Spectral interventions visited upon tourists

Julius von Bismarck with his creation

The Image Fulgurator is a device for physically manipulating photographs. It intervenes when a photo is being taken, without the photographer being able to detect anything. The manipulation is only visible on the photo afterwards.

In principle, the Fulgurator can be used anywhere where there is another camera nearby that is being used with a flash. It operates via a kind of reactive flash projection that enables an image to be projected on an object exactly at the moment when someone else is photographing it. The intervention is unobtrusive because it takes only a few milliseconds. Every photo another photographer takes of an object at which the Fulgurator is also aimed is affected by the manipulation. Hence visual information can be smuggled unnoticed into the images of others.

Herr Bismarck’s creation is so powerful because he breaches what is assumed to be an impermeable frontier. The photograph, in some ways, is supposed to be the paragon of realism when it comes to documenting the world. Yet here is this device that can be deployed tactically in moments of performance to intervene how photographers, as such, perceive the moment. It is marvelous that most people who would use flash photography during the day in places like Checkpoint Charlie are going to be hapless tourists who, instead of confronting the history and visceral experience before them, snap away so that they may keep themselves busy and make something of the trip. Perhaps this is precisely the sort of person upon whom a mysterious intervention, a ghostly cue, would be best received by. Hmm, but I only wish that someone could get one of these into a presidential news conference and strike the requisite sub-text into the photographic record for the morning papers.