Robert L. Bowen : The Human Shutter – Photographs, Stereoscopic Depth, and Moving Images

The book expands our conception of time in photography, being a radical reexamination of the history of the photographic medium as an interplay of stillness, depth, and motion, from analog to digital to GenAI. This transdisciplinary study of art and binocular vision spans areas of stereo photography, art, philosophy, and the science of perception. It investigates time and space perception going back to the origin of this light-based medium. Among the artists discussed in the context of binocular art are Arakawa and Gins, Antoine Claudet, Marcel Duchamp, Jean-Luc Godard, Hans Hoffman, Ken Jacobs, Peter Kubelka, OpenEndedGroup, Lucy Raven, Alfons Schilling, Robert Smithson, and Giorgio Sommer.

Photography-based cinema began in the mid-nineteenth century in the two-frame medium of stereographs. These little-known, often experimental works employed binocular rivalry, in which, according to early photographer Antoine Claudet, the brain interpolates the in-between frames. The human shutter is an invented term intended to describe binocular rivalry more graphically.

From a 2025 perspective, stereographs are an obsolete, difficult-to-see, abject medium. We don’t know what to make of them, which is surprising given that they were once a mass medium consumed by everyone. Today, they offer essential insights into the wide-ranging history of lens-based mediums into the post-lens-based era.

The book includes a preliminary taxonomy of stereo photographic temporality represented by an astonishing array of early stereoviews that link to ideas from painting, experimental film, philosophy, and theories of perception and consciousness. Closely examining these early stereographs leads to understanding how early photographic still, moving, and stereoscopic depth media emerged as a single medium.

The ideas in the book emerged while closely examining a vast number of stereographs as physical objects and online. Instead of working backward from a central thesis, the images guided me to the ideas. Simultaneously searching the historical record, I located primary sources and scientific explanations to support my evolving understanding. Among other discoveries, it turns out that there was interest in photographic cinema nearly two decades before the work of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey.

Parallel to this discussion, the stereoscope has also been adopted as a foundational metaphor for critical thinking in the work of Walter Benjamin, Gilbert Simonton, Gilles Deleuze, Brian Massumi, and others. Considering Henri Lefebvre’s work and specific scientific concepts in perception, the human shutter can similarly be understood as a metaphor for perception and consciousness.

It’s helpful to think of the history of photography as a continuum in which early photographic investigators Thomas Wedgwood and Humphry Davy were already describing their central concern as “time and space.” Most recently, one technological endgame of the history of photography is being played out with GenAI. The light of singular photographic moments of phenomenal reality has become contaminated by the statistical averaging of massive photographic datasets in the context of large language models and diffusion. This leads to a dissolution and reconfiguring of recorded time, which affects not only documentary work but the entire medium.

Robert L. Bowen is a New York-based artist and writer. He also teaches photography, film, and art history. His work involves perception, distinguishing illusion from reality in photography, stereoscopic cinema, and experimental architecture

The book is part of the School of Visual Arts Lens and Screen Series and was published by Intellect Press/University of Chicago.

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