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According to a widespread assumption the history of technical media (such as photography) has been an enterprise of permanent progress. But the history of photography records countless instances in which the motif never came out at all, was lost somewhere along the way to visibility, or mingled with the artifacts of the medium itself to the point where one became indistinguishable from the other: The rising line of human inventors and their successful inventions has always been counterattacked by the invented itself. In his study Peter Geimer explores this unknown story of photographic accidents, a story that goes to the heart of the question concerning the truth of representation. From an interdisciplinary perspective (covering art history, theory of photography, media studies, and history of science) this book seeks to complement the history of photographic images with a corresponding history of their symptoms, their precarious visibility and the disruptions threatened by image noise. Since accidents reveal what usually disappears in the seeming transparency of the medium. The book explores this nexus from a variety of perspectives and with reference to various artists, amateurs and scientists and proposes to keep both in sight: the technical making and the necessary unpredictability of what is made, the intentional and the accidental aspects, representation and its potential disruption, the production of facts and artifacts.

Photography as a medium is often associated with the psychic effects of trauma. The automaticity of the process, the wide open camera lens, and the light sensitivity of film all lend themselves to this association. Just as a photograph registers things that to some extent bypass artistic intention and convention, so also the event that precipitates a trauma bypasses consciousness leaving an indexical trace on the psyche. Both involve the chance exposure to something which leaves an indelible impression. This book is an exploration of artists and theorists who have thought of photography as somehow analogous to trauma. It also considers art in other media, especially those sculptural forms, like direct casts, that can readily be understood as presenting or simulating a trace or residue of a traumatic event. Chapters are devoted to indexicality, analogue photography and film, direct casting, rubbing, the graphic trace, and representing the “unrepresentable.” Contesting the rise of digitization, the art under consideration claims some referential weight and meaning but, like trauma, only indirectly, belatedly.