1 00:00:03,760 --> 00:00:09,710 Thank you so much. You can hear me, right? So I want to start by thanking everyone here. 2 00:00:09,730 --> 00:00:13,389 You've almost made it. We're at the end of a very long and very full day. 3 00:00:13,390 --> 00:00:22,090 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. 4 00:00:23,110 --> 00:00:31,480 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. 5 00:00:33,160 --> 00:00:37,180 Now this podium makes me feel told. Okay, 6 00:00:38,260 --> 00:00:46,239 so I want to start with this intriguing byway in the Bright Sparks exhibition next door between 7 00:00:46,240 --> 00:00:53,980 labelled light sensitive inside several spotlight pieces by contemporary artists using unfixed papers, 8 00:00:54,280 --> 00:00:58,420 non-standard chemical preparations, expired photographic materials. 9 00:00:59,110 --> 00:01:06,280 These works dwell in the chemically unstable aesthetics of the afterlife of industrial photographic materials. 10 00:01:07,000 --> 00:01:15,400 The visibility is conditional, as Kate Palmer Alpers has put it, writing about a different set of American photographers who made unfixed images. 11 00:01:16,660 --> 00:01:23,200 The photograph is an event here, a durational process that unfolds over time and which is assumed, 12 00:01:23,200 --> 00:01:27,790 at least in some of these cases, to have an inevitable end one day. 13 00:01:27,790 --> 00:01:32,020 The image, such as it is in some of these photographs, is expected to be gone. 14 00:01:32,830 --> 00:01:35,740 Every moment of potential looking brings that day closer, 15 00:01:36,370 --> 00:01:41,770 and the visitors participation in the performance of that loss is an essential aspect of the work. 16 00:01:43,300 --> 00:01:51,310 Alongside them. In the bottom left are two enclosed acid free cardboard boxes labelled tells us that they hold photogenic 17 00:01:51,310 --> 00:01:58,060 drawings made by William Henry Fox Talbot in the first year after the public announcement of photography inside, 18 00:01:58,060 --> 00:02:05,980 presumably fugitive scraps of paper soaked with long ago chemicals by Talbot sit quietly in the dark, 19 00:02:06,370 --> 00:02:12,400 as they do in other repositories around the world which hold the remnants of his experimental infographic practice. 20 00:02:13,720 --> 00:02:19,630 These unseen objects to dwell in the chemically unstable afterlife of photographic materials. 21 00:02:20,560 --> 00:02:23,650 Light sensitivity is a defining feature of photography. 22 00:02:24,220 --> 00:02:31,330 The Photosensitivity of Silver Salts offered one of the first mechanisms for photographic image making, and this case dramatises. 23 00:02:31,330 --> 00:02:36,310 That light sensitivity is also one of photography's many mechanisms for image unmaking. 24 00:02:37,740 --> 00:02:44,160 But where the works by the contemporary photographers are presented for view embracing the risk of ongoing loss, 25 00:02:44,820 --> 00:02:47,860 the Talbott photographs stay hidden in order to last. 26 00:02:47,880 --> 00:02:56,010 They must not be seen. So they are kept out of sight. But visitors are offered the rare, unusual opportunity to notice their invisibility. 27 00:02:56,580 --> 00:02:57,270 Normally, we don't. 28 00:03:00,050 --> 00:03:08,630 The juxtapositions in this case tantalisingly suggest the possibility of a different way of presenting and engaging with historical photographs. 29 00:03:09,580 --> 00:03:13,450 A scholarly and curatorial approach to historical photographs that accepts and 30 00:03:13,450 --> 00:03:17,710 follows their trajectories of change and transformation rather than ignoring, 31 00:03:17,980 --> 00:03:27,549 hiding away or seeking to arrest those changes. What might it look like to foreground fading and loss alongside the fantasy of perfect 32 00:03:27,550 --> 00:03:31,870 permanent fixing in our histories of photography and our curatorial practices? 33 00:03:34,320 --> 00:03:36,600 The elegant Ms. Playfair, pictured here, 34 00:03:37,050 --> 00:03:44,370 reminds us eloquently that the ongoing decay of the image was an undeniable and essential element of the early photographs chemical nature, 35 00:03:44,940 --> 00:03:47,730 its aesthetics, and its cultural life as an object. 36 00:03:48,880 --> 00:03:53,650 Yet our most prominent photographic history is tend to implicitly centre the display worthy the print. 37 00:03:55,250 --> 00:03:58,850 An archive of faded, decayed, damaged and illegible, 38 00:03:58,940 --> 00:04:04,250 light sensitive or otherwise undisputable photographs from the medium's early decades remain in storage. 39 00:04:06,040 --> 00:04:11,710 What kind of historical object is a faded photograph and what are the conditions under which it continues to have meaning? 40 00:04:14,300 --> 00:04:21,590 Today, I will approach these questions through the paradox of photographs that have become iconic, even as they have become illegible. 41 00:04:22,490 --> 00:04:28,520 So I look at three famous early photographic objects that have played a powerful role in structuring 42 00:04:29,120 --> 00:04:34,970 influential late 20th Century Euro-American narratives about the origins and meaning of photography. 43 00:04:36,320 --> 00:04:40,280 Bringing the early history of photography into conversation with scholarship in history of Science, 44 00:04:40,640 --> 00:04:46,850 Science and Technology Studies and the material history of Art, I will explore the durational qualities that these photographs presented, 45 00:04:46,850 --> 00:04:50,989 both in their historical moment and then continuing forward into our present. 46 00:04:50,990 --> 00:04:57,649 And in fact, although I'm going to be talking about early photographs, very early photographs, my actual subject is is us today. 47 00:04:57,650 --> 00:05:04,910 Now, the work that we expect these images to do in our histories and the ways that our institutions like museums and libraries, 48 00:05:05,240 --> 00:05:06,920 make it possible for them to do that work. 49 00:05:08,640 --> 00:05:15,120 So I will be tracing out the material conditions that have allowed their endurance as photographs that have allowed them to remain photographs. 50 00:05:15,870 --> 00:05:18,449 Powerful institutional practices of preservation, 51 00:05:18,450 --> 00:05:24,660 reproduction and display keep certain iconic images a narrative centred, invisible and others obscured. 52 00:05:29,210 --> 00:05:33,410 So this is the kind of space where I can assume that most of you have seen this before. 53 00:05:34,280 --> 00:05:39,470 This enigmatic view, through the diamond pained Oriel window in the South Gallery of Talbot's Country House, 54 00:05:39,890 --> 00:05:43,640 is one of the most reproduced images from the archive of early photography. 55 00:05:44,640 --> 00:05:50,730 The inscription indicates that this photogenic drawing negative was made in August 1835. 56 00:05:51,780 --> 00:05:59,520 Scholarly consensus based on circumstantial evidence suggests that this negative was likely mounted in 1839. 57 00:05:59,670 --> 00:06:02,610 And the inscription that we see here added to the mount then. 58 00:06:03,480 --> 00:06:11,490 Before Talbott took it on the road in his campaign to have his priority of invention of a photographic process recognised over decades. 59 00:06:13,840 --> 00:06:21,100 So he likely displayed it at scientific meetings that year, including at the Royal Institution in late January 1839, 60 00:06:21,790 --> 00:06:25,899 when he brought examples of his process to an evening soiree for viewing an 61 00:06:25,900 --> 00:06:29,860 event which constituted the first ever public display of photographs in Britain. 62 00:06:31,620 --> 00:06:34,980 So this object has an outsized presence in photo history. 63 00:06:35,550 --> 00:06:37,980 Considering how few people have ever seen it in person, 64 00:06:38,880 --> 00:06:43,680 it is so frequently reproduced and actually so often projected onto a big screen like I'm doing here. 65 00:06:44,070 --> 00:06:49,080 So it can be easy to forget how big it is, and negative itself is just a few centimetres wide. 66 00:06:50,020 --> 00:06:57,370 It's usually described as the earliest surviving photographic negative, sometimes erroneously as the first negative ever made. 67 00:06:57,760 --> 00:07:04,750 It's not for many historians of photography. This latticed window has seemed to capture the essence of the early experimental years. 68 00:07:05,950 --> 00:07:11,590 The reference to looking closely with a magnifying lens is an early lesson in photographic observation. 69 00:07:12,070 --> 00:07:18,190 The mysterious deep purplish blue hue unsettles the common misperception that early photographs are colourless. 70 00:07:18,790 --> 00:07:23,829 The tactility of the fine drawing papers surface, particularly in high resolution digital images, 71 00:07:23,830 --> 00:07:29,800 affirms our sense that this is a unique, singular, precious or even priceless object. 72 00:07:30,280 --> 00:07:34,239 Although that is somewhat in tension with the fact that it's often presented as being the 73 00:07:34,240 --> 00:07:38,770 earliest surviving example of a technique used to make many prints from a single negative. 74 00:07:41,220 --> 00:07:47,970 Geoffrey Batchen once dubbed this the philosophical window, the originally view through which photography's way of seeing is articulated. 75 00:07:49,450 --> 00:07:52,450 So this scrap of paper, just the size of a postage stamp, 76 00:07:52,450 --> 00:08:00,580 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, 77 00:08:00,820 --> 00:08:04,150 which again was likely written four or five years after the image was made. 78 00:08:05,110 --> 00:08:11,410 He tells us when first made the squares of glass about 200, a number could be counted with the help of a lens. 79 00:08:13,030 --> 00:08:20,679 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, 80 00:08:20,680 --> 00:08:28,810 at this first exhibition of photographs in Britain, was presented proudly as an already too faint remnant of what it once was. 81 00:08:30,470 --> 00:08:36,050 In calling attention to the disappearance of detail, Talbot's aim clearly wasn't to present this as a failure, 82 00:08:36,680 --> 00:08:42,799 but instead to authenticate its past condition using what was still in the 1830s an 83 00:08:42,800 --> 00:08:47,010 authoritative way to authenticate an observation in the rooms of the Royal Institution. 84 00:08:47,030 --> 00:08:50,150 That is the unsubstantiated word of a gentleman. 85 00:08:53,440 --> 00:08:57,280 About a week later, Talbot ran out of paper before the Royal Society, 86 00:08:57,280 --> 00:09:02,050 establishing his invention narrative, which included this famous and triumphant proclamation. 87 00:09:02,410 --> 00:09:08,350 The most transitory of things a shadow, the proverbial emblem of all that is fleeting and momentary, 88 00:09:08,950 --> 00:09:14,220 may be fettered by the spells of our natural magic and may be fixed forever, etc., etc. 89 00:09:14,410 --> 00:09:19,270 I've highlighted some of the phrases here that are about that kind of arresting time. 90 00:09:21,270 --> 00:09:29,160 So at the very beginning of photography's public history in Britain, we have the coexistence of these two attitudes in the same person, 91 00:09:29,970 --> 00:09:36,420 extreme boosterism about the photographic fantasy of fixing the transient moment forever and 92 00:09:36,420 --> 00:09:41,190 the unapologetic matter of fact admission that the image had and would deteriorate over time. 93 00:09:42,400 --> 00:09:45,670 If we just pay attention for it. An understanding of the photograph, 94 00:09:45,670 --> 00:09:53,620 as always in a state of its own gradual undoing is everywhere in the early archive and in the archives of early photography. 95 00:09:56,940 --> 00:10:01,650 We're told it seems to have been fairly nonchalant about the lattice windows fading in 1839. 96 00:10:02,670 --> 00:10:09,690 In later situations. The fading of delicate silver deposits in larger additions of prints led to a sense of crisis and failure, 97 00:10:10,080 --> 00:10:14,310 both within Talbot's own account of his work and within the growing photographic community. 98 00:10:15,880 --> 00:10:23,470 His first attempt at integrating mass produced teletypes into the printed page in the Journal of the Art Union was widely seen as disastrous, 99 00:10:23,860 --> 00:10:28,750 dramatically overtaxing the production facilities that he had established at his printing workshop in Redding. 100 00:10:29,560 --> 00:10:33,310 The prints started fading almost immediately. This is a familiar story to everyone here, I think. 101 00:10:34,630 --> 00:10:39,250 The editor of the art union wrote afterward that they were pieces of slurred paper, nothing more. 102 00:10:41,430 --> 00:10:47,579 Well, that project was soon forgotten. Another photographic publication from around the same period. 103 00:10:47,580 --> 00:10:54,240 The Pencil of Nature, of course, has now been recognised for decades as one of the most significant projects in the history of photography. 104 00:10:55,610 --> 00:11:01,040 Published in the six instalments or physicals that you see here between 1844 and 1846. 105 00:11:01,610 --> 00:11:05,210 It was an early experiment in the illustration of printed text with photographs 106 00:11:05,840 --> 00:11:08,660 commissioned and financed by Talbot to be printed from his own negatives. 107 00:11:10,960 --> 00:11:15,880 Of course, this project included some of what are now the most iconic images from early photography. 108 00:11:16,570 --> 00:11:23,350 Each hand mounted print was accompanied by a brief text by Talbot himself, describing a responding to it printed in letterpress. 109 00:11:26,150 --> 00:11:32,990 So integrating text with image, the pensive nature proposed with extraordinary eloquence and ingenuity and a lot of contradiction. 110 00:11:33,440 --> 00:11:38,750 An array of archival, scientific and aesthetic possibilities for what this new medium could already do. 111 00:11:38,870 --> 00:11:42,530 In the mid 1840s. And what it might eventually become in the future. 112 00:11:43,580 --> 00:11:45,470 And there's now been decades of scholarship, 113 00:11:46,190 --> 00:11:52,950 leaving us with a rich understanding of the representational possibilities for photography that Talbot envisioned and articulated in its pages. 114 00:11:53,390 --> 00:12:01,360 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. 115 00:12:01,360 --> 00:12:04,659 Again, I think this will be familiar to many of you. It's the pencil. 116 00:12:04,660 --> 00:12:11,050 Nature has been studied as a self-portrait of a man of possessions, evoking the aesthetics of land, of land and gentility. 117 00:12:12,040 --> 00:12:16,150 It's been analysed as an extended allegory of labour, skill and image making, 118 00:12:17,050 --> 00:12:21,310 as well as a series of philosophical exercises about representation and realism. 119 00:12:22,150 --> 00:12:27,880 It's been claimed as an emblem of positive positivism and empiricism, but also of romanticism and idealism. 120 00:12:28,270 --> 00:12:34,090 It's been described as an expression of gentlemanly, gentlemanly amateurism, but also of industrial capitalism. 121 00:12:34,420 --> 00:12:42,040 Not that those were in contradiction, necessarily. It's been taken as a meditation on genius and authorship and photographic composition, 122 00:12:42,490 --> 00:12:47,230 but also as a celebration of the mechanisation and automation of image making. 123 00:12:47,890 --> 00:12:53,590 It is such a shapeshifting work, the text so rich and suggestive, but so maddeningly contradictory. 124 00:12:54,760 --> 00:12:58,299 The photographic works in its pages so miscellaneous and so inventive in their 125 00:12:58,300 --> 00:13:03,070 creation of new photographic genres that it has seemingly lent itself to many, 126 00:13:03,430 --> 00:13:06,520 meaning maybe every intellectual agenda we might have for photography. 127 00:13:07,840 --> 00:13:12,340 But I think I finally found one limitation of this insightful and varied body of scholarship, 128 00:13:12,340 --> 00:13:17,650 and that is that it continues to assume that the pencil of nature is a singular and stable work of art. 129 00:13:20,300 --> 00:13:26,270 But anyone who has ever had the privilege of encountering an original copy, such as the ones held here at the Bodleian, 130 00:13:27,050 --> 00:13:29,120 has likely been forced to confront the fact, 131 00:13:29,120 --> 00:13:34,430 the disorienting realisation that the pencil of nature doesn't look at all the way we have been told that it does. 132 00:13:35,970 --> 00:13:41,520 A number of the prints in the copy of the Pencil of Nature that we acquired at the Yale Centre for British Art, 133 00:13:41,520 --> 00:13:45,240 where I was once the photo curator, have faded nearly beyond recognition. 134 00:13:45,990 --> 00:13:54,660 The rest show varying levels of discolouration and image degradation from ever present edge fading to foxing to enigma to chemical splotches. 135 00:13:54,960 --> 00:13:59,040 So the faded print on the right. So both of these are at the Yale Centre for British Art. 136 00:13:59,310 --> 00:14:03,210 The one on the right is from our copy of The Pencil of Nature. 137 00:14:03,570 --> 00:14:08,220 While the strong print on the left was a loose print made from the same negatives that was acquired at a different time. 138 00:14:09,890 --> 00:14:10,370 In fact, 139 00:14:10,370 --> 00:14:18,020 there is no perfect original copy of the pencil of nature anywhere across all the known copies in dozens of institutions and private collections. 140 00:14:18,200 --> 00:14:20,270 And no copy is identical to any other. 141 00:14:21,850 --> 00:14:29,259 But when analysed in scholarly publications and taught in art history courses, more often than not, the pensive nature is reproduced by its art, 142 00:14:29,260 --> 00:14:35,950 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. 143 00:14:36,370 --> 00:14:43,300 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. 144 00:14:45,080 --> 00:14:48,380 And that describes most of the prints that I've been showing you up until now. 145 00:14:50,340 --> 00:14:57,660 In. In 1989, a stunning facsimile edition of The Pencil of Nature was published bound in six vesicles like the original, 146 00:14:58,020 --> 00:15:03,540 with photo lithographic prints copied from the finest existing loose prints from pencil to be found anywhere. 147 00:15:04,830 --> 00:15:11,430 This remarkable work has made it possible to encounter something that looks like a perfect copy of the Pencil of Nature, 148 00:15:12,030 --> 00:15:20,280 and that, alongside the increased availability of digital images of other fine prints of pencil negatives held in major museums. 149 00:15:21,220 --> 00:15:29,020 There's now this incredible visibility and accessibility of an idealised version of the pencil of nature, one that seems never to have existed. 150 00:15:29,860 --> 00:15:33,159 So we have this entire generation of really quite extraordinary art, 151 00:15:33,160 --> 00:15:37,420 historical scholarship and teaching about the pencil of nature that oddly has been 152 00:15:37,750 --> 00:15:42,700 almost entirely severed from the material peculiarities of the actual publication. 153 00:15:44,210 --> 00:15:48,170 Even as that same scholarship has established the pencil of nature as a masterwork of the 154 00:15:48,170 --> 00:15:53,060 early medium and a touchstone for photographic aesthetics that remains relevant today. 155 00:15:55,960 --> 00:16:00,310 But what if we were to think of this a little differently and treat the physical attributes, 156 00:16:00,760 --> 00:16:06,640 attributes of pencil prints, their varied appearance appearances, and their differing degradation over time? 157 00:16:06,910 --> 00:16:12,880 What if we saw those as essential aspects of the work, not accidents or problems, to be kind of shoved away? 158 00:16:13,360 --> 00:16:18,250 And what if we saw them as influencing the way that pencil was viewed and interpreted historically? 159 00:16:18,880 --> 00:16:23,200 If we took seriously the instability, the materiality, the multiplicity, 160 00:16:23,200 --> 00:16:28,270 the temporality of the many instantiation of the work scattered around the world. 161 00:16:28,630 --> 00:16:32,980 And this is just a selection of copies of the Haystack. 162 00:16:32,980 --> 00:16:38,800 The same image I showed you before that I found using the Talbert catalogue Raisonné project posted here at the Bodleian. 163 00:16:41,830 --> 00:16:48,310 So consider, for example, how each farcical, each individual farcical or volume was composed of prints made over the course of months, 164 00:16:48,910 --> 00:16:52,300 printed from negatives that were themselves made over a longer period of years. 165 00:16:52,810 --> 00:17:00,010 Then each farcical was purchased or acquired by owners at different times and assembled with other festivals into a complete set, 166 00:17:00,820 --> 00:17:03,070 each of which then had a different trajectory of its own. 167 00:17:03,580 --> 00:17:09,910 Some owners inserted other prints by Talbot into their sets or removed prints from the publication to sell on the open market. 168 00:17:10,720 --> 00:17:18,030 Some sets were separated from each other, and the pencil of nature was made by Talbot and by the staff of his printing workshop. 169 00:17:18,580 --> 00:17:23,110 But it was then continually remade and unmade by its many owners. 170 00:17:24,100 --> 00:17:30,880 Like part books and serially issued compilations of prints. It had a complex and unstable temporality of making and consumption. 171 00:17:33,350 --> 00:17:37,999 We could also consider the pencil of nature as an evolving experimental record in material 172 00:17:38,000 --> 00:17:43,610 form of the development of scaled up printing techniques atop its writing workshop. 173 00:17:44,240 --> 00:17:49,250 The goal, of course, was to produce identical copies of each print for every copy of the publication. 174 00:17:50,880 --> 00:17:59,040 Here's some familiar image of the printing workshop at Redding showing the many people involved in the work. 175 00:17:59,280 --> 00:18:03,600 But we know from the workshop records that as production was scaled up, 176 00:18:03,630 --> 00:18:09,090 Talbot staff soon began altering the printing process gradually to save time and resources. 177 00:18:10,280 --> 00:18:13,579 The carefully selected paper ran out and had to be replaced with another kind. 178 00:18:13,580 --> 00:18:18,440 Chemicals purchased from suppliers in London were sometimes on standardised variable levels 179 00:18:18,440 --> 00:18:22,850 of industrial pollutants in the water supply in Reading were likely changing from day to day. 180 00:18:23,090 --> 00:18:26,120 Unreliable weather made uniform exposures impossible. 181 00:18:28,560 --> 00:18:34,020 So each and every mounted print was really an uncontrolled chemical experiment. 182 00:18:34,170 --> 00:18:40,800 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, 183 00:18:41,100 --> 00:18:45,540 and that fading problems plagued most of those prints within a few years of production. 184 00:18:46,740 --> 00:18:52,110 Fading and loss was the constant theme whenever the pencil of nature was brought up in its own historical moment, 185 00:18:52,110 --> 00:18:56,880 and it wasn't discussed all that much, but when it was, it was described as faded. 186 00:18:57,870 --> 00:19:02,610 Um, and for decades thereafter too. And so whatever the mechanism and there were many, 187 00:19:02,760 --> 00:19:06,839 I think the prints in the pencil of nature were constantly being undone by their 188 00:19:06,840 --> 00:19:11,520 own materials and by those materials dynamic engagement with their environment. 189 00:19:13,540 --> 00:19:20,290 And attending to these aspects of the pencil of nature draws us outward into the 190 00:19:20,290 --> 00:19:24,520 broader social history and labour history of the photographic studio and darkroom. 191 00:19:25,500 --> 00:19:32,700 Over the next few decades, photographic techniques spread and multiplied into an increasingly socially heterogeneous marketplace of 192 00:19:32,700 --> 00:19:39,330 photographic practitioners who actively investigated and debated the nature and causes and aesthetics of fading. 193 00:19:40,930 --> 00:19:46,850 The impossibility of permanence was under constant discussion in the decades after the pencil, 194 00:19:46,890 --> 00:19:52,000 nature and indeed the impossibility of permanence became the condition for and the 195 00:19:52,000 --> 00:19:57,159 motivation for the development of photographic expertise and for the rise of what would, 196 00:19:57,160 --> 00:20:05,530 by the end of the 19th century, be known as photographic science or later emulsion science, the experimental investigation of the chemical, 197 00:20:05,530 --> 00:20:11,680 physical or eventually biological nature of the different components of the photographic surface. 198 00:20:13,290 --> 00:20:20,370 Many photographers sought to define their communities professional ethos by policing the boundaries of who was the right kind of photographer. 199 00:20:20,910 --> 00:20:24,420 And so when photographers debated the proper techniques for processing prints, 200 00:20:24,900 --> 00:20:30,479 they suggested that these practices were not simply technical procedures, but moral imperatives. 201 00:20:30,480 --> 00:20:33,420 And I'm drawn here on the work of Jennifer Tucker and others, 202 00:20:35,130 --> 00:20:41,430 but also on this incredible rich discussion hat that happened in the pages of the specialist photographic press. 203 00:20:42,870 --> 00:20:51,270 Faded prints were associated with charlatans with untrained license assistance, with neglectful or deceptive practice, or even with femininity. 204 00:20:53,980 --> 00:21:01,870 And practitioners also developed rich accounts of the photograph as an active surface with language that suggested a kind of living being. 205 00:21:02,710 --> 00:21:07,660 Organic materials like gelatine and albumin capable of succumbing to bacterial disease. 206 00:21:08,140 --> 00:21:17,350 Or so in the phrase disease emulsions or requiring defence in a war like conflict with enemies in its environment like sulphur or moisture. 207 00:21:19,250 --> 00:21:25,850 By the 1880s, the vocal conversation about how to address photographic impermanence had coalesced around 208 00:21:25,850 --> 00:21:31,010 a new commitment to the idea that photographs should have a lifespan not of a few years, 209 00:21:31,130 --> 00:21:37,630 but of decades or longer. It was also in this period that a set of proposals for creating and maintaining 210 00:21:37,630 --> 00:21:42,640 permanent comprehensive photographic archives began to circulate in Britain. 211 00:21:43,850 --> 00:21:51,680 And by this point, a number of more expensive and labour intensive but highly stable alternatives to silver photography were available, 212 00:21:51,830 --> 00:21:57,979 such as the platinum print of the carbon print, the photo mechanical process and the carbon print in particular was often involved, 213 00:21:57,980 --> 00:22:04,010 or it was often invoked as part of this new aspiration for comprehensive and permanent photo archives. 214 00:22:04,850 --> 00:22:07,220 So the photographer, Cosmo Burton, for example, 215 00:22:07,640 --> 00:22:13,459 insisted that a truly valuable photographic archive for posterity would be one that maintained a massive collection 216 00:22:13,460 --> 00:22:20,570 of photograph albums documenting all of cultural life kept sacred from the polluting touch of the silver print. 217 00:22:21,920 --> 00:22:24,080 And obviously I'm drawing here on the work of Elizabeth Edwards. 218 00:22:25,220 --> 00:22:30,950 This ambition was articulated in relation to an understanding of the silver photograph as an unstable 219 00:22:30,950 --> 00:22:36,950 entity that was made unmade and remade through a complicated interplay between its material stability, 220 00:22:37,250 --> 00:22:42,600 its social life, and its many environments. And as we follow this arc, 221 00:22:42,600 --> 00:22:49,740 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, 222 00:22:50,250 --> 00:22:53,399 in which works like the pencil of nature, are not only part of the history of art, 223 00:22:53,400 --> 00:22:58,080 but part of labour history, of environmental history, the history of print culture, the history of science, 224 00:22:58,650 --> 00:23:04,470 and the history of the preservation paradigm in photo collecting institutions, which is what I'm going to turn to next. 225 00:23:07,840 --> 00:23:11,680 So now I want to think about not just the kind of material and chemical stability of photographs, 226 00:23:11,680 --> 00:23:14,770 but their institutional stability, the politics of preservation. 227 00:23:16,260 --> 00:23:23,460 Most of the objects familiar to Western photo historians reside in the major museums and research libraries of Western Europe and North America, 228 00:23:23,470 --> 00:23:31,799 places like this one, the Bodleian and these institutions are predominantly shaped by a set of commitments which 229 00:23:31,800 --> 00:23:36,000 scholars working in critical heritage studies have sometimes called the preservation paradigm. 230 00:23:36,000 --> 00:23:40,260 So this is the idea, and we might even not. It's easy to not notice this idea. 231 00:23:40,260 --> 00:23:43,410 It seems so obvious, so essential, so necessary. 232 00:23:44,370 --> 00:23:51,720 But this is the idea that there are certain objects designated as cultural heritage that must be preserved for the benefit of future generations, 233 00:23:52,380 --> 00:23:59,280 and that we have a moral imperative to conserve them, to maintain their physical and aesthetic integrity in perpetuity. 234 00:24:00,960 --> 00:24:07,410 Photography, of course, was powerfully implicated in preservationist projects, as we know from Elizabeth Edwards work and others. 235 00:24:07,890 --> 00:24:14,040 It was put forward as an essential tool for recording things whose disappearance seemed inevitable, 236 00:24:14,520 --> 00:24:17,910 even if it wasn't due to the forces of historical change. 237 00:24:18,480 --> 00:24:26,370 So recording things like architecture, cultural practices, or the people's identified as doomed in terms of racialized differences. 238 00:24:28,080 --> 00:24:33,750 But it also through some of the investigations and debates within the photography community that I've just described. 239 00:24:34,650 --> 00:24:38,610 Photography also became implicated as heritage to itself be preserved. 240 00:24:42,140 --> 00:24:48,920 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 241 00:24:48,920 --> 00:24:55,370 of photography to have the rarefied experience of examining early photographs in carefully dimmed rooms, 242 00:24:56,330 --> 00:25:02,930 of convincing otherwise wary institutions that they should open up the boxes that they would normally insist stay closed at all times. 243 00:25:03,230 --> 00:25:08,150 And I describe this as a as a privileged position, because, of course, I've had to mobilise my expertise, 244 00:25:08,150 --> 00:25:14,840 my fancy degrees for my fancy universities and my personal connections sometimes to get those boxes to be opened. 245 00:25:16,230 --> 00:25:18,930 Like the Talbot boxes on view in the exhibition. 246 00:25:21,490 --> 00:25:28,300 The boxes are usually labelled light sensitive or restricted access or do not page as with these boxes. 247 00:25:28,690 --> 00:25:32,259 Can the people in the back read this slip on the right? Because it's amazing. 248 00:25:32,260 --> 00:25:36,240 You can read it. Okay, cool. I wasn't going to discuss it. 249 00:25:36,250 --> 00:25:43,580 I just wanted it up there. You know where I stood because I got to go in. 250 00:25:45,020 --> 00:25:50,660 The preservation paradigm for the most part is taken as a given in these institutions, including the Bodleian. 251 00:25:51,740 --> 00:25:55,820 And there are many good reasons for it, but it is not as self-evident as it might seem. 252 00:25:56,990 --> 00:26:02,630 Conservation, as practised in museums and libraries, is always political, as all care practices are. 253 00:26:03,200 --> 00:26:08,240 Conservation is a set of decisions about what is a value and what is worth preserving. 254 00:26:08,810 --> 00:26:15,680 Whom is is it to be preserved for? And then what financial and material and human resources will be put towards doing so? 255 00:26:16,760 --> 00:26:23,540 Preservation projects always articulate a relationship between the past and the future through actions that are taken in the present. 256 00:26:24,080 --> 00:26:30,170 And they project values into the future through decisions about what to care for now and which boxes to open. 257 00:26:34,490 --> 00:26:42,680 At very well-resourced institutions. This commitment can sometimes involve a formidable technical infrastructure to sustain it. 258 00:26:43,160 --> 00:26:48,350 Shiny conservation laboratories staffed with trained conservators and scientists with PhDs. 259 00:26:48,860 --> 00:26:55,100 Scanning X-ray fluorescence machines and other high tech analytical devices to assess and analyse materials. 260 00:26:55,790 --> 00:27:01,790 Cold storage facilities with temperature and humidity controls and monitoring acid free archival boxes, 261 00:27:01,910 --> 00:27:07,160 security cameras, light controlled reading rooms and display spaces for safe viewing. 262 00:27:09,990 --> 00:27:16,950 This is the object, I think, in which for which the infrastructure of photographic survival is taken to the greatest extreme. 263 00:27:17,490 --> 00:27:27,420 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, 264 00:27:27,690 --> 00:27:33,450 was dubbed the Foundation Stone of Photography by the German British photo historian and collector Helmut Gernsheim. 265 00:27:34,770 --> 00:27:37,980 It is one of the oldest excellent photographic objects there is. 266 00:27:39,440 --> 00:27:44,300 Made around 1826, a singular and reproducible image on a pewter plate. 267 00:27:45,480 --> 00:27:49,350 It depicts the view from the upstairs window at the offices of Niépce's estate, Le Gras in Burgundy. 268 00:27:50,900 --> 00:27:54,290 And of course, then I think I'm I think you all know this, but, you know, 269 00:27:54,290 --> 00:27:57,589 most people encounter this object via this elaborately touched up reproduction, 270 00:27:57,590 --> 00:28:05,630 reproduction that Gernsheim commissioned in 1952 for the influential history of photography penned by him and his wife, Allison Gernsheim. 271 00:28:06,410 --> 00:28:12,260 So this was the image that was reproduced in most publications for the following half century, partly against his own request. 272 00:28:12,260 --> 00:28:16,600 It rendered the view legible, more legible then than this, right. 273 00:28:18,050 --> 00:28:21,140 And the curator at the Harry Ransom Centre, Jessica McDonald, 274 00:28:21,140 --> 00:28:28,969 has detailed how the Harry Ransom Centre always offers this an enhanced view when authors request a reproduction of the new for their publication. 275 00:28:28,970 --> 00:28:37,100 But most often they usually demur and they ask for this one, which tells you that in some sense the the holograph itself, 276 00:28:37,490 --> 00:28:41,030 how it actually has survived and what it looks like now is actually not at all 277 00:28:41,030 --> 00:28:45,410 adequate to the role that we want it to play in our histories of photography. 278 00:28:45,830 --> 00:28:50,750 And so the enhanced reproduction has to live on. But back to the thing itself. 279 00:28:51,350 --> 00:28:56,240 The Times later sold it along with their massive photography collection to the Harry Ransom Centre in Texas, 280 00:28:56,690 --> 00:29:02,030 where it now resides on permanent display in what is effectively a shrine in the public gallery. 281 00:29:03,380 --> 00:29:05,270 The display raises fascinating set, 282 00:29:05,330 --> 00:29:13,580 a fascinating set of issues around early photography and how museums and archives treat their custodial responsibilities towards them. 283 00:29:14,210 --> 00:29:18,590 It's on permanent view, despite its being one of the most fragile and rare objects in their collection. 284 00:29:19,220 --> 00:29:26,840 It's presented like a sacred relic, so individuals enter into this hushed, dark, holy space for their encounter with it. 285 00:29:28,650 --> 00:29:37,730 The Holograph is mounted within a special one of a kind case designed to maintain an oxygen free atmosphere to prevent further deterioration. 286 00:29:37,980 --> 00:29:40,500 And the current case, I think there was one built in the 1960s. 287 00:29:40,650 --> 00:29:45,450 The current one was designed about 20 years ago by a team of scientists who specialised in 288 00:29:45,450 --> 00:29:50,700 environmental systems and photographic materials at the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles. 289 00:29:51,030 --> 00:30:00,909 Collaborating with conservators at the Harry Ransom Centre. So inside this hermetically sealed case, the helium broth is surrounded by argon gas. 290 00:30:00,910 --> 00:30:11,070 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, 291 00:30:11,190 --> 00:30:15,480 temperature and pressure and test constantly for the presence of oxygen. 292 00:30:16,530 --> 00:30:23,550 Also inside are silica gel for humidity buffering. You know, those little like packets that you find like in in a new leather bag. 293 00:30:24,660 --> 00:30:31,860 So that's to absorb any excess humidity. There's activated charcoal which serves as a pollutant scavenger so that if any kind 294 00:30:31,860 --> 00:30:35,550 of off gassing happens from the materials of the case or from the wooden frame, 295 00:30:36,360 --> 00:30:41,170 they'll be kind of captured by that. Three years ago in 2019. 296 00:30:41,650 --> 00:30:44,050 So three years ago, I feel like my math is wrong. 297 00:30:44,860 --> 00:30:52,240 Four years ago the case was taken apart and all the components were replaced and updated by a team of engineers, scientists and conservators. 298 00:30:53,390 --> 00:30:58,670 So now if any aspect of the the helium graphs, environment breaches acceptable parameters, 299 00:30:58,970 --> 00:31:02,450 the conservators will receive an alert on their cell phones immediately, no matter where they are. 300 00:31:03,710 --> 00:31:09,290 The sensors are now calibrated annually and the argon in the case will be replaced every ten years. 301 00:31:10,400 --> 00:31:16,309 If photographs were living beings, then this one would be on life support. So here's my question. 302 00:31:16,310 --> 00:31:17,510 I mean, we're laughing and it's funny, 303 00:31:17,510 --> 00:31:24,140 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. 304 00:31:24,920 --> 00:31:28,640 And, I mean, where does the photograph end and its infrastructure begin? 305 00:31:28,880 --> 00:31:35,840 That's my question for you. What does the Telegraph mean now that it's annexed to this social and technical system? 306 00:31:36,680 --> 00:31:42,290 What does any photograph mean in relation to the much more, less extreme workaday protective arrangements, 307 00:31:42,560 --> 00:31:45,920 cold storage, acid free boxes like controlled viewing, etc.? 308 00:31:46,900 --> 00:31:54,880 I would argue that the scholarly, institutional and scientific apparatus that stabilises a fragile photograph is not simply maintaining it. 309 00:31:55,920 --> 00:32:00,360 The infrastructure of photography is engaged in constantly producing the object itself, 310 00:32:00,360 --> 00:32:05,430 making it into a photograph, making something into a photograph that otherwise would barely be one anymore. 311 00:32:07,970 --> 00:32:14,030 And in doing so, the system continually defines photographs so that their meaning and value comes in part from this infrastructure. 312 00:32:15,110 --> 00:32:18,319 So what if we defined a photograph as an object that requires an infrastructure? 313 00:32:18,320 --> 00:32:22,370 Not exactly like this, but, you know, the kind of broader infrastructure that I've described to survive. 314 00:32:23,780 --> 00:32:29,509 How have we arrived at this place where a long faded photograph nonetheless becomes iconic and sits 315 00:32:29,510 --> 00:32:34,700 gleaming somewhere between faint legibility and complete blankness in a hermetically sealed case, 316 00:32:35,480 --> 00:32:37,820 texting conservatives as if any oxygen gets in. 317 00:32:39,140 --> 00:32:44,210 To understand this, I think we actually need more historical research on the emergence of photograph conservation, 318 00:32:44,570 --> 00:32:49,970 a specialist field formed in the last decades of the 20th century from the consequence of photographic science, 319 00:32:50,330 --> 00:32:55,280 the rise of technical art conservation, and the growing art market for photography, for photographs. 320 00:32:56,240 --> 00:33:03,890 But we also need to expand how we think about the work of conservation within the ideological apparatus of the heritage industry. 321 00:33:05,670 --> 00:33:12,960 Early British paper photographs, particularly those by Talbot, have become invested with and sustained by this infrastructure that I've described. 322 00:33:13,560 --> 00:33:19,620 Even hundreds of test strips and experimental prints of Talbot's that now look completely blank have been stored 323 00:33:19,980 --> 00:33:26,250 in these acid free archival enclosures and have now been comprehensively digitised and available in the catalogue. 324 00:33:26,250 --> 00:33:32,710 Raisonné. The comprehensiveness of Talbot's surviving archive in stark contrast to, for example, 325 00:33:32,890 --> 00:33:38,350 the many British women who worked with the medium in its first decade, or the many commercial photographers of less genteel birth. 326 00:33:39,730 --> 00:33:43,660 The comprehensiveness of this archive is partly due to the fact that it was maintained as part of a 327 00:33:43,660 --> 00:33:49,780 larger multigenerational country house archive at his estate before being gradually gifted to museums, 328 00:33:49,780 --> 00:33:54,249 libraries and collectors by his descendants and then brought into this what I've 329 00:33:54,250 --> 00:33:58,720 been calling the infrastructure of early photography that I've been describing. 330 00:34:00,040 --> 00:34:05,560 By contrast, early paper photographs by British women have generally not been sustained by this infrastructure. 331 00:34:06,790 --> 00:34:10,869 The brilliantly inventive and skilled photographer Mary Dillon, cousin of Talbot, 332 00:34:10,870 --> 00:34:15,400 an early adept at paper photography, has only survived to us in family albums. 333 00:34:16,180 --> 00:34:20,190 Often, her works are dramatically faded. Not always. Here's a really beautiful one from Yale. 334 00:34:21,970 --> 00:34:28,270 Even though we know from Dylan's correspondence that she mastered the salt print process through a determined commitment to experimentation, 335 00:34:28,660 --> 00:34:33,129 we don't have the archive of faded and experimental prints to testify to that process. 336 00:34:33,130 --> 00:34:37,540 We don't have a kind of art or factual history of that work that she did the way that we do. 337 00:34:37,750 --> 00:34:44,410 For Talbot, it could have been the basis for understanding Mary Dillon as a chemical expert and tinkerer, which she must have been. 338 00:34:45,250 --> 00:34:52,159 In addition to being a skilled photographic portraitist. Meanwhile, environmental, 339 00:34:52,160 --> 00:34:57,590 political and institutional conditions in many places outside Western Europe and North America have meant that 340 00:34:57,590 --> 00:35:02,720 most traces of early photographic histories in the global South have been particularly vulnerable to decay. 341 00:35:03,500 --> 00:35:10,129 And this renders the vibrant combination of Western photographic practices with local visual traditions in Western Africa, 342 00:35:10,130 --> 00:35:16,640 South India and many other places chemically degraded, institutionally inaccessible, or simply no longer extant. 343 00:35:16,640 --> 00:35:17,780 Not all of it, obviously. 344 00:35:17,780 --> 00:35:24,380 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. 345 00:35:26,160 --> 00:35:31,860 Meanwhile, Talbot's latest window and Cecilia graph, each arguably barely an image anymore, 346 00:35:32,160 --> 00:35:39,780 are continually found to be vital moments in the MeToo medium's history, while decaying photograph collections across the Global South are not. 347 00:35:40,930 --> 00:35:48,790 Jennifer Bjork's recent book Unfixed I've taken this image from from her work is precisely about rendering a new kind of visibility 348 00:35:48,790 --> 00:35:55,210 for West African photographs that circumvents both Euro-American institutions and the reductive assumptions that structure them. 349 00:35:57,840 --> 00:36:04,200 Recent work in science and technology studies or stress has turned towards foregrounding maintenance, 350 00:36:04,200 --> 00:36:08,320 breakage and repair as constitutive parts of a technical system. 351 00:36:09,180 --> 00:36:15,750 And in a now classic essay from 2014, an essay called Rethinking Repair STS 352 00:36:15,830 --> 00:36:20,520 scholar Stephen Jackson proposed to recenter our understanding of the history of technology, 353 00:36:20,970 --> 00:36:27,690 letting go of this obsession with the innovation, with the new in favour of what he called a kind of broken world. 354 00:36:27,690 --> 00:36:37,000 Thinking. What happens? He asks. When we take erosion, breakdown and decay rather than novelty growth and progress as our starting points, 355 00:36:37,020 --> 00:36:42,000 when we think through the nature, use and effects of information technology and new media. 356 00:36:43,900 --> 00:36:48,700 A broken world thinking approach to the history of photography could offer a kind of double vision. 357 00:36:48,910 --> 00:36:56,530 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, 358 00:36:56,530 --> 00:37:05,019 sustained and continually remade by practices of maintenance or destruction by their many owners and users pulled all the way into the present. 359 00:37:05,020 --> 00:37:12,009 So just as we could think about a building as shaped and sustained and constantly remade by its inhabitants and its maintenance staff, 360 00:37:12,010 --> 00:37:23,139 not just by its architects. Some repair work, such as photograph conservation and its attendant practices might seem like it's backward looking, 361 00:37:23,140 --> 00:37:27,370 kind of oriented towards returning ruined objects to prior states, 362 00:37:27,670 --> 00:37:34,570 toward maintaining an inadequate status quo, or towards deferring change to produce an illusory image of permanence. 363 00:37:37,640 --> 00:37:44,210 But and there is a way of seeing the telegraph and the sophisticated technological apparatus that maintains it in this light. 364 00:37:45,350 --> 00:37:50,570 It feels like we're saving the holograph for a future that will never come. But following Jackson. 365 00:37:51,050 --> 00:37:55,420 What would it look like? What would a forward looking approach to photographic conservation look like? 366 00:37:55,430 --> 00:38:03,200 One one which seeks to rework the landscape of our inherited situations to sustain and project values and value into the future. 367 00:38:04,670 --> 00:38:09,650 Would it involve? And I'm just being speculative here. I'm not saying we should put the photographs out in the sun. 368 00:38:11,000 --> 00:38:11,450 But am I? 369 00:38:12,780 --> 00:38:19,880 Would it involve reallocating conservation resources to under-resourced locations and areas of collection where they are most urgently needed? 370 00:38:20,950 --> 00:38:24,999 Would it involve re-evaluating energy intensive storage practices in recognition 371 00:38:25,000 --> 00:38:28,990 of the need for sustainability in a in the face of a global climate crisis? 372 00:38:29,740 --> 00:38:35,530 Would it let go of the institutional commitment to preserve everything in our collections for perpetuity? 373 00:38:36,840 --> 00:38:43,230 Would it begin to let go of some not all of these fragile scraps of chemical soaked paper, these blank plates, glass and metal. 374 00:38:44,930 --> 00:38:49,160 Recognising that photographs are not only visual objects but inherently social 375 00:38:49,280 --> 00:38:53,720 cultural artefacts whose meanings arise out of human interactions with them. 376 00:38:54,180 --> 00:38:58,040 Would it maybe involve deciding to accept future deterioration, 377 00:38:58,040 --> 00:39:04,490 further deterioration of precious objects through handling and display in order to allow the photograph to live? 378 00:39:08,400 --> 00:39:11,820 All physical objects are composed of active and unruly matter. 379 00:39:13,250 --> 00:39:21,350 The varied materials of which they are composed respond in sometimes unpredictable ways chemically, physically and otherwise to their surroundings. 380 00:39:22,250 --> 00:39:25,639 But I think we all feel that there is perhaps a profound sense in which this 381 00:39:25,640 --> 00:39:29,900 is more existentially true of 19th century photographs than of most things. 382 00:39:30,710 --> 00:39:32,810 All silver based photographic processes, of course, 383 00:39:32,810 --> 00:39:40,540 had a volatile and inherently unstable photochemistry with which early photographers had to grapple in order to make and preserve images. 384 00:39:41,540 --> 00:39:46,550 Their makers and users also intimately knew photographs to be temporal temperamental things. 385 00:39:47,750 --> 00:39:56,180 But photography was also positioned early on by many of its most influential commentators as a powerful cultural practice for halting time and place. 386 00:39:56,540 --> 00:40:00,290 For preserving and archiving the ephemeral. For fighting loss and decay. 387 00:40:00,290 --> 00:40:07,430 And historical change. Despite our powerful structuring narratives about the history of photography as a medium of fixity. 388 00:40:08,180 --> 00:40:13,069 And these are narratives of narratives of progress handed down to us by gentleman of science, 389 00:40:13,070 --> 00:40:18,710 like Talbot in their invention accounts, and then sustained by our photo history institutions. 390 00:40:19,550 --> 00:40:23,060 Despite these narratives, photographs are always profoundly unfixed. 391 00:40:23,450 --> 00:40:23,840 Thank you.