Transformation and Trouble: Photography as a Tool in Nineteenth-Century France
9 November 2023 - 1600 (GMT) / 1700 (CET) / 1100 (EST) / 0800 (PST)
It is hard to overestimate the extent to which the advent of photography in the early nineteenth century changed the course of visual culture in France and abroad. New photographic inventions, such as Louis Daguerre’s ‘diorama’ (a popular Parisian spectacle featuring theatrical painting and lighting effects) introduced novel visual mechanisms to a wide audience. Though denigrated by critics like Charles Baudelaire for its presumed limitation to merely reproduce the visible world, photography was in fact in dialogue with other means of visual expression. Artists such as Eugène Delacroix and Paul Cezanne were indebted to the medium for the development of many of their paintings; Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic studies of bodies in motion allowed artists such as Edgar Degas to reconsider the artist’s capacity to depict movement. While linked to aesthetic and scientific advancement, however, photography was equally a vital tool for French colonial endeavours, reinforcing propagandistic messages, justifying missionary activities, and lending seemingly objective evidence to the pseudoscientific project of eugenics and related endeavours of white supremacy. The tool of photography was put to many uses, unified by its promise of technological progress.
We are pleased to announce the following speakers:
Isabelle Lynch (University of Pennsylvania) - "'World Without Sun': The Diving Bell, The Camera, and the Rapture of the Deep."
“Is an underwater environment unsuitable for taking good photographs?” pondered marine zoologist and pioneering underwater photographer Louis Boutan (1859–1934), frustrated with what he described as the “shapeless” and “clouded” images taken by his submerged camera while researching mollusks at the Observatoire océanologique (Arago Marine Laboratory) in Banyuls-sur-Mer, France. Artificial light made photography possible in spaces no sunlight reaches, and as early as 1893, Boutan seized artificial fire to conquer the depths of darkness and bring forth pictures of the sea floor.
Described by the oceanographer and filmmaker Jacques Cousteau as a kind of “Prometheus who had given mankind fire and thus artificial light,” Boutan developed underwater flash technologies, specialized camera housings, and remote-control technologies for deep waters using an electromagnet. Collaborating with electrical engineers M. Chaffour and (later) Joseph David, Boutan developed various lighting technologies to illuminate and visualize underwater environments: dangerously explosive underwater flash bulbs where magnesium coils burned inside oxygen-filled glass bottles, and later, battery powered carbon-arc lamps. How might the materiality and agential capacities of artificial light—which explodes and creates dense clouds of vapor—confound ambitions of scientific objectivity and oceanic visuality? Situating Boutan’s experiment with underwater flash photography within the context of burgeoning research in underwater optics, this paper considers the temporality and “liquid intelligence” of artificial light.
Isabelle Lynch is a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania who studies modern and contemporary art. Her dissertation focuses on the role of artificial light in processes of photographic exposure, development, and projection. She currently lives in Chicago where she teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
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Édouard de Saint-Ours (University of St Andrews) - “Capturing the French imperial imagination: Émile Gsell’s photographs at the edge of colonial desires in Indochina, 1865–79”
In Picturing Empire (1997), James Ryan writes that Samuel Bourne’s aesthetic motivations in creating his commercial photographic portfolio of the British Raj between 1863 and 1870 does not absolve his work of imperial ideology because the context of imperialism was itself ‘a major source of imaginative power’ for photographers (p. 55). This was a euphemism, considering the colonial biases conveyed both in Bourne’s writings and photographs. There were many ways in which photographers could and did support the global agendas of imperial powers, whether they were operating at the forefront of colonial expansion or at the very centre of empire, whether their pictures were disseminated as prints in colonial settlements, or as engravings in the mainland’s illustrated journals.
Émile Gsell is a case in point. A commercial photographer operating from Saigon, the capital city of French Cochinchina (present-day Ho Chi Minh City in southern Vietnam) from 1865 until his death in 1879, he appears to have received only one commission from the colonial authorities. Yet his work often embodied the edge of French designs in Southeast Asia, whether geographically thanks to the expeditions he was able to join, or iconographically through the performance of colonial desires in front of the lens (depicting indigenous women as available, presenting local rulers as loyal allies, rendering tribal people as tame and visible). Furthermore, Gsell’s photographs also circulated widely in illustrated journals and books rife with colonial rhetoric and in the colonial sections of international exhibitions. In this talk, which draws on material in my dissertation, I argue that the apparent contradiction between commission and production actually bears witness to a tacit transaction existing between Gsell and the colonial project at large, as well as to the systemic nature of this relation and the efficacy of photography as a tool of imperial vision. I suggest that the imperial imagination was so ingrained in colonial society that an ambitious and savvy photographer could not fail to give it visual currency. In turn, his production, made appealing by a certain talent for the medium, could not fail to sell.
Édouard de Saint-Ours is a historian of photography specializing in the early development of the medium in Asia. Trained in art history and museology at the École du Louvre (2012–2017), he pursued his doctoral studies at the Universities of St Andrews (Art History) and Le Havre (Contemporary History) and is preparing a thesis on the place of photography within the French colonial enterprise in Indochina in the 19th century. His work has been published in the journals History of Photography, Photographica and Le Magasin du XIXe siècle, and more recently in the collective work Mondes photographiques, histoire des débuts (2023), the catalogue of the exhibition "Ouvrir l'album du monde. Photographies (1842-1911)" at the Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac. Édouard de Saint-Ours also works at the Musée national des arts asiatiques - Guimet, where he took over as Curator of Photographic Collections in October 2023.
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Joshua Teasdale (University of Oxford) - “Capturing Subjectivity in Late Nineteenth-Century Photographic Catalogues”
Animal Locomotion (1884–87) by Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) was a pioneering use of the camera to depict the spectrum of human movement. It is often incorporated into narratives of Western modernity, wherein the camera surpasses the limitations of the human eye, enabling the rationalisation of the natural world. In these accounts, Muybridge appears to utilise the device to accumulate swathes of visual information, which he gathered into categories and then brought together as a catalogue. As a result, Animal Locomotion has been implicated in the emergence of modern discourses fusing knowledge and power. However, we can fruitfully re-situate his work within a cultural context of experimentation with representational forms, revealing salient tensions with unexpected works. L’Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière (1878) was a visual record of physical symptoms observed in patients with hysteria at L’Hôpital de la Salpêtrière; it functioned as a conduit for comprehending this altered state of consciousness. These physical expressions were subsequently cited by Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) in his Gates of Hell (1880–1917) to convey his subjects’ psychological torment. Through re-framing the catalogue, we can begin to reconsider photography’s relationship to subjectivity in Muybridge’s canonical work.
Joshua Teasdale is a research student at the University of Oxford’s Department of History of Art, and a member of Wadham College. He holds both a BA and MSt degree from Oxford, in History and History of Art, respectively. His research focuses on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century intellectual culture in Britain, France, and the US, with a particular interest in the relationship between representation and subjectivity. His thesis is supervised by Professor Jane Garnett, and titled: ‘Mathematics, Marble, and Martial Arts: Art in Motion from 1887 to 1930’.
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Sophie Lynch (University of Chicago) - "The Blur of Market Labor: Eugène Atget’s Photographs of Les Halles"
This paper considers the blurs that emerge across Eugène Atget’s photographs of market vendors at Les Halles, the busy central market of 19th century Paris. As a visual effect, photographic blur is often an indication of movement that could not be apprehended: residue of that which eluded the speed of the shutter. In these works, the photographer’s lack of control over the unfolding movements of labor offers a series of images that are not easily legible. A spectral figure appears to hover over boxes of fresh produce, lingering on the threshold of photographic visibility. In another photograph, women are hunched over counters, the rapid movements of hands counting coins or garlic cloves blurred by the photographic apparatus. Through the movements of their labor, the figures resist complete photographic legibility. Indistinct expanses invite the deceleration of viewing experiences; half-glimpsed figures emerge and retreat, at times seeming to flee from visibility and evoking the instabilities of experiences of movement and migration. The contours of their bodies only partially expressed, the blurred workers recall the complexities of lived experiences in turn of the century Paris, as well as the spectral past’s imbrication within encounters of daily life. By failing to depict labor through legible forms, the photographs poetically portray the everyday movements of labor and interrogate the ability of a photograph to function as evidence, shining a light on the socio-economic conditions of labor. Through a focus on relations between blurred photographs, movement and labor in Paris at the turn of the century, I argue that blurs caused by the movements of workers come forth as sites of temporal disruption, fugitivity, and resistance.
Sophie Lynch is a PhD candidate pursuing a joint-degree in the departments of Cinema & Media Studies and Art History at the University of Chicago. She studies modern and contemporary art, photography and film from the late 19th century to the present. Following her interests in historical intersections of bodies and technologies, her dissertation considers blurred images in works of photography and film from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
