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Even before we entered the caves we'd found fire: the first source of light and heat we could control and manipulate, the first deity to serve us, gift of Prometheus, portable and protective. As carnivores, cooking our meat over it gave us even faster access to animal proteins, allowed a reduction in tooth and jaw size, made more room for brain in the skull. Staring into the dancing flames at night, watching the endless variations of radiant light, sharing the comfort of glowing heat, we discovered a space for story-telling and myth-making. To a considerable extent, community originated in, and is still enhanced by, sitting around a generator of visible light. The cave wall was our species' first screen, a display context for many kinds of images formed or activated by light: the drawn and painted figures that, viewed in trance states by flickering torchlight during rituals, seemed to move; the constantly shifting shadows cast on the wall by the fire, whether happenstance or contrived with fingerplay or puppetry, that served Socrates as a metaphor for the distinction between the real world and our perceptions of it; the inverted image of the world outside the cave that slipped at dawn through a chink in the hides covering the cave's mouth to paint the interior with the upside-down appearance of what lay outside, that accidental precursor of the camera obscura, whose principle was known to the Greeks before the Common Era.

None of these images were deliberately embodied in objects as such. One would not even call the cave drawing a thing (in the sense that a fertility fetish could be so identified), though it exists on a physical surface; it seems likely that those representations, usually observed by their original audience by fire-light, exemplified something of the relation that reels of motion-picture film bear to the cinematic experience. In any case, except for the cave drawings, these naturally occurring pictures could not be touched or held, only seen. They were impermanent, dematerialized visual phenomena that relied on no physical support for their transient existence.

By the time we began to design and construct our own permanent safe havens, those encounters with luminosity had become embedded in culture, and in language. The Latin word for hearth -- the domesticated fire at the center of household activity -- is focus. In that same tongue, camera means room or chamber. Thus the focus of the camera is the primary source of light. In various and complex ways, these deep structures of culture have filtered down to us today. Out of them grew photography, in its many forms.

By approximately the year 1000 A.D., as described by the Arab scholar Alhazen, rooms whose primary purpose was to serve as cameras obscurae were being constructed, both for private use and public enjoyment. These structures would have a long history in our culture. Evidence suggests that Canaletto later utilized one such space while working on his famous views of Venice in the 18th century, by which time a portable model of the camera obscura had also become a standard tool for professional and amateur artists alike. Some were even built into light-tight coaches, so that travelers could enjoy the changing scenery at one remove from direct eye contact with it.

Interest in this visual phenomenon persisted for centuries. Many historic cameras obscurae of the room-sized variety have survived. During a residency at the J. Paul Getty Museum in the fall of 1993, I had the pleasure of strolling regularly to a late 19th-century one on the beach in downtown Santa Monica, California (somewhat incongruously reinstalled in a senior- citizens' center); its rotating periscopic lens offered a 360- degree panoramic view directed onto a horizontally placed round screen that allowed a choice between city- and ocean-scape. And these devices continue to be built and used even now, in a number of different ways.

In 1550, Girolamo Cardano became the first to mount a lens in the light-admitting aperture of the camera obscura, which allowed the sharper focusing of the image it rendered: the basic prototype of the photographic camera. And, circa 1640, Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit priest, invented the magic lantern, which allowed the projection across some distance of images painted on glass slides. This "phantasmagoria" remained a popular form of entertainment, both in private households and in public theaters, for the next 250 years, and in fact -- if we recognize the present-day slide projector as the direct lineal descendant of Kircher's device -- it evinces a continuing hold on contemporary audiences as well. (Indeed, for the past forty years or so it has served as the primary means by which students of art have encountered representations of original artworks, which suggests that a consideration of the slide projector's impact on the production and study of art is long overdue.)

In the centuries after the magic lantern made its debut, lenses were added to it, which enabled the refinement and elaboration of the possibilities for image projection. The microscopy craze that began in the late 17th century led to a widespread fascination with the microcosm as revealed by another lens instrument, one eventual result of which was the projection of prepared microscope slides of assorted animal, mineral and vegetable specimens for the entertainment and edification of the populace -- culminating in the 1829 projection in London theaters of the active microbial life in drops of Thames river water, to the delight and horror of the large audiences who flocked to sample visually what one cartoonist of the day dubbed "Monster Soup."

Those diverse combinations of lensed instruments and light projections just mentioned were essential components in the creation of what I've elsewhere called lens culture -- a cultural environment in which optical extensions of sight became defining features of everyday life. The gradual evolution of this changed social context helped pave the way for photography. In the early part of the 19th century, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, a French showman, specialized in the production of dioramas -- stage- sized, slowly moving backlit transparent and translucent images presented in theaters. (The mechanized transparencies of Alfredo Jaar, Jon Kessler and Ted Victoria in this show extend that technique and give it a meaningful contemporary incarnation.) Hardly coincidental that Daguerre would then turn his hand to the invention of a device that could freeze the lens-formed image and render it in permanent form.

Announced to the public in 1839, Daguerre's system, which helped to shift western culture's perceptual paradigm in many ways, had one severe limitation: its result was a unique miniature positive on metal that did not lend itself to easy reproduction, to enlargement or projection, or to viewing by more than a few people at a time. (In these ways it much resembles the hologram, whose various forms are represented in this exhibit by the work of Shu-Min Lin, who places his holographic images on the floor; in turn, because they are portraits of people, these evoke the daguerreotype, which was employed primarily for formal portraiture.)

William Henry Fox Talbot, a British amateur scientist who'd worked out a different solution to the problem of making permanent versions of lens-derived imagery at roughly the same time as Daguerre, shortly thereafter announced an alternative process. His "Talbotype" system (eventually to be known, generically, as the calotype) encoded a monochrome image in negative -- that is, with its tones reversed -- on paper. That sheet of paper, when waxed or oiled, became a negative photographic transparency, viewable as such when held up to the light. And, by using it to reiterate the process of its own making, one could make it serve to generate additional positives on paper, which themselves could be viewed by reflected light or, if one chose, waxed in turn to become positive transparencies.

Lightboxes, screens, lampshades and other artifacts of the Victorian era employed this effect, our first cultural encounter with luminous photographic images in object form. Many of the artists in this exhibit employ some variation on that basic idea. The works of David Byrne, James Casebere, Roz Dimon, the team of Terry Maxedon and Amy Fisch, Doug Prince, Doug and Mike Starn, Cheryl van Hooven, and Krzysztof Wodiczko are constructed as lightboxes displaying backlit transparencies. Martin Liebscher converts a photographic C-print -- normally considered an opaque artifact -- into a translucency, by placing a neon light strip behind it. And Dennis Adams, Jennifer Sloan and Patrick Raynaud imbed such artificially illuminated transparencies in sculptural objects.

Such photographic images, if printed on emulsion-coated glass, could also be projected via the magic lantern, as people discovered by the middle of the last century. The projected still and kinetic images involved in the works presented here by Heidi Kumao, Amy Jenkins and Anne Deleporte function as contemporary extensions of that venerable tradition. (Wodiczko's lightbox image here represents such a projection too, one done outdoors, on a grand scale, at the Hirschorn Museum in Washington, D.C.) And, with the invention of the stereoscope by Charles Wheatstone in 1832, and its refinement for use with photographs by David Brewster in 1849, the possibility of transparent stereo photographs providing a 3-D illusion when the stereo viewer was lit from behind was born. The modern-day Viewmaster, a commonplace child's toy that comes with interchangeable circles of minute transparencies imbedded in cardboard, is an offspring of that method. So was the Stereo Realist, a camera that produced stereo photographic slides on color film, which enjoyed a vogue in the post-W. W. II period. Gerald Marks brings that tendency into the present by offering us a 3-D image viewable only on a computer screen.

Nowadays our stores -- from Bloomingdale's to MacDonald's -- are decorated with illuminated transparencies. Our concert halls and nightclubs have functioned for decades as venues for experimental projections of photographic imagery. And, as a matter of course, we commonly sit in front of several kinds of illuminated screen: the television set, the classroom or auditorium screen for slides (as well as for transparencies and opaque material shown via overhead projectors), the movie-house screen, the VDT (video display terminal) of our computer. Obviously, then, our fascination with projected photographs, transparencies and lens-derived pictures that emanate (or seem to) their own light -- what curator Franc Palaia generically calls "the luminous image" -- persists. Something inherent in these forms speaks to something bone-deep in us.

Palaia, himself an artist who has worked with this form of photography, says that he undertook the organizing of this survey only as a last resort, after waiting for years for someone else to do it. Certainly, given the frequency with which works like these appear nowadays, such an overview -- which by no means exhausts the roster of artists who've explored aspects of this approach to image presentation -- seems overdue, and is surely welcome. The work represented here covers approximately the past two decades, from the late 1970s until now. Seeing it in one place at one time, as a physical installation at The Alternative Museum, allows us to observe at first hand the wide range of creative options that "the luminous image" offers to artists and their audiences today. And it seems entirely appropriate that this show's catalogue should come to you in the form of a CD-ROM, so that, even if at one remove, you can see its reproductions of these works as illuminated images, closer in effect than the printed page to what their makers had in mind.

The artists represented here address and utilize those ancient impulses and inclinations of which I spoke earlier, for diverse and complex purposes. They do so by working with and through these idiosyncratic versions of technologies that we think of as recent, but which have actually evolved over several millenia. And then they ask us once again to gather around the fires, these glowing devices they've created -- thus reminding us that we are still of the tribes, and that the proverbial "spark of humanity" was always more than metaphor.

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(This essay first appeared on the CD-ROM The Luminous Image, the exhibition catalogue for a survey exhibition of the same title curated by Franc Palaia for The Alternative Museum in New York City, November 19, 1996 through January 4, 1997.)

© Copyright 1996 by A. D. Coleman. All rights reserved. For reprint permissions contact Image/World Syndication Services, POB 040078, Staten Island, NY 10304-0002 USA;T/F (718) 447-3091, imageworld@nearbycafe.com.