Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Victorian Flash

2018; Oxford University Press; Volume: 23; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jvcult/vcy045

1750-0133

Kate Flint,

One of the subjects of BBC2's pioneering series of programmes on photographic history, 'The World's Most Photographed ' (2005), was Queen Victoria.The episode featuring her did a great job of showing how photography's rapid growth as a form of image-making technology coincided almost exactly with the years of Victoria's reign.But it also contained one egregious error.Throughout the half-hour, the excitement and novelty of having one's portrait taken was signaled by a man with a heavy box camera on a tripod, a cloth over the lens -and a tray on a stick containing flash powder, which he exploded in a surprising, eye-shocking burst of light.The flash powder that was set off in this contraption was not invented until 1887, the creation of two German chemists, Adolf Miethe and Johannes Gaedicke.Before then, photographers had experimented with a number of other means of supplying artificial light, but this compound powder was the first relatively safe, practical, and economic means of doing so.However, if one looks beyond the demands of factual accuracy (and the episode works hard to capture our imagination, transitioning from colour to sepia, re-enactment to photograph), the decision by director Emily Kennedy to signal the event of portrait taking in this way points to something else: the association of the Victorian period with the innovation, the excitement, the drama of flash photography.My intention in writing Flash!Photography, Writing and Surprising Illumination was to produce a cultural history of this medium.This meant, necessarily, giving an account of its technological development -which entailed, in the first place, negotiating the shifting territory of what, precisely, I was examining.For on the one hand, I was dealing with light itself, and the unique characteristics of sudden, blinding, human-made illumination, including its effects of ocular and somatic disturbance.On the other, I was tracing the complex history of the means used to produce this light: complex because there is no one clear narrative, but rather a good deal of overlap between similar inventions and experiments with equipment taking place simultaneously in different locations -a microcosm, indeed, of the history of photography itself.Achieving this artificial illumination, characterized by the speed inherent in the very label 'flash' , depended a great deal on trial and error, and on the continual tweaking both of lightproducing apparatus and of ancillary studio devices.These included reflectors, and screens, and nets constructed on an old crinoline frame that would catch the smelly, smoky residue that filled the air after a tray of flash powder was exploded.In my research and writing, it was hard, on occasion, not to get lost in the fascinating proliferations of such inventions that, from the 1860s onwards, were increasingly reported in the columns of the specialist press; that appeared in advertisements; or that can be traced through the registration of patents.What emerged, in fact, was less a narrative of flash photography per se than a narrative of inventiveness at the hands of both professionals and amateurs -or rather, a demonstration of the blurred hinterland between these categories when it came to photographic practice