Presentation

for Photography Symposium (by Hanna Timonen) 14 November 2019

Marjaana Kella

Evidence of an idea of the world


My photographic work has dealt mainly with the oddity of the photographic medium: how we
see photographs as natural images, how special they are as images and how deeply they are
related to the image-likeness of our reality. Photographs are capable of multiplying the
semblance of the world around us, since they are mute, still, flat, and “superficial”.
Photographs are surrealistic. They also force us to see how the things in the world appear to
us as images.

For many years I made pictures about this “image-likeness” and later I wrote about it in my
PhD thesis. When I had submitted my thesis 2014, I was quite exhausted and thought “What
next?”. I was returning the books that I had borrowed for my thesis project to the library,
when, suddenly, on a shelf I saw the book Photography and Occult. I opened the book and in
front of me there was this picture. What is this, I thought. [2] For sure it´s a picture of an iron,
but why it´s included in this book?

In the caption there was a description: Images were created by exposing them directly from
the mind, they were mental images, so to say. The man who had this extraordinary talent was
Ted Serios. A wild and charismatic vagrant, who gained notoriety in The Unites States in the
1960’s for claiming to be able to produce photographs using psychic powers. [3] These
peculiar abilities of his were eagerly studied, most notably by Doctor Jule Eisenbud [4], a
psychiatrist interested in Freudian psychoanalysis and parapsychology. Eisenbud devoted his
life to studying Ted’s purported talent, but others remained skeptical of the alcoholic man’s
skills, accusing Ted of being a fraud, while unwittingly only adding to the attention he
received.

Especially the so called “gizmo”, a rolled-up Polaroid cover paper that Serios used to focus his
psychic powers onto the camera lens, caused distrust [näytä gismo]. Critics often claimed that
Ted used this device to conceal a microfilm which he then projected onto the film. [5]
Especially for professional photographers, the look of the pictures themselves seems to
confirm this theory. Two amateur magicians even wrote after a session that they had seen Ted
slipping something into the tube. However, Ted was never got caught in the act. During the
years there were hundreds of people observing Ted´s shooting and looking out for possible
fraud. The camera, the film package and especially the gizmo were usually examined before,
during and after the shooting, and nothing suspicious was ever found inside them.
Furthermore, Serios produced many images without a gizmo, and sometimes also standing 20
meters from the camera.

Back to the book in the library: After reading the text in the book, I learned that this particular
image [6] was not in fact exposed by the mind, but was a so called “target image” for
experiments made on Ted´s exceptional skills. However, the idea of a “thoughtograph” had
already hooked me, and I felt I needed to do something with it.

The story seemed to be closely related to the “image-likeness”, which had puzzled and
inspired me from the very beginning. It actually seemed to manifest exactly in the weird
combination of the image and the text, which dislocated the reality as we know it.

The impact of this event and the documents regarding this case were so stunning that I just
felt I need to show them with no added “artistic gestures”. It was also an experiment on
fundamentally changing my own practice. I wanted to make a work of art (or just simply a
work) by just bringing some elements together, using documentary material.

I started to study this case and contacted several people who were involved in the
documentary material and research on Ted Serios. It turned out that the collections, the
original polaroids and all documentary material, were in the possession of Jule Eisenbud
collection on Ted Serios and thoughtographic photography, in the University of Maryland,
Baltimore county [7]. It was exactly there, where I had to travel. After some correspondence I
got the kind permission to research the collection, and so I travelled to Baltimore for a hot
week in July 2016.

The visit was really confusing, I must say. It was stunning to see all the material, original
polaroids, film materials, hundreds of reports and letters related to this story. [8-20] I also got
permission to use the copies of the documents and polaroids in the exhibition, and that is
what I then later did. However, the most confusing souvenir of this visit was the disbelief over
what I had seen during the week. Before the trip I was not really interested in whether Ted’s
ability really was a supernatural phenomenon, or if it was just a skillful deception. In truth, I
took it as fraud. After the visit I was not at all so sure. How could anyone produce so much
material, like documents and private correspondence, during several decades just to create a
fake archive? All the documents I read seemed to confirm that the events described in them
were authentic and true.

False or not, Serios’ story could be seen as an allegory for our ability to “produce” what we see
at any given moment. The visible, as we see it, is ultimately a product of the mind, isn´t it? [21]

The exhibition Super-illusion was on show in November 2016 at the Photographic Gallery
Hippolyte in Helsinki and then also in Turku in 2018 and it was based on the stories and
documents about Ted Serios. The reproductions of the polaroids said to have been exposed by
Serios’ mind, formed the core of the exhibition [22-28].

Alongside the photographs, the exhibition consisted of a script, which I had edited from
archival documents, and an excerpt of Rebecca Baron’s Tour de Force, a short film composed
of archival footage of Ted’s photo sessions. So everything on display in this exhibition was just
re-arranged reproductions, authentic-looking copies of documents and excerpts of films
which were edited from already edited TV documentaries.

The film and the story were divided by a wall, so that the film was displayd on the other side
of the wall and the text was displayd on the other side, from where the voice of the narrator
also came. Let´s watch now these two projections displayd on one screen, so that you can get
an idea of the story and also see Ted performing.[script ja filmi]

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The name Super-illusion relates to the illusory nature of Serios’ story, but above all it is
allusion to Roland Barthes’ book Camera Lucida, on the original back cover of which this
enigmatic concept is mentioned. [29] There Barthes quotes Tibetan Buddhist teacher
Chögyam Trungpa, who discusses the response of a lama (Marpa) to the loss of his son:

Marpa was very upset when his son was killed, and one of his disciples said: “You
used to tell us that everything is illusion. How about the death of your son? Isn´t
it an illusion?” And Marpa replied: “True, but my son´s death is a Super-Illusion”.

Reality is visible in a particular way in photography, in all its static imageness. All the while a
photograph stubbornly proclaims that something really has been. In the photographs
“exposed” by Ted, this relationship between reality and image is put into a new light – mind
and image are essentially inseparable.

Ted Serios has inspired several writers and also some artists in the U.S. In these works,
attention has been paid to the dichotomy between the protagonists of this story. One is a “wild
and primitive man” who has special powers, while the other is a “civilized man” who has
another kind of power and also instruments to investigate his alleged abilities. [30] Apollo
versus Dionysus, as in Greek mythology. The dominance of male characters involved in these
investigations is also striking, but so was the setup in almost all research still in the 60´s.

My interest in this story arose especially from its analogical relation to the image-likeness of
our experience, that which is often called reality. To explain this relationship I start by asking
the basic question of this symposium: What is a photographic act?

Isn´t it about pointing, pointing like an index finger points? Photography is our second eye
with which we can wrench the time and space and which we can utilise to show: Look at this!
Look at that! But like Roland Barthes wrote, the picture is mute, it does not speak to us, it just
shows, like a child pointing to the things in world, still without words. Barthes uses the
Sanskrit word tathata to describe this.
tat means that in Sanskrit and suggests the gesture of the child pointing his
finger at something and saying: that, there it is, lo! but says nothing else; […] the
Photograph is never anything but an anticipation of ‘Look,’ ‘See,’ ‘Here it is’; […].

On the other hand, the photograph is (still in the digital era) a trace of something that was
really there, in front of the lens, at the moment when the picture was taken. So the trace in a
photograph and a photograph as an index, a pointer, are two beautifully circular aspects of
photography. It is mute evidence of our own existence, of our physical world and the time
passing. It testifies that our material world is real.

But how is it actually? Isn´t it the consciousness that is the first precondition for anything to
manifest – be it material or purely imaginary. Do we know anything at all without it existing in
the mind? With no-one experiencing, no-one pointing, no-one watching, no-one taking
pictures and no-one inventing apparatuses like cameras there would be no experience of time
passing. We are time-bound creatures in the gravitational field of our globe, which creates the
experience of time. That is why we have invented instruments, like cameras, to function like
prosthesis, which expand, enforce and testify our own subjective experience.

How do we even know if there is a material world without us? Well, surely if someone passes
away, the world still continues to exist for the rest of us. We seem to share the same world.
However, without consciousness there wouldn´t be any material world at all. Mind and the
world such as we understand them seem to be intertwined and dependent of each other. They
are one.

What does this have to do with Ted Serios´ thoughtographs?

We easily feel embarrassed if we find ourselves cheated. That's why changing beliefs has
always been so difficult - starting from the flatness of the earth, which was once such a
persistent belief. Let us now, however, for a moment, dispel our doubts, and let us be tempted
to interpret Serios' pictures.

The fact that we doubt Ted´s pictures is actually evidence of the ontology of photography, how
we understand the medium and our own existence in this time and space. The images create
disbelief exactly because we strongly believe in the chronologic and logical course of time and
space, which is always bound to the subjective point of view. This we know for a fact and it
regulates our worldview. Ted´s pictures violently shake this worldview by stating to be
dislocated from the course of events.

Let us look at these images: to be a scam, these pictures are just too senseless. [31] They seem
to be completely dull and affectless and have no pointing aspect typical to photography. Just
because of that muteness and dullness, they are photographs par excellance, in barthesian
sense. They just show the dislocation in itself, thus creating a disruption to our stable and
harmonious worldview.

Why should thoughts result in recognizable images like photographs in the first place? The
memories in the mind reside hardly in the form of photographic images, do they? And why
were these pictures still images, even when their formation was filmed on moving film in the
KOA studio?

Isn´t the world around us living and moving all the time? Or is it perhaps that the movement
and flowing time are just an illusion which we call life? Isn´t it after all so that the only thing
we have is here and now. In thoughtographs that moment seems to be somehow slipped out
of time and space. [32]

Let me now postulate a very debatable but intriguing hypothesis, which may have more
metaphorical than scientific value, but which can slightly disrupt our comfortable worldview.

In the fifth century BCE, Empedocles postulated the theory of vision. He believed that
Aphrodite made the human eye out of the four elements (fire, air, earth, and water) and that
she lit the fire in the eye which shone out from the eye, making sight possible [33]. Perhaps
there is still something in his theory worth considering.

Perhaps in Ted´s psychic images the moment slipped out of time and space exposes the light-
sensitive material exactly because of the light that resides in our minds and shines from our
eyes.