This article examines the ever-actual desire to visualise and materialise thought-images in a historical perspective. The interest for research into thought imagery,and of visual proof production of thoughts, coincided with the invention of the camera and culminated somewhere around 1900. Together with other scientific circumstances that appeared up to 1900, such as the experimental psychology model of the mind as an archive and the discovery of rays as an immaterial but yet scientifically proven fact, the camera became the self-evident centre to construct theories around in attempts to scientifically legitimise research into the
realm of mental imagery. As a highly recognised scientific tool, a proven detector and visualiser of rays, and a generally recognised explanatory model of the mechanism of the mind, photography became the centre in the axis mind-photography-rays, along which researchers experimented in the quest for materialisation of the
mental around 1900.
