A. H. Binden, Lightning, 1888; gelatin silver print.

Recognizing the materiality, lineage, recurrence, and confluence of diverse modes of imaging ties them to a shifting earthly reality instead of to a vague "something" existing immaterially above or transcendentally beyond. Understanding that instruments belong to a broader technological system and are integral to connective theories and practices of visual communication allows us to situate them with a more inclusive endeavor, where art and science do not so much rival each other as intermingle and branch.

-Barbara Maria Stafford, "Revealing Technologies/Magical Domains," Devices of Wonder

Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840-1900 at SF MOMA presents images of early scientific photography that revealed the imperceptible, unknown, and unfamiliar to the Nineteenth century viewer. This exhibition is divided into five galleries, each dedicated to a specific subject: Microscopes, Telescopes, Motion, Electricity & Magnetism, and X-rays & "Spirit Photography". Produced with early photographic and optical technologies, these images range from highly focused renderings to both soft and high contrast abstract images reminiscent of Modernist geometric and organic abstraction. While Associate Curator Corey Keller intends for Brought to Light to address the invisible, it also illustrates the trajectory that science and optical technologies have pursued beyond the examination of the clearly visible and tangible to the increasingly abstract. While photography documents visual phenomenon by recording light as it plays off the subject of observation, its analogous process created limitations that Nineteenth century scientists supplemented with more traditional types of visual record, like observational drawing and three-dimensional model making. Even today, as photographic imaging has become more sophisticated, scientists still employ other visual media (e.g., two dimensional graphic imaging, computer simulations, graphs and charts, etc.) to supplement photography, as our increasing interest in abstract and theoretical issues require multiple forms of representation to fully comprehend and explain the complexities of the world we inhabit.

The show begins with photomicrography that expanded the public's understanding of the minuscule and our own optical deficiencies. While the microscopic is undetectable to the unaided eye, the photographic process also had shortcomings, as scientists and photographers were still developing the chemistry behind these early emulsion techniques. Apart from the need for huge volumes of light and long exposure times, the color blue didn't react to the emulsions at the same rate as other colors in the spectrum. Fernand Monpillard's Leg of a Wasp: Dark Yellow Object is a composition of three images: one photographic, one watercolor, and one photograph made with special emulsions and colored gels. Because the photographic process was unable to render Monpillard's own visual experience of looking through the microscope, he presents three images using three different techniques. Moreover, Leg of a Wasp illustrates the transition that scientific exploration was experiencing by relying on the history of observational drawing while embracing the emerging photographic technologies.

Crater image from James Nasmyth and James Carpenter's The Moon: Considered as a Planet, A World, and a Satellite.

While Monpillard's Leg of a Wasp explores issues of representation in the micro, in The Moon: Considered as a Planet, A World, and a Satellite (1874) James Nasmyth and James Carpenter have examined representation of the distant and the macro. With the aid of a high power telescope, Nasmyth and Carpenter created observational drawings of the moon's topography over an extended period of time and at various levels of detail, as visibility and the Earth's and moon's rotational axes and orbits cause the appearance of the lunar surface to fluctuate, as both the subject's location and the object of study are in constant motion. Nasmyth and Carpenter then synthesized these drawings to create plaster models of the moon's terrain and photographed them in sunlight to, "faithfully produce the lunar effects of light and shadow". Again, because the imaging technologies were still being developed, Nasmyth and Carpenter needed to rely upon their observational drawing and model making skills while taking advantage of the emerging photographic technologies to study and explain the complexity of the moon's surface. Up to the time that we landed on the moon, and even still today, scientists were/are forced to study the moon remotely making our knowledge of it an abstract amalgam of various modes of representation, including visual, mathematical, and linguistic.


Illustration of Étienne-Jules Marey's zoetrope for studying the flight of birds.

While scientists were using photography to uncover the micro and macro, Étienne-Jules Marey, like Eadweard Muybridge, was studying the dynamics of motion. Marey devoted much of his study to the mechanics of flight and the motion of animals through chronophotographic studies and mechanical models. Before the invention of the movie camera, chronophotography allowed scientists and photographers to take sequential still images that froze the motion of animals and people. Based on his chronophotographs of pigeons and seagulls Marey created three dimensional plaster and bronze models of the birds at various intervals of their flight cycle. Marey then placed his models in a large zoetrope. As the zoetrope spun, Marey was able to study and reproduce the mechanics of the birds' flight at various speeds and detail. Besides illustrating the dynamics of flight, Marey's projects reveal the abstraction involved in studying motion that is too fast or slow to examine with the unaided eye. Motion, like scale, requires the suturing of various forms of visual record, in Marey's case: chronophotographs, models, and zoetropes.

While few scientists today still rely upon observational drawing, many scientists employ two dimensional graphic representations and three-dimensional models to diagram, dissect, and explain their work to each other and the larger public. Brought to Light addresses the difficulty and play that the very process of representation creates and allows for. In addition to the technical aspects of photography (e.g., exposure time, film type, print type, light and color correction and filtering, etc.) that can effect the way visual phenomenon are recorded, ideology and context effects the way that images are read and interpreted. Along with understanding the various processes through which the images in Brought to Light were produced, we must also consider the many different ways the Nineteenth century viewer may have read these images. While photography at its inception was awe inspiring, it was also held in suspicion and now in the Twenty-first century, with the proliferation of digital media and the ease of image manipulation we again question the credibility of the photograph as document.

Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840-1900 will be on view at SF MOMA through January 4th, 2009.