carolin
    lange

selected projects

On actino-chemical reactions: J.F.W. Herschel’s photographic spectra with botanical matter


Doctor of Philosophy in Visual Culture

Photographic History Research Centre, Faculty of Arts, Design and Humanities

Supervised by Prof. Kelley Wilder and Prof Tim Fulford.

2021 – 2025



 

Thesis Abstract

With this thesis, I study the scope, conduct and context of the experiments. I employ the recreative research method, reconstructing the instrumentation, reperforming the experiments, and creating new photographic objects. Re-creating Herschel’s experiments shows how the new medium of photography disrupted spectral and chemical investigations into light-induced chemical reactions. Photography introduced the possibility of producing stable and representative records, which later became central in science photography. Yet Herschel’s photographic objects, remaining in the research tradition of spectral and chemical investigations, were not treated as records documenting experiments. Instead, they served as experimental spaces in which light-induced chemical reactions could be created, observed and analysed in their transient states. Herschel’s experiments thus point to a function of photographic objects defined not by documenting experiments, but by being active, temporal spaces for experiments.

This thesis revises the narrative of Herschel’s failed attempt at colour photography. I reposition them as a study of light and actino-chemical (light-induced chemical) reactions within the history of photography and science. The use of photographic objects as spaces to conduct experiments reaches beyond that of Herschel’s. It presents a new research question for studying nineteenth and twentieth-century experiments that investigated actino-chemical reactions without leaving concrete photographs.

Funded by the AHRC-funded Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership (M4C)and Het Cultuurfonds.

under the same sun


in collbaration with Dico Kruijsse

more information on our website

a video of our public artwork in public space for the Biennale für Aktuelle Fotografie x BUGA 23.




(2017 – present)


How can we record light through material? What happens when we think of a building as a 'camera'? How does sunlight affect the way we perceive and understand spatial relations, dimensions of time, place, proximity and absence?

These are the questions that drive our collaborative project 'under the same sun'. We are working with the early photographic blueprint process. Non-toxic and with long exposure times, this process allows us to capture light on a 1:1 scale with multiple and long exposures of hours to weeks. The blueprint process is an accessible medium that we use to create artworks in which collaborative workshops - or 'light recording' sessions - have become an integral part. In these workshops, we share our working methods, and we invite people to join us in capturing sunlight.
We often work in a series of 'light recordings', using scale models of buildings and the actual location as our analogue recording devices, creating unique photograms of light. Light and shadow are translated into blue and white formations of a universal nature. At the same time, we find that each location has its own conditions, which influence the making.

'under the same sun' describes the obvious and the immediate, that what all locations have in common is the same sun that shines on them every day. Working with sunlight over days and weeks makes the movement of the earth around the sun visible and tangible. Visible as photographic material and tangible as a physical experience in the making. The record and recording both share the experience of space over time, registered in and by light.

run and exhibited at the Humbolt Forum Berlin, Het Nieuwe Instituut,  Goethe Instituut Rotterdam, TENT Rotterdam, Biennale für Akuelle Fotografie x BUGA 23 among others.

...to who am I talking to...


in collaboration with experimental physicist S.Skacel, KIT Karlsruhe.




(2015 – 2017)


The project started with a research-residency at the Physics Research Institute for Experimental Quantum Research, KIT University Karlsruhe (DE) in January 2015. During this one moth residency, a similar interest in day-to-day challenges of research emerged. Moments of error, the role of failing, beauty and uncertainty became main topics of further conversations. In researching each other’s point of view, we started to employ each other’s working methods resulting in a workshop and a book.

Kindly supported by the City of Karlsruhe and the ZKM Karlsruhe.

current...




“How to render visible: Robert Hunt’s experimentation, from photography to electromagnetism”. In PhotoResearcher no. 45 (2026): upcoming.
“Blue infrastructures: The blueprints of Castle de Haar.” In Original copies: blueprints, whiteprints, zips, and photocopies in the architectural office, 1870–2000, edited by Ellen Smit (Nai 010, 2025).
“Photographic Experimentation in the Letters of Sir John Herschel.” In The Royal Society — Science in the Making, online article (The Royal Society, 2024).
“Appendix: Vegetable Colours.” In The Cambridge Companion to John Herschel, edited by Stephen Case and Lukas M. Verburgt (Cambridge University Press, 2024)

Cowritten with Hetty Berens. “Blueprint Experiments.” In Approaches to Drawing in Architectural and Urban Design, edited by Fabio Colonnese, Nuno Grancho, and Robin Schaeverbeke (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024).