Visibility by Destruction/Disturbance
Visibility by Destruction/Disturbance
Incidents of Photography
Since the early nineteenth century, every new photographic process has engendered novel and specific forms of disruption as well. This chapter traces these photographic contaminations from the early pictures of the French and English pioneers of photography to the scientists, artists, and amateurs who began to investigate them in the late nineteenth century. Thus, the ambivalence of image noise comes into view: although it initially appeared primarily as an obvious “defect,” “flaw,” or even “enemy,” it very soon also revealed its specific surplus value. Artists like August Strindberg now elaborated an aesthetic of noise and exploited the vicissitudes of the photochemical processes to produce unpredictable images. In the field of scientific photography, researchers recognized that ostensible defects and contaminations frequently turned out to reveal phenomena that had hitherto gone unnoticed. Around 1900, attention increasingly turned to the depiction of objects, fluxes, or radiations that were virtually invisible to the naked eye (distant galaxies, objects in rapid motion, or phenomena like electricity, X-rays, or radioactivity). The highly sensitive photographic materials confronted scientists and amateur photographers with an excessive production of traces whose invisible sources were often virtually undetectable and raised the question of the truth of photography.
Keywords: noise, contamination, materiality, invisibility
Chicago Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
