Argument

In 1867 Edouard Manet painted the execution of the Mexican emperor Maximilian of Habsburg. Manet broke with the classical tradition of history painting, for he depicted the actual shooting itself instead of choosing moments before or after the execution. Thus, the painting refers to a moment that in real time would have been far too brief to be perceptible. Manet presented a portrait of living actors whose execution has already taken place. This depiction of the imperceptible invites comparison to contemporaneous photographs of extremely short periods of time: attempts to capture flying cannon balls (Thomas Kaife), to take flashlight portraits of patients that would undermine their bodies' reaction time (Albert Londe), to visualize the successive stages of a drop falling into water (Arthur Worthington). Like Manet these scientists referred to an “optical unconscious” (Walter Benjamin). A closer look at their work reveals that they dealt with a space of knowledge that went beyond the classical dichotomy between objectivity and imagination, scientific and artistic pictures.