1 00:00:03,270 --> 00:00:07,410 Hello, everyone. So I'm Olena Chervonik, I'm Dphil student here at Oxford. 2 00:00:07,800 --> 00:00:18,260 I write my dissertation with Geoff on John Herschel and his phytotypes is the term that he used, 3 00:00:18,510 --> 00:00:22,170 and he also referred to this photographs as vegetable photographs. 4 00:00:22,800 --> 00:00:26,100 And so I'm going to dive in immediately into my slides. 5 00:00:26,790 --> 00:00:35,730 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. 6 00:00:36,270 --> 00:00:41,790 So these are paper negatives and they are often referred to as the images of a telescope. 7 00:00:42,930 --> 00:00:47,520 What we see here is not exactly a telescope, actually, but rather a scaffolding for one. 8 00:00:48,420 --> 00:00:53,490 It's an iconic structure that's used to prop up a telescope owned by John's father, 9 00:00:53,760 --> 00:00:58,770 William Herschel, a discoverer of the planet Uranus, and the founder of Stellar Astronomy. 10 00:00:59,580 --> 00:01:09,450 So this photographs are not signs, actually, but they tentatively dated to autumn 1839 in John's Herschel's body of work. 11 00:01:09,900 --> 00:01:14,930 These pictures of scaffolding are the only photographs that he ever took with a camera. 12 00:01:15,770 --> 00:01:26,700 Now, these are also some of the very few novel images that he attempted to create with the new medium of photography. 13 00:01:27,540 --> 00:01:32,280 So most of his photographs are, in fact, contact prints, not camera works. 14 00:01:33,660 --> 00:01:39,030 And among some of those contact brings some of some of them are botanical specimens. 15 00:01:39,390 --> 00:01:47,730 But by far, the majority of Herschel's photographs are contact prints of existent etchings from cheap literary magazines of the 1830s. 16 00:01:48,540 --> 00:01:53,850 So, in other words, Herschel was actually less interested in creating novel imagery, 17 00:01:54,690 --> 00:01:58,830 but he was really interested in figuring out the photographic process itself. 18 00:01:59,970 --> 00:02:05,340 In the history of Science Museum, we have the largest collection of Herschel's photographic artefacts. 19 00:02:05,460 --> 00:02:14,250 We have around 700 of them, and most of them have never been commented upon featured in critical literature or even digitised. 20 00:02:15,150 --> 00:02:19,410 So with my next couple of slides, I'm going to show you some of these artefacts. 21 00:02:23,280 --> 00:02:26,430 Just a couple of. Kind of a very. 22 00:02:29,670 --> 00:02:38,520 So what do we see in the slides? Chemical stains, basically, chemical stains with very visible traces of Herschel's hand. 23 00:02:39,060 --> 00:02:42,570 His gestural strokes and application of photographic chemistry. 24 00:02:43,860 --> 00:02:49,050 Stains that are actually quite unruly. But above all, they're very colourful. 25 00:02:49,680 --> 00:03:00,030 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. 26 00:03:00,900 --> 00:03:04,590 In other words, a pretty much the entire range of colour wave. 27 00:03:06,210 --> 00:03:11,160 And so these artefacts that I'm showing you right now, again, are not dated, 28 00:03:11,160 --> 00:03:15,600 but they're they come in from the very beginning of Herschel's involvement with photography, 29 00:03:16,020 --> 00:03:21,990 which starts at the end of January, 1839, and lasts until around 1844. 30 00:03:22,590 --> 00:03:26,660 Then Herschel largely ceased to be interested in this matter. 31 00:03:27,750 --> 00:03:31,170 The ones I'm showing you here come from this earliest stage. 32 00:03:31,770 --> 00:03:34,770 So from the very beginning of his involvement with photography. 33 00:03:34,800 --> 00:03:42,510 Herschel becomes very interested in photographic colour and he in fact tries to figure out the polchromy. 34 00:03:42,930 --> 00:03:46,499 So these are obviously going to monochromatic, colourful, but monochromatic. 35 00:03:46,500 --> 00:03:54,700 And he actually wants to figure out how to create photography in polychrome in colour and to understand Herschel's research on colour. 36 00:03:54,700 --> 00:04:00,600 In photography, we actually need to kind of step back in address Herschel's drawings. 37 00:04:01,170 --> 00:04:06,280 So Herschel was an excellent draughtsman. We have I'm going to show you in the next slide. 38 00:04:06,330 --> 00:04:09,330 So the other way around. 39 00:04:13,850 --> 00:04:17,120 Here it is. So version was an excellent draughtsman. 40 00:04:17,510 --> 00:04:21,320 We have around 800 drawings created by him. 41 00:04:21,380 --> 00:04:25,280 Most of the drawings he executed with a camera lucida. 42 00:04:26,120 --> 00:04:29,270 He was a devoted user of the instrument his entire life. 43 00:04:30,050 --> 00:04:32,540 In most of his drawings are actual landscapes. 44 00:04:33,260 --> 00:04:40,610 However, there is a portfolio of 132 botanical studies that Herschel created together with his wife, Margaret. 45 00:04:41,810 --> 00:04:52,250 When the family lived in South Africa. They moved there in 1930, 1834, and they came back to Britain late 1838. 46 00:04:52,760 --> 00:04:59,270 So Herschel relocated his family to South Africa to observe the sky or the Southern Hemisphere. 47 00:05:00,590 --> 00:05:08,810 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. 48 00:05:10,130 --> 00:05:16,220 The Herschel's also became mesmerised by the local flora and especially bald flowering plants. 49 00:05:17,120 --> 00:05:21,290 So the entire Herschel household would go on what they called bulbing excursions, 50 00:05:21,650 --> 00:05:31,580 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. 51 00:05:32,270 --> 00:05:41,330 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. 52 00:05:42,770 --> 00:05:51,499 So however, we have one instance in this portfolio that the Herschel actually painted himself and this is what you see on the slides. 53 00:05:51,500 --> 00:05:58,640 So on the left, Herschel's camera used a sketch of potato, which is nowadays it's a national flower of South Africa. 54 00:05:59,030 --> 00:06:03,200 And then on the right in other officials portrayals of this flower, but in colour. 55 00:06:04,040 --> 00:06:08,270 So as you can see, Herschel was actually quite skilful in colour replication. 56 00:06:10,490 --> 00:06:11,930 It's just that he didn't like to do it. 57 00:06:13,190 --> 00:06:24,260 It's instructive to compare Herschel's graphic rendition of Protea with one of his contact prints of botanical specimens dated 1839. 58 00:06:25,960 --> 00:06:32,950 So the Herschel's came back from South Africa to Britain in late 1839, 38, excuse me, late in 1838. 59 00:06:33,550 --> 00:06:40,780 And then almost immediately John became involved with the emergence of photography, whose public announcement happened in January 1839. 60 00:06:41,290 --> 00:06:50,830 So by the end of January, Herschel figured out how to create paper based silver photographs and most importantly, how to fix them properly. 61 00:06:52,900 --> 00:06:59,890 So these contact prints of full leaves dates from that time, and in comparison with Herschel's graphic sketches. 62 00:07:00,310 --> 00:07:04,600 Photography introduces unavoidable colouration, as you see here. 63 00:07:05,320 --> 00:07:09,820 So monochrome, but definitely not devoid of colour, photochemical, 64 00:07:09,820 --> 00:07:17,170 but a nice and evidently presented Herschel a draughtsman rather than the colourist with a pictorial conundrum it 65 00:07:17,170 --> 00:07:25,330 destroyed a sequential process that involved first pencil drafting a graphic skeleton and then filling it in with colour. 66 00:07:25,930 --> 00:07:35,080 This two two stage orderly process could be incomplete, as Herschel often treated his pencil drafts as sufficient pictorial science, 67 00:07:35,890 --> 00:07:42,670 or the process could be outsourced, as in the case when Herschel relegated the colouring responsibilities to his wife. 68 00:07:43,720 --> 00:07:52,420 So early photography with with its often unruly and always unavoidable colouration thus collapsed a centuries long 69 00:07:52,420 --> 00:07:59,920 European art historical duality between designer and colour order that was often conceptualised in gender terms. 70 00:08:00,760 --> 00:08:08,290 So designer was viewed as masculine as it supposedly indicated rationality in the structural indispensability of a drawing. 71 00:08:08,620 --> 00:08:15,520 And then colour was feminine as it was stereotyped as a nonessential application of decorative features. 72 00:08:16,240 --> 00:08:22,900 In this binary representational schema instituted during the Renaissance, the skeleton of a drawing, 73 00:08:23,200 --> 00:08:31,389 measurable and mathematically precise comes first, and its colouration, fluid and intuitively applied comes after the fact. 74 00:08:31,390 --> 00:08:32,200 Or not at all. 75 00:08:33,490 --> 00:08:42,550 So the Herschel spouses division of labour in representing South African flora by graphic means thus fell neatly within this gender expectations. 76 00:08:43,150 --> 00:08:52,240 However, this hierarchy was inexorably disrupted by the emergent medium of photochemical representation, where line and colour became indivisible. 77 00:08:53,770 --> 00:08:59,950 So thus Herschel could not stop the image in process at the point of drawing, drawing linearity, 78 00:09:00,220 --> 00:09:06,850 and he was forced to negotiate the colour imposed upon him by this imagined materials. 79 00:09:08,000 --> 00:09:13,610 So first we realised that in order to create photographic polychromy he would need dyes. 80 00:09:14,960 --> 00:09:18,950 So he became preoccupied with the next slide. 81 00:09:19,550 --> 00:09:26,120 So he became preoccupied with the search for adequate dyes to imprint coloured spectra onto paper. 82 00:09:27,260 --> 00:09:33,110 In the spring of 1841, Herschel intensified his experiments with vegetable juices. 83 00:09:33,530 --> 00:09:41,090 And I'm, I'm saying intensified because he was actually interested in extraction from plants in already in the 1820s. 84 00:09:41,120 --> 00:09:45,470 It's just he was not doing those extractions for any kind of imaging purposes. 85 00:09:45,800 --> 00:09:52,910 But in 1841 he realised that he could use that extraction for the photographic purposes. 86 00:09:53,750 --> 00:10:01,820 And so vegetable juices, that's how he called them natural dyes that he would extract from various plants cultivated in his garden. 87 00:10:02,390 --> 00:10:09,770 Some of those plants were those that the Herschel's brought from South Africa and successfully acclimatised in their can to state. 88 00:10:10,790 --> 00:10:17,300 He extracted dye so juices in his own words from plants, usually through alcohol distillation. 89 00:10:19,580 --> 00:10:23,060 So Herschel observed that these extracts would react to light. 90 00:10:23,420 --> 00:10:27,770 And what is more crucial are two different segments of its wavelength. 91 00:10:28,490 --> 00:10:37,340 So his juices were sensitive to different portions of the spectrum, producing variegated things under certain coloured rays. 92 00:10:38,240 --> 00:10:47,600 Herschel's vegetable photography that he also dubbed phytotypes worked analogous analogously to contemporary dye destruction photographic process. 93 00:10:48,050 --> 00:10:56,840 So the light would bleach out particles of vegetable dyes while the shadow parts of the image would stay coloured. 94 00:10:58,420 --> 00:11:08,590 And so the process actually rendered the direct positive. About a dozen of Herschel's phytotypes direct positives are in existence. 95 00:11:09,430 --> 00:11:13,960 They all retain particular tints, ranging from purple to green to red. 96 00:11:14,980 --> 00:11:20,290 And so here you see a wrapper and a paper divider from our science museum. 97 00:11:21,610 --> 00:11:25,120 Both of these are created by Herschel and signed in his own hand. 98 00:11:25,570 --> 00:11:35,380 So the the wrapper, which is kind of an envelope, contains 20 vegetable photographs dated to 1841 through 1843. 99 00:11:36,370 --> 00:11:44,680 And so the earliest photograph from this batch, which is actually dated, is from June 25th, 1841. 100 00:11:45,100 --> 00:11:48,159 But most of that, some of them are not dated. 101 00:11:48,160 --> 00:11:59,050 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. 102 00:12:02,410 --> 00:12:06,640 So this is an example of one of those phytotypes. 103 00:12:07,540 --> 00:12:12,280 It's actually signed on on verses you see in the Herschel's hand. 104 00:12:14,200 --> 00:12:24,609 So, Mike, I have to say that Mike Ware, where in his monograph on this on the cyanotype process identified most of the images, 105 00:12:24,610 --> 00:12:33,340 the source of this for those images that he that they come from a literary almanac, which is called Friendship's Offerings. 106 00:12:33,700 --> 00:12:37,929 And Herschel's family probably subscribed to this almanac for like years and years, 107 00:12:37,930 --> 00:12:44,470 because quite a few of this etchings come from 1831 until like 18, 1814. 108 00:12:46,570 --> 00:12:57,880 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. 109 00:13:02,050 --> 00:13:10,270 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. 110 00:13:10,270 --> 00:13:18,790 And so we have this a seascape in his in a science museum, also as a Cyanotype, as a silver print. 111 00:13:19,420 --> 00:13:22,570 So Herschel was copying this stuff over and over again, 112 00:13:23,260 --> 00:13:27,850 create and create in these multiple copies of the same etching that would allow 113 00:13:27,850 --> 00:13:32,410 Herschel to compare the results of the various photographic techniques he was devising. 114 00:13:32,860 --> 00:13:39,190 So contact printing of existent etchings rather than creating a novel image area with a camera, 115 00:13:39,460 --> 00:13:43,690 allowed Herschel to better control the material parameters of his experiments. 116 00:13:46,370 --> 00:13:52,550 And one more phytotype on the backside. 117 00:13:52,970 --> 00:14:01,010 It's there's no date but we actually have again in Herschel Herschel's hand we have an indication of a 118 00:14:01,010 --> 00:14:09,170 flower she uses its crimson crimson poppy and he uses that flower a lot in some of his phytotypes. 119 00:14:09,180 --> 00:14:15,650 He also indicates the location where he picked up the flower, like somewhere around his estate. 120 00:14:15,980 --> 00:14:22,400 And there is also a number there, 1000 1622, and that's a number of experiment. 121 00:14:23,190 --> 00:14:26,540 So imagine how many experiments he was doing. 122 00:14:30,350 --> 00:14:37,280 So while all of this phytotypes are indeed monochrome, the full dramatic rendition would be possible, 123 00:14:37,760 --> 00:14:42,260 Herschel surmised, if further steps could be introduced into the process. 124 00:14:42,830 --> 00:14:53,690 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 125 00:14:53,690 --> 00:15:03,350 certain things which under light exposure would be bleached proportionally to the coloured race to which each of them is individually sensitive. 126 00:15:03,710 --> 00:15:12,090 So in combination they would yield a polychromatic image. So Herschel grasped the chemical underpinnings of colour photography. 127 00:15:12,450 --> 00:15:18,690 Yet he could not fully develop it the natural colourants he was using. 128 00:15:19,110 --> 00:15:23,580 Were unable to coat a substrate in multiple emulsion layers. 129 00:15:24,510 --> 00:15:29,580 In retrospect, the crucial obstacle to achieving the practical method of colour photography 130 00:15:30,210 --> 00:15:34,530 did not stem from the individual circumstances of a particular experimenter. 131 00:15:34,920 --> 00:15:38,430 The obstacle was more structural and even epistemic. 132 00:15:38,880 --> 00:15:43,770 Colour photography would only become possible with the advent of synthetic dyes, 133 00:15:44,850 --> 00:15:48,810 and they were invented and manufactured in the second part of the 19th century. 134 00:15:49,590 --> 00:15:56,880 Until Aniline, the first coal tar based synthetic material, appeared in circulation in 1856. 135 00:15:57,510 --> 00:16:02,880 Herschel would not have been able to create a practical method for making polychrome photographs. 136 00:16:03,900 --> 00:16:09,990 And so paradoxically, in conclusion, paradoxically, in order to create natural colours, 137 00:16:10,050 --> 00:16:14,700 one would need to use synthetic dyes, which is unnatural colours. 138 00:16:15,300 --> 00:16:21,390 And so with that conceptual paradox, I will close my presentations using.