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Photography and the art of science

2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 24; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14725860903106161

1472-5878

Kelley Wilder,

Visual Culture and Art Theory

Abstract Photography and science have a symbiotic relationship; they always have. It was in the context of science that photography was first announced to the public by François Arago in 1839. And it was the rhetoric of observation and objectivity that was so beloved of scientists in the mid-nineteenth century that photography very soon acquired. It was, in fact, photography's close ties to science that hindered its bid to claim fine-art status. It is photography's close and continued ties to science that have also been utilised by artists through the decades, artists who played with the concepts of objectivity, truth, documentary and surveying. The author discusses the unique place that photography has taken up in the art of science and the science of art, dwelling on moments when the two appear to be one and the same, and moments where they appear to diverge. Rather than writing a sort of survey, the paper will dip in at various points in history, looking at the debates from various historical perspectives so as to consider the paradigm ‘art science’ as it has variously been applied to photography. The paper will take up the conflicting rhetorics of passivity and control, mechanical and creative, showing how each is used in its place, but always emphasising the back-and-forth, the give-and-take between science and art. It will be argued that photography's dual nature is exactly what makes it interesting to artists, and what makes it valuable to the sciences. Notes [1] Although it is popularly believed that François Arago was wholly responsible for the original announcement of the daguerreotype, the original text shows that his part constitutes only the first half of what was said. Biot's statement was appropriated several decades later by the astronomer Jules Janssen, who may or may not have known of Biot's use of the analogy. [2] I am greatly indebted to my colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Lorraine Daston, and especially to those who worked on the project concerning the History of Scientific Observation for developing my thoughts on photography and observation. A collaborative volume of this work is forthcoming. [3] Interest in these arguments can be gauged by the proliferation of writing engendered by the publication of Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison's introduction of the concept of ‘mechanical objectivity’ in 1992. They have further clarified their position in Chapter 3 of Daston and Galison Citation2007. [4] This exhibition was found with the aid of Exhibitions of the Royal Photographic Society 1870–1915 to be found at http://erps.dmu.ac.uk, published by De Montfort University and the Department of Knowledge Media Design, 2008 (accessed November 2008). [5] Corey Keller writes, ‘Nineteenth-century scientists and popularizers of science, however, did not see the layman's response of wonderment and pleasure as inappropriate, but rather counted on this reaction to encourage scientific interest among the general public… . To consider what they looked like is by no means to assimilate them into the category of art… . It is rather to recognize that despite their origins as scientific information, these photographs must be considered first and foremost as pictures… . If they appear remarkably modern to us, it is in large part because science and photography have determined our idea of what modernity looks like’ (Keller Citation2008, 23). [6] Corey Keller has also come to the same conclusion, as have many other writers on the subject (Keller Citation2008, 29). [7] The Lumière brothers were deeply involved in emulsion development and science, and published regularly in the Comptes Rendus and more popular scientific journals like Le Radium. [8] Jules Janssen is credited with inventing a mechanism that exposed up to 50 times on a single plate. It was used in the Venus transits by many of the expeditions both English and French. No known plates made during the transit survive, although Abney asserts that his expedition made several successful plates of this sort. [9] This technique is described in detail in the forthcoming chapter Kelley Wilder, ‘Visualizing Radiation, the Photographs of Henri Becquerel’ in the forthcoming volume (as yet untitled) deriving from the working group on the History of Scientific Observation produced within Department II of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. [10] Too many well-known treatises do this to list them all but a remarkable example is Kepes, Citation1965. [11] It is unclear how this fits in the structure that Elkins has so clearly laid out, of one subject being used to illuminate another, or perhaps it does not (Elkins Citation2008). [12] I use ‘stabilise’ here in a very general sense, because it was still decades before much photography would be standardised into film speeds, or have common development or exposure times. [13] Exhibited at the Sugimoto Retrospective, July–October 2008, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin. [14] Auf/zu Der Shrank in den Wissenschaften (open/closed The cabinet in the sciences), curated by Anke te Heesen, Tübingen University, Tübingen, Germany, October 2007–February 2008. [15] Exhibitions represented in the bibliography are Alchemy, Close-Up, Brought to Light and Beauty of Another Order, Wahr-Zeichen, and Auf/zu, but there have been more, for instance Festivals, Ceremonies & Customs: Sir Benjamin Stone & the National Photographic Record Association, at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London in 2006, and Claudia Terstappen's Wunderforschung at the Natural History Museum, Berlin in 2008. Numerous scholars have begun to investigate the curious nature of scientific photography, or photography in various sciences in the recent past (there is not room to list the history of those who have written on the subject). Aside from the authors already listed in the bibliography there are works by Elizabeth Edwards, Alex Pang, Peter Geimer, Scott Cutis, Jimena Canales, Marta Braun, Richard Proctor, Martin Kemp, and many others.