For the official version of record, see here:
Henning, M. (2024). Photography’s Other Sensitivities. Media Theory, 8(1), 79–106. Retrieved from https://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/1069
Photography’s Other Sensitivities
MICHELLE HENNING
University of Liverpool, UK
Abstract
This article sets out to challenge the idea of photography as a medium that deals purely in the visible. Taking the example of the mid-twentieth-century British photography industry, this article considers photographic sensitivity as part of a sensory economy in which human, technological and environmental sensing are mutually entangled. I emphasise these interlinked sensing systems, and what I see as the “passive agency” of photographic materials, showing how photographic emulsions are capable of registering much more than visible light or even radiation. Chemical photographic materials had distinct cultural biases built into them, yet often registered entities other than those they were designed to picture. Great effort went into restricting photographic sensitivities, as well as into cultivating them. By the 1930s, the photographic materials factories had air purification and climate control systems, sensitometry laboratories and specialist tropical materials. Their sensitised materials and chemicals transformed ecosystems and participated in a “technological sensory training”, shaping what people could perceive.
Keywords
Photography, photosensitivity, sensory economy, technological bias, media
In 1985, writing about colour movie film, Brian Winston drew attention to “the ideologically charged nature of the apparatus itself” (Winston, 1985: 106). Previous writers had recognised that film and photographic cameras were part of a European “lens culture” stretching back to the late Renaissance and the introduction of perspectival modes of representation. But Winston also argued that the film stock itself was a technology with an in-built ideological bias, towards White people. Building on Peter Wollen’s observation that film “in natural colours” was never merely that, and that in fact “a whole technology of dyeing has intervened”, Winston looked at how colour film was calibrated to faithfully reproduce paler skin tones (Wollen, 1980: 24; Winston, 1985: 107). Winston went into some depth regarding the different methods for reproducing (or constructing) colour in film, in order to foreground the human choices and decisions that built a racial bias into the technology. The chemists at Eastman Kodak’s research labs in the 1930s had an agenda: “to accommodate the cultural prejudices of the users — to make, by careful chemistry, already pleasing (Caucasian) flesh tones more pleasing than they are in nature” (Winston, 1985: 120; the concept of “pleasing flesh tones” is drawn from industry sources from the time — specifically from Valentine, 1939: 54). This agenda, though not necessarily conscious or explicit, revealed that chemistry and optics were not ideologically neutral sciences but formed by the culture and reproducing its ideological orientations. More recent writers and artists have taken this further, looking at the use of the infamous “Shirley card” used to calibrate flesh tones in photo labs (Roth, 2009; Broomberg and Chanarin, 2012).[1]
This “whole technology of dyeing” is, as Winston suggests, shot through with social and cultural values. However, social constructionism can only take us so far. It cannot account for the ways in which photographic films and emulsions exceed the control of manufacturers, and how they have their own inherent material tendencies and biases with which chemists, photographers and cinematographers had to struggle. Sensitised photographic materials appear to have their own ideas. Emphasising the sensitivity of photographic material as more than just optical, I propose a more “crude” materialist orientation, or even a more animist one, empathetic and attentive to these materials, to address photographic sensitivity as both socially constructed and at the same time, as possessing its own capacities that are not always understood or acknowledged. Recent writers, informed by the multispecies feminism of Donna Haraway, or by actor network theory, vitalist or new materialist approaches, have emphasised the social interactions and networked agency of nonhumans or other-than-humans, whether actually living (animals and plants) or lively (technologies). The liveliness and reactive qualities of chemical photographic materials seem to invite this kind of attention. They require us to consider their agency — not simply as chemical reactivity but as a kind of receptivity. If to be receptive sounds rather passive and object-like, it is worth remembering the etymology of passivity, which relates to the passions, to feeling and to suffering, qualities sometimes used to define what it means to be human. While, in Western culture, passivity is often aligned with weakness and non-agency, it also describes an openness to the actions of others (Braunmühl, 2018). Photographic emulsions are receptive and open to impressions. They are both limited by human bias and, at the same time, capable of sensing more and sensing differently than their humanly determined social destinations might require.
The main way in which the photographic industries manipulated the sensitivities of photographic materials was through the use of aniline dyes as additives in emulsions — something Winston and others do not seem to notice, despite the phrase “a whole technology of dyeing”. These dyes were used extensively from the nineteenth century, both to produce the three colour filters used in colour processes, and to alter the spectral range in the emulsions used for monochrome films and plates. Photo-sensitising dyes, manufactured first from coal tar, shaped the ways in which photographs could provide a monochrome analogue to human colour vision, enabling otherwise highly blue-sensitive chemistry to better register the yellow-red end of the spectrum (Mees, 1936). Their value to photography is evident in the fact that firms associated with photography, such as Ciba-Geigy and Agfa, began as dyestuffs companies. As well as resolving problems of spectrum insensitivity that plagued older emulsions, these dyes facilitated low-light and high-speed photography. The introduction of photo-sensitisers to photographic emulsions also initiated a new control over photographic sensitivity, eventually expanding the capacity of photographic materials to “see” far beyond the humanly-visible spectrum. In the 1890s, with the discovery of X-rays and of the radioactivity of uranium, manufacturers and experimenters began to exploit the sensitivity of photographic materials to invisible radiation. X-ray films, infra-red plates and, eventually, nuclear emulsions all followed. Emulsion formulae were tightly kept industry secrets, but it is known that in the 1920s and ’30s certain dyes became central to the most widely marketed black and white films, called “panchromatic” films. These included the dye pinacyanol, also called sensitol red (Mees, 1936).
In Britain, it was during this interwar period that manufacturers took the major steps in refining and controlling photographic sensitivity, as the photographic companies established their research labs, led by two major firms, Ilford Limited and Kodak Ltd (the British subsidiary of Eastman Kodak). Until this time, Germany had been the principal supplier of the sensitising dyes, with firms carefully concealing their chemical makeup. It was only following the First World War, and the seizure of German patents and formulae, that the full details of many of the dye sensitisers used in photographic emulsions were more widely known. Government investment during the war had facilitated Ilford’s work on infra-red for aerial photography, and allowed the company to develop copies of sensitising dyes previously purchased from Germany, leading to the success of their Special Rapid Panchromatic plates for aerial photography by 1918 (Pope, 1918: 296). However, it was not until 1928-1930 that panchromatic roll films became available for snapshot photography. “Panchromatism” facilitated a burgeoning snapshooter market that kept the trade in photographic materials buoyant despite economic slumps, and it also transformed the motion picture industry, forcing changes in lighting and make-up — Max Factor introduced “panchromatic” make-up known as “Pan cake” for the new film stock — and influencing and enabling subtle changes in cinematographic technique (Bordwell et al., 1988: 343-344). (A parallel might be found today in sales of “blurring primer” and “photo finish” foundation for use in mobile phone “selfies”.)
Photographic emulsions are part of a new synthetic and artificial world that emerged as a result of developments in chemistry which made it possible to mimic organic substances (such as silk and indigo) using coal tar dyes (Leslie, 2006). Coal tar was a by-product of the coal-gas industry’s coking process. The products of coal tar threaten to contaminate the living organic earth, upsetting delicate ecosystems. They persist as residues in soil, air and water, and accumulate in the bodies of organisms, and many of these products are known to be carcinogenic in humans (Stoff and Travis, 2019). At the same time, photographic emulsions are themselves remarkably sensitive to changes in the environment, yet such sensitivity is often neglected and unrecognised. Certainly, media theorists can be accused of overlooking the diversity and range of things that photographic materials can sense. Even in photography theory, an overemphasis on the camera as technology and the print as the finished artefact has led to a neglect of the negative and of photosensitive emulsions (Batchen, 2021: 3-5). But the industry itself also sometimes refused to acknowledge what these materials were showing them, preferring instead to eliminate these visible traces as flaws, “troubles” and accidents.
The photographic materials manufacturers, in making films and plates destined for different uses, were involved in the production of a sensory economy, prioritising certain kinds of light or radiation sensitivity over the reactivity of the materials to other substances but also budgeting the spectral range of the material’s sensitivity to ensure that a given product was oriented toward one end of the spectrum rather than the other. In The Politics of Aesthetics, Jacques Rancière describes an unequal “distribution of the sensible” according to which aesthetic sensibilities and competencies are allocated across social classes and help to determine an individual’s social destiny (Rancière, 2004). Since human sensibilities and competencies are today so entangled with technological ones, their social destinations are also entangled. As X-ray materials head for the hospitals and dental surgeries, infra-red to the police and the airforce, and so on, they are caught up in the social destinations of people and implicated in the increasing specialisation of technical roles and the development of particular skills. Sensitised photographic materials participate in what Michael Bull calls a “technological sensory training” — a concept based in Walter Benjamin’s well-known arguments (rehearsed across a number of essays from the 1930s) regarding the transformation of the human sensorium in the context of rapid technological change (Bull, 2016).
Here, I pay attention to the sensory economy that directed different sensitivities toward different social functions, and to the work that went into restricting and suppressing photographic sensitivities, as well as to the interrelation of photographic sensing, human sensing and environmental sensing. I choose to use the word “sensitivity” rather than “seeing” not because I am averse to personifying photographic technologies (on the contrary!), but because seeing tends to invoke the human eye and (in the context of photography studies) the camera and the lens, which have a long history of being imagined as prosthetic eyes. Photosensitive materials are more analogous to the retina of the eye, but even this is too restrictive. As receptive surfaces, which come to “life” through the involvement of volatile chemicals (not least that most volatile of substances, nitric acid), they are better conceived in relation to the broad range of animal and plant sensitivities, rather than as purely optical.
To develop this argument about chemical photographic sensitivities, I will use several examples: first, the unintended sensitivities of photographic materials, especially to atmospheric pollution, which posed a particular problem in interwar Britain, since most photographic materials factories were situated within reach of the London fogs. Second, using Benjamin’s argument about film and sensory experience, I will look at the work of the photographic companies in refining and shaping the sensing capacities of different emulsions, as well as the training practices that accompanied the introduction of new photographic technologies. In the third section, I consider specialised sensitised films and plates designed for scientific and military uses, and the “hacks” introduced by specialists to tailor more generalised and widely available materials to their specific needs. Their work then encouraged the industry to develop and produce more specialised materials. The fourth section is about the flaws and disruptions in photographic emulsions that appear to emanate, not from the environment, but from something in the process itself; I address the symptomatic readings practised by company chemists and by photographers, trying to establish what went wrong, and consider what happens when we think of these flaws in relation to sensitivity. Finally, I turn to the example of products and tips for photography in the tropics, which supports Winston’s notion of in-built cultural bias but also tells us something about how careful control of photographic processes, and with this, control over photographic sensitivity, becomes harnessed to larger ideas about social and environmental control and regulation.
“The fog is hardly visible to the eye”
As Kelley Wilder has argued, the history of photographic emulsions is a history of increased specialisation, of “designer emulsions”, made for different uses, able to register only specific wavelengths of visible light, or invisible forms of radiation (Wilder, 2009: 167). But in addition, especially during their manufacture, chemical photographic materials are sensitive to atmosphere, humidity, dust, temperature, the oils in human hands. From the 1840s, experimenters in photography had, both accidentally and deliberately, tested the limits of photographic sensitivity, noting its responses to substances other than light. Photographic emulsions could react to metals and oils but also to “chalk, marble, cotton and feathers”, to use Peter Galison’s list, and, importantly for the eventual development of nuclear emulsions, to uranium salt (Galison, 1997: 146).
As control over and knowledge of photographic sensitivity improved, factories producing photographic materials became more highly regulated spaces. Even the materials out of which the factory was constructed could be potential sources of contamination, and from the late nineteenth century photographic materials factories were not only equipped with darkened spaces, but had machinery plated with silver or even constructed of solid silver to prevent contamination from copper and iron (Hercock and Jones, 1979: 131). Dust was also a great risk to the sensitised photographic plates. The cutting of plates and films produced dust, which was also spread by the electric fans within the factory and by the workers who brought it into the factory on their clothes, plus it was present in the air due to the pervasiveness of coal smoke from factories, homes and the gasworks. The manufacturers set out to protect their materials from dust and other contaminants by regulating the factory interiors (and by extension the workers) to keep them as immaculate as possible. Outside yards and passages at Ilford’s factories were watered down several times a day, floors were oiled and vacuum-cleaned. Interwar promotional materials for Ilford Limited describe workers being vacuumed before they began their shifts. Possibly The Ilford-Selo Record set out to titillate its readers with mention of women workers stripping down to their underwear and vacuuming one another, though the image is not as extreme as that of the chemist William Crookes, who reportedly got around the dust problem by working naked in his darkroom (‘Behind the Scenes at the Ilford Factory’, 1935: 4;Geimer, 2018: 44).
As well as guarding against dust, reactive metals and light leaks, manufacturers had to confront the impact of invisible chemical contaminants in the air and water. Until the late 1950s, Britain continued to be beset by heavily polluted fogs loaded with sulphuric compounds, dust and oily particles, the result of emissions from the coal-fired gasworks and from coal-burning more generally. Even in the early days of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot was able to recognise that his materials were more sensitive to the London fog than he was: on 15 June 1841, he wrote to his wife, Constance Talbot, that he was struggling to photograph the view from his window because “the London atmosphere prevents a good result, even when the fog is hardly visible to the eye” (Talbot, 1841).
One article in the British Journal of Photography (BJP) in 1870 described the fog as “the great winter enemy of London photographers” (‘London Fog’, 1870: 476). These fogs, which usually began in November and persisted until February, could make it almost impossible to take photographs. Outdoors, not only did fog restrict the available sunlight but also the distinctive yellow colour of the “pea-souper” would prevent the image from registering on the yellow-insensitive photographic emulsion of the time. In the photography studios, the fog came between the sitter and the camera — as another article in the BJP expressed it: “however brightly the sitter may be illumined, the fifteen or twenty feet of smoky fog intervening between the sitter and the lens necessarily mars the brilliancy of the picture” (‘November’, 1898: 757). The studios’ own heating exacerbated the issue as it also used coal (‘Dust and Fog’, 1881: 2-3). In the darkrooms of London, high levels of hydrogen sulphide in the fog affected emulsions and developers. By the 1890s, in the small town of Ilford which was rapidly becoming a suburb of London, the Britannia Works Company (soon to be renamed “Ilford Limited”) found that even when there was no fog, the coal fires in surrounding houses and the fumes from the gasworks affected their sensitised materials (Hercock and Jones, 1979: 47).
The chemical industries that supplied photographic manufacturers were already major contributors to the coming ecological crisis (through fossil fuel exploitation, nitrogen depletion, pollution and contamination), but by the turn of the century it was becoming clear that photographic emulsions were able to sense environmental and atmospheric changes, registering the sulphur dioxide in a fog or contaminants in water. Rather than exploit this capacity, however, the manufacturers tried to limit the responsiveness of the emulsions to atmospheric and environmental variations. One way that they did this was by using coal-tar dyes to control sensitivity, themselves by-products of the very gas industry that was increasingly plaguing the photographic works.
In Ilford, the Britannia Works was situated directly across the river from the local gasworks. Following a disastrous pollution incident in 1899 that destroyed 25,000 sensitised plates in the factory drying rooms, the company introduced air conditioning (Catford, c.1955: 50). Ilford Limited’s innovation, introduced in 1902, was among the first mechanically driven air conditioning systems on record — 1902 was the year that American engineer Willis Haviland Carrier, who described himself as the “father of air conditioning”, installed his first system in the Sacklett-Wilhelms printing plant in Brooklyn, New York, and it was also the year that the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast pioneered air conditioning (Banham, 1969: 172). Ironically, but unsurprisingly, Ilford’s system was fossil fuel-driven. Given their own investment in and dependence on coal, the photographic industries had no real interest in responding to what their photographic plates were making vivid, which was the contamination of the air. Instead, they moved their factories further from the city, built upwind of the fog, or on higher ground, or they installed air conditioning — which in this context refers not only to heating and cooling, but air-washing and purification systems. In each case the aim was to address atmospheric pollution by creating or finding a space of exception. To prevent contamination of their emulsions, either the sensitised plates were moved to a less polluted atmosphere, or the atmospheric pollution was removed from the space of manufacturing, through air conditioning.
While photographic emulsions proved highly sensitive to pollution in both water and air, the wide range of chemicals used in photographic manufacture and processing, and employed to refine these sensitivities, also found their way into the local atmosphere and into the water courses. The nineteenth-century chemical industries’ polluting of the environment had had a human impact that was hard to ignore, as when the dyeworks of the 1860s repeatedly dumped arsenic waste into major European rivers and exposed their workers to toxic fumes (Travis, 1993: 96-101). By the interwar period, less toxic processes, waste filtration systems and the practice of silver recovery in photographic manufacture had reduced most of these dramatic effects. However, the polluting activities of Kodak Eastman in Rochester, New York, exposed in lawsuits in the 1990s and leaving a long legacy in the health outcomes of Rochester residents, remain notorious (Feser, 2020; Maxwell, 2020: 27-28). The dyeworks’ carcinogenic effects were studied as early as the 1890s in Germany and in the 1920s and ’30s in Britain and the USA (Stoff and Travis, 2019: 141-5). More widely, the accumulated residues of chemical works, including photographic factories, have been found to have produced subtle transformations in the surrounding ecosystems — even substances that appear harmless in isolation can turn out to be toxic to rivers and their inhabitants in combination (Bryan and Langston, 1992: 89). While sensitive photographic materials were protected from contamination by ever more sophisticated systems of “air washing” and high standards of cleanliness in the factory, the factories’ environments were treated as dumps for the effluent from these cleansing practices, and from the whole process of photographic manufacture. It is not only individual living organisms in these environments that are sensitive: rather like photographic technologies, ecosystems are themselves sensitive, since, as Bruno Latour put it in Facing Gaia, as systems they are capable of “detecting and responding rapidly to small changes” (Latour, 2017: 141).
The human sensitometry lab
In the late 1930s, Ilford Limited opened its “sensitometry” laboratory. Sensitometry is the study and measurement of the sensitivity of the materials, which ensures that different photographic films and emulsions respond in a predictable way to different intensities of light and radiation, and to different parts of the spectrum. This is, to use a phrase from the 1930s marketing of “Selo” brand film, “the power behind the lens”. It is the culmination of processes of diversification and specialisation of photographic materials, of a new sensory economy that had started in the late nineteenth century but accelerated since the 1914–18 war. The opening of sensitometry labs marks a new era in the refinement of photographic emulsions and films, and if, as Walter Benjamin argued, visual reproduction technologies such as photography and film transformed the human sensorium, then the research laboratories of the photographic companies were refining not only film but also human sensory capacities (Benjamin, 1992). In his “Work of Art” essay, written in the mid-1930s, Benjamin famously describes the effect of photographic media as “the dynamite of a tenth of a second” blowing apart the restrictions of human vision and experience (Benjamin, 1992: 229). The choice of a tenth is significant (though in some translations it becomes a “split second”), insofar as this had become the motif for photographic instantaneity, the shutter speed at which the camera outstripped the eye. In the discussion that follows this phrase, Benjamin evokes the movie camera, expanding space and slowing movement, but also the photographic enlargement which revealed what could not otherwise be seen. Film was participating in the training of a modern sensorium. This training involved not just the camera, which controlled the exposure time and broke the flow of experience into fragments, but the sensitised film itself, with its increasingly fine grain and high sensitivity that allowed for rapid exposures and greater enlargement. If photographic emulsion participated in the transformation of human perception, it follows that controlling and limiting what these sensitive materials can register might control and limit that perception.
As Derek McCormack argues in his book Atmospheric Things, entities that can respond to atmospheric variations can be understood to be “sensing” them even if they don’t make “sense” of these or “feel” them in the way that a human might (McCormack, 2018: 42). He writes that “[s]ensing is not the preserve of the capacities of human bodies. It is spread out and distributed across an array of devices, an array that is becoming more and more complex” (McCormack, 2018: 52). This distributed technological sensing is entangled with our own, formative of our own sensual and aesthetic experiences and of how we know our world and environment. Technological sensing, human and animal sensing and the sensitivities of ecosystems feedback to one another; they are reciprocally linked.
The research laboratories of the major photographic companies were shaping what was possible for human observers to detect as they calibrated and tuned the sensitivities of photographic materials. However, the “technological sensory training” of people by media is not produced simply by the media themselves. New technological media tend to arrive with instruction manuals and demonstrations, advertising and promotion materials which contribute to this training. More subtly, they remediate old media in ways that temper the shock of the new, while inculcating new habits and dispositions (Bolter and Grusin, 2000; Chun, 2016). As new photographic materials and equipment arrived on the market, the people whose sensibilities were also being calibrated and attuned included holiday makers, keen amateur photographers, professional news photographers, high street photographers and artists, who learned not solely through using the materials themselves but through pamphlets and instructional leaflets, classes, clubs and societies and, of course, the photographic magazines, where articles and letter pages shared tips and techniques. These materials taught them not only how to take photographs, but how to distinguish “good” compositions from “bad” and how to diagnose visible flaws in a print or negative.
Within the factory, too, staff had to train their sense perception in response to the demands, not only of the machinery, but also of the products that they were manufacturing. The introduction of panchromatic emulsions caused particular difficulties. The greater sensitivity of these new films and plates meant that they had to be developed in complete darkness in a light-proof tank and could not be visually checked under a red safety light during development. It also meant that workers handling the sensitised plates and films had to work in total darkness for the first time. In a speech given in the 1940s, one of Ilford Limited’s factory managers, Cecil N. Potter, remarked about how much darker the workplace had become when panchromatic and “super speed orthochromatic” plates arrived. He claimed that the women who packed the plates suffered eyestrain leading to protests, which he described in dismissive and sexist terms as “an outbreak of hysteria in the Packing Department among the girls”. He also claimed that there had been an unsuccessful trial to test whether blind people would be able to do this job more effectively (Potter, c.1945: 15).
It was not only factory workers and photographers who were undergoing technological sensory training to adapt to new photographic processes and techniques. Companies like Ilford and Kodak produced a wide range of highly specialised films for scientific, medical and military use, including those designed to sense infra-red, X-ray or nuclear radiation. In these cases, the training was itself increasingly specialised, not only requiring new bodily practices and habits, but also refined and highly particular modes of interpretation and carefully honed visual recognition. Ilford Limited kept records of all of the different sensitised films and glass plates they manufactured, collecting the labels together in one volume. From this record we can see the diversity of uses for photographic film that goes far beyond what we might call photography — including for example “Clydonograph film” used to measure changes in electrical voltage and “Cardiographic film” used in the measurement of heart beats.[2] In the 1930s the company was manufacturing at least five types of aerial film including infrared film. The firm supplied the RAF, the Admiralty, Nobel’s Explosives and G.E.C. Birmingham (General Electric Company). The human observers whose sensitivities were being tuned alongside photographic sensitivities included medical staff, particle physicists, reconnaissance officers and aerial photography specialists, who all needed to learn how to interpret the often ambiguous images produced in their distinct fields. Human and material specialisation went hand in hand.
The hack
Yet technological sensory training was not always a one-way process. Developments in film and plate manufacturing could be driven by demand from users, who would find what we might now call hacks and workarounds to control the sensitivity of the medium. An early but entertaining example is the backed plate. The first dry plates (glass plates pre-coated with a gelatine and silver-halide emulsion) were not manufactured with an opaque backing. This increased the risk of halation, in which the sensitised surface registers light twice, as it passes through the plate, bounces off the back of the camera and passes through the plate a second time. Halation was a visual effect not generally considered desirable, produced especially when the camera was pointed at a bright light source. The Ilford Manual of Photography explained that halation could be diagnosed from a negative when “[t]he reflected image exceeds the boundaries of the true image and forms a halo of density around it” (Mitchell, 1945: 254). To prevent it, photographers had to paint an opaque backing onto their plates. The materials they used were diverse: in 1885, one author recommended a backing made of powdered burnt sienna, gum, glycerine and water; in 1890, French astronomer Marie-Alfred Cornu suggested manufacturing a paste from clove oil, turpentine and soot, and rumour had it that one photographer resorted to raspberry jam (de Wiveleslie Abney, 1885: 65; Geimer, 2018: 54; Catford, c.1955: 61). As late as 1945, the Ilford Manual was recommending caramel for home-backed plates, even though since 1897 the manufacturers had been selling plates with dissolvable opaque backings. Unbacked plates and films began to be marketed on the grounds of their tendency toward the glowing effect of halation as “Aura” films. Photography had long been used in the context of spiritualism and the occult, and the name played on the popularised theosophist notion that psychic energy could be perceived (by certain mystics) as a halo of coloured light emanating from a body.
Unbacked plates also made it possible to cultivate the sensitivity of photographic materials in a new direction, making existing sensitised emulsions able to distinguish or separate out particular forms of radiation. In early nuclear emulsion research, Ilford Limited’s unbacked glass plates were frequently stacked to create layers of emulsion thick enough to ensure that alpha particles would not get past the grains of silver halide. The Japanese scientist Suekichi Kinoshita, working in Manchester and Tokyo in the 1900s and 1910s, introduced this practice. In India, Biva Chowdhury, still a student working with her tutor D.M. Bose at the Bose Institute in Calcutta, stacked Ilford plates for her cosmic ray research in the late 1930s and ’40s (Raychaudhuri, 2021: 112). In Austria, the Jewish scientist and particle physics pioneer Marietta Blau, who first published papers on her work in this field in the mid-1920s, also stacked her plates.
In the 1930s, Blau took it further, contacting Ilford and commissioning them (from about 1934) to supply her with tailor-made plates coated with a thicker layer of emulsion specifically to record the tracks of particles (Galison, 1997: 152). She found that larger grained emulsions proved more able to visibly render the tracks of alpha particles across the plate, and she and her colleague also came up with the “counterintuitive” idea of using a desensitising dye — pinakryptol yellow — which, it turned out, inhibited the emulsion’s sensitivity to beta and gamma rays without affecting the alpha tracks, although neither Blau nor the manufacturers were clear why this was so (Galison, 1997: 150-151).
It was Blau’s work that ultimately led to the development of patented nuclear emulsions. In Britain, inspired by her research, Cecil Powell worked with Ilford and Kodak to develop these specialised emulsions for particle physics. It was more than three decades after Kinoshita’s experiments that Ilford and Kodak each produced their first official nuclear emulsions: Kodak’s NT4 and Ilford’s G5 film, both launched in 1948 (Galison, 1997: 189). These nuclear emulsions, sometimes called “electron-sensitive emulsions”, could be coated to a thickness of up to two millimetres (CERN Courier, 1966). Nuclear emulsion plates continue to be used today (Ariga et al., 2020).
A central part of the training needed in specialised scientific uses of photographic materials was how to distinguish the meaningful mark from the insignificant, how to filter signal from noise. Is the thing that has been sensed something you are looking for, or is it an interloper, an intruder from the outside environment or an entity internal to the photographic process? One of the difficulties for the early researchers of cosmic rays was how to interpret the resulting, very ambiguous images. Were Marietta Blau and Biva Chowdhury seeing the traces of alpha particles on their plates, or flaws already present in the emulsion? It is precisely this that required them to become trained observers, to adjust their own perceptive abilities to allow them to make such refined distinctions.
“Working upon the border-line of fog”
Writing about nuclear emulsion research in the 1930s and ’40s, Galison describes the film as “epistemically fragile” and “rife in a hundred ways with possibilities of deception” (Galison, 1997: 42). Peter Geimer adds that photographers and chemists were dealing with “substances whose activities were neither predictable nor completely under their control” (Geimer, 2018: 42). Despite the powerful “truth claim” assigned to photographs from the early days of the medium, and the “mechanical objectivity” that these technological images were deemed to possess, these other sensitivities always clouded the matter. Sensitivity means reception — it opens the door and welcomes guests. To the photographer or the scientists, these may appear as unwanted intruders. Galison writes, “choose too sensitive a film and the observer will be overwhelmed with ‘parasitic’ effects” (Galison, 1997: 151). His choice of term recalls Michel Serres’ discussion in his book The Parasite. In his translator’s introduction to that book, Lawrence Schehr explains:
The parasite is a microbe, an insidious infection that takes without giving and weakens without killing. The parasite is also a guest, who exchanges his talk, praise, and flattery for food. The parasite is noise as well, the static in a system or the interference in a channel (Schehr in Serres, 2007: xi).
Serres himself writes, “[w]e parasite each other and live amidst parasites. Which is more or less a way of saying that they constitute our environment” (Serres, 2007: 10). Parasites are interceptors, interrupters, and they are ever-present. Serres argues that even while communication systems are designed to repress noise, “[t]he couple noise-message is part of the system” (Serres, 2007: 68). And while the task of the reader or observer seems to be distinguishing image or signal from noise, perhaps, he suggests, we “understand the message only because of the noise” (Serres, 2007: 70). Noise forms the background against which the signal can be discerned, even while its presence makes the whole task of interpretation more difficult. Serres is reflecting on the discoveries in cybernetic communications theory that noise is an integral part of communication, a product of the channel that, despite efforts to create a pure and uninterrupted signal, will always proliferate. As Steven Crocker summarises, it is “the contribution made by the medium” and “[e]ach new innovation in media promises to minimize noise and clarify the signal, but inevitably generates its own kind of noise” (Crocker, 2021: 191).
In photography generally, and in nuclear emulsions in particular (which can be exposed for weeks or months at a time), one such parasitic effect is fogging. Fog seems to have first appeared as a photographic effect, rather than an external atmospheric condition, with the invention of the wet plate collodion process in the 1850s. One of the things that is distinctive about this process is that it requires two, rather than one, developing baths, and nineteenth-century authors seemed to agree that this increased the risk of fogging. The inventor of the process, Frederick Scott Archer, attributed fogging to the “precipitation of silver” possibly caused by problems with the “exciting bath” (the silver nitrate bath that is used in the collodion process) (Archer, 1854: 27-8). In 1928, Ilford research chemist Olaf Bloch wrote about the factors leading to photographic fog appearing in gelatine emulsions. He explained that in emulsion manufacture, “[i]f, at any stage, the processes are pushed too far”, it would lead to a reduction in the difference between the exposed and unexposed crystals and the result would be fog (Bloch, 1928: 94). By 1945, The Ilford Manual of Photography was defining fog as “the term applied to the density which is obtained on parts of the sensitive surface which have received no exposure” and attributing it “either to the general action of light other than that from the lens, or to chemical action” (Mitchell, 1945: 66 and 226).
Harman Technology (the successor company of Ilford Limited) supply factsheets with their specialist films and emulsions, which advise on development times. The exposure of the sensitive emulsion causes invisible specks of silver known as “latent image centres” to form on crystals in the emulsion, and these grow during development to become the image. The factsheet for Nuclear Emulsions reads:
The development time used for processing material should be sufficient for those crystals with a latent image centre to be reduced completely, but not so long that unexposed crystals are developed. In practice, a certain number of crystals will be developed even though they do not contain a latent image centre. These grains, when developed, constitute what is known as fog or background (‘Ilford Nuclear Emulsions’, 2011).
Photographic fog is not exactly an uninvited guest. It is already inside the material, inherent to the process, always present. Bloch pointed out that there is more risk with the most highly sensitive or fast emulsions, as small variations in production and development time have greater effect: “in the case of a fast emulsion, we are working upon the border-line of fog” (Bloch, 1928: 94). Unexposed crystals (those without a latent image centre) blacken despite not having been exposed to the appropriate radiation. Ideally, these non-exposed crystals that act as if they were exposed should not exist; “in practice”, they always do. And since the emulsion only exists “in practice”, fog is unavoidable. The border-line of fog is the edge at which the newly visible risks sinking back into invisibility, the line between the sensitive and the oversensitive, evidence of the fragility and unreliability of even the most carefully calibrated and well-honed emulsion. Thus, fog is a “parasitic” effect in the same way that noise is for Serres in The Parasite. It derives from the fact that the system is not closed: every photograph is an exposure, photography is by nature leaky. This leakiness is sometimes exploited by photographers. While the industry tried to exclude fog, artists invited it in: the technique of solarisation, pioneered in the 1930s by Man Ray and Lee Miller, was a harnessing of the accidental Sabattier effect, an effect made by fogging a print through exposure to light during development.
Undeterred by the ever-lurking possibility of fog, the aim of photographic manufacturers was to produce a reliable product that kept photography’s other sensitivities tightly under control. Ilford Limited and its subsidiary companies kept detailed experiment books in which company chemists listed the issues they encountered and worked backwards from these to try to establish causes. The flaws, or “troubles” as they were often called, that were encountered in making emulsions or other photographic materials (developers, toners and so on) were read as symptoms. What they indicated was often the sensitivity of the materials to environmental variations such as shifts in temperature and humidity, to contaminants in water, air or gelatine or to other materials that came into contact with them, such as the varnish on wood, dust, metals and oils. The issues the chemists encountered could be to do with the shelf-life of materials, uneven tones and marks on the photograph surface, such as spots and fogging, issues with the viscosity or drying and setting of gelatine emulsions, or changes in contrast, softness and tones of negatives and prints. At every stage new troubles could appear: troubles with “mealiness”, with grease and froth, with “blistering” and “pimples”.[3]
In his book Inadvertent Images, Peter Geimer sees this kind of reading, practised not only by the chemists at the major companies but by all sorts of amateur photographers and experimenters, as a symptomology. He understands a symptom not as an expression, but as “a fortuitous encounter, a coincidence, or an event that disturbs the order of things” (Geimer, 2018: 4). Were these symptoms discovered by the company chemists, things external to the photographic process — in other words, were they the products of intruders, disruptive entities that the photographic material was responding to in its environment — or were they things that are internal to photography, products of photography itself? Photographic materials do not exist in isolation; they neither entirely manufacture their own “flaws”, nor are they simple recipients of impressions. Invariably, the line between what is internal and external to the process becomes difficult to draw. In a similar vein to Serres, Geimer argues that excess information or “noise” is not a “deficit” but “a specific potential of photography” (Geimer, 2018: 7). Geimer is interested in the origins of these “disturbances” that happen in the process of the image’s “emergence into visibility” (Geimer, 2018: 33). Drawing on Paul Virilio, he argues that the accident or flaw is innate to the medium itself (Virilio, 2007). Virilio himself, responding to Aristotle’s claim that “the accident reveals the substance”, argued that the “invention of the ‘substance’ is equally invention of the accident” and that therefore “production of any ‘substance’ is equally production of a typical ‘accident’” (Virilio 2007: 5, 70). Or as Geimer puts it, instead of accidents being “events that befall us from outside”, they are latent in the process — unforeseen, but always already possible, unexpected and yet “waiting to happen” (Geimer, 2018: 50).
There’s a mismatch in scale between Virilio’s observations about the “original accident” — Virilio speaks of catastrophe and cataclysm on a global scale — and Geimer’s discussion of minor photographic flaws. Nevertheless, photography is a technology and it has substance, and the symptomology practised by photographers and chemists would seem to suggest that these flaws that “crop up” on the surface of the image can be thought of as the eruption of “what is beneath” — which is how Virilio thinks of accidents and substance (Virilio, 2007: 10). But if we are dealing with sensitive substances, this metaphysics of surface and depth is complicated. The chemical photographic surface (print or negative) is crystalline, the emulsion is supported by a substrate (acetate, glass and, at one time, celluloid) but the image does not simply sit on the emulsion; it is in the emulsion, itself formed of crystals. The surface is not the expression of a hidden substance (or inner truth), but the substance (emulsion) itself, behaving as it behaves, registering its interactions with other substances in the atmosphere, in the developing bath, with the hands of the photographer herself. Thinking about photographic emulsions in these terms might help us to see the practices of refining these processes, not in terms of eliminating accidents but as suppressing sensitivities, restricting what the emulsion can “see” or register.
To understand flaws not as accidents at all (even integral or original ones), but as qualities of the sensitive material, shifts the orientation. For example: poorly mixed chemicals or ones used at the “wrong” temperature would result in “badly” developed negatives. Conceive of these as accidents in Virilio’s sense and they reveal a “hidden truth” of the technology and of its invention (Virilio, 2007: 11). Consider them as resulting from the sensitivity of the material, its ability to react differently to even the subtlest changes in temperature or the balances of chemicals, and it reveals only what the technological practice of photography and the industry tries to suppress about its materials: their wild tendency to do more than they are supposed to do, their oversensitivity, which must be harnessed and controlled. One story of the interwar photography industry would say that in this period it produced ever more advanced products and improved the consistency and reliability of its products through the rationalisation of its processes. Another (mine) might instead look at how the industry devoted itself to the expansion of photography’s sensory capacities in relation to radiation, at the same time as it devoted itself to the elimination of its other sensitivities (such as towards the polluted London atmosphere). The ideal photographic emulsions would be insensitive to changes in temperature and humidity, immune to the gases and particles contaminating the air. Its potential in this direction would ideally be entirely stifled. So the chemical photographic industry simultaneously develops and suppresses the potentials of photographic sensing — what the photograph can “see”.
A technoscientific sublime
The example of photography in the tropics also shows the struggle of photographers to avoid disturbances and parasitic effects from an environment that seems unable to resist intruding into the darkroom and the camera, and generally making a mockery of the colonial photographer’s carefully planned and systematic approach. Largely manufactured in the temperate climates of Europe and North America, photographic materials and equipment were not made for extremes of climate, and photographers from the temperate regions struggled with darkroom work in the hot and humid tropics. In numerous articles in the British photographic press, photographers complained that the heat of these regions sped up development, making it difficult to control the process as the picture appeared too quickly, while fixers and salts exploded out of their containers, and the gelatine-based emulsions swelled and softened, even sliding off the plate while in the fixing bath. Negatives that were exposed and not yet developed would become mottled by the heat, while prints came out “foggy, black stained or splotched” or had a “distinct yellow haze” (Smith cited in Quanchi, 2009: 41; Dykes, 1922: 310). Photographers found that their prints and films deteriorated quickly in tropical climates. The high levels of moisture also had a destructive effect on cameras, which were manufactured using leather, wood and metal. The leather and wood rotted or was attacked by insects and mould, the metal parts rusted, the lenses were filled with condensation or fungi. One writer described perspiration “actually dripping off one’s fingers over the emulsion” and ants that “dine off the emulsion and thrive on it”, with darkrooms invaded by giant horned beetles and sudden flashes of blue lightning (Dykes, 1922: 310). His account reinforced a widely accepted British view of the tropics as excessive, decadent and extravagant, in contrast to a British (and especially, English) climate and nature regarded as temperate, mild, picturesque and generally ideal for photography — this despite incessant rainfall and the persistent winter fogs. It also revealed the dependence of the whole endeavour on local labour — “native carriers” who carefully transported all of the photographer’s heavy equipment (including cinematographic equipment) on their heads (Dykes, 1922: 311).
The photographic materials companies responded to photographers’ tales of tropical photography with specialist products for hot and moist climates, including slower darkroom chemicals to counter the effects of heat. Ilford’s “tropical hardener” was designed to enable gelatine to set in tropical conditions. Patented in 1918 and marketed via Johnson & Sons of Finsbury, chemical supplier to the photographic industry, it was the product of Ilford Limited’s experiments with simulating tropical conditions in a special climate-controlled tropical darkroom built within the factory in early 1918 (Agnew, 1920: 120-123). At Kodak Ltd., the research scientist Walter Clark would later be sceptical of such attempts at simulation, arguing that the tropical atmosphere, its organisms and its air, could not be reproduced in a lab (Feser, 2020: 236-7). This unreproducible environment was too rich, too full of life; in general, too much.
The difficulties that colonial photographers had in adapting their processes to the climatic and environmental conditions of the tropics could be taken as examples of how photographic sensitivity had a built-in ideological and racist bias, as Winston suggests. Specialist tropical materials and advice for working in tropical conditions reinforced a wider cultural perception of tropical zones as exceptional and exotic. In the nineteenth century, there had even been fears that the British Empire would invariably flounder in tropical conditions, which seemed to harbour deadly diseases, and many felt that the best strategy was to shut out the outside world as much as possible, effectively placing colonising populations in their own carefully managed environments to ensure “thermal comfort” and protection from disease (Valen, 2020: n.p.; Ackermann, 2002:23-25).
However, the example also reveals how the industry navigated environmental conditions for which the process had not been initially designed. By the mid-twentieth century, attitudes had shifted and increasingly there was a sense that the environment and the colonised peoples and nature could be technologically managed. In medicine, there was a move from an older discourse of “climatic determinism”, in which a tropical climate was always going to be an impediment to White colonisation, to a new vision of a technologically enhanced, highly disciplinary, bureaucratic and regulated colonial order that promised to overcome the disorder threatened by the tropics (Anderson, 2003: 37-42). Warwick Anderson names this the “technoscientific sublime” (Anderson, 2003: 42). His use of the phrase invokes earlier discussions of the sublime by writers such as Leo Marx and Rob Wilson where “sublime” involves a double move of evoking awe (the older Kantian sense of the term) and “sublimation”, in which the opposition and the suffering of native peoples is, in Wilson’s phrase, “wiped away from such scenes of technological redemption” (Wilson, 1992: 207; Marx, 1964).
I suggest that tropical photography products also participate in this. Ilford’s tropical darkroom was an early laboratory along these lines. Managing photographic seeing becomes part of a wider effort to tame and manage an unruly environment (implicitly linked to unruly colonised peoples). Unlike the factory’s air conditioning systems, it was not predicated on creating spaces of exception, but on the production of innovative technologies that made it possible to “see” even in the most trying circumstances. In bringing the tropics into visibility, making them photographable, reproducible, taming their wild excesses, the photographic industries nevertheless suppressed other sights and other modes of perception. The abundance and pervasiveness of tropical nature, of fungi and plants and insects that made their way into cameras, ate away at gelatine emulsions and plagued photographers in their darkrooms, was repressed in favour of photographic transparency. As tropical environments were increasingly managed and regulated, so the regulation of photographic materials becomes part of this larger colonial-managerial effort. Like the labour of the West Africans who transported Dykes’ equipment, this work is also invisible in the finished photographs and films.
Writing about early-1900s photographs of Antarctica, Liz Watkins describes how the photographic emulsion “registers the effects of an inhospitable climate” and how the flaws on the plates (including marks and scratches produced by the difficulty of work in a freezing climate) worked to support “the ideation of the incomprehensible in narratives of polar exploration” and helped to shape public discourse about the Antarctic (Watkins, 2021: 482). This logic suggests that advances in tropical photography might actually damage the discourse — found across the photographic magazines in the 1910s and ’20s — in which the colonial photographer is a brave adventurer and every image a struggle to achieve (Henning, 2020: 4-7). Instead, erasing the difficulties of photography in so-called tropical regions made it possible to open them up to a new kind of touristic gaze, and allowed for a legible iconography of tropicality in the form of recurrent visual tropes that market a “tropical dream” (Thompson, 2006: 297-8, 302). This is only possible because the unmanageability of the tropical, its threatening and disruptive nature, has been suppressed through the control of certain kinds of photographic sensitivity.
Conclusion
One way of looking at the twentieth-century refining of photographic seeing might be as an ongoing process of “baking in” certain kinds of ideological bias through the suppression of photography’s other sensitivities. The history of photographic seeing is in this sense a history of not-seeing, of blinkers and blinds, but also of the suppression of other modes of perception. The manipulation of chemical emulsions brought about changes in photographic sensitivity that had effects on what humans were capable of sensing, and the ways they were trained to perceive some entities and not others. They also had effects on ecosystems that detect and respond to the wet technology in different ways, as the balance of gases and compounds in the atmosphere, water and soil are altered, and as organisms absorb, consume and adapt to new presences in their environments. To reduce these entangled sensing systems to “seeing” is like reducing the complexity of our animal sensoria to just one sense. This is what we, as theorists and historians, have tended to do, but it is also what the photographic industry tried to do, in flattening lively, reactive photographic sensing to make a perfect, transparent, medium of visibility. Today our photographic technologies might appear more lively in some ways (mobile and malleable) while also being ever more tightly controlled. As with chemical photography, they make some things visible and knowable, while suppressing others. The digital image, like the chemical image, has racial and other biases directly built in, but also the fact that the image we see is already mediated by software within the camera itself makes it harder to unearth and expose contemporary photography’s “other sensitivities”.
References
Ackermann, M. (2002) Cool Comfort: America’s Romance with Air-Conditioning. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Agnew, A.P. (1920) ‘Development Under Tropical Conditions’, The Photographic Journal (March): 120-123.
Anderson, W. (2003) ‘The Natures of Culture: Environment and Race in the Colonial Tropics’, in P. R. Greenough and A. Lowenhaupt Tsing (eds.) Nature in the Global South: Environmental Projects in South and Southeast Asia. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 29-46.
Ariga, A., T. Ariga, G. D. Lellis, A. Ereditato, and K. Niwa(2020)‘Nuclear Emulsions’, in C. Fabjan and H. Schopper (eds.) Particle Physics Reference Library. Cham:Springer.
Archer, F.S. (1854) The Collodion Process on Glass, Second Edition. London.
Banham, R. (1969) The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment. London: Architectural Press.
‘Behind the Scenes at the Ilford Factory’ (1935) The Ilford-Selo Record, 1935-36, MS0232/49/5, Museum of Science and Industry Manchester.
Benjamin, W. (1992) ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in H. Arendt, ed. Illuminations, trans.H. Zohn. London: Fontana Press, pp. 217-251.
Bloch, O. F. (1928) ‘The Chemist in the Photographic Industry’, The British Journal of Photography (February 17): 94-96.
Bolter, J.D. and R. Grusin (2000) Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press.
Bordwell, D., J. Staiger and K. Thompson (1988) The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. London: Routledge.
Braunmühl, C. (2018) ‘Beyond Hierarchical Oppositions: A Feminist Critique of Karen Barad’s Agential Realism’, Feminist Theory 19(2): 223-240.
Broomberg and Chanarin (2012) ‘To Photograph the Details of a Dark Horse in Low Light’, Artwork first exhibited at Paradise Row, London, 2012. Details online at http://www.broombergchanarin.com/hometest#/to-photograph-a-dark-horse-in-low-light-1-1/ Accessed 16 February 2024.
Bryan, G. W. and W. J. Langston (1992) ‘Bioavailability Accumulation and Effects of Heavy Metals in Sediments with Special Reference to United Kingdom Estuaries: A Review’, Environmental Pollution, 76(2): 89-131.
Bull, M. (2016) ‘Technological Sensory Training’ in J.G. Papenburg and H. Schulze (eds.) Sound as Popular Culture: A Research Companion. Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, pp.233-239.
Catford, A.J. (c. 1955) ‘Our First 75 Years’, unpublished manuscript. Box 1361, 90/359/E1/6 Redbridge Museum and Heritage Centre.
CERN Courier (1966) ‘Nuclear Emulsions’, 6 (May), pp. 83-87. Available online at https://cerncourier.com/a/nuclear-emulsions/ (Accessed: 8 December 2023).
Chun, W. H. K. (2016) Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media. Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press.
Crocker, S. (2021) ‘“As Soon as We Are Two There is a Medium”: Michel Serres’ Philosophy of Relations’, Media Theory, 5(1): 186-200.
‘Dust and Fog’ (1881) The British Journal of Photography, 28(1079): 2-3.
Dykes, R. (1922) ‘Photography in Tropical West Africa’, The British Journal of Photography 69 (3238): 310-311.
Feser, A. (2020) ‘Reproducing Photochemical Life in the Imaging Capital of the World’, PhD dissertation, The University of Chicago, 2020.
Galison, P. (1997) Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Geimer, P. (2018) Inadvertent Images: A History of Photographic Apparitions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Harman Technology, factsheet for Nuclear Emulsions.
Henning, M. (2020) ‘The Worlding of Light and Air: Dufaycolor and Selochrome in the 1930s’, Visual Culture in Britain, 21(2): 177-198.
Hercock, R. J. and G. A. Jones (1979) Silver by the Ton: The History of Ilford Limited, 1879-1979. Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill.
‘Ilford Nuclear Emulsions’ (2011) Ilford Photo. Available online at https://www.ilfordphoto.com/amfile/file/download/file/1855/product/579/. Accessed 16 February 2024.
Latour, B. (2017) Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climate Regime. Cambridge: Polity.
Leslie, E. (2006) Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry. London: Reaktion.
‘London Fog’ (1870) The British Journal of Photography, 17(544): 476.
Marx, L. (1964) The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. London and New York: Oxford University Press.
Maxwell, R. (2020) ‘Green Accounting for a Creative Economy’, in Kate Oakley and Mark Banks (eds.) Cultural Industries and the Environmental Crisis: New Approaches for Policy, Cham: Springer, pp. 25-36.
McCormack, D. P. (2018) Atmospheric things: On the allure of elemental envelopment. Durham: Duke University Press.
Mees, C. E. K. (1936) ‘Sensitizing Dyes and their Use in Scientific Photography’, Nature 137(3470): 726-730.
Mitchell, J. (1945) The Ilford Manual of Photography. London: Ilford Limited.
‘November’ (1898) The British Journal of Photography, 45 (2012): 757.
Pope, W. J. (1918) ‘Presidential Address. The Future of Pure and Applied Chemistry’, Journal of the Chemical Society, 113: 289-300.
Potter, C.N. (c. 1945) ‘The Works’, unpublished talk. Box 1362, 90/359/E1/3, Redbridge Museum and Heritage Centre.
Roth, L. (2009) ‘Looking at Shirley, the Ultimate Norm: Colour Balance, Image Technologies, and Cognitive Equity’, Canadian Journal of Communication, 34: 111-136
Travis, A.S. (1993) The Rainbow Makers: The Origins of the Synthetic Dyestuffs Industry in Western Europe.London: Associated University Presses.
Quanchi, M. (2009) Photographing Papua: Representation, Colonial Encounters and Imaging in the Public Domain. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Rancière, J. (2004) The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. G. Rockhill. London: Continuum.
Raychaudhuri, S. (2021) The Roots and Development of Particle Physics in India, Springer Briefs in History of Science and Technology.
Serres, M. (2007 [1980]) The Parasite. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Stoff, H. and A. S. Travis (2019) ‘Discovering Chemical Carcinogenesis: The Case of Aromatic Amines’ in E.Homburg and E.Vaupel (eds.) Hazardous Chemicals: Agents of Risk and Change, 1800–2000. New York: Berghahn, pp.137-178.
Talbot, W. H. F. (1841), ‘Letter to Constance Talbot’, June 15, 1841. The Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot, Project dir. Larry Schaaf. Available at http://foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk/ document no. 4282 (Accessed: 8 December 2023).
Thompson, K.A. (2006) An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque. Durham: Duke University Press.
Valen, D. (2020) ‘Imperial Atmospheres: Race and Climate Control on the Niger’, ABE Journal: Architecture beyond Europe 17(2020).
Virilio, P. (2007) The Original Accident, trans. J. Rose. Cambridge: Polity.
Watkins, L. (2021) ‘The Spectacle of “Nothing”: the Image, Material, and Object in a Photographic Ecosystem of Antarctica’, photographies, 14(3): 481-503.
Wilder, K. (2009) ‘Photography and the Art of Science’, Visual Studies 24(2): 163–168.
Wilson, R. (1992) ‘Techno-Euphoria and the Discourse of the American Sublime’ boundary 2, 19(1): 205-229.
Winston, B. (1985) ‘A Whole Technology of Dyeing: A Note on Ideology and the Apparatus of the Chromatic Moving Image’, Daedalus, 114(4): 105-123
Wollen, P. (1980) ‘Cinema and Technology: A Historical Overview’, in T. de Lauretis and S. Heath (eds.) The Cinematic Apparatus. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Notes
[1] This article draws on my research in the archives of Ilford Limited, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council under grant no. AH/R014639. Thanks to the anonymous reviewers and to my departmental colleagues, especially Antal Wozniak who organised the “Cake for Comments” event at which they gave me very useful feedback.
[2] Box 1379, Ilford Limited collection, Redbridge Museum and Heritage Centre.
[3] 90/359/B1/A13 in box 1372 Ilford Limited collection, Redbridge Museum and Heritage Centre.
Michelle Henning is Professor in Photography and Media in the Department of Media and Communications, School of the Arts, University of Liverpool, UK. Her books include Photography: The Unfettered Image (2018) and she is currently writing a book on photography and atmosphere drawing on the archives of Ilford Limited.
Leave a Reply