21st September 2008 - 31st March 2009
**Note: Part of this exhibition will be unavailable whilst it is displayed at an external venue between 2nd-4th December 2008. The rest of the museum will, however, be open as normal**
Derek Ogbourne's The MicroMuseum of Optography is the British Optical Association Museum's first ever collaboration with a contemporary artist and the first to incorporate video and sound alongside the display of artefacts. It follows on from the artist's earlier show The Museum of Optography shown in Cologne but this show is different and, in particular, it is on a very much smaller scale...positively miniature in fact, and that is what makes it so eye-opening!
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So what is optography? Derek researched the subject across a wide range of libraries and archives including that of the College of Optometrists. His feature on the topic is to be found elsewhere on our website under the title Optography and Optograms. Basically it concerns the historic belief that the final image seen before death could somehow be retrieved from the retina and fixed in a quasi-photographic process to form a permanent image. Just as a prehistoric insect can become fixed in amber for evermore, so our last visions could be recoverable...or so Victorian scientists thought. The exhibition includes a recently rediscovered optogram 'camera'...or does it? It certainly does include a dried out cow's lens that has a poem to tell, though the text is only visible through high magnification and a twenty minute video about the artist's quest to meet the last practitioner who gave the science of optography any serious attention.
Find out how to arrange a visit to the MicroMuseum of Optography.
**Note: Part of this exhibition will be unavailable whilst it is displayed at an external venue between 2nd-4th December 2008. The rest of the museum will, however, be open as normal**
Derek Ogbourne writes...
We enter a museum within a museum; a miniature archive to the obscure and forgotten dark art of optography. An image temporarily bleached in flesh by the light that illuminates things on to our retina, an afterimage. This image, at the moment of death, now hidden in the eyes of death can be held in the living hands, observed temporarily by living eyes, detached from its brain and life that once decoded life’s light. The MicroMuseum Of Optography is the second in my series of shows exploring Optography. My work merges within the confines of the British Optical Association Museum, a little known gem in the heart of the West End of London, housing a collection of nearly twelve thousand outstanding objects and archival items relating to the history of ophthalmic optics (optometry), the human eye and visual aids, as well as the representation of these subjects in art.
In the mid 17th Century, a Jesuit Friar called Christopher Schiener observed an image laid bare on the retina of a frog, a faint, fleeting record of what the eye had been fixed on at the moment of death. The fixing on the retina of the last image seen before death came to be known as an Optogram. (Time-Life, 1970). In late 1870’s Heidelberg, Germany, the physiologist Wilhelm Kühne made the first and most successful visually identifiable optograms recorded as drawings. He also had obtained the only known ‘human optogram’, in Bruchsal. Optography was believed to be a new criminology tool that would help to solve murders, akin to early DNA testing. A condemned young man, two scientists, Jack the Ripper, Salvador Dalí and the only known human optogram are leads I follow within the MicroMuseum Of Optography in the quest to uncover the truth and constant fascination behind this dark art.
Part science, part detective story, part history lesson, part psychogeography, but always already, simultaneously, ‘art’, this archival show investigates the human preoccupation with what exists within the very fine line between being and not being. Within every gaze that contemplates death. We imagine death, we imagine when and where. This project is about imagination and death. As a poetic metaphor, optography suggests a series of associations: the eye as camera; the eyelid, its shutter, the moment of retreat into the internal, the virtual and eventually, a real death moment.
My MicroMuseum Of Optography has an accompanying book. The Encyclopedia of Optography, The Shutter of Death is published by Muswell Press. It is both an artist’s book and an anthology of writers who have a mutual research interest in optography and optograms—Each writer stakes out new territory in a subject now so obscure it has retreated into myth. They rediscover a secret world that rings of Victorian science fiction. gathering together for the first time pieces of the same jigsaw to make a comprehensive description of the events that led to the forgotten science of optography. Contributors are Dr Evangelos Alexandridis, as far as it is known the only person to have successfully produced optograms in the 20th century, Professor Richard Kremer, historian at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, Dr. Ali Hossaini, author of Vision of the Gods: An Inquiry Into the Meaning of Photography, Dr. Arthur B Evans, Professor of French at DePauw University, Bill Jay, author of more than twenty books on the history and criticism of photography, Paul Sakoilsky, artist and writer, Olly Beck, artist and writer and novelist and essayist Susana Medina, author of Philosophical Toys.