From the 1840s until the late 1890s, it was – except when photographing one’s own reflection – technically impossible to stand in front of the camera and operate it simultaneously. Nevertheless, photographic self-portraits have survived since the public introduction of the daguerreotype in 1839. This article examines how nineteenth-century photographers negotiated authorship under these technical constraints. Focusing on self-portraits by Charles Nègre and Frédéric Boissonnas, it identifies two experimental tendencies: the transfer of conventions from painted self-portraiture into photography, and the deliberate departure from established visual norms. Drawing on concepts of intermediality, the article argues that photographic authorship emerges through specific media constellations involving image, text, technique, and performance.

Challenging narratives of linear progress, this essay analyzes resistance against administrative rationality through the ‘small formation’ paradigm. It argues that techniques by Robert Walser, Franz Kafka, Anni Albers, Léna Meyer-Bergner, and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt function as ‘logistic inversions’: embodied acts thwarting the hegemony of standardized code. By situating these practices within specific historical dispositifs – from Taylorist labor and US mass production to Soviet planning and GDR surveillance – the analysis reveals how material gestures counter Kittler’s “writing systems” and the logic of the grid. Reaching into the digital present and the logic of large language models, this framework offers a historical lens for understanding resistance against the encroachment of administrative rationality on autonomous practice.