Thank you so much. You can hear me, right? So I want to start by thanking everyone here.
You've almost made it. We're at the end of a very long and very full day.
It's been such a pleasure to reconnect with old friends and meet new friends and geek out over 19th century photography with all of the above.
So thank you again to Geoff Batchen, to the team at the Bodleian for creating the exhibition and this occasion for all of these conversations.
Now this podium makes me feel told. Okay,
so I want to start with this intriguing byway in the Bright Sparks exhibition next door between
labelled light sensitive inside several spotlight pieces by contemporary artists using unfixed papers,
non-standard chemical preparations, expired photographic materials.
These works dwell in the chemically unstable aesthetics of the afterlife of industrial photographic materials.
The visibility is conditional, as Kate Palmer Alpers has put it, writing about a different set of American photographers who made unfixed images.
The photograph is an event here, a durational process that unfolds over time and which is assumed,
at least in some of these cases, to have an inevitable end one day.
The image, such as it is in some of these photographs, is expected to be gone.
Every moment of potential looking brings that day closer,
and the visitors participation in the performance of that loss is an essential aspect of the work.
Alongside them. In the bottom left are two enclosed acid free cardboard boxes labelled tells us that they hold photogenic
drawings made by William Henry Fox Talbot in the first year after the public announcement of photography inside,
presumably fugitive scraps of paper soaked with long ago chemicals by Talbot sit quietly in the dark,
as they do in other repositories around the world which hold the remnants of his experimental infographic practice.
These unseen objects to dwell in the chemically unstable afterlife of photographic materials.
Light sensitivity is a defining feature of photography.
The Photosensitivity of Silver Salts offered one of the first mechanisms for photographic image making, and this case dramatises.
That light sensitivity is also one of photography's many mechanisms for image unmaking.
But where the works by the contemporary photographers are presented for view embracing the risk of ongoing loss,
the Talbott photographs stay hidden in order to last.
They must not be seen. So they are kept out of sight. But visitors are offered the rare, unusual opportunity to notice their invisibility.
Normally, we don't.
The juxtapositions in this case tantalisingly suggest the possibility of a different way of presenting and engaging with historical photographs.
A scholarly and curatorial approach to historical photographs that accepts and
follows their trajectories of change and transformation rather than ignoring,
hiding away or seeking to arrest those changes. What might it look like to foreground fading and loss alongside the fantasy of perfect
permanent fixing in our histories of photography and our curatorial practices?
The elegant Ms. Playfair, pictured here,
reminds us eloquently that the ongoing decay of the image was an undeniable and essential element of the early photographs chemical nature,
its aesthetics, and its cultural life as an object.
Yet our most prominent photographic history is tend to implicitly centre the display worthy the print.
An archive of faded, decayed, damaged and illegible,
light sensitive or otherwise undisputable photographs from the medium's early decades remain in storage.
What kind of historical object is a faded photograph and what are the conditions under which it continues to have meaning?
Today, I will approach these questions through the paradox of photographs that have become iconic, even as they have become illegible.
So I look at three famous early photographic objects that have played a powerful role in structuring
influential late 20th Century Euro-American narratives about the origins and meaning of photography.
Bringing the early history of photography into conversation with scholarship in history of Science,
Science and Technology Studies and the material history of Art, I will explore the durational qualities that these photographs presented,
both in their historical moment and then continuing forward into our present.
And in fact, although I'm going to be talking about early photographs, very early photographs, my actual subject is is us today.
Now, the work that we expect these images to do in our histories and the ways that our institutions like museums and libraries,
make it possible for them to do that work.
So I will be tracing out the material conditions that have allowed their endurance as photographs that have allowed them to remain photographs.
Powerful institutional practices of preservation,
reproduction and display keep certain iconic images a narrative centred, invisible and others obscured.
So this is the kind of space where I can assume that most of you have seen this before.
This enigmatic view, through the diamond pained Oriel window in the South Gallery of Talbot's Country House,
is one of the most reproduced images from the archive of early photography.
The inscription indicates that this photogenic drawing negative was made in August 1835.
Scholarly consensus based on circumstantial evidence suggests that this negative was likely mounted in 1839.
And the inscription that we see here added to the mount then.
Before Talbott took it on the road in his campaign to have his priority of invention of a photographic process recognised over decades.
So he likely displayed it at scientific meetings that year, including at the Royal Institution in late January 1839,
when he brought examples of his process to an evening soiree for viewing an
event which constituted the first ever public display of photographs in Britain.
So this object has an outsized presence in photo history.
Considering how few people have ever seen it in person,
it is so frequently reproduced and actually so often projected onto a big screen like I'm doing here.
So it can be easy to forget how big it is, and negative itself is just a few centimetres wide.
It's usually described as the earliest surviving photographic negative, sometimes erroneously as the first negative ever made.
It's not for many historians of photography. This latticed window has seemed to capture the essence of the early experimental years.
The reference to looking closely with a magnifying lens is an early lesson in photographic observation.
The mysterious deep purplish blue hue unsettles the common misperception that early photographs are colourless.
The tactility of the fine drawing papers surface, particularly in high resolution digital images,
affirms our sense that this is a unique, singular, precious or even priceless object.
Although that is somewhat in tension with the fact that it's often presented as being the
earliest surviving example of a technique used to make many prints from a single negative.
Geoffrey Batchen once dubbed this the philosophical window, the originally view through which photography's way of seeing is articulated.
So this scrap of paper, just the size of a postage stamp,
really has been made to bear quite a heavy conceptual weight in the historiography of photography and not what Talbot tells us in his inscription,
which again was likely written four or five years after the image was made.
He tells us when first made the squares of glass about 200, a number could be counted with the help of a lens.
So if Talbert did take this to the Royal Institution in 1839, which it's likely he did then, one of the the photographs displayed at this event,
at this first exhibition of photographs in Britain, was presented proudly as an already too faint remnant of what it once was.
In calling attention to the disappearance of detail, Talbot's aim clearly wasn't to present this as a failure,
but instead to authenticate its past condition using what was still in the 1830s an
authoritative way to authenticate an observation in the rooms of the Royal Institution.
That is the unsubstantiated word of a gentleman.
About a week later, Talbot ran out of paper before the Royal Society,
establishing his invention narrative, which included this famous and triumphant proclamation.
The most transitory of things a shadow, the proverbial emblem of all that is fleeting and momentary,
may be fettered by the spells of our natural magic and may be fixed forever, etc., etc.
I've highlighted some of the phrases here that are about that kind of arresting time.
So at the very beginning of photography's public history in Britain, we have the coexistence of these two attitudes in the same person,
extreme boosterism about the photographic fantasy of fixing the transient moment forever and
the unapologetic matter of fact admission that the image had and would deteriorate over time.
If we just pay attention for it. An understanding of the photograph,
as always in a state of its own gradual undoing is everywhere in the early archive and in the archives of early photography.
We're told it seems to have been fairly nonchalant about the lattice windows fading in 1839.
In later situations. The fading of delicate silver deposits in larger additions of prints led to a sense of crisis and failure,
both within Talbot's own account of his work and within the growing photographic community.
His first attempt at integrating mass produced teletypes into the printed page in the Journal of the Art Union was widely seen as disastrous,
dramatically overtaxing the production facilities that he had established at his printing workshop in Redding.
The prints started fading almost immediately. This is a familiar story to everyone here, I think.
The editor of the art union wrote afterward that they were pieces of slurred paper, nothing more.
Well, that project was soon forgotten. Another photographic publication from around the same period.
The Pencil of Nature, of course, has now been recognised for decades as one of the most significant projects in the history of photography.
Published in the six instalments or physicals that you see here between 1844 and 1846.
It was an early experiment in the illustration of printed text with photographs
commissioned and financed by Talbot to be printed from his own negatives.
Of course, this project included some of what are now the most iconic images from early photography.
Each hand mounted print was accompanied by a brief text by Talbot himself, describing a responding to it printed in letterpress.
So integrating text with image, the pensive nature proposed with extraordinary eloquence and ingenuity and a lot of contradiction.
An array of archival, scientific and aesthetic possibilities for what this new medium could already do.
In the mid 1840s. And what it might eventually become in the future.
And there's now been decades of scholarship,
leaving us with a rich understanding of the representational possibilities for photography that Talbot envisioned and articulated in its pages.
And also of the tensions that arise within the work itself. So just a kind of quick romp through the scholarship on the pencil of nature.
Again, I think this will be familiar to many of you. It's the pencil.
Nature has been studied as a self-portrait of a man of possessions, evoking the aesthetics of land, of land and gentility.
It's been analysed as an extended allegory of labour, skill and image making,
as well as a series of philosophical exercises about representation and realism.
It's been claimed as an emblem of positive positivism and empiricism, but also of romanticism and idealism.
It's been described as an expression of gentlemanly, gentlemanly amateurism, but also of industrial capitalism.
Not that those were in contradiction, necessarily. It's been taken as a meditation on genius and authorship and photographic composition,
but also as a celebration of the mechanisation and automation of image making.
It is such a shapeshifting work, the text so rich and suggestive, but so maddeningly contradictory.
The photographic works in its pages so miscellaneous and so inventive in their
creation of new photographic genres that it has seemingly lent itself to many,
meaning maybe every intellectual agenda we might have for photography.
But I think I finally found one limitation of this insightful and varied body of scholarship,
and that is that it continues to assume that the pencil of nature is a singular and stable work of art.
But anyone who has ever had the privilege of encountering an original copy, such as the ones held here at the Bodleian,
has likely been forced to confront the fact,
the disorienting realisation that the pencil of nature doesn't look at all the way we have been told that it does.
A number of the prints in the copy of the Pencil of Nature that we acquired at the Yale Centre for British Art,
where I was once the photo curator, have faded nearly beyond recognition.
The rest show varying levels of discolouration and image degradation from ever present edge fading to foxing to enigma to chemical splotches.
So the faded print on the right. So both of these are at the Yale Centre for British Art.
The one on the right is from our copy of The Pencil of Nature.
While the strong print on the left was a loose print made from the same negatives that was acquired at a different time.
In fact,
there is no perfect original copy of the pencil of nature anywhere across all the known copies in dozens of institutions and private collections.
And no copy is identical to any other.
But when analysed in scholarly publications and taught in art history courses, more often than not, the pensive nature is reproduced by its art,
is represented by reproducing prints made from one of the negatives used for pencil, but which survives as a loose print as I've just described.
In other words, you know, through images like this one from the Met, the Metropolitan Museum, which were never bound into a copy of the book at all.
And that describes most of the prints that I've been showing you up until now.
In. In 1989, a stunning facsimile edition of The Pencil of Nature was published bound in six vesicles like the original,
with photo lithographic prints copied from the finest existing loose prints from pencil to be found anywhere.
This remarkable work has made it possible to encounter something that looks like a perfect copy of the Pencil of Nature,
and that, alongside the increased availability of digital images of other fine prints of pencil negatives held in major museums.
There's now this incredible visibility and accessibility of an idealised version of the pencil of nature, one that seems never to have existed.
So we have this entire generation of really quite extraordinary art,
historical scholarship and teaching about the pencil of nature that oddly has been
almost entirely severed from the material peculiarities of the actual publication.
Even as that same scholarship has established the pencil of nature as a masterwork of the
early medium and a touchstone for photographic aesthetics that remains relevant today.
But what if we were to think of this a little differently and treat the physical attributes,
attributes of pencil prints, their varied appearance appearances, and their differing degradation over time?
What if we saw those as essential aspects of the work, not accidents or problems, to be kind of shoved away?
And what if we saw them as influencing the way that pencil was viewed and interpreted historically?
If we took seriously the instability, the materiality, the multiplicity,
the temporality of the many instantiation of the work scattered around the world.
And this is just a selection of copies of the Haystack.
The same image I showed you before that I found using the Talbert catalogue Raisonné project posted here at the Bodleian.
So consider, for example, how each farcical, each individual farcical or volume was composed of prints made over the course of months,
printed from negatives that were themselves made over a longer period of years.
Then each farcical was purchased or acquired by owners at different times and assembled with other festivals into a complete set,
each of which then had a different trajectory of its own.
Some owners inserted other prints by Talbot into their sets or removed prints from the publication to sell on the open market.
Some sets were separated from each other, and the pencil of nature was made by Talbot and by the staff of his printing workshop.
But it was then continually remade and unmade by its many owners.
Like part books and serially issued compilations of prints. It had a complex and unstable temporality of making and consumption.
We could also consider the pencil of nature as an evolving experimental record in material
form of the development of scaled up printing techniques atop its writing workshop.
The goal, of course, was to produce identical copies of each print for every copy of the publication.
Here's some familiar image of the printing workshop at Redding showing the many people involved in the work.
But we know from the workshop records that as production was scaled up,
Talbot staff soon began altering the printing process gradually to save time and resources.
The carefully selected paper ran out and had to be replaced with another kind.
Chemicals purchased from suppliers in London were sometimes on standardised variable levels
of industrial pollutants in the water supply in Reading were likely changing from day to day.
Unreliable weather made uniform exposures impossible.
So each and every mounted print was really an uncontrolled chemical experiment.
And so it's not that surprising really that the material and aesthetic qualities of the prints varied so much across the copies of pencil,
and that fading problems plagued most of those prints within a few years of production.
Fading and loss was the constant theme whenever the pencil of nature was brought up in its own historical moment,
and it wasn't discussed all that much, but when it was, it was described as faded.
Um, and for decades thereafter too. And so whatever the mechanism and there were many,
I think the prints in the pencil of nature were constantly being undone by their
own materials and by those materials dynamic engagement with their environment.
And attending to these aspects of the pencil of nature draws us outward into the
broader social history and labour history of the photographic studio and darkroom.
Over the next few decades, photographic techniques spread and multiplied into an increasingly socially heterogeneous marketplace of
photographic practitioners who actively investigated and debated the nature and causes and aesthetics of fading.
The impossibility of permanence was under constant discussion in the decades after the pencil,
nature and indeed the impossibility of permanence became the condition for and the
motivation for the development of photographic expertise and for the rise of what would,
by the end of the 19th century, be known as photographic science or later emulsion science, the experimental investigation of the chemical,
physical or eventually biological nature of the different components of the photographic surface.
Many photographers sought to define their communities professional ethos by policing the boundaries of who was the right kind of photographer.
And so when photographers debated the proper techniques for processing prints,
they suggested that these practices were not simply technical procedures, but moral imperatives.
And I'm drawn here on the work of Jennifer Tucker and others,
but also on this incredible rich discussion hat that happened in the pages of the specialist photographic press.
Faded prints were associated with charlatans with untrained license assistance, with neglectful or deceptive practice, or even with femininity.
And practitioners also developed rich accounts of the photograph as an active surface with language that suggested a kind of living being.
Organic materials like gelatine and albumin capable of succumbing to bacterial disease.
Or so in the phrase disease emulsions or requiring defence in a war like conflict with enemies in its environment like sulphur or moisture.
By the 1880s, the vocal conversation about how to address photographic impermanence had coalesced around
a new commitment to the idea that photographs should have a lifespan not of a few years,
but of decades or longer. It was also in this period that a set of proposals for creating and maintaining
permanent comprehensive photographic archives began to circulate in Britain.
And by this point, a number of more expensive and labour intensive but highly stable alternatives to silver photography were available,
such as the platinum print of the carbon print, the photo mechanical process and the carbon print in particular was often involved,
or it was often invoked as part of this new aspiration for comprehensive and permanent photo archives.
So the photographer, Cosmo Burton, for example,
insisted that a truly valuable photographic archive for posterity would be one that maintained a massive collection
of photograph albums documenting all of cultural life kept sacred from the polluting touch of the silver print.
And obviously I'm drawing here on the work of Elizabeth Edwards.
This ambition was articulated in relation to an understanding of the silver photograph as an unstable
entity that was made unmade and remade through a complicated interplay between its material stability,
its social life, and its many environments. And as we follow this arc,
were pulled away kind of further and further from the gravitational force of Talbot's archive and out into a more integrated history of photography,
in which works like the pencil of nature, are not only part of the history of art,
but part of labour history, of environmental history, the history of print culture, the history of science,
and the history of the preservation paradigm in photo collecting institutions, which is what I'm going to turn to next.
So now I want to think about not just the kind of material and chemical stability of photographs,
but their institutional stability, the politics of preservation.
Most of the objects familiar to Western photo historians reside in the major museums and research libraries of Western Europe and North America,
places like this one, the Bodleian and these institutions are predominantly shaped by a set of commitments which
scholars working in critical heritage studies have sometimes called the preservation paradigm.
So this is the idea, and we might even not. It's easy to not notice this idea.
It seems so obvious, so essential, so necessary.
But this is the idea that there are certain objects designated as cultural heritage that must be preserved for the benefit of future generations,
and that we have a moral imperative to conserve them, to maintain their physical and aesthetic integrity in perpetuity.
Photography, of course, was powerfully implicated in preservationist projects, as we know from Elizabeth Edwards work and others.
It was put forward as an essential tool for recording things whose disappearance seemed inevitable,
even if it wasn't due to the forces of historical change.
So recording things like architecture, cultural practices, or the people's identified as doomed in terms of racialized differences.
But it also through some of the investigations and debates within the photography community that I've just described.
Photography also became implicated as heritage to itself be preserved.
Like many of us in this room, surely I have had the privilege of travelling around the world in my capacity as a historian and one time curator
of photography to have the rarefied experience of examining early photographs in carefully dimmed rooms,
of convincing otherwise wary institutions that they should open up the boxes that they would normally insist stay closed at all times.
And I describe this as a as a privileged position, because, of course, I've had to mobilise my expertise,
my fancy degrees for my fancy universities and my personal connections sometimes to get those boxes to be opened.
Like the Talbot boxes on view in the exhibition.
The boxes are usually labelled light sensitive or restricted access or do not page as with these boxes.
Can the people in the back read this slip on the right? Because it's amazing.
You can read it. Okay, cool. I wasn't going to discuss it.
I just wanted it up there. You know where I stood because I got to go in.
The preservation paradigm for the most part is taken as a given in these institutions, including the Bodleian.
And there are many good reasons for it, but it is not as self-evident as it might seem.
Conservation, as practised in museums and libraries, is always political, as all care practices are.
Conservation is a set of decisions about what is a value and what is worth preserving.
Whom is is it to be preserved for? And then what financial and material and human resources will be put towards doing so?
Preservation projects always articulate a relationship between the past and the future through actions that are taken in the present.
And they project values into the future through decisions about what to care for now and which boxes to open.
At very well-resourced institutions. This commitment can sometimes involve a formidable technical infrastructure to sustain it.
Shiny conservation laboratories staffed with trained conservators and scientists with PhDs.
Scanning X-ray fluorescence machines and other high tech analytical devices to assess and analyse materials.
Cold storage facilities with temperature and humidity controls and monitoring acid free archival boxes,
security cameras, light controlled reading rooms and display spaces for safe viewing.
This is the object, I think, in which for which the infrastructure of photographic survival is taken to the greatest extreme.
This is the famous holograph. Many of you will know that this celebrated pewter plate, bearing the faint image of a courtyard viewed from above,
was dubbed the Foundation Stone of Photography by the German British photo historian and collector Helmut Gernsheim.
It is one of the oldest excellent photographic objects there is.
Made around 1826, a singular and reproducible image on a pewter plate.
It depicts the view from the upstairs window at the offices of Niépce's estate, Le Gras in Burgundy.
And of course, then I think I'm I think you all know this, but, you know,
most people encounter this object via this elaborately touched up reproduction,
reproduction that Gernsheim commissioned in 1952 for the influential history of photography penned by him and his wife, Allison Gernsheim.
So this was the image that was reproduced in most publications for the following half century, partly against his own request.
It rendered the view legible, more legible then than this, right.
And the curator at the Harry Ransom Centre, Jessica McDonald,
has detailed how the Harry Ransom Centre always offers this an enhanced view when authors request a reproduction of the new for their publication.
But most often they usually demur and they ask for this one, which tells you that in some sense the the holograph itself,
how it actually has survived and what it looks like now is actually not at all
adequate to the role that we want it to play in our histories of photography.
And so the enhanced reproduction has to live on. But back to the thing itself.
The Times later sold it along with their massive photography collection to the Harry Ransom Centre in Texas,
where it now resides on permanent display in what is effectively a shrine in the public gallery.
The display raises fascinating set,
a fascinating set of issues around early photography and how museums and archives treat their custodial responsibilities towards them.
It's on permanent view, despite its being one of the most fragile and rare objects in their collection.
It's presented like a sacred relic, so individuals enter into this hushed, dark, holy space for their encounter with it.
The Holograph is mounted within a special one of a kind case designed to maintain an oxygen free atmosphere to prevent further deterioration.
And the current case, I think there was one built in the 1960s.
The current one was designed about 20 years ago by a team of scientists who specialised in
environmental systems and photographic materials at the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles.
Collaborating with conservators at the Harry Ransom Centre. So inside this hermetically sealed case, the helium broth is surrounded by argon gas.
So an inert gas. And hidden behind it is this this complex array of sensors that monitor and maintain a stable environment in terms of humidity,
temperature and pressure and test constantly for the presence of oxygen.
Also inside are silica gel for humidity buffering. You know, those little like packets that you find like in in a new leather bag.
So that's to absorb any excess humidity. There's activated charcoal which serves as a pollutant scavenger so that if any kind
of off gassing happens from the materials of the case or from the wooden frame,
they'll be kind of captured by that. Three years ago in 2019.
So three years ago, I feel like my math is wrong.
Four years ago the case was taken apart and all the components were replaced and updated by a team of engineers, scientists and conservators.
So now if any aspect of the the helium graphs, environment breaches acceptable parameters,
the conservators will receive an alert on their cell phones immediately, no matter where they are.
The sensors are now calibrated annually and the argon in the case will be replaced every ten years.
If photographs were living beings, then this one would be on life support. So here's my question.
I mean, we're laughing and it's funny,
but it's it's it's also it's also so strange and it's a lot of resources that have been put into maintaining this object.
And, I mean, where does the photograph end and its infrastructure begin?
That's my question for you. What does the Telegraph mean now that it's annexed to this social and technical system?
What does any photograph mean in relation to the much more, less extreme workaday protective arrangements,
cold storage, acid free boxes like controlled viewing, etc.?
I would argue that the scholarly, institutional and scientific apparatus that stabilises a fragile photograph is not simply maintaining it.
The infrastructure of photography is engaged in constantly producing the object itself,
making it into a photograph, making something into a photograph that otherwise would barely be one anymore.
And in doing so, the system continually defines photographs so that their meaning and value comes in part from this infrastructure.
So what if we defined a photograph as an object that requires an infrastructure?
Not exactly like this, but, you know, the kind of broader infrastructure that I've described to survive.
How have we arrived at this place where a long faded photograph nonetheless becomes iconic and sits
gleaming somewhere between faint legibility and complete blankness in a hermetically sealed case,
texting conservatives as if any oxygen gets in.
To understand this, I think we actually need more historical research on the emergence of photograph conservation,
a specialist field formed in the last decades of the 20th century from the consequence of photographic science,
the rise of technical art conservation, and the growing art market for photography, for photographs.
But we also need to expand how we think about the work of conservation within the ideological apparatus of the heritage industry.
Early British paper photographs, particularly those by Talbot, have become invested with and sustained by this infrastructure that I've described.
Even hundreds of test strips and experimental prints of Talbot's that now look completely blank have been stored
in these acid free archival enclosures and have now been comprehensively digitised and available in the catalogue.
Raisonné. The comprehensiveness of Talbot's surviving archive in stark contrast to, for example,
the many British women who worked with the medium in its first decade, or the many commercial photographers of less genteel birth.
The comprehensiveness of this archive is partly due to the fact that it was maintained as part of a
larger multigenerational country house archive at his estate before being gradually gifted to museums,
libraries and collectors by his descendants and then brought into this what I've
been calling the infrastructure of early photography that I've been describing.
By contrast, early paper photographs by British women have generally not been sustained by this infrastructure.
The brilliantly inventive and skilled photographer Mary Dillon, cousin of Talbot,
an early adept at paper photography, has only survived to us in family albums.
Often, her works are dramatically faded. Not always. Here's a really beautiful one from Yale.
Even though we know from Dylan's correspondence that she mastered the salt print process through a determined commitment to experimentation,
we don't have the archive of faded and experimental prints to testify to that process.
We don't have a kind of art or factual history of that work that she did the way that we do.
For Talbot, it could have been the basis for understanding Mary Dillon as a chemical expert and tinkerer, which she must have been.
In addition to being a skilled photographic portraitist. Meanwhile, environmental,
political and institutional conditions in many places outside Western Europe and North America have meant that
most traces of early photographic histories in the global South have been particularly vulnerable to decay.
And this renders the vibrant combination of Western photographic practices with local visual traditions in Western Africa,
South India and many other places chemically degraded, institutionally inaccessible, or simply no longer extant.
Not all of it, obviously.
But, you know, we don't have the kind of like deep rich archives of early experimental practice that we do for a person like Robert.
Meanwhile, Talbot's latest window and Cecilia graph, each arguably barely an image anymore,
are continually found to be vital moments in the MeToo medium's history, while decaying photograph collections across the Global South are not.
Jennifer Bjork's recent book Unfixed I've taken this image from from her work is precisely about rendering a new kind of visibility
for West African photographs that circumvents both Euro-American institutions and the reductive assumptions that structure them.
Recent work in science and technology studies or stress has turned towards foregrounding maintenance,
breakage and repair as constitutive parts of a technical system.
And in a now classic essay from 2014, an essay called Rethinking Repair STS
scholar Stephen Jackson proposed to recenter our understanding of the history of technology,
letting go of this obsession with the innovation, with the new in favour of what he called a kind of broken world.
Thinking. What happens? He asks. When we take erosion, breakdown and decay rather than novelty growth and progress as our starting points,
when we think through the nature, use and effects of information technology and new media.
A broken world thinking approach to the history of photography could offer a kind of double vision.
We could see photographs, not simply as images whose agency in the world is enacted as they are made, but also as entities that are shaped,
sustained and continually remade by practices of maintenance or destruction by their many owners and users pulled all the way into the present.
So just as we could think about a building as shaped and sustained and constantly remade by its inhabitants and its maintenance staff,
not just by its architects. Some repair work, such as photograph conservation and its attendant practices might seem like it's backward looking,
kind of oriented towards returning ruined objects to prior states,
toward maintaining an inadequate status quo, or towards deferring change to produce an illusory image of permanence.
But and there is a way of seeing the telegraph and the sophisticated technological apparatus that maintains it in this light.
It feels like we're saving the holograph for a future that will never come. But following Jackson.
What would it look like? What would a forward looking approach to photographic conservation look like?
One one which seeks to rework the landscape of our inherited situations to sustain and project values and value into the future.
Would it involve? And I'm just being speculative here. I'm not saying we should put the photographs out in the sun.
But am I?
Would it involve reallocating conservation resources to under-resourced locations and areas of collection where they are most urgently needed?
Would it involve re-evaluating energy intensive storage practices in recognition
of the need for sustainability in a in the face of a global climate crisis?
Would it let go of the institutional commitment to preserve everything in our collections for perpetuity?
Would it begin to let go of some not all of these fragile scraps of chemical soaked paper, these blank plates, glass and metal.
Recognising that photographs are not only visual objects but inherently social
cultural artefacts whose meanings arise out of human interactions with them.
Would it maybe involve deciding to accept future deterioration,
further deterioration of precious objects through handling and display in order to allow the photograph to live?
All physical objects are composed of active and unruly matter.
The varied materials of which they are composed respond in sometimes unpredictable ways chemically, physically and otherwise to their surroundings.
But I think we all feel that there is perhaps a profound sense in which this
is more existentially true of 19th century photographs than of most things.
All silver based photographic processes, of course,
had a volatile and inherently unstable photochemistry with which early photographers had to grapple in order to make and preserve images.
Their makers and users also intimately knew photographs to be temporal temperamental things.
But photography was also positioned early on by many of its most influential commentators as a powerful cultural practice for halting time and place.
For preserving and archiving the ephemeral. For fighting loss and decay.
And historical change. Despite our powerful structuring narratives about the history of photography as a medium of fixity.
And these are narratives of narratives of progress handed down to us by gentleman of science,
like Talbot in their invention accounts, and then sustained by our photo history institutions.
Despite these narratives, photographs are always profoundly unfixed.
Thank you.