Old Fields: Photography, Glamour, and Fantasy Landscape

5: Od

Well into the  s, Eastman Kodak advertising suggested the enduring mysteries suffusing photography. Here a catalog cover hints at connections with Od and Oda, and with paganism.  Od ^_] SHE STANDS FACING THE OBSERVER IN A ROBE, NOT diaphanous but not opaque, and in a headdress glorifying the tree of life. Hair up, hands down, she holds a No. A Autographic Kodak Special, offering what the Eastman Kodak Company called “the highest type of hand-camera efficiency.” The No. A could boast not only the novel autographic feature, in which the photographer might write with a stylus directly on one edge of every negative before development, but also a German-made Zeiss lens. “With this equipment it is possible to get welltimed pictures under light conditions that would be fatal to good results with the ordinary camera,” an advertisement proclaimed in . To the Eastman Kodak Company, the camera is exquisite, and exquisitely special . Its body is made of aluminum, “light, strong, and durable,” and “it is richly finished in genuine Persian Morocco” leather. It is more than an astonishingly versatile camera fitted with a superb lens and shutter. It is a gorgeous object, one seemingly exotic, transported from afar. The triptych cover of the  camera catalog not only isolates the first and final letters of the word Kodak but makes a word between them that changes headdress into antenna. Oda designates either a room in a harem, or an occupant of the room. The woman in the photograph might be a harem girl, then, suitably Americanized against a white-painted Federal-era wall paneled high enough to accentuate her shoulders and waist. But oda might also refer to the life forces which Karl Freiherr von Reichenbach discovered in the middle of the nineteenth century and which vexed scientists and laymen into the s. Headdress might be antenna. Von Reichenbach named the forces Od, creating a word he derived from the classical Greek term for road, odos; Od, the abbreviated name for the Norse god Odin; and voda, an Old Norse expression meaning “I flow forth.” Historians of photography routinely note that company tradition credits George Eastman’s love of the letter k to his playing anagrams with his mother when a boy.¹ They ignore the letters the k’s bracket. But Od subtly shaped photographic technology and sometimes seemed to explain the eerie visual effects at which amateurs photographers wondered. Von Reichenbach began his career in basic research on coal tar and coal-tar derivatives. He developed paraffin in , the antiseptic Eupion a year later, and in  creosota or creotsote, which he understood as both an antiseptic and a preservative, especially of wood. In the next years he discovered the indigo colorant Pittical, a red dye he called Cid- ^^_ old fields reret, and Picomer, a perfume base. His discoveries not only shaped the foundation of the German synthetic dye and chemical industries, out of which grew the German photographic industry, but made him a very wealthy young man able to shi" his attention to other research. While he studied aeroliths well before some astronomers even accepted meteorites as fact, and analyzed exotic types of lightning and other atmospheric electrical energy, he interested himself especially in somnambulism and related psychophysiological conditions. Grouping sleepwalking , night cramp, and what he loosely termed “emotional hysteria” under the larger heading of neurasthenias, Von Reichenbach focused not only on pure research but also on helping those whom many peasants from remote areas still considered possessed or intrinsically evil. Eventually he determined that some individuals are more sensitive than most to something (perhaps forces particularly strong when the moon is full) and that some of the sensitives suffer terribly. The sick sensitives perhaps endured illnesses Franz Anton Mesmer had begun treating with electric current—not shock—from a homemade battery.² Mesmer treated mostly upper-class people, some of whom merely wanted the frisson of touching the battery posts, and while better known for his hypnosis work, pioneered in the fields of psychology and neurobiology. Through a colleague and successor, Jean-Martin Charcot, who combined Mesmer’s work with electricity and hypnosis, his early research eventually brought Sigmund Freud to Paris. But years before the research attracted Freud, it shaped Von Reichenbach’s evolving hypothesis that some sort of external force impaired some people peculiarly sensitive to it. In an effort to locate the force or forces, Von...