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
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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.