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4. Photography of the Invisible
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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Chapter 4 hotography of the nvisible An 1882 Photographic News essay, “What Photography Does for Science,” compared the proliferation of photography during the late 1870s and early 1880s to the hierarchies within the rising Victorian labor market for domestic service. Roughly forty years after its invention, the author wrote, the camera was no longer an “upper-servant” but rather a “maid of all work.” After elaborating on photography’s value in the self-registration of meteorological and other instruments , the author reported, however, that “when photography is used as means of investigation . . . more interest attaches to the subject, and within the past two years especially there have been some wonderful discoveries made through the medium of our art.” Although he stressed the role of technology, the skill of the worker was also crucial. The taking of a scientific picture inevitably involved making aesthetic choices, judgments, and interventions. “Upper-servant” photography included new medical research on the action of the heart; discoveries in the chemical analysis of iron and steel by means of spectroscopic work; astronomical photographs of the spectrum, star spectra, and the sun’s orb; the measurement of skull sections in anthropology; and pictures of the thickness of the ice crust at different altitudes. He was delighted “to find that the camera showed to the world something that previously had been invisible ”: bacteria. In his pioneering studies of bacteria, Robert Koch “found not only bacteria present in animal tissue, but he found, too, by taking pictures of the tiny organisms, that their shape and form varied with the nature of the disease by which the animal tissue had been attacked . . . As these organisms were not visible under the microscope, to photography alone is due their discovery.”1 Whereas in meteorology scientists assembled images of phenomena seen by amateur photographers, many of them unspecialized in meteorology, the centralization of bacteriology in medical school laboratories meant that the photography of bacteria was practiced and interpreted by experts trained in the use of microscopical techniques. Microscopy imposed special problems of corroboration because it revealed to the eye completely unfamiliar images. As Gerard 159 L’E. Turner has shown, in the second half of the nineteenth century the microscope increased in scientific importance, creating a need for rapid and efficient means of communicating results, to which photography and new printing techniques were essential.2 The issues raised in the field of public health by the photographing of microscopic objects generated a fascinating and complex discussion about the different levels of seeing in Victorian science, and raises new questions for us to consider in thinking about scientific photography. Early photographs of bacteria caused a sensation in England from the mid-1870s to 1910. Some idea of this excitement can be gleaned from the many writings about them in scientific atlases, medical journals, newspapers, and magazines. The first part of this chapter offers a history of photography in bacteriology that suggests its importance in medical teaching and thus in the spread of laboratory knowledge about bacteria as research objects. The second part examines the relation of drawing to photography and, in particular, how drawings supplemented photography’s limitations for showing and preserving scientific meanings of bacteria. Consideration of the visual imagery of bacteria that circulated in print, from the popularscience book to the scientific atlas to the periodical magazine, points to how different visual representations of bacteria carried ideological unity and coherence . The debate over bacteria photographs centered not simply on the truth or falsity of representation but also on whether photographs could be accurately paraphrased by drawings. The Microbian Craze The manufacture and subsequent evolution of the first photographs of bacteria excited interest in the possibilities inherent in the new science of photomicrography as well as in the new science of bacteriology. During the second half of the nineteenth century, many forms associated today with modern science emerged, from the creation of multiple scientific societies devoted to singular disciplines, to the rise of laboratories and the expansion of university-based instruction in the experimental sciences. From 1870 to 1914, British scientists gained public platforms and greater prestige as scientific observation became associated with the skills of political leadership. Men of science were widely seen as better leaders than military heroes, social reformers, and politicians. One contemporary declared, “In this new world, where . . . observation suffices to put us on the road to discovery, we never pause, but always advance.”3 As another observer put it...