The Dichotomic Manifestations of David Maisel
“Penetration of the body with light is one of the greatest visual experiences”
Lazlo Moholy -Nagy
For the photographs of David Maisel’s book, History’s Shadow, blackness dominates the picture plane. It is not a simple, black emptiness, a negation, like that in the apparent vacuum of space; but rather a sumptuously lush, velvety presence. It has density, like ebon water, soothing the eye, preparing it for the presentation of dramatic forms of light. It encapsulates an apparition, and offers an escape route from our contemplation of the sublime, the ineffable, and the surreal. Like a blanket, it is soft and assuring.
But this black blanket is too suffocating to be altogether comfortable. If we retreat into it, it only serves to drive us back to the point of concentration. It ushers towards the light, to the object harnessed under the brilliance of X-ray photon bombardment as it gives up the ghost, so to speak, of its inner existence. The subject whirls, or glows, or emanates with light, and with the paradoxical shades of light. This light is often white, with varying densities, like star-shine; sometimes blue, like the reflected light of an ice-cave (Figure 1, 3 & 5). Others give off the burnt incandescence of yellow diamonds shining under lamplight (Figure 2). Some forms swirl in the blackness like the heated whites of eggs, congealing into a tangible substance; others glow with the white-hot hardness of metal removed from the furnace (Figure 4), or fracture like super-cooled shards of glass (Figure 6). Fiery or frozen, all these images share something in common: above all, there is a negation of the apparent concrete actuality we anticipate in the photograph of an object. Thereness is turned in upon itself. We are hesitant and slow to comprehend – to digest and appreciate - like someone too long adrift upon a black sea who strains his eye to fix the outline of an island from the clouds. What is mirage; what real?
It is in such an unaccustomed environment that we must appreciate or evaluate the energetic body of a horse, captured by Maisel (Figure 1). Its head twists in dramatic profile, revealing cheeks and nostrils and open mouth. A glowing mane marshals the apparent movement, and the skin or sinew of the neck ripples with light. Then, suddenly, confusion sets in. The torso dissembles into a vortex of visual priority where the chest blends into the hind- quarters. Is the horse charging, or escaping from us? While the muscles are not visible, the horse still seems to burst with energy despite the arrested movement. We seem to see an internal, almost skeletal outline. How strange then to learn that this X-ray photograph is of an equine statue!
The above esoteric image is alluring through its simplicity of composition. Yet the viewer lingers, enthused with the unusual complexities rendered via means of the X-ray imaging technology. The photograph carries the visual codes of X-ray images: the stark contrast in the black & white tones, and the conflation of dimensions; but compels the viewer’s imagination to respond to the unexpected subject matter. This can be described on two levels. For rather than an actual, living horse, this is an unidentifiable sculpture from antiquity; and rather than regarding an X-ray image obtained for security, medical or forensic purposes, this picture is made intentionally of an aesthetic object for aesthetic appreciation.
Like the juxtaposition of dark and light, and X-ray photo-imagery’s black and white, which offers two empirical avenues for the eyes, David Maisel’s collection of images from his series History’s Shadow present a dichotomy of visual and formal qualities, resting upon a paradoxical appreciation of terms. He uses a technology most often connected to generating evidence or proof to purely appeal to our senses, and thus, reflectively, to our intellect. Many X-ray images are the products of the art history archives, such as those images created for conservation purposes. Such images of Maisel’s are both part of this archive, and yet removed from it. They serve as both archival, cataloguing images, and as objects of artistic appreciation in and of themselves. Maisel - through analogue & digital manipulation – either alienates, estranges, disassociates or severs any identifying ties to the original artwork. He is thereby creating something new with pieces from the past, transcribing the remnants of a past reality into a somewhat self-reflexive, contemporary fiction.
This is much like Lazlo Moholy-Nagy (Figure7). His ideas (on de-familiarization and de-contextualization through both the use of technology and the innovative development of technical means) resulted in the emergence of new fields of creativity in the late Twenties of the last century. Similarly, Maisel embraces the new and improved imaging technology available in museum archives today, and those readily available to the advanced photographer, such as digital manipulation tools. Moholy-Nagy argued that the camera, the X-ray machine, and other new techniques such as the photo-montage allowed us to create "a new dynamic and kinetic existence freed from the static, fixed framework of the past," and, more pointedly, showed us the possibilities for living in that new world. Liberated "from the constraints of narrow perception and consciousness", the photographer could "bring to the masses a new and creative vision."
Maisel explores this new vision, and the boundaries and essential properties of the medium of photography, in the Shadow series. Here, he re-photographed X-ray images. He selected such images of antique objects - from the archives produced by museums for conservation purposes, by placing them on a light box and then capturing the emanations of this light on film. Moholy-Nagy claims that through photography one can “see the world with entirely different eyes” and in Maisel’s work this abnormal vision is presented to the viewer in large format. The images are 30”x40” and often exceed the original object in size, further creating a new, distinct identity. “Through the X-ray process,” David Maisel explains, “the artworks of origin become de-familiarized and de-contextualized, yet acutely alive and renewed.” In re-photographing and re-proportioning these images, he draws on the spectral visions of past cultures and tries to render the invisible into appreciative manifestations. Technology, Moholy-Nay argues, helps to “make visible existences which cannot be experienced or taken in by our optical instrument, the eye.” The camera can thereby supplement, or possibly complete, the vision of the organic, optical instrument.
In Maisel’s work, any such completion is achieved through X-ray images serving the both dual and twinned processes of memory and excavation. The images in History’s Shadow provide for the continuation and expansion of these intertwined themes. The viewer can see inside the objects; still some vestiges from the past – both interior and exterior - are also revealed (Figure 3). In power, these ghostly images seem to somehow surpass the original objects of art. In the eyes of Moholy-Nagy, all photographs were a reproduction of Nature - with the special exception of the X-ray photograph. Thus Maisel achieves a complete alienation from the original in his work, as the object X-rayed is already a reproduction of Nature (i.e. a sculpture), and the resulting X-ray image further removes any visually identifying links to the piece. Couple that thought to the further step in Maisel’s process – X-ray photographing an X-ray image of an art-piece representing or reproducing Nature – and, voila, the removal is complete.
Playing with what Walter Benjamin called the optical unconscious, Maisel’s images go beyond the appreciated-unconscious, the sublime, or what is almost too fast for the human eye to see, and enters a realm that is entirely invisible to the human eye. Professor and film historian, Tom Gunning, writes the following in Invisible Worlds, Visible Media about early photography and X-ray images in the 1890’s: “Still photography, and later cinema and x-ray, seemed to arm mankind with new tools of vision, following the telescope and microscope. Those technical devices not only aided scientific research, but also enlarged the dimension of the visual world beyond its seemingly secure boundaries, revealing previously unimaginable realms in which invisible treats lurk.” While much time has passed since the early days described by Gunning, these same alluring ‘invisible treats’ are what tantalize us in the images from History’s Shadow, captivating and multi-dimensional, suffused with the further dichotomy of a macabre neither here nor there-ness.
To the viewer, Maisel offers up a curio of visual insights into the artworks he selected (Figure 6). He pays homage to early photographs and X-ray images in several ways (Figure 8 & 9). To re-photograph these records, each was laid on a light box in a darkened room; the emanations of light were transmitted by long exposures - just as was necessarily done by early photographers - although Maisel exposes the images onto color film and then further manipulates the images with the help of digital technologies.
He also renders his images in sepia or cyanotype tones. These tints suggest his manipulation of the photographic film after scanning it by modifying it in the Photo-Shop process. Such modifications serve to further broaden the gap between the ‘reality’ of the original and the creative fictional existence of the new, incorporating art history into his artistic discourse. Most images are also mysteriously incomplete, fragmentary, puzzling either in form or feature (Figure 5 & 6). They come disembodied or seemingly broken, turned about or separated, somehow always askew to normal appreciation, and thereby defy the ease of natural, visual dissection.
Through the use of use of archival material in his artistic practice, Maisel not only embraces Moholy-Nagy’s ideas of creative vision via means of technology, but also incorporates forms that carry with them an awareness of the art-historic institution. In Living with Contradictions, Abigail Solomon-Godeau discusses the Levine’s appropriation of Evans (via re-photographing) and argues that the “artwork is able to question, contest, denaturalize the very terms in which it is produced, received and circulated.” Following this thought-line, Maisel is exploring the way a museum both values and exploits its art-works, where every object in the collection is X-rayed upon acquisition. In such regard, his images serve to record and observe the lifetime of a work: to map its history, the scars and trauma of a potentially mysterious past, and allude to future transformation and decay.
The archives from which Maisel gathered the X-ray images he subsequently photographed were all created for the sole purpose of art conservation and perpetuation. Amidst this purely administrative aspect of the world of objects and artworks, his focus is to create transparency. Maisel makes images that are available to viewers that would otherwise never gain access to them. In truth, he makes these images (his very personal selection) available to viewers that have also most likely never seen the original object d’art. In Reading an Archive, according to Allan Sekula states:
“In an archive, the possibility of meaning is ‘liberated’ from the actual contingencies of use. But this liberation is also a loss, an abstraction from the complexity and richness of use, a loss of context. Thus the specificity of the ‘original’ uses and meanings can be avoided, and even made invisible, when photographs are selected from an archive and reproduced in a book. […] So new meanings come to supplant old ones, with the archive serving as a kind of ‘clearing house’ of meaning.”
Sekula further argues, ”the archive constitutes the paradigm or ironic system from which photographic ‘statements’ are constructed.” Thus by selectively choosing and placing images gathered from an archive, Maisel also plays with the meaning of them, creating a new archive of a system of record normally hidden from public view.
But we must return to the separation of Maisel’s work from the archived records he photographs in order to imbue them with their own artistic merit; otherwise, his work is simply that of an embellishing archivist. Moholy-Nagy stated that the “new use of the material transforms the everyday object into something mysterious.” Maisel’s use of the art history archive, and of the history that can be found inside X-rayed objects to create new meaning, manifests and transforms the hitherto invisible. Mystery is a subsequent by-product of this process, which expresses via photographic means the “shape-shifting nature of time itself, and the continuous presence of the past contained within us”. Chronicling and incanting, the X-ray images of History’s Shadow serves two masters. Again, spiralling levels of consideration - of aesthetic removal and intellectual appreciation - surround Maisel’s work, seeming to fly off in different directions, but seeking completion, even oneness.
Still, we must realize that it is the appreciation of the viewer that completes Maisel’s artistic process. The mystery must remain occluded if it is to remain a mystery; what we see, or think we see, in these X-ray images compounds their worth. Tom Gunning supplies the why: “The belief that photography could discover a new spiritual world would now seem naïve and perhaps a bit touching, but capturing the invisible remains an ultimate horizon for both scientific and artistic practice.” In this regard, and by using our anticipation to advantage, History’s Shadow wages a bright campaign, stepping into the suggested unknown, and – where all else is blanketed about by blackness - inching toward some ultimate divination.
Figure 1: David Maisel, History`s Shadow GM3
Figure 2: David Maisel History`s Shadow GM16
Figure 3: David Maisel History`s Shadow AV7
Figure 4: David Maisel History`s Shadow GM12
Figure 5: David Maisel History`s Shadow AB16
Figure 6: David Maisel History`s Shadow GM8
Figure 7 Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Photogram, ca. 1923
Figure 8: Bernard Heon X-ray of a pelvis 1897, Cyonotype, 8 3/16 x 11 3/8 in. (22.4 x 28.3 cm) San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Accessions Committee Fund
Figure 9: Josef Maria Eder and Eduard Valenta Cameos in gold settings 1896, Photogravure, 4 5/8x 6 9/16 in. (11.8 x 16.7 cm) Albertina, Vienna, permanent loan of the Hoehere Graphische Bundes-Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt, Vienna
Bibliography
Bate, David. Photography: The Key Concepts (New York: Berg, 2009).
Cotton, Charlotte. The Photograph as Contemporary Art (New York: Thames and
Hudson, 2009).
Maisel, David. History's Shadow (Nazraeli Press, Portland, 2011).
Moholy-Nagy, Lazlo. Painting Photography Film (Albert Langen, Munich, 1927)
Röntgen, Wilhelm Konrad. Eine Neue Art von Strahlen (Würzburg: Hof und Universitätsbuch und Kunsthandlung, 1896).
Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 1988).
Wells, Liz ed., The Photography Reader (London: Routledge, 2003).
Wormser, E M. Sensing the invisible world. Applied Optics 7, no. 9, . September 01, 1968
Online sources:
http://davidmaisel.com/default.asp
http://www.sfmoma.org/about/press/press_exhibitions/releases/369
http://www.modernism101.com/moholy_painting_photo_film.php
Lazlo Moholy -Nagy
For the photographs of David Maisel’s book, History’s Shadow, blackness dominates the picture plane. It is not a simple, black emptiness, a negation, like that in the apparent vacuum of space; but rather a sumptuously lush, velvety presence. It has density, like ebon water, soothing the eye, preparing it for the presentation of dramatic forms of light. It encapsulates an apparition, and offers an escape route from our contemplation of the sublime, the ineffable, and the surreal. Like a blanket, it is soft and assuring.
But this black blanket is too suffocating to be altogether comfortable. If we retreat into it, it only serves to drive us back to the point of concentration. It ushers towards the light, to the object harnessed under the brilliance of X-ray photon bombardment as it gives up the ghost, so to speak, of its inner existence. The subject whirls, or glows, or emanates with light, and with the paradoxical shades of light. This light is often white, with varying densities, like star-shine; sometimes blue, like the reflected light of an ice-cave (Figure 1, 3 & 5). Others give off the burnt incandescence of yellow diamonds shining under lamplight (Figure 2). Some forms swirl in the blackness like the heated whites of eggs, congealing into a tangible substance; others glow with the white-hot hardness of metal removed from the furnace (Figure 4), or fracture like super-cooled shards of glass (Figure 6). Fiery or frozen, all these images share something in common: above all, there is a negation of the apparent concrete actuality we anticipate in the photograph of an object. Thereness is turned in upon itself. We are hesitant and slow to comprehend – to digest and appreciate - like someone too long adrift upon a black sea who strains his eye to fix the outline of an island from the clouds. What is mirage; what real?
It is in such an unaccustomed environment that we must appreciate or evaluate the energetic body of a horse, captured by Maisel (Figure 1). Its head twists in dramatic profile, revealing cheeks and nostrils and open mouth. A glowing mane marshals the apparent movement, and the skin or sinew of the neck ripples with light. Then, suddenly, confusion sets in. The torso dissembles into a vortex of visual priority where the chest blends into the hind- quarters. Is the horse charging, or escaping from us? While the muscles are not visible, the horse still seems to burst with energy despite the arrested movement. We seem to see an internal, almost skeletal outline. How strange then to learn that this X-ray photograph is of an equine statue!
The above esoteric image is alluring through its simplicity of composition. Yet the viewer lingers, enthused with the unusual complexities rendered via means of the X-ray imaging technology. The photograph carries the visual codes of X-ray images: the stark contrast in the black & white tones, and the conflation of dimensions; but compels the viewer’s imagination to respond to the unexpected subject matter. This can be described on two levels. For rather than an actual, living horse, this is an unidentifiable sculpture from antiquity; and rather than regarding an X-ray image obtained for security, medical or forensic purposes, this picture is made intentionally of an aesthetic object for aesthetic appreciation.
Like the juxtaposition of dark and light, and X-ray photo-imagery’s black and white, which offers two empirical avenues for the eyes, David Maisel’s collection of images from his series History’s Shadow present a dichotomy of visual and formal qualities, resting upon a paradoxical appreciation of terms. He uses a technology most often connected to generating evidence or proof to purely appeal to our senses, and thus, reflectively, to our intellect. Many X-ray images are the products of the art history archives, such as those images created for conservation purposes. Such images of Maisel’s are both part of this archive, and yet removed from it. They serve as both archival, cataloguing images, and as objects of artistic appreciation in and of themselves. Maisel - through analogue & digital manipulation – either alienates, estranges, disassociates or severs any identifying ties to the original artwork. He is thereby creating something new with pieces from the past, transcribing the remnants of a past reality into a somewhat self-reflexive, contemporary fiction.
This is much like Lazlo Moholy-Nagy (Figure7). His ideas (on de-familiarization and de-contextualization through both the use of technology and the innovative development of technical means) resulted in the emergence of new fields of creativity in the late Twenties of the last century. Similarly, Maisel embraces the new and improved imaging technology available in museum archives today, and those readily available to the advanced photographer, such as digital manipulation tools. Moholy-Nagy argued that the camera, the X-ray machine, and other new techniques such as the photo-montage allowed us to create "a new dynamic and kinetic existence freed from the static, fixed framework of the past," and, more pointedly, showed us the possibilities for living in that new world. Liberated "from the constraints of narrow perception and consciousness", the photographer could "bring to the masses a new and creative vision."
Maisel explores this new vision, and the boundaries and essential properties of the medium of photography, in the Shadow series. Here, he re-photographed X-ray images. He selected such images of antique objects - from the archives produced by museums for conservation purposes, by placing them on a light box and then capturing the emanations of this light on film. Moholy-Nagy claims that through photography one can “see the world with entirely different eyes” and in Maisel’s work this abnormal vision is presented to the viewer in large format. The images are 30”x40” and often exceed the original object in size, further creating a new, distinct identity. “Through the X-ray process,” David Maisel explains, “the artworks of origin become de-familiarized and de-contextualized, yet acutely alive and renewed.” In re-photographing and re-proportioning these images, he draws on the spectral visions of past cultures and tries to render the invisible into appreciative manifestations. Technology, Moholy-Nay argues, helps to “make visible existences which cannot be experienced or taken in by our optical instrument, the eye.” The camera can thereby supplement, or possibly complete, the vision of the organic, optical instrument.
In Maisel’s work, any such completion is achieved through X-ray images serving the both dual and twinned processes of memory and excavation. The images in History’s Shadow provide for the continuation and expansion of these intertwined themes. The viewer can see inside the objects; still some vestiges from the past – both interior and exterior - are also revealed (Figure 3). In power, these ghostly images seem to somehow surpass the original objects of art. In the eyes of Moholy-Nagy, all photographs were a reproduction of Nature - with the special exception of the X-ray photograph. Thus Maisel achieves a complete alienation from the original in his work, as the object X-rayed is already a reproduction of Nature (i.e. a sculpture), and the resulting X-ray image further removes any visually identifying links to the piece. Couple that thought to the further step in Maisel’s process – X-ray photographing an X-ray image of an art-piece representing or reproducing Nature – and, voila, the removal is complete.
Playing with what Walter Benjamin called the optical unconscious, Maisel’s images go beyond the appreciated-unconscious, the sublime, or what is almost too fast for the human eye to see, and enters a realm that is entirely invisible to the human eye. Professor and film historian, Tom Gunning, writes the following in Invisible Worlds, Visible Media about early photography and X-ray images in the 1890’s: “Still photography, and later cinema and x-ray, seemed to arm mankind with new tools of vision, following the telescope and microscope. Those technical devices not only aided scientific research, but also enlarged the dimension of the visual world beyond its seemingly secure boundaries, revealing previously unimaginable realms in which invisible treats lurk.” While much time has passed since the early days described by Gunning, these same alluring ‘invisible treats’ are what tantalize us in the images from History’s Shadow, captivating and multi-dimensional, suffused with the further dichotomy of a macabre neither here nor there-ness.
To the viewer, Maisel offers up a curio of visual insights into the artworks he selected (Figure 6). He pays homage to early photographs and X-ray images in several ways (Figure 8 & 9). To re-photograph these records, each was laid on a light box in a darkened room; the emanations of light were transmitted by long exposures - just as was necessarily done by early photographers - although Maisel exposes the images onto color film and then further manipulates the images with the help of digital technologies.
He also renders his images in sepia or cyanotype tones. These tints suggest his manipulation of the photographic film after scanning it by modifying it in the Photo-Shop process. Such modifications serve to further broaden the gap between the ‘reality’ of the original and the creative fictional existence of the new, incorporating art history into his artistic discourse. Most images are also mysteriously incomplete, fragmentary, puzzling either in form or feature (Figure 5 & 6). They come disembodied or seemingly broken, turned about or separated, somehow always askew to normal appreciation, and thereby defy the ease of natural, visual dissection.
Through the use of use of archival material in his artistic practice, Maisel not only embraces Moholy-Nagy’s ideas of creative vision via means of technology, but also incorporates forms that carry with them an awareness of the art-historic institution. In Living with Contradictions, Abigail Solomon-Godeau discusses the Levine’s appropriation of Evans (via re-photographing) and argues that the “artwork is able to question, contest, denaturalize the very terms in which it is produced, received and circulated.” Following this thought-line, Maisel is exploring the way a museum both values and exploits its art-works, where every object in the collection is X-rayed upon acquisition. In such regard, his images serve to record and observe the lifetime of a work: to map its history, the scars and trauma of a potentially mysterious past, and allude to future transformation and decay.
The archives from which Maisel gathered the X-ray images he subsequently photographed were all created for the sole purpose of art conservation and perpetuation. Amidst this purely administrative aspect of the world of objects and artworks, his focus is to create transparency. Maisel makes images that are available to viewers that would otherwise never gain access to them. In truth, he makes these images (his very personal selection) available to viewers that have also most likely never seen the original object d’art. In Reading an Archive, according to Allan Sekula states:
“In an archive, the possibility of meaning is ‘liberated’ from the actual contingencies of use. But this liberation is also a loss, an abstraction from the complexity and richness of use, a loss of context. Thus the specificity of the ‘original’ uses and meanings can be avoided, and even made invisible, when photographs are selected from an archive and reproduced in a book. […] So new meanings come to supplant old ones, with the archive serving as a kind of ‘clearing house’ of meaning.”
Sekula further argues, ”the archive constitutes the paradigm or ironic system from which photographic ‘statements’ are constructed.” Thus by selectively choosing and placing images gathered from an archive, Maisel also plays with the meaning of them, creating a new archive of a system of record normally hidden from public view.
But we must return to the separation of Maisel’s work from the archived records he photographs in order to imbue them with their own artistic merit; otherwise, his work is simply that of an embellishing archivist. Moholy-Nagy stated that the “new use of the material transforms the everyday object into something mysterious.” Maisel’s use of the art history archive, and of the history that can be found inside X-rayed objects to create new meaning, manifests and transforms the hitherto invisible. Mystery is a subsequent by-product of this process, which expresses via photographic means the “shape-shifting nature of time itself, and the continuous presence of the past contained within us”. Chronicling and incanting, the X-ray images of History’s Shadow serves two masters. Again, spiralling levels of consideration - of aesthetic removal and intellectual appreciation - surround Maisel’s work, seeming to fly off in different directions, but seeking completion, even oneness.
Still, we must realize that it is the appreciation of the viewer that completes Maisel’s artistic process. The mystery must remain occluded if it is to remain a mystery; what we see, or think we see, in these X-ray images compounds their worth. Tom Gunning supplies the why: “The belief that photography could discover a new spiritual world would now seem naïve and perhaps a bit touching, but capturing the invisible remains an ultimate horizon for both scientific and artistic practice.” In this regard, and by using our anticipation to advantage, History’s Shadow wages a bright campaign, stepping into the suggested unknown, and – where all else is blanketed about by blackness - inching toward some ultimate divination.
Figure 1: David Maisel, History`s Shadow GM3
Figure 2: David Maisel History`s Shadow GM16
Figure 3: David Maisel History`s Shadow AV7
Figure 4: David Maisel History`s Shadow GM12
Figure 5: David Maisel History`s Shadow AB16
Figure 6: David Maisel History`s Shadow GM8
Figure 7 Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Photogram, ca. 1923
Figure 8: Bernard Heon X-ray of a pelvis 1897, Cyonotype, 8 3/16 x 11 3/8 in. (22.4 x 28.3 cm) San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Accessions Committee Fund
Figure 9: Josef Maria Eder and Eduard Valenta Cameos in gold settings 1896, Photogravure, 4 5/8x 6 9/16 in. (11.8 x 16.7 cm) Albertina, Vienna, permanent loan of the Hoehere Graphische Bundes-Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt, Vienna
Bibliography
Bate, David. Photography: The Key Concepts (New York: Berg, 2009).
Cotton, Charlotte. The Photograph as Contemporary Art (New York: Thames and
Hudson, 2009).
Maisel, David. History's Shadow (Nazraeli Press, Portland, 2011).
Moholy-Nagy, Lazlo. Painting Photography Film (Albert Langen, Munich, 1927)
Röntgen, Wilhelm Konrad. Eine Neue Art von Strahlen (Würzburg: Hof und Universitätsbuch und Kunsthandlung, 1896).
Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 1988).
Wells, Liz ed., The Photography Reader (London: Routledge, 2003).
Wormser, E M. Sensing the invisible world. Applied Optics 7, no. 9, . September 01, 1968
Online sources:
http://davidmaisel.com/default.asp
http://www.sfmoma.org/about/press/press_exhibitions/releases/369
http://www.modernism101.com/moholy_painting_photo_film.php