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By Alec

I am a bit skeptical of Adam Frank’s primary argument that “[Emily] Dickinson’s writing … registers and theorizes experiences of looking conditioned by photographic materials”, if only because I felt that he was was occasionally grasping at straws to make ties between photography and Dickinson’s life and to find references to photography in her writing. That said, I was completely onboard with and intrigued by Frank’s observation that the physical qualities of technologies mold the ways that we use and interpret them. He notes that the daguerrotype, a metallic precursor to the paper-printed photograph, was necessarily reflective and thus “allow[ed] the viewer to see his or her own image superimposed over the photographic one”. This quality, he later argues, offered to its viewers a material hybridization of the “Calvinist requirements of self-examination and witnessing with sentimental sincerity and transparency” and thus supplemented the changing concept of “the self” during this time period.

This notion that a technology’s physical attributes can direct us toward certain values and sentiments is a powerful one, and holds true for just about every object. It makes sense, after all, that the way we hold/view/use an object will probably affect how we feel about it. Letter-writing, for example, is made even more personal by envelopes that require the sender’s own saliva for the seal. A thick, printed newspaper suggests a certain standard of journalism not typically associated with blogs or websites. Red sports cars evoke a sense of speed and adventure; station wagons, not so much.

In some cases these physical attributes are an intentional effort on behalf of the designer to evoke a certain emotion or idea in its users. Red paint doesn’t make a car drive any faster, nor does it dictate how a person uses the car – but the psychological suggestions are probably enough to convince many to drive a bit faster, and for onlookers to make certain judgments about the driver’s lifestyle. In other instances, this effect seems more a product of happenstance and/or practicality. For example, I would guess that the mirror-like quality of the daguerrotype was more a product of technical limitation than a conscious attempt at creating a print that reflected its user. In any case, I know that this topic of connecting the tangible and material qualities of an object to its immaterial, intangible qualities ones is a relatively small topic in Frank’s essay, but it’s a notion that I’m completely fascinated by, and plan to continue to look out for in other technologies we discuss in this course.