eager for visual sensation. Stereoscopic vision, this small domestic theatre, is undeniably one of the first successful commercial forms.

As for the panoramas, they propose with regard to the cities and landscapes that literature has  popularized in a flood of original effects.

The spectator and the user do not know how it works and do not care: only the effect counts. From the deus ex machina theatrical to the photographic revelation, the Western and urban spectator admits his submission to the spectacle.

For him, reality can only be seen in a form of strangeness, a phantasmagoria, an exoticism within sight. The Aristotelian laws of unity of time and place are withdrawn in favour of a chimeric time, pure intellectual construction and the consequence of decorative games.

The scenes follow one another as a series of visual phenomena  in the form of crossfades or optical compensations.

The control of light allows the hypertrophy of feelings. 

Oriental photography, photography of workshops in particular, under the guise of archaeological scholarship, methodically organizes by its system of representation the fragmentation of a vague region that would be dispossessed of its history by Islam.

The colonial project is based on a trompe l’oeil approach to the world, on a biased relationship to reality. It elaborates a “poetic-biblical” commentary that is as effective as it is historically incoherent.

The image of imperial modernity (railway construction, booming trade, etc.) is a set of adulterated productions whose permanence is ensured, from the  first daguerreotypes to postcards, from the Egyptian expedition to the SykesPicot agreement.

What gives coherence to this heterogeneous production is neither the thirst for knowledge nor the desire for scientific classification; it  is the satisfaction of a feeling of European superiority, this consensus carried by the entire colonial society.

This process needs unreality and in particular mythical places. Apart from any chronology or even simple logic—a mixture of ordinary characters and celebrated heroes—the subject is a historical rewriting. The vestige—a ruin or an object—is not a document of analysis.

Endowed with a symbolic value, it refutes its instrumental function to attain the status of a monument.

The past, a romantic figure, puts the living in front of corpses or ghosts.