Hello, everyone. So I'm Olena Chervonik, I'm Dphil student here at Oxford.
I write my dissertation with Geoff on John Herschel and his phytotypes is the term that he used,
and he also referred to this photographs as vegetable photographs.
And so I'm going to dive in immediately into my slides.
So I start my presentation with this three photographs by Herschel, two of which you can see on display in the exhibition, A New Power.
So these are paper negatives and they are often referred to as the images of a telescope.
What we see here is not exactly a telescope, actually, but rather a scaffolding for one.
It's an iconic structure that's used to prop up a telescope owned by John's father,
William Herschel, a discoverer of the planet Uranus, and the founder of Stellar Astronomy.
So this photographs are not signs, actually, but they tentatively dated to autumn 1839 in John's Herschel's body of work.
These pictures of scaffolding are the only photographs that he ever took with a camera.
Now, these are also some of the very few novel images that he attempted to create with the new medium of photography.
So most of his photographs are, in fact, contact prints, not camera works.
And among some of those contact brings some of some of them are botanical specimens.
But by far, the majority of Herschel's photographs are contact prints of existent etchings from cheap literary magazines of the 1830s.
So, in other words, Herschel was actually less interested in creating novel imagery,
but he was really interested in figuring out the photographic process itself.
In the history of Science Museum, we have the largest collection of Herschel's photographic artefacts.
We have around 700 of them, and most of them have never been commented upon featured in critical literature or even digitised.
So with my next couple of slides, I'm going to show you some of these artefacts.
Just a couple of. Kind of a very.
So what do we see in the slides? Chemical stains, basically, chemical stains with very visible traces of Herschel's hand.
His gestural strokes and application of photographic chemistry.
Stains that are actually quite unruly. But above all, they're very colourful.
They're very vivid colour. And there is a whole gamut of colours here, a very variegated palette from yellows and greens to blue, red and purple.
In other words, a pretty much the entire range of colour wave.
And so these artefacts that I'm showing you right now, again, are not dated,
but they're they come in from the very beginning of Herschel's involvement with photography,
which starts at the end of January, 1839, and lasts until around 1844.
Then Herschel largely ceased to be interested in this matter.
The ones I'm showing you here come from this earliest stage.
So from the very beginning of his involvement with photography.
Herschel becomes very interested in photographic colour and he in fact tries to figure out the polchromy.
So these are obviously going to monochromatic, colourful, but monochromatic.
And he actually wants to figure out how to create photography in polychrome in colour and to understand Herschel's research on colour.
In photography, we actually need to kind of step back in address Herschel's drawings.
So Herschel was an excellent draughtsman. We have I'm going to show you in the next slide.
So the other way around.
Here it is. So version was an excellent draughtsman.
We have around 800 drawings created by him.
Most of the drawings he executed with a camera lucida.
He was a devoted user of the instrument his entire life.
In most of his drawings are actual landscapes.
However, there is a portfolio of 132 botanical studies that Herschel created together with his wife, Margaret.
When the family lived in South Africa. They moved there in 1930, 1834, and they came back to Britain late 1838.
So Herschel relocated his family to South Africa to observe the sky or the Southern Hemisphere.
He was an astronomer, obviously, and that that was kind of his main purpose of why he was in South Africa, was he needed to see the sky.
The Herschel's also became mesmerised by the local flora and especially bald flowering plants.
So the entire Herschel household would go on what they called bulbing excursions,
so to find new plants in the area and then also cultivate them in their garden and they Herschel also loved to portray the plants.
So what's interesting here is that John would create a camera lucida sketch with a graphite pencil and Margaret would colour them in watercolour.
So however, we have one instance in this portfolio that the Herschel actually painted himself and this is what you see on the slides.
So on the left, Herschel's camera used a sketch of potato, which is nowadays it's a national flower of South Africa.
And then on the right in other officials portrayals of this flower, but in colour.
So as you can see, Herschel was actually quite skilful in colour replication.
It's just that he didn't like to do it.
It's instructive to compare Herschel's graphic rendition of Protea with one of his contact prints of botanical specimens dated 1839.
So the Herschel's came back from South Africa to Britain in late 1839, 38, excuse me, late in 1838.
And then almost immediately John became involved with the emergence of photography, whose public announcement happened in January 1839.
So by the end of January, Herschel figured out how to create paper based silver photographs and most importantly, how to fix them properly.
So these contact prints of full leaves dates from that time, and in comparison with Herschel's graphic sketches.
Photography introduces unavoidable colouration, as you see here.
So monochrome, but definitely not devoid of colour, photochemical,
but a nice and evidently presented Herschel a draughtsman rather than the colourist with a pictorial conundrum it
destroyed a sequential process that involved first pencil drafting a graphic skeleton and then filling it in with colour.
This two two stage orderly process could be incomplete, as Herschel often treated his pencil drafts as sufficient pictorial science,
or the process could be outsourced, as in the case when Herschel relegated the colouring responsibilities to his wife.
So early photography with with its often unruly and always unavoidable colouration thus collapsed a centuries long
European art historical duality between designer and colour order that was often conceptualised in gender terms.
So designer was viewed as masculine as it supposedly indicated rationality in the structural indispensability of a drawing.
And then colour was feminine as it was stereotyped as a nonessential application of decorative features.
In this binary representational schema instituted during the Renaissance, the skeleton of a drawing,
measurable and mathematically precise comes first, and its colouration, fluid and intuitively applied comes after the fact.
Or not at all.
So the Herschel spouses division of labour in representing South African flora by graphic means thus fell neatly within this gender expectations.
However, this hierarchy was inexorably disrupted by the emergent medium of photochemical representation, where line and colour became indivisible.
So thus Herschel could not stop the image in process at the point of drawing, drawing linearity,
and he was forced to negotiate the colour imposed upon him by this imagined materials.
So first we realised that in order to create photographic polychromy he would need dyes.
So he became preoccupied with the next slide.
So he became preoccupied with the search for adequate dyes to imprint coloured spectra onto paper.
In the spring of 1841, Herschel intensified his experiments with vegetable juices.
And I'm, I'm saying intensified because he was actually interested in extraction from plants in already in the 1820s.
It's just he was not doing those extractions for any kind of imaging purposes.
But in 1841 he realised that he could use that extraction for the photographic purposes.
And so vegetable juices, that's how he called them natural dyes that he would extract from various plants cultivated in his garden.
Some of those plants were those that the Herschel's brought from South Africa and successfully acclimatised in their can to state.
He extracted dye so juices in his own words from plants, usually through alcohol distillation.
So Herschel observed that these extracts would react to light.
And what is more crucial are two different segments of its wavelength.
So his juices were sensitive to different portions of the spectrum, producing variegated things under certain coloured rays.
Herschel's vegetable photography that he also dubbed phytotypes worked analogous analogously to contemporary dye destruction photographic process.
So the light would bleach out particles of vegetable dyes while the shadow parts of the image would stay coloured.
And so the process actually rendered the direct positive. About a dozen of Herschel's phytotypes direct positives are in existence.
They all retain particular tints, ranging from purple to green to red.
And so here you see a wrapper and a paper divider from our science museum.
Both of these are created by Herschel and signed in his own hand.
So the the wrapper, which is kind of an envelope, contains 20 vegetable photographs dated to 1841 through 1843.
And so the earliest photograph from this batch, which is actually dated, is from June 25th, 1841.
But most of that, some of them are not dated.
So it's not clear if he June, June 25th is the earliest that he created or maybe he actually had an early, even earlier ones.
So this is an example of one of those phytotypes.
It's actually signed on on verses you see in the Herschel's hand.
So, Mike, I have to say that Mike Ware, where in his monograph on this on the cyanotype process identified most of the images,
the source of this for those images that he that they come from a literary almanac, which is called Friendship's Offerings.
And Herschel's family probably subscribed to this almanac for like years and years,
because quite a few of this etchings come from 1831 until like 18, 1814.
So here is another one. So it's a comparison of a phytotypes of the same obviously of the same etchings with some kind of boat scene there.
And he also I have. Now, the thing is that he used the same personal use, the same etchings over and over again, not just with phytotypes.
And so we have this a seascape in his in a science museum, also as a Cyanotype, as a silver print.
So Herschel was copying this stuff over and over again,
create and create in these multiple copies of the same etching that would allow
Herschel to compare the results of the various photographic techniques he was devising.
So contact printing of existent etchings rather than creating a novel image area with a camera,
allowed Herschel to better control the material parameters of his experiments.
And one more phytotype on the backside.
It's there's no date but we actually have again in Herschel Herschel's hand we have an indication of a
flower she uses its crimson crimson poppy and he uses that flower a lot in some of his phytotypes.
He also indicates the location where he picked up the flower, like somewhere around his estate.
And there is also a number there, 1000 1622, and that's a number of experiment.
So imagine how many experiments he was doing.
So while all of this phytotypes are indeed monochrome, the full dramatic rendition would be possible,
Herschel surmised, if further steps could be introduced into the process.
So one would need to go with the paper in support paper or whatever support you would use in actually several layers of dye emulsion of
certain things which under light exposure would be bleached proportionally to the coloured race to which each of them is individually sensitive.
So in combination they would yield a polychromatic image. So Herschel grasped the chemical underpinnings of colour photography.
Yet he could not fully develop it the natural colourants he was using.
Were unable to coat a substrate in multiple emulsion layers.
In retrospect, the crucial obstacle to achieving the practical method of colour photography
did not stem from the individual circumstances of a particular experimenter.
The obstacle was more structural and even epistemic.
Colour photography would only become possible with the advent of synthetic dyes,
and they were invented and manufactured in the second part of the 19th century.
Until Aniline, the first coal tar based synthetic material, appeared in circulation in 1856.
Herschel would not have been able to create a practical method for making polychrome photographs.
And so paradoxically, in conclusion, paradoxically, in order to create natural colours,
one would need to use synthetic dyes, which is unnatural colours.
And so with that conceptual paradox, I will close my presentations using.