observing by light and shadow

Project description

Observing by Light and Shadow takes a bold but necessary turn to the all too often sidelined labor essential to photographic practices in science. Much of the historical scholarship into the scientific uses of photography have relied on photographs in print as they publicly circulate and acquire social meaning on the way. But this is only half the story. By taking the exemplary case of astrophotography, the project shows that after photographs have been developed and fixed, but before they are sometimes printed for scientific consumption, there is an important stage where most photographs (usually fragile glass plates in the case of astronomy) are actively handled and used at the astronomer’s bench in order to derive information and meaning, which often results in remediation. This project is the first historical investigation into how photographs qua research-tools were handled as three-dimensional objects—and not just two-dimensional images—in the service of observational science; how they were stored at newly built spaces at major observatories; how their materiality and even decay were incorporated into research; how astronomers’ demands for custom materials—like glass and gelatine—were met by industry; how new and often gendered office-space, personnel, and technologies were devised to work with photographs; and how photographs migrated in global networks of observatories (some at colonial sites).

At many of the archives I visited, moreover, I found the prevalence of explicit traces of the astronomer’s labor not just in corresponding notebooks but also directly on glass plates themselves, marked-up with layers of annotations and sometimes wrapped in paper for the purposes of labeling, preservation, and orientation. Photographs are even drawn from by hand, an act that remediates drawing into an entirely new dispositive where the mechanical and manual productively overlap. I contextualize this kind of painstaking work into a larger account of the history of labor and the tensions between not just mechanical and manual but headwork and handwork in the development of astrophysics at the time of its professionalization, and even, as I have shown in a recent paper, in light of socialism and its struggles against the iron fingers of mechanization. Historicizing the significance of these laborious acts and manual marks for the history of science is made all the more urgent by the fact that astronomers at observatories with large historical collections of astrophotography are currently funded millions to erase all such historical annotations for the purposes of digitization. As a contribution to the history of photography, Observing by Light and Shadow tackles this erasure head-on by articulating another view of photography in science, one that, for the first time, allots historical and theoretical significance to handmade markings.