This blog was produced for a 2018-19 AHRC funded research project on the work of the Ilford Limited photographic company and aspects of photographic culture during WWI and in the interwar period in Britain. It was titled
Aesthetics, Industry and Innovation in Twentieth Century Photography: The Ilford Archive . Some of the ideas have made their way into my book
A Dirty History of Photography: Chemistry, Fog and Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2025), though the project developed a lot in the intervening years. I have reformatted it and removed the preamble and the last post, which both dealt with the practicalities of the project, but otherwise have left it as it was published online at the time.
Clicking on the title of a blog entry will take you to that entry.
Table of contents
Readings and beginnings; refining terminology; concept of innovation; “laboratory studies”; business structures and models.
Joseph A. Schumpeter; innovation as a social activity; role of the entrepreneur; “creative destruction”; evolutionary model of capitalism; Marxism; Thatcherism and Reaganism; political emphasis on entrepreneurship and innovation.
Critique of Schumpeterian economics; innovation as means for monopoly; role of the state in innovation; technological innovation as an industry in itself; reluctant consumers; “creative destruction”.
Modernity and modernism'; spectacle and astonishment; wonder and habit; avant-garde; everydayness of technological commodities; gendering of technology; technological determinism; adaptations, maintenance, repair and re-use.
The “distribution of the sensible”; the senses in social and cultural history; relation between senses and regulatory frameworks; newness;
aesthísis and expanded conception of sensory and aesthetic experience; change, cultural loss and nostalgia; innovation and ailments.
The rise of organic chemistry; aniline dyes; reconfiguration of the human senses in industrial modernity; mass-production and industrialisation of photography; first world war expansion; German and British production of sensitising dyes; reciprocal effects in technological development; new technologies and newly attuned bodies.
First visit to the Redbridge Museum and Heritage Centre in Ilford; 1930s packaging and labels; Ilford aerial film; Dufay-Chromex; military and defence supplies; the Hythe gun camera; specialist films for clydonographs, oscillographs, optical sound recording and phototelegraphy; importance of the negative; “designer emulsions” and diverse film formats.
“Grey media”; “cultural techniques”; the 1933 Houston Mount Everest Expedition; aerial films and plates; emulsion production methods; procedures and instructions; modernization through technology; fascism and imperialism; Nepal and British nationalism; military mapping; innovation and use; rendering the world visible and exploitable.
“Photographic Advertising” company; stock photography; advertising agencies; sentimental realism; advertising illustration; Selo film advertising in the 1930s; beach photography; modernist tropes; images of divers; the female body in flight; concepts of freedom; bodies and technology; hedonism; outdoor photography; rise of the holiday.
The Great Slump of 1929–33; British empire; export markets; family firms; consolidation and amalgamation; state intervention; Kodak and Agfa; rationalization and recession; Woolworths and Boots the chemist; Selo roll film; consumer film markets; militarization; Nazification of IG Farben; British armaments industry; the ‘warfare state’ and the military-industrial complex.
Connections between writing on social media photography and my Ilford research; history written from the perspective of the present; need for digital photography theory to have more nuanced understanding of analogue, chemical photography; the chemical and industrial infrastructure of experience; new technologies reconfiguring the everyday.
Contamination of photographic emulsion; London fogs; atmospheric pollution; humidity in manufacture; coal; industrialisation of photography; poor light in Britain; class prejudice; eugenics; moral purity; expansion of suburbs; gas industry and the smoke abatement campaigns; gasworks; air conditioning; association of photography with sun and seaside.
Dufaycolor; Spicer-Dufay; historical film colours; panchromatic emulsion; grain; digital cameras; Bayer filter; the analogue-digital distinction; the Lumière brothers’ Autochrome; nineteenth-century physiological optics; colour perception; computing; rationality of the grid.
Nineteenth-century advice literature for amateur photographers; rules of composition; nineteenth-century drawing and watercolour manuals; amateur artists; William Henry Fox Talbot; the cult of sketching; the picturesque; property and the landed gentry; freedom and ideas of “slavishness”; custom, habit, and sentiment; grids; the Ilford
Manual of Photography.
Amateurism; Lucia Moholy’s
A Hundred Years of Photography; the Pelican Specials series (Penguin books); Kodak fiends and photography lovers; the photography amateur as a reader of photography histories and Ilford manuals.
The Harman Technology Ltd. factory in Mobberley; mechanisation at Ilford Limited 1880s-1930s; emulsion coating machines; factory labour; repair and maintenance; living and working alongside machines; sensitivity and contamination; air conditioning; photographic emulsions as like living creatures; human and non-human collaboration.
Facture; medium as not inert; gun cotton / nitrocellulose / pyroxylin; wet-plate collodion process; “artificial skin”; cosmetics and surgery; gender and artifice; Parkesine / Xylonite / celluloid; big game hunting; George Eastman; elephants and the ivory trade; analogy between photography and taxidermy; flammability of film; surface culture of modernity.
Writing / archives / fog / distraction / sunglasses / Boots the Chemist / Kodak Limited / cigarette vouchers.
Representations versus material practices; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak; Martin Heidegger; relation between world and earth; colonialism; imperialism; concept of world and worlding; the photography archive; sensory experiences and ways of being; work of worlding.
.
Full list of Sources:
Armstrong Carol, “From Clementina to Käsebier: The Photographic Attainment of the ‘Lady Amateur’”,
October 91 (2000), 101–39.
Benjamin, Walter. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” In
Selected Writings, Volume 4 1938-1940, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 313-355. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, Second Version” (1936). In
Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935-1938, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. 101-133. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Bothamley, Charles Herbert,
Manual of Photography, London: Ilford Limited. n.d.
Brown, Elspeth H.
The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Corporate Culture, Baltimore MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2005.
Catford, A.J.,
Our first 75 years. Redbridge Museum and Library, Ilford Limited Archive, Box 1361, 90/359/E1/6
Chandler, Charles F. “Presentation Address.”
Industrial and Engineering Chemistry 6, no. 2 (1914): 156–158
Dominici, Sara,
Travel Marketing and Popular Photography in Britain, London: Routledge, 2017.
Douglas-Hamilton, Lord James,
Roof of the World: Man’s First Flight Over Everest, New York: Random House 2013.
Eagleton, Terry,
Ideology of the Aesthetic., Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.
Eastman correspondence 1928, George Eastman House Study Center.
Edgerton, David, “Industrial Research in the British Photographic Industry, 1879-1939.” In Liebenau, Jonathan (ed)
The Challenge of New Technology: Innovation in British Business since 1850, 106-134. Aldershot: Gower, 1988.
Edgerton, David. “From innovation to use: Ten eclectic theses on the historiography of technology.”
History and Technology, an International Journal 16, no. 2 (1999): 111-136.
Edgerton, David,
The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900, London: Profile Books 2006.
Edgerton, David,
Warfare State: Britain, 1920-1970, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Elliott, John E., ‘Introduction to the Transaction Edition’, in Schumpeter, Joseph A.
The Theory of Economic Development. London: Routledge, 2017 (originally published in 1983).
Friedberg, Anne.
The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 2006.
Fuller, Matthew, and Goffey, Andrew,
Evil Media, Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press 2012.
Le Guern, Nicolas.
“Contribution of the European Kodak Research Laboratories to Innovation Strategy at Eastman Kodak”, PhD dissertation, De Montfort University, 2017.
Gunning, Tom. “Re-Newing Old Technologies: Astonishment, Second Nature, and the Uncanny in Technology from the Previous Turn-of-the-Century.” In David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins (eds)
Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition. Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 2003.
Gunning, Tom, “Hand and Eye: Excavating a New Technology of the Image in the Victorian Era”,
Victorian Studies 54 (3), Spring (2012): 495-516.
Haraway, Donna. “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936”,
Social Text, no. 11 (Winter, 1984-1985): 20–64.
Harrison, G.B., “The laboratories of Ilford Limited”,
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 142, no.906 (1954): 9-20.
Harvey, David.
Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Heidegger, Martin, “The Origin of the Work of Art,”
Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York, 1977), 17-87.
Hercock, Robert J. and Jones, George A.,
Silver by the Ton: The History of Ilford Limited, 1879-1979, Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill, 1979.
Higgins, Hannah B.,
The Grid Book, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2009.
Hobsbawm, Eric,
Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day, London: Penguin Books, 1968/1999 (revised and updated with Chris Wigley).
Holmes, Oliver Wendall. “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph.”
Atlantic Monthly, June 1859.
Howard, Frank,
The Sketchers Manual, or the Whole Art of Picture Making reduced to Its Simplest Principles by which Amateurs may Instruct Themselves without The Aid of a Master, London, 1837.
Joicey, Nicholas, “A Paperback Guide to Progress: Penguin Books 1935–c.1951”,
Twentieth Century British History 4:1 (1993), 25-56.
Kaufman, Morris.
The First Century of Plastics: Celluloid and its Sequel. London: Plastics Institute, 1963.
Kemp, Martin. “Talbot and the picturesque view: Henry, Caroline and Constance.”
History of Photography 21, no. 4 (1997): 270-282.
Krauss, Rosalind. “Grids”.
October 9 (1979): 51-64
Lea, M. Carey,
Manual of Photography, Philadelphia, 1868.
Leslie, Esther,
Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry, London: Reaktion Books, 2005.
Lloyd-Jones, Roger, and Merv Lewis.
British Industrial Capitalism since the Industrial Revolution. London: Routledge, 2014 (originally published in 1998).
Luckin, Bill, “‘The heart and home of horror’: The great London fogs of the late nineteenth century.”
Social History 28(1) 2003, 31-48.
Marsch, Ulrich, “Strategies for Success: Research Organization in German Chemical Companies and IG Farben until 1936”,
History and Technology, vol. 12 (1994): 23-77.
Mensel, Robert E. “ ‘Kodakers Lying in Wait’: Amateur Photography and the Right of Privacy in New York, 1885 -1915”,
American Quarterly, 43:1 (1991), 24-45.
Moholy, Lucia,
A Hundred Years of Photography, Penguin Books Ltd., 1939.
Parkes, Alex. “On the Properties of Parkesine and its Application to the Arts and Manufactures.”
Journal of the Society of the Arts XIV, no. 683 (1865): 81–6.
Pritchard, Michael.
The Development and Growth of British Photographic Manufacturing and Retailing 1839-1914. PhD dissertation, De Montfort University, 2010.
Ramalingam, Chitra. “Dust Plate, Retina, Photograph: Imaging on Experimental Surfaces in Early Nineteenth-Century Physics.”
Science in Context 28, no. 3 (2015): 317–55.
Rancière, Jacques,
The Politics of Aesthetics, London: Bloomsbury 2013 (Originally published in French in 2000).
Russo, Mary,
The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity, London: Routledge, 1994
Rylance, Rick, “Reading with a Mission: The Public Sphere of Penguin Books”,
Critical Quarterly 47:4 (2005): 49-66.
Sarvas, Risto and Frohlich, David M.,
From Snapshots to Social Media: the Changing Picture of Domestic Photography, London: Springer, 2011.
Schumpeter, Joseph A.
The Theory of Economic Development. London: Routledge, 2017 (originally published in German in 1911).
Scoffern, John,
Stray Leaves of Science and Folklore, London: Tinsley Brothers, 1870.
Seremetakis, C. Nadia, “The Memory of the Senses Part 1: Marks of the Transitory” in C. Nadia Seremetakis (ed).
The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity . Boulder: Westview Press, 1994.
Sha, Richard. “The power of the English nineteenth-century visual and verbal sketch: appropriation, discipline, mastery.”
Nineteenth-Century Contexts 24, no. 1 (2002): 73-100.
Siegert, Bernhard,
Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors and Other Articulations of the Real, New York: Fordham University Press 2015.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, “The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives”,
History and Theory, 24: 3. (1985a), 247-272.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism”,
Critical Inquiry, 12: 1, (1985b), 243-261.
Taylor, John. “Kodak and the ‘English’ Market between the Wars.”
Journal of Design History 7, no. 1 (1994): 29-42.
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Environment and History 8, no. 4 (2002): 381-401.
Virilio, Paul,
The Vision Machine, London: BFI, 1994 (originally published in French 1988)
Wajcman, Judy. “Feminist Theories of Technology.”
Cambridge Journal of Economics 34, no. 1 (2010): 143-152.
Walker, John Frederick.
Ivory's Ghosts: the White Gold of History and the Fate of Elephants. Grove Press 2010.
Ward, Janet.
Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001.
Wilder, Kelley E. "Photography and the art of science."
Visual Studies 24.2 (2009): 163-168.
Wilkinson, Helen. “‘The New Heraldry’: Stock Photography, Visual Literacy, and Advertising in 1930s Britain”.
Journal of Design History 10, no. 1 (1997): 23-38.
Wilson, Erasmus. “Observations on Collodion in the Treatment of Diseases of the Skin.”
The Lancet 52, no. 1316 (1848): 553–554.
Woodbury, W. E.
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Twentieth Century British History, 21, no.3 (2010): 300-329.
Links
Historical Film Colors
National Meteorological Archive,
Monthly Weather Reports
Beginnings and Returnings
20 August 2018 | Aesthetics, Industry and Innovation in Twentieth Century Photography: The Ilford Archive
I guess one way to begin is to return. I have started my project (ahead of the official start date and my archival work) by re-reading two PhD theses from de Montfort University: Michael Pritchard’s
“The Development and Growth of British Photographic Manufacturing and Retailing 1839-1914” which was completed in 2010. and Nicolas Le Guern’s
“Contribution of the European Kodak Research Laboratories to Innovation Strategy at Eastman Kodak”, awarded in 2017 . Neither is directly about my subject: Pritchard’s study ends at the point where mine begins, and Le Guern is centred on Kodak, not Ilford, but both are useful in terms of context and historical background. Other work I am re-reading at the moment include the writings of David Edgerton and Sally Horrocks, both working in business and economic history, who deal directly with the British context and with Ilford Ltd.
Another way to begin, and something I am doing at the same time, is to start to sharpen my terminology. In my AHRC application I wrote that I would be investigating “practices of technical innovation in the work of the Ilford Ltd”. I think “innovation” is a term that needs some unravelling: first because claims about innovation are entangled with claims about social and technological change and questions about technological determination; and second, because understanding innovation necessarily also involve considering the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge.
Le Guern’s thesis (which I am turning to first as one of the very few studies on innovation in the photographic industry) frames some of these studies of scientific knowledge-production under the rubric of “laboratory studies”. I am not yet sure to what extent my study of the archival material is a kind of laboratory study, since ultimately I am more concerned with the spread of practices out into the world, into everyday experience and photographic practice.
Le Guern also points out that in economics literature, innovation is distinct from invention and is much more to do with the introduction of new products, or techniques or forms of organisation after their invention (which means that it is as much to do with business structures and models as practices in the lab). It relates to the decision to adopt, put into production and market an invention.
I had been thinking of innovation as a combination of invention and then producing, marketing etc. but I had not consciously made this distinction. This distinction between innovation and invention comes from an Austrian economist, Joseph A. Schumpeter, whose book
The Theory of Economic Development was published in German in 1911, and in English translation in 1934. I think it is time for a brief foray into economics.... brace yourselves!
Excursus into Economics
25 August 2018 | Understanding Innovation in Schumpeter's Economic Theory
I have been reading some economic theory and economic history to try to understand the meaning of
“innovation”, particularly, about the economist Joseph A. Schumpeter, whose book
The Theory of Economic Development was published in German in 1911, and in English translation in 1934.
It makes sense, I think, to use his definition of innovation as a social activity with a commercial, economic function and purpose (whereas invention or discovery can happen without regard to this), and to apply the concept of innovation, as he did, not only to products and technologies, but to new combinations of resources and technology, new processes and markets, the exploitation of new raw materials or intermediary products (such as chemical compounds), and the development of new ways to organize the firm.
For Schumpeter innovation results from an “entrepreneurial function”. Entrepreneurs set themselves against existing knowledge, routines and habit, and he presents them as more talented and creative than ordinary managers, and distinct in their role from capitalists or financiers. I suspect that Schumpeter’s theory plays well with individuals who fancy themselves as creative risk-takers!
In fact, Schumpeter viewed the whole development of capitalism as dependent on innovation and his theory of capitalism is inseparable from his conservative / right-wing politics. For Schumpeter, innovation is a process tightly linked to what he calls “creative destruction” — a term that describes the process by which innovation “incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one” (Schumpeter cited in Elliott xx). This rocky process allows capitalism to ride or at least survive, periods of depression and economic crisis. Politically, though he shared with Marx a dynamic, evolutionary model of capitalism, where Marx attended to the destructive human cost of capitalism, Schumpeter saw the pain of creative destruction as nevertheless leading to greater relative equality and social benefits.
Schumpeter’s politics, or the politics of “Schumperterians”, matters for my study, because I need to know what it might mean to claim that Ilford Limited was “innovative” or not in the 1920s and ‘30s. I need to know more about the role of the concept of innovation in the larger context of political and economic thought. Certainly, there are Schumpeterian elements to the new right. Recall how Thatcherite and Reaganite politics viewed capitalism as dynamic and mythologised the entrepreneur; the neoconservative theorist Francis Fukuyama also drew on Schumpeter’s concept of creative destruction. We can find the Schumpeterian notion of the heroic entrepreneur institutionalised in government and policy, especially in schemes and competitions by governments and regions to encourage and reward entrepreneurship with the belief it will stimulate economic growth. This emphasis on entrepreneurship and innovation has crept into universities too.
Sources:
Schumpeter, Joseph A.
The Theory of Economic Development. London: Routledge, 2017 (originally published in German in 1911).
Lloyd-Jones, Roger, and Merv Lewis.
British Industrial Capitalism since the Industrial Revolution. London: Routledge, 2014 (originally published in 1998).
Elliott, John E., ‘Introduction to the Transaction Edition’, in Schumpeter, Joseph A.
The Theory of Economic Development. London: Routledge, 2017 (originally published in 1983).
Innovation as Fetish Object
26 August 2018 | David Harvey and Key Points on Innovation
David Harvey’s 2014 book,
Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism provides a useful critique of some of Schumpeter’s core assumptions, which I am using to help me think through the concept of innovation. He argues against the emphasis on competition in the Marxist and Schumpeterian accounts, because capitalism tends toward monopoly —companies try and protect their competitive advantage through patents, confidentiality and monopoly (Harvey 93). He argues that there is a “cultural” preference for increased productivity and efficiency (and hence increased profits) and that product innovation can be a means to acquire “monopoly profits” and, via patents, “a monopoly rent” (Harvey 93).
In the case of Ilford: as both David Edgerton and Michael Pritchard discuss, between 1918 and the mid 1930s, Ilford Limited absorbed most of their competitors until their only large remaining competitor was Kodak Ltd. the British subsidiary of Eastman Kodak. By the late 1930s, the two firms combined had 90% of the market (Edgerton 1988, 113).
Against the emphasis on the firm and the entrepreneur, Harvey points to the role of the state in innovation, including the military, but also the legal system, inland revenue, customs and excise, etc., and collaborative research and development between government and industry (Harvey 93). Again we can see this in the photographic industry: e.g. state support for the development of panchromatic plates in WWI, the use of import quotas and duties during and after WWII to favour ‘strategic’ and modern industries including the manufacturers of photographic film (Edgerton 1988, 112).
But one of the key things I get from Harvey is that technological innovation has become an industry in itself, concerned with producing “generic technologies” (Harvey 94). Thus, “Technological innovation became a fetish object of capitalist desire” (Harvey 95). Against the conventional view of technologies as necessary improvements related to customer demand or desire, Harvey argues that consumers are often reluctant and have new technologies and products foisted on them (think of the emphasis on “upgrading” in phones, computers and so on). Just as all innovations beget more innovations (as Schumpeter recognised), technologies set in motion more problems and more opportunities for further technological solutions. Citing Schumpeter’s phrase “gales of creative destruction”, Harvey says: “The question always to be asked is: who gains from the creation and who bears the brunt of the destruction” (Harvey 98).
So — here is my understanding of innovation based on my reading so far:
1. Innovation should be distinguished from invention (Schumpeter).
2. Innovation can be (/is?) destructive (Schumpeter)
3. Innovation does not necessarily result from competition between firms (Harvey, contra Schumpeter).
4. Innovation does not necessarily result from/ rarely results from entrepreneurship (numerous writers).
5. Innovation proves profitable in itself and has led to an innovation industry (Harvey).
6. The drive toward innovation may be cultural / ideological (rather than envisaging the rational economic actor of neoclassical economics) (Harvey).
7. Innovation’s economic advantage is brief as it produces imitators, but it also produces bandwagon effects, and more innovation (sometime called innovatory bunching or clusters) (Schumpeter / numerous writers).
8. Innovation is not necessarily a positive value, not only because it is destructive but because it is often unwanted / coercive (Harvey, contra Schumpeter)
Sources:
Harvey, David.
Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Edgerton, D. E. H. “Industrial Research in the British Photographic Industry, 1879-1939.” In Liebenau, Jonathan (ed)
The Challenge of New Technology: Innovation in British Business since 1850, 106-134. Aldershot: Gower, 1988.
Pritchard, Michael.
The Development and Growth of British Photographic Manufacturing and Retailing 1839-1914. PhD dissertation, De Montfort University, 2010.
Innovation-Determination
28 August 2018 | Modernism, Feminism, Technology-in-use
My last two posts on innovation miss out some key ideas which I will discuss briefly here (this is a longer post as I want to move on from innovation!): 1) that innovation is specifically associated with modernity and modernism, 2) that technological innovations are gendered, 3) that an emphasis on innovation in the history of technology is problematic.
I will take each of these at a time. On the first point, Tom Gunning, in the essay “Re-Newing Old Technologies”, writes about modernity in terms of “the dazzling experience of the new” (Gunning 43). He is interested in the spectacle that seems to accompany novelty in modernity — in the reception of technological innovation as something astonishing.
This is the shock of the new that wears off quickly, as a new technology quickly becomes something habitual, everyday, even unnoticed (Gunning 39). The initial wondrousness is not a property of the technology so much as a discourse that surrounds it. Gunning writes that “Surprise is learned, fostered and expressed by discursive practices whose implementation brings profit to someone.... Modernity must be partly understood as learning to be surprised by certain [not all] innovations...” (Gunning 44).
Gunning argues “the cycle from wonder to habit need not run only one way” (Gunning 47). Avant-garde aesthetics, particularly the strategy of de-familiarization” practised by the modernist avant-gardes, attempt to keep the newness of innovation alive, not to reinvigorate its economic advantage (though it may) but to draw out its uncanniness, revealing an “address to a previously unimagined future”, a utopian element which is lost as the technology sinks “back into the established grooves of power and exploitation” (Gunning 56).
While innovation may be disruptive, the success of a commodity is nevertheless largely measured by the way in which it settles into the everyday and makes itself at home to the point it is largely unnoticed except when called upon (a recent example might be Amazon’s Alexa). Against this, aesthetic defamiliarization refuses to allow the new to settle in. In echoing the “creative destruction” of industrial innovation, it attempts to prevent the riding-out of crisis by the status-quo.
My second point, that innovation is gendered, refers to feminist studies of technology, which emphasise the discursive and material construction of innovation. As Judy Wajcman summarizes in her essay “Feminist Theories of Technology”, (2010) gender relations not only shape the reception of technology by framing its arrival but are embedded in and embodied by the technology itself . That is, gender relations (indeed all social relations) and technology are mutually shaping (Wajcman 147).
The third issue is to do with the overvaluing of innovation, particularly in the history of technology. In a 1999 text “From innovation to use “, David Edgerton claims that innovation draws attention away from technology in use. He argues that “technological determinism” ought to be called innovation-determinism, “a belief that innovation powered change” as against “the thesis that society is determined by technology in use” (Edgerton 121).
Edgerton says that the bias toward innovation puts too much emphasis on origins, privileges production over consumption and change over stasis (Edgerton 113). It produces a bias towards richer countries and distorts the sense of the time period to which a technology belongs (e.g. associating coal with the nineteenth century, when “in Britain domestic coal consumption peaked in the 1950s” — Edgerton 115). In photography (technology) history too, accounts of the Victorian period and circa 1900 (when the Brownie is introduced) are more common than accounts of the interwar period. The emphasis on invention detracts from adaptations, “maintenance, repair, remodelling, re-use, and re-cycling” (Edgerton 120).
I am hoping to identify how aesthetic norms and technical expertise are built into technical apparatuses, to explore the intertwining of human and apparatus in photography, and to map a relationship between sensual and technological transformations at the level of everyday experience. I need to consider whether this is really about “innovation” as such.
So to my list of points from last week I think I can add:
9. The shock of the new is not to do with the nature of the technology but the discursive framing which accompanies its entry into the world.
10. Modern culture trains us in the reception of innovation: teaching us how and when to be surprised, or astonished.
11. Innovation in modernity is met by the modernist insistence on newness and originality. This can feed into the innovation industry, as its aesthetic or cultural twin, but it can also, challenge the process by which innovations are absorbed into everyday experience.
12. Innovations do not produce changes in social relation after the fact, but are the product of certain social relations and embody social relations and discourses in material, practical form.
13. “Innovation” gives a narrow, and potentially misleading, perspective from which to think through the everyday experience of technologies.
Sources:
Gunning, Tom. “Re-Newing Old Technologies: Astonishment, Second Nature, and the Uncanny in Technology from the Previous Turn-of-the-Century.” In David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins (eds)
Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition. Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 2003.
Wajcman, Judy. “Feminist Theories of Technology.”
Cambridge Journal of Economics 34, no. 1 (2010): 143-152.
Edgerton, David. “From innovation to use: Ten eclectic theses on the historiography of technology.”
History and Technology, an International Journal 16, no. 2 (1999): 111-136.
The Sensory Economy
30 August 2018 | Imperceptible changes in everyday aesthesis
Still slightly in advance of the official start-date of my AHRC funded research project, and before I go into the archive, I am trying to clarify my framework. This involves returning to the original description of the project I provided the AHRC and re-examining some of the terms. In the last few blog posts I looked at the concept of innovation. I am now going to turn to a phrase that exercised one of the AHRC reviewers: the “sensory” or “sensual economy”.
Since the last few blog posts have been about the economy (trade and industry), I should point out that “economy” in this context does not mean that. It refers to the management, circulation and distribution of sensory experiences and organisation of the relationships between them. It links together the broad sense of economy as administration and distribution, with the everyday sense of it as thrift / budgeting.
It is connected to Jacques Rancière’s concept of the “distribution of the sensible”, which refers to the social distribution of competencies and “the way in which . . . a social destination is anticipated by the evidence of a perceptive universe, of a way of being, saying and seeing” (Rancière 12). The distribution of the sensible (/ the sensory economy) is about the unequal availability of varieties of sensory and aesthetic experience across social groups.
Questions about the distribution of the sensible and the sensory economy are addressed, but not named as such in work on the senses in social and cultural history (for example in terms of history “from below” as well as “from above”. One of the tendencies in early histories of the senses was towards global or generalizing histories, but others are more specific and differentiated.
In a lovely 1994 essay called “The Memory of the Senses Part I”, C. Nadia Seremetakis writes of how certain sensory experiences (the taste of a peach) that belong to a culture (Greek culture) are affected by larger regulatory frameworks (the European Economic Community regulations relating to food). Seremetakis talks of “a cordoning off of the capacity for certain perceptual experiences in such a manner that their very disappearance went unnoticed” (Seremetakis 2). In particular (and in contrast to Gunning's work on newness and astonishment discussed previously in this blog), she is interested in imperceptible changes, sensory changes that “occur microscopically through everyday accretion” (Seremetakis 3).
Seremetakis also attends to the question of newness and how the experience of the new is “culturally prepared and programmed with the simultaneous fabrication or promise of new sensory powers... promised as substitutions, replacements and improvements of prior sensory experience” (Seremetakis 8).
She provides an account of the Greek roots and meanings of the “aesthetic” . In Greek the word for senses is
aesthísis and aesthetics is
aesthítiki. Seremetakis shows how the roots of these words link moral sense, emotions and the senses, affective and aesthetic experience (Seremetakis 5). This is important for understanding the culturally specific ways in which Greeks name and experience sensory change. But for me, it is also useful, because this is the expanded way that I am conceiving of sensory experience and aesthetic experience. I want to connect the experience of photographs and taste in photographs, questions of style and aesthetics with other changes in everyday sensory experience (not necessarily visual).
Terms such as economy, distribution, or even acculturation suggest something relatively painless — yet what Seremetakis charts is a deep sense of cultural loss. Similarly, industrial innovation is not always met easily or seamlessly adapted to, even when it sneaks in, as Benjamin and Siegfried Gideon suggested, in the guise of the old (I discuss this in an early essay called “Digital Encounters”).
The new ailments that accompanied innovation (new kinds of labour process, new forms of transport and new consumer technologies) challenged the separation of mental and physical life. Various types of repetitive strain injury and musculoskeletal problems were diagnosed alongside symptoms that seemed to have their roots in various kinds of “hysteria” (including shellshock) and which manifested as physical changes in the body / sensorium. Nostalgia appears in this context not just as a romantic yearning for the past, but as one of the few means of navigating and naming the pain and loss associated with change.
Sources
Rancière, Jacques,
The Politics of Aesthetics, London: Bloomsbury 2013 (Originally published in French in 2000).
Seremetakis, C. Nadia, “The Memory of the Senses Part 1: Marks of the Transitory” in C. Nadia Seremetakis (ed).
The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity . Boulder: Westview Press, 1994.
Into the Archive
7 September 2018 | A Dizzying Variety of Film
Yesterday I began my research project in the Ilford Limited archive. This archive is housed at the Redbridge Museum and Heritage Centre in Ilford. I had a long meeting with Gerard Greene, the Redbridge Museum manager, and the collections officer Dawn Galer. The plan is to involve archivists and librarians in later stages of the project, so we talked about that, but the conversation was also useful because it helped me to understand aspects of the local context. For example, we pondered on the links between the Ilford factory and other businesses in the area, such as Howards and Sons chemical works, which produced aspirin, and also quinine for use by the British Army, in the treatment of malaria (Ilford Limited experimented with quinine as a preservative).
While at the archive I looked at packaging, especially labels, from the 1930s. This turned out to be one way to get a sense of the sheer variety of Ilford films being marketed in this period to different specialist markets. I am not clear yet whether each of these films is chemically distinct or to what extent the variety is principally in the branding, and the physical format of the film. In the 1930s, Ilford aerial film, for example, came coated in at least four types of emulsion and was supplied on spools, on Selo no 20 film (equivalent in size to 120 film) or on 4" high negatives packed into cartons and airtight tins. Another aerial film, produced for Rossi and co., Switzerland, used a metal spool that was 192 mm (roughly 7 1/2") tall. Colour film produced by Dufay-Chromex in Elstree but “sensitised for the manufacturer by Ilford Limited”, was sold in flat sheets in eleven different sizes ranging from 3 1/4" by 2 1/4" to 15" by 12". The thickness of the film base varied too, from about 0.0321mm to 0.127mm depending on the intended use (the Ilford records describe this in thousandths of an inch, but I find millimetres easier to visualise).
The books of labels also give a sense of the organisations being supplied film by Ilford Limited in the interwar period. Films are destined for the commercial markets but also for the RAF, the Admiralty, Nobel's explosives, and G.E.C. Birmingham (General Electric Company which was also a defence contractor). The role of photographic suppliers in war and the parallel between the photographic “shot” and the gun shot becomes explicit in the archive. Ilford supplied aerial film on Selo no 20 stock (equivalent in size to 120 film) to be used in a Hythe gun camera (You can see one of these cameras
here .) I have written about gun cameras in my 2006 essay “Skins of the Real: Taxidermy and Photography”, but while the ones I was talking about were largely substitutes for the killing sort, the Hythe gun camera was actually a means to train aerial gunners and thus to enhance their accuracy with a real gun (a precursor of contemporary simulation technology).
Much has been written on the connections between media and war (and the origins of media in war) but this should not obscure the sheer variety of uses to which film and photographic materials were put. There was a specialist film for clydonographs, which optically record voltage surges, and for oscillographs, which also record oscillations in electrical current. There was film for optical sound recording (how this worked in cinema is described in great detail in
this 1930s film from the Huntley Archives ) and phototelegraphic film, used in early television.
When photography theorists and historians think about photography we tend to think about photographic prints . This was point made by Geoffrey Batchen in his talk
“Repetition and Difference: A Little History of the Negative” at the Photographer's Gallery which I went to after my visit to the archive. Batchen drew attention to the neglect of the negative, arguing that thinking about negatives moves us away from thinking about photographs as singular objects towards thinking about multiplicity and about the “otherness” of photography.
It struck me, as Batchen was talking, that what I had been looking at in the archive was an even more dizzying multiplicity and variety that complicated the idea of a picture as the final outcome of a photographic process. This variety is expressed in the range of “designer emulsions” that Kelley Wilder discusses (see my last blog post) but also the range of formats, each produced and adjusted for specific and often obsure and highly technical uses. For my purposes, this suggests the extent to which the photographic / photochemical was shaping social experience in ways that have barely been addressed in media histories and photographic histories.
Photochemistry as second nature
4 September 2018 | Walter Benjamin and Sensory Experience in Modernity
In the interwar period I am interested in, the global photographic industry had massively expanded during the First World War and become a key producer and consumer of new, artificial chemical products. Along with other industries, photographic manufacture was materially altering the environment via new products, byproducts and pollutants, as well as via the construction of a global infrastructure, and new ways of organizing labour, all the while facilitating new ways of picturing and representing this altered world. Benjamin called the new humanly made environment “second nature”, and Esther Leslie has shown how this depended on the rise of organic chemistry and of new synthetic materials, such as aniline dyes (Leslie).
In my research, I am trying to identify how photochemistry participated in changes in sensory regimes, as part of a wider reconfiguration of the human senses in industrial modernity. This research question is fundamentally informed by Walter Benjamin’s claim that new media forms were met by altered sensoria, resulting from new industrial, urban experiences (Benjamin,
Some Motifs, 314). However, while I am attending to photographic materials, Benjamin was talking about forms and structures: about how edited montages in cinema, for example, might match changes brought about by industrial environments (central to Benjamin’s argument in the
Work of Art essay is the often neglected point that film met the spectator “halfway”) and how Baudelaire found a poetic form to match a kind of bored, numbed and shut-down sensibility that emerged in response to the jolting, abrupt and discontinuous aspects of modern technological experience (Benjamin,
Some Motifs, 319).
It is nevertheless a Benjaminian assumption to claim that not only did photographs picture the world in new ways, photography was engaged in altering everyday situations, shaping new kinds of perception, sensation and feelings. Even so, while Benjamin draws on literature to diagnose these affects, I am starting with the production of photographic materials in an industrial context. While Benjamin situates photographic reproduction within the larger world of industrialization and urbanization, broadly defined, in my research I want to situate photography more precisely within its own industrialisation.
This began in the 1870s-90s with the introduction of mass-production, standardization, improvements in dry plate manufacture, new emulsions, the introduction of celluloid, and the growth of the global supply chain (Pritchard 115), and expanded in the First World War due to the growth of cinema and of the amateur market, and also to government investment in photographic materials as “weapons of war” (Edgerton 112). The war had boosted British production of sensitising dyes because it made German dyes no longer available to British manufacturers. By the 1920s and ’30s, the central period of my project, the photography industry was refining silver halide emulsions via the addition of specific kinds of sensitising dyes, which not only extended the visible spectrum registered by the emulsions, but more importantly made it possible to control photosensitivity (Wilder 166).
The introduction of panchromatic materials into the everyday made all sorts of other technical developments possible, and we can trace reciprocal effects. For example, faster gelatin and aniline dye emulsions facilitated handheld cameras, and these cameras reshaped darkroom chemistry. Their small negatives necessitated enlargement, which in turn necessitated finer grain in the negative, and therefore the introduction of new developing agents. This connects to the concept of innovation begetting more innovation, discussed in previous blog posts.
However, here I am concerned with how the new panchromatic emulsions might have both depicted new kinds of embodied experience, and co-produced these. A technology meets newly attuned bodies halfway, because it is already oriented toward them. We don’t have to make a choice between a consideration of representation and a consideration of affects, bodies, and materialities. Photography constructs, reproduces and communicates ideological content in the same moment that it facilitates a specifically embodied culture — a certain affective atmosphere, certain kinds of orientation and disposition, particular sensibilities, new temporalities, bodily rhythms, ways of inhabiting space.
Sources
Benjamin, Walter. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” In
Selected Writings, Volume 4 1938-1940, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 313-355. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, Second Version” (1936). In
Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935-1938, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. 101-133. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Edgerton, D. E. H. “Industrial Research in the British Photographic Industry, 1879-1939.” In Liebenau, Jonathan (ed)
The Challenge of New Technology: Innovation in British Business since 1850, 106-134. Aldershot: Gower, 1988.
Leslie, Esther.
Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry. London: Reaktion, 2005.
Pritchard, Michael.
The Development and Growth of British Photographic Manufacturing and Retailing 1839-1914. PhD dissertation, De Montfort University, 2010.
Wilder, Kelley E. "Photography and the art of science."
Visual Studies 24.2 (2009): 163-168.
Cutting Through the Haze
11 September 2018 | Cultural Techniques and Ilford’s Aerial Film
In my last blog post, I explained that I am interested in imperceptible or obscure uses of photographic materials. I have been thinking about Bernhard Siegert’s phrase “inconspicuous technologies of knowledge” and Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey’s discussion of “grey media”, a phrase they use to describe the technical systems and operations that underpin the workplace and everyday life (Siegert 2; Fuller and Goffey). These writers are interested in mediating technologies that operate beyond
the media (film, television, press). They emphasize, not audiences or uses, but operations, sequences, workflow and technical training. This seems to me very useful. These are the techniques, procedures and programs that precede and shape communication, knowledge and culture.
Siegert describes “cultural techniques” as the means by which “the symbolic is filtered out of the real”, the means by which signal is made out from noise, sense from nonsense, culture from nature (Siegert 13). Media work to exclude interruptions, disturbances, static or contaminants but these are actually the means by which culture and communication can happen at all. This is why Siegert says that cultural techniques are first of all filters, processing material and creating “order by introducing distinctions” (Siegert 23).
Film can be understood as a media technology. But I am particularly interested in how we might think about Ilford’s photochemical products from the perspective of technical procedures, and in relation to this idea of ordering or filtering. I will use the example of the 1933 Houston Mount Everest Expedition, which used Ilford’s aerial films and plates.
The panchromatic emulsion used on these films was produced using the same routine as every other emulsion: silver nitrate and soluble halides are added to gelatin, where they react to form silver halide and soluble nitrate, this mixture is then heated so that the silver halide crystals grow in size, the emulsion is shredded and washed to get rid of byproducts and impurities and then heated again to increase sensitivity. This process was described by the Ilford chemist G.B. Harrison in 1954, and he added, “all of these operations are capable of almost infinite variation and it is in the modification of these steps that much of the progress has been made, and emulsions of extremely diverse characteristics produced” (Harrison 10).
Another set of pre-ordained steps is used to coat the emulsion onto glass plates, flat films or roll film as required by the specific purchaser and dependent on what camera it is to be used in. Then there are specific instructions that determine whether / how the film is wrapped and whether there is a leader or not, whether the film ends are “pennanted”. They specify a set of procedures such as: to wind the film with the emulsion inwards, to seal it with brown gummed strip, and to pack it in a particular way. Such variable procedures turn an invention (or two: the celluloid film and the Ilford Fast Panchromatic Type 1 emulsion) into various innovative products, each differently labelled and branded.
The Everest expedition was not a military survey but was privately funded. It was financed by and involved “prominent members of the high-imperialist, often pro-fascist, far right” (Zander 2010, 304). Patrick Zander describes the expedition’s origins in this group’s anxieties regarding degeneracy and national decline, and a preoccupation with modernization through technology. Unsurprisingly, then, the air survey had an ideological purpose. Its main backer, the Mussolini and Mosley-supporting Lady Lucy Houston, hoped to see it “impressing a native population in India with the courage, endurance and vigour of the new generation of Britons” (Zander, 315; Clydesdale cited in Douglas-Hamilton). It was also a means to identify natural resources ripe for exploitation both within and without the British empire.
The survey took place over Nepal, at that time a closed nation, and therefore a source of frustration to a British notion that the world could at least be known and conquered through trade, if it could not be absorbed into the empire. The photographs and film would bring Nepal “under the dominion of the map” (Sheperd cited in Zander 321). And since innovation begets innovation, it is hardly surprising that the Army Council expressed interest in creating a military map using the expedition photos. Zander adds, “While Britain was not going to invade the Himalayas any time soon, working with photos from 30,000 feet promised a new potential for mapping any region on earth” (Zander 326).
The Everest exhibition demonstrates how uses are not the end-point of innovation or something that follows after a pure and neutral process of scientific research: the products developed by Ilford, the specially equipped planes, and the cameras used were all designed or adapted to meet the ambitions of this particular (far-right, Imperialist) project. What was pioneered was not only a new kind of film but a new set of procedures, a program, a sorting technique through which the unmapped and unknown, and the resistant (Nepalese) could be marshalled into order, mapped and made intelligible. The program begins in the wet chemical solution and includes the sorting, assembly and labelling and the trained aerial photographer loading and unloading spools and plates. It links the work of photochemists, developing emulsions capable of cutting through the bluish atmospheric haze, to political and commercial desires to cut through a different kind of haze, in order to render the world visible, analyzable and exploitable.
Sources
Siegert, Bernhard,
Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors and Other Articulations of the Real, New York: Fordham University Press 2015.
Fuller, Matthew, and Goffey, Andrew,
Evil Media, Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press 2012.
Harrison, G.B., “The laboratories of Ilford Limited”,
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 142, no.906 (1954): 9-20.
Zander, Patrick, “Wings over Everest: High Adventure, High Technology and High Nationalism on the Roof of the World, 1932-1934”,
Twentieth Century British History, 21, no.3 (2010): 300-329.
Douglas-Hamilton, Lord James,
Roof of the World: Man’s First Flight Over Everest, New York: Random House 2013.
Avant-Garde and Kitsch
21 September 2018 | Photographic Advertising, Modernism and Sentimental Realism
Last week I took part in the biennial conference of the European Society for the History of Science (ESHS) in conjunction with the British Society for the History of Science (BSHS). It was held at the Institute of Education and at the Science Museum. Our round table was organised by Geoffrey Belknap, curator of photography at the National Science and Media Museum, and included Kelley Wilder, director of the Photographic History Research Centre at De Montfort University, and Chitra Ramalingam, assistant curator of photography at the Yale Center for British Art. It centred on the interactions of photography and chemistry and how these might be represented in an exhibition. Geoff, Kelley and Chitra’s work offers fascinating insights into photography as a material practice, so I am keen to see and read the exhibitions and publications resulting from their projects.
In the archive at Redbridge I looked at a file of photographs compiled in June 1940, including photographs from the 1930s attributed to “Photographic Advertising”, which turns out to be a stock photography company founded in 1926. Helen Wilkinson has examined the sales ledgers of this company, which reveal that it supplied photographs both to advertising agencies and directly to manufacturers such as Ilford (Wilkinson 24).
Characteristically, the studio drew on “populist sources” such as cinema and older graphic traditions, and used a sentimental narrative realism, much like the photography competitions of the period which advised that every photo should have a “human element” and “
tell its story” (Wilkinson 24, 27;
Amateur Photographer, 1927, cited in Dominici 132). This seems to be supported by the examples in the Ilford archive: which include people smiling and playing on beaches, and a woman smiling at an excessively large dog in the back of her open-top car.
In the interwar period, photographic advertising remained subsidiary to drawn and painted illustration. Even the photographic companies such as Kodak and Ilford mainly used drawn and painted advertisements. It has been argued that photography was seen as a more literal, realist art and therefore less suited to fantasy and idealization than hand-drawn and often colour illustration (Brown 169, Dominici 154). Sara Dominici’s research also suggests that illustration was preferred over photography “because the latter was regarded as somehow less effective in directing consumer’s responses” i.e. photographs were more open to varying interpretation (Dominici 163).
Even so, Ilford did use photographs to promote their products. The photographs they selected operate partly as technical demonstrations, prints displayed in shops rather than reprinted as ads in magazines. Since they were taken on Selo film, they displayed the ability of its (relatively) fast panchromatic emulsion to facilitate short exposure times and therefore motion capture and, in 1936-1939, repeatedly show people at the beach caught in movement —diving, cartwheeling, even dancing.
These sample photographs use motifs and a style clearly informed by the modernist avant-garde, and reminiscent of, for example, Rodchenko’s photographs of divers. In a talk at Birkbeck earlier this year, I looked at Ilford’s use of modernist motifs in relation to ideas of flight and dynamism circulating in the period and centred on the figure of the female diver. I connected this to the modernist image of the female body in flight discussed by Mary Russo, in which flight and weightlessness represented a new individualistic and upwardly mobile notion of freedom (Russo 50). Such images of diving, cartwheeling, dancing bodies, contrast sharply with Charlie Chaplin’s jerky, maladjusted body in his film
Modern Times. If the latter shows the human body as traumatised by mechanisation, these free and uninhibited bodies, I argued, stand as the very image of technological success, the body set free by technology, and specifically, by photography.
Yet Wilkinson distances Photographic Advertising’s approach from that of the more modernist advertising photographers, and it’s true that the beach photos from Photographic Advertising do not fit this mold. It occurs to me that perhaps Ilford used the more sentimental narrative images they had acquired from the agency as sources for their drawn and painted ads, which Wilkinson suggests was a common way that advertising made use of such photographs. This is something I need to check by comparing the photographs against the 1930s Ilford ads.
In the late 1930s, then, Ilford seems to have used two kinds of photographic image: the modernist ones and the sentimental narrative images acquired from Photographic Advertising Ltd. These need to be considered not just in relation to modernism but also in relation to other contexts: the continuing dominance of hand-illustrated ads; the beginnings of lifestyle advertising which Wilkinson identifies in Photographic Advertising’s images; the role of hedonism in advertising in this period as discussed by Dominici; the renewed enthusiasm for outdoor photography which had been practically prohibited in wartime; and the rise of a new suburban consumer class largely cushioned from the impact of the Depression who, even if they were not yet actually able to take holidays, were being addressed by new holiday imagery (Wilkinson; Dominici; Taylor).
Sources
Wilkinson, Helen. “‘The New Heraldry’: Stock Photography, Visual Literacy, and Advertising in 1930s Britain”.
Journal of Design History 10, no. 1 (1997): 23-38.
Dominici, Sara,
Travel Marketing and Popular Photography in Britain, London: Routledge, 2017.
Brown, Elspeth H.
The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Corporate Culture, Baltimore MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2005.
Russo, Mary,
The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity, London: Routledge, 1994
Taylor, John. “Kodak and the ‘English’ Market between the Wars.”
Journal of Design History 7, no. 1 (1994): 29-42.
Surviving the Slump
27 September 2018 | Ilford Limited and British Industry in the 1920s - 1930s
I have been wondering how Ilford Limited negotiated and survived the Great Slump of 1929–33, which followed the stock market crash of 1929 and the subsequent collapse in world trade. Eric Hobsbawm suggests that Britain had already fallen behind her rivals such as Germany and the US in the years before the Great War, because, being the earliest industrial nation, she struggled to modernize. Instead, Britain retreated into Empire, complacently relying on her colonies as export markets. Ilford relied on exports to the tropics. As competition from Kodak and Continental firms increased at the turn of the century, “Ilford weathered the storm of competition at home by increasing its exports, especially to India and the Far East. If it had not been for this, the company might not have survived the difficult period between 1899 and 1914” (Hercock and Jones 115).
British industry, Hobsbawm says, was largely characterized by relatively small, specialized family firms, and this is true of the photographic industry in the late nineteenth century, though from the 1890s a number of firms start “consolidating through takeover or amalgamation” (Pritchard 210). Michael Pritchard writes that “By 1914 the majority of British sensitised goods were being produced by a small number of large companies” (Pritchard 211). Generally though, it was only during and after the Great War that British industry started to concentrate into larger monopolies, a process accelerated partly by war, partly by the depression and “almost invariably fostered by a benevolent government” (Hobsbawm 193). Both Hobsbawm and David Edgerton see the development of industry in Britain as dependent on government support and the ending of Free Trade.
Ilford started to acquire other British manufacturers in the 1890s, but its main period of expansion and amalgamation is between 1918 and 1935. By the mid-1930s, its only real competitor in Britain was the British subsidiary of Kodak. In Germany too, increased monopolization characterizes the interwar period. Ulrich Marsch writes about the 1925 merger of the six big German chemical companies into IG Farben, the biggest chemical trust in the world (Agfa, which eventually specialised entirely in photographic materials, was part of this merger).
Initially, Ilford’s collaborations and takeovers were financial and managerial. Robert Hercock and George Jones write that “the main advantage of amalgamation — the opportunity to rationalize production between the various factories — was not taken” (Hercock and Jones 54). Similarly IG Farben did not immediately rationalize production, having separate facilities in each of the member firms until 1929 (Marsch 41). It took the Great Depression to force Ilford to rationalize, a process which involved closing about four of nine factories (Hercock and Jones 61).
Heavy industries based in the North of England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales had been in a recession since 1921. Hobsbawm says that the slump did not hit Britain as hard as it might have done since “those who are already low do not fall so far” (Hobsbawm 191). Also, the Midlands and the South East, where Ilford’s factories were located, did not feel the full force of the recession, although Ilford,which had thrived in the 1920s, did experience a heavy drop in its profits, from £133,000 in 1930 to £95,000 by 1933 (Hercock and Jones 61).
Yet as Hobsbawm points out, through the 1920s and ‘30s, there was a growth in retail, particularly those “cheap articles of domestic and personal use” sold by Woolworths stores and the rapidly expanding Boots the Chemist (Hobsbawm 198). These shops sold the photographic industry’s new consumer products, such as Selo roll film. So the rise of the high-street chemist and the expansion of the consumer film market in the 1930s offers one explanation of how Ilford survived the effects of the slump. Certainly they were heavily promoting their consumer films and cameras: in May 1935, the Ilford Courier described King George’s Silver Jubilee as an “opportunity for every dealer to push camera and film sales”. Their giant competitors, Kodak and Agfa, also thrived: Marsch describes IG Farben’s sales of photographic materials as growing by more than 100% between 1926 and 1931 (Marsch 52-3).
Hobsbawm and Edgerton’s work also suggests another factor: the role of Ilford in supplying protected industries, notably, the military. Writers on the chemical industry and the photographic industry tend to treat the militarization of these industries in wartime as exceptions or aberrations to the normal run of things. Marsch does this in his essay on IG Farben’s research policy, which I find bizarre, because although his study ends at the point of the company's “Nazification” in 1936, after which it directly facilitated and profited from the war and from Auschwitz, it was engaging much earlier with the Nazi social and economic programme (Leslie 2005, 169-70).
In Britain too, military and industrial interests do not just come together in wartime. Even in the depression Britain had a growing and increasingly modern “state-sponsored field of armaments” (Hobsbawm 200). In a number of publications Edgerton has addressed this neglected aspect of British history, noting how the growth of a ‘warfare state’ happened alongside the growth of the welfare state. In a previous blog post I discussed Ilford’s supply to the RAF in the early 1930s. It is clear to me now that this is part of a larger picture: while Ilford profited from the growth of the picture press, of advertising and tourism, the entertainment industry and the amateur photography market, it was also part of an expanding military-industrial complex.
Sources
Hobsbawm, Eric,
Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day, London: Penguin Books, 1968/1999 (revised and updated with Chris Wigley).
Hercock, Robert J. and Jones, George A.,
Silver by the Ton: The History of Ilford Limited, 1879-1979, Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill, 1979.
Pritchard, Michael.
The Development and Growth of British Photographic Manufacturing and Retailing 1839-1914. PhD dissertation, De Montfort University, 2010.
Edgerton, David,
Warfare State: Britain, 1920-1970, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Marsch, Ulrich, “Strategies for Success: Research Organization in German Chemical Companies and IG Farben until 1936”,
History and Technology, vol. 12 (1994): 23-77.
Leslie, Esther,
Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry, London: Reaktion Books, 2005.
Now and Then
5 October 2018 | Links between my work on contemporary photography and the Ilford Limited project
I plan to do two blog entries in fairly quick succession to try to link some of the various things I have been working on in the past week or so. This first one is about the connections between my research into Ilford Limited and work I have been doing about contemporary photographic practices.
For reasons unrelated to this research project, I was invited to the University of Westminster at Harrow by Lucy Soutter (author of
Why Art Photography?) to give a lecture which I titled
Big Photography - Small Talk. I talked about what social media is doing to our experience of photography and how critics, theorists and artists have responded to it, also the watery language used to describe the great volume of images and the question of whether a photograph can still be analysed as a singular thing. I looked at the idea that photographs have become a kind of chit-chat or small talk, how they are carriers of marketable data, and how social media encourages us to respond quickly and unthinkingly.
I was thinking about the connections between this and my Ilford research as I returned to the archive the next day. I am so used to moving between different worlds, making images and designs for musicians and then writing about academic subjects, or making my own visual work and teaching, that I don’t have too much of a problem with the idea that my practices do not seem outwardly linked. They feel connected to me, and I use the same ways of thinking (intuitive and analytical) in all of them. Yet in relation to writing and researching about photography, which really should be one area of my work, I find I am operating across another partition between historical research and contemporary criticism.
In my book
Photography: The Unfettered Image I tried to overcome this separation — it was intended from the start to be a history written unashamedly from the perspective of, and in response to, the present moment of digital networked photography. I felt that in a rush to characterize and make sense of the present we were at risk of overlooking the possibility that mobility and fleetingness were characteristics that could be traced back to the early years of the medium.
I can make a related case for the connections between this project on Ilford and my preoccupation with the contemporary production and circulation of vast amounts of images. The project began partly because I felt that if I was going to make pronouncements about digital photography, I had to have a more nuanced understanding of what it replaced, of the world of analogue, chemical photography.
There are existing excellent histories of companies such as Kodak, Polaroid and of family photography but these largely discuss change in the consumption of photographs, the development of new practices of photographing and so on. I wanted to get a better understanding of the technical basis of this culture, by which I mean the chemical and industrial infrastructure. I set out to make sense of chemical photography or photographic chemistry as culturally shaping, in ways which go beyond photographic practices, and into other aspects of experience, just as digital networked images are fundamental to our experience in ways that extend beyond the making and viewing of photographs.
As I said in
an earlier post on the history of the senses, I am guided by the idea, from Walter Benjamin, that new technologies alter not just what we experience with our senses, but the very nature of sensory experience. I don’t know if I will ever arrive at the point where I can connect sensory regimes and specific technical shifts, but that’s the broad goal: to understand what was reconfigured and rejigged by changes and innovations in photographic chemistry.
In the next blog I am going to try to put together some thoughts provoked by archival material I have been looking at. In particular, I aim to go back to the seaside, inside the home and immerse myself in the London fog, to go deeper into questions of light and exposure and perhaps also start to think about colour.
Fogging
7 October 2018 | Light, air, purity and pollution
“Fogging” is a term widely used among darkroom photographers to describe streaks, blotches or an overall darkness caused either by light or by contaminants in the processing chemicals or atmosphere. I had always assumed it was a metaphor, since the effect on the image looks like a fog. But this week, I discovered there is a connection between “fogging” and the notorious London fogs.
In the Ilford Limited archive at Redbridge library there is a memo dated 19 January 1923, glued to a page in an experiment book about “troubles with fog”, which is about problem-solving to prevent “fogged” papers and films. The memo says, “We have definitely decided that in future coating of any kind of emulsion must not be commenced or proceeded with during a fog as the risk is not worth the small gain we aim at in coating during a fog”. I checked against the Met Office’s historic weather reports and there was fog in the London area on the 17th January 1923. So, on one page, fog refers simultaneously to the photographic phenomenon and the atmospheric one. The “risk” the memo refers to is presumably of contamination from atmospheric pollution, the “gain” might be the added moisture in the atmosphere that helped prevent film from curling during the coating process.
The London fogs were particularly noxious and persistent between 1870 and 1910, though they started to decline around 1900. They were a toxic consequence of London’s basin climate, and pollution produced largely by coal. This is also a period when photography underwent dramatic, rapid change, becoming fully industrialised and marked by a series of innovations: dry plates are introduced in 1871, also gelatine bromide papers, paper roll film (called stripping film), cellulose nitrate film from the 1880s, handheld cameras and new emulsions and developers. The Kodak model of lab processing for films delivered and returned in camera was instigated by George Eastman in 1888, and took off in the early 1900s (Sarvas and Frohlich).
This new industry relied on such ephemeral things as bright light and pure air. One of the greatest difficulties for early photographers in Britain was poor light, because of the limited sensitivity of early photographic emulsions. Dark winters with short days, rainy and foggy weather limited opportunities for natural light photography. The polluting, sulphorous yellow fogs, which could make the days as dark as night, not only prevented photographs being taken, but could ruin newly coated films and plates.
Mid-nineteenth century reformers blamed the fogs partly on the working class’s wasteful squandering of coal. As Bill Luckin argues, eugenic theory also linked the fogs to a racialised understanding of class, manifested in claims that the fogs were stunting the urban working class, rendering them “incapable of reproducing a strong and healthy ‘stock’” (Luckin 40). The fog became increasingly associated with ideas of urban degeneration and moral decline, and sunshine and pure air became linked to moral purity. The daytime darkness was associated with sin and corruption, the rise of the urban underworld, with crime and “aestheticism”. Just as bodily cleanliness was thought to reflect individual moral selfhood, so light and cleanliness in the city suggested the moral state of the city and nation.
The fogs affected the City of London far more than Greater London, which is one reason photographic manufacturers located themselves in the suburbs. But London expanded outward, and one appeal of places like Ilford was the ability to escape the fogs.
In 1879, when Alfred Harman established his factory in Ilford, the town had a population of 7,000 and, the factory was surrounded by green fields on three sides, but by 1900 the population had grown to 20,000 (Hercock and Jones 47).
Unfortunately, as London expanded toward Ilford, the fog also relocated. The gasworks at Ilford expanded, as gas was promoted as a clean fuel by the anti-fog activists. The gas companies themselves donated money to the smoke abatement campaigns (Thorsheim 395). Gas appealed to a middle class who wanted to distance themselves not only from the smoke but from the associated workers (such as the sweep and the coal merchant). Yet while it was relatively clean at the point of use, gas was filthy at the point of production. As well as filling the air with fumes, the gasworks polluted the soil and waterways.
By 1900 London’s gas companies were consuming about 4 million tons of coal annually, and the pollution problem in places such as Ilford grew worse (Thorsheim 383). As Peter Thorsheim writes, the rise of the gas industry merely moved the pollution “from one environment and group of people to another” (Thorsheim 282). The “stunted” working classes were now to be found in the vicinity of the gasworks, while the acrid black smoke drove the well-off away (Thorsheim 386).
In 1899, in just one day, 25,000 plates were ruined through fogging at Ilford’s factory. Company historian A.J. Catford places the blame for the incident firmly on the sulphurated hydrogen emissions from the Ilford Gas Company’s new works “for the manufacture of Sulphate of Ammonia” (Catford 49-50). He claims that in May 1900 the board of Ilford Limited issued a writ against the gas company which they later withdrew, instead planning a new factory further out from London, in Brentwood, to avoid the pollution. In the meantime, engineers at the original plant invented a system to purify the air inside the factory, pioneering an early form of air-conditioning (Catford 50).
In
a previous blog post I described photography as a technology for “cutting through the haze”. Photography’s sensitivity to contamination aligns it with sunlight, cleanliness and morality, even while the photography industry was itself a major pollutant. In the early twentieth century, the photographic companies’ appeals to amateur photographers to make the most the sun, the seaside, and the great outdoors, as well as their tips on photographic processing, will need to be understood in the context of ideas of purity and impurity, cleanliness and contamination, which emerged and developed out of the nineteenth century fog.
Sources
Sarvas, Risto and Frohlich, David M.,
From Snapshots to Social Media: the Changing Picture of Domestic Photography, London: Springer, 2011.
Catford, A.J.,
Our first 75 years. Redbridge Museum and Library, Ilford Limited Archive, Box 1361, 90/359/E1/6
Luckin, Bill, “‘The heart and home of horror’: The great London fogs of the late nineteenth century.”
Social History 28(1) 2003, 31-48.
Hercock, Robert J. and Jones, George A.,
Silver by the Ton: The History of Ilford Limited, 1879-1979, Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill, 1979.
National Meteorological Archive,
Monthly Weather Reports
Thorsheim, Peter, “The Paradox of Smokeless Fuels: Gas, Coke and the Environment in Britain, 1813-1949.”
Environment and History 8, no. 4 (2002): 381-401.
Further reading
Taylor, Jesse Oak,
The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 2016.
Brimblecombe, Peter,
The Big Smoke: A History of Air Pollution in London Since Medieval Times, London: Routledge, 2012.
Otter, Chris,
The Victorian eye: a political history of light and vision in Britain, 1800-1910, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Thorsheim, Peter,
Inventing pollution: coal, smoke, and culture in Britain since 1800, Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006.
McClintock, Ann,
Imperial leather : race, gender and sexuality in the colonial contest, London: Routledge 1995.
Thinking through the Grid
16 October 2018 | On Dufaycolor and the Réseau
In 1932, Ilford Limited invested in a colour film product called Dufaycolor, manufactured by Spicer-Dufay. This was a colour reversal film (primarily for movies) based on the Frenchman Louis Dufay’s system of colour photography on glass plates (circa 1908). In brief, Dufaycolour was an additive, three colour, process, similar to the earliest commercial colour process, the Lumière Autochrome.
[To understand exactly how Dufaycolor worked and what it looked like, especially close-up, it’s best to head over to the
Timeline of Historical Film Colors, a database created by Professor Barbara Flueckiger of the University of Zurich.]
However, while Autochrome used
irregularly distributed grains of coloured potato-starch, the Dufaycolor process (like several other processes) used a réseau, a
coloured geometric pattern of red, green and blue dyed onto the film , through which the black and white panchromatic emulsion would be exposed. The réseau acted as a filter both in the taking and the viewing of the film-image.
Réseau can be translated from French as network, mesh, grid or even web. We tend to think of chemical photography as characterised by a scattered random grain, with an indefinite set of values (shades of grey). Yet Dufaycolor systematized the image, and curiously there is a similarity between the way in which Dufaycolor worked and the way in which colour is sensed by a digital camera. The digital camera’s sensor is made using a photolithographic process and pitted with light sensitive cavities that record the number of photons hitting them as an electrical charge. The sensor is an analogue device, which cannot distinguish colours, so the usual system to rectify this involves a coloured mesh or mosaic — called a Bayer filter — placed over the sensor. This is strikingly like the réseau of Dufaycolor film and works in much the same way.
To some extent Dufaycolor demonstrates the poverty of our conventional ways of thinking about analogue photography and film. The analogue-digital distinction is based around an opposition between continuous and discrete signals, between sampling and direct translation, between numerical encoding (in French, digital is “
numérique”) and an uncoded representation. While I am not suggesting Dufaycolor was in any sense digital, it sandwiched together on one surface the black and white emulsion with its irregular grain and infinite shades of grey and an RGB grid that we might associate more with electronic systems such as television and computers.
How to make sense of this grid? The grid is usually associated with rationalisation, standardisation and instrumentalisation, and opposed to the organic. The silver-halide grains of the film sit on the side of the organic in this crude opposition, as does the Lumière brothers’ potato starch Autochrome. Rosalind Krauss says that nineteenth century treatises on physiological optics were illustrated with grids as a means to convey “the separation of the perceptual screen from that of the ‘real’ world” (Krauss 57). Light passes through a “physiological screen” or filter in order to reach our perception. In the case of colour perception in particular, the grid signifies that colours do not exist objectively or singularly outside their interaction with neighbouring colours .
The réseau breaks up white light into its constituent parts: it acts as a filter in the sense that it controls what is let through and what is not. But it is also a net. It holds the image together. Computing too relies on grids of binary code, on cells and pixels but also on networks and grids that constitute the infrastructure linking computers to ones another (Higgins 253) . Hannah Higgins argues against the reduction of the notion of the grid to regulation and standardisation, writing that grids are “not physically flat, nor are they experientially flat , nor are they dimensionally pure” (Higgins 276).
In one sense the réseau base of Dufaycolor film can be seen as a step in what Paul Virilio saw as the history of the reduction of human sensory perception to a mechanized logistics of perception. Virilio directly links the losses of human perception with the gains of the photographic system: “While the human gaze became more and more fixed, losing some of its natural speed and sensitivity, photographic shots, on the contrary became even faster” (Virilio 13).
This dystopian picture of the photographic system growing in sensitivity at the expense of what was once a far more nuanced and subtle human perception, might be qualified with a view that sees film and photography as appealing to the sophistication of human vision. Writing on cinema and the notion of “persistence of vision”, Tom Gunning says, “I have always found it odd to describe as an imperfection our ability to blend two images into one” (Gunning 508). One of Dufaycolor’s main failings was that, blown up on the big screen of the cinema, the regular réseau was perceptible to human eyes used to the fine grain of panchromatic (black and white) cinema film. Rather than facilitating the hallucinatory spectacle of cinema, the grid had an unfortunate tendency to disrupt it.
Sources
Krauss, Rosalind. “Grids”.
October 9 (1979): 51-64
Higgins, Hannah B.,
The Grid Book, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2009.
Virilio, Paul,
The Vision Machine, London: BFI, 1994 (originally published in French 1988)
Gunning, Tom, “Hand and Eye: Excavating a New Technology of the Image in the Victorian Era”,
Victorian Studies 54 (3), Spring (2012): 495-516
Links for Technical Explanations
https://www.whatdigitalcamera.com/technology_guides/bayer-filter-work-60461
https://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/camera-sensors.htm
http://zauberklang.ch/filmcolors
The Rule of Thirds
26 October 2018 | Grids and Freedom in Photography and Sketching Manuals
This post, like the last, is about grids, the grid that represents the so-called “Rule of Thirds” — a rectangle divided into nine smaller ones of equal size. This compositional device was used in advice literature for amateur photographers in the nineteenth century and is still referred to by digital photographers today, and even built in to Instagram (although the advice was that it does not apply to square pictures — take that, Instagram).
It is tempting to imagine that this grid, overlaid on a scene in a viewfinder or an app, derives from Renaissance drawing aids such as those described in Alberti’s
De Pictura or illustrated in Durer’s
Treatise on Measurement (Friedberg 38-41). However, such devices were constructed not to aid composition but to facilitate perspectival drawing, while the photographic camera automates the construction of perspectival space.
More likely, it derives from British nineteenth-century drawing and watercolour manuals, of which there were a huge number. Frank Howard’s 1837
The Sketchers Manual includes such a grid, where the intersections of the lines indicate “strong” points of a picture, i.e. those areas of the picture where the subject, or points of light or dark, should be placed (Howard 44-49).
Howard’s grid appeared only two years before the announcement of photography’s invention. It was a means to systematize the practice of sketching for amateurs — people such as William Henry Fox Talbot’s wife Constance and sister Caroline. According to Martin Kemp, their sketches, and Talbot’s, largely conform to the principles for picturesque composition set out in such manuals, regardless of whether they consulted them (Kemp 275-6).
The “nineteenth-century cult of sketching” and its picturesque aesthetic has been linked by Richard Sha to the English landed gentry’s appropriation of land and conception of property (Sha 73). The manuals use the word “taking” to describe sketching (and later photography), linking making pictures with ownership (Sha 77). Sketching manuals reaffirmed and naturalised the values of this class: the world is there to be taken.
Sha also points out that the manuals struggle with the tension between freedom and adherence to rules in sketching. The sketch gained its truth-value or documentary function through its sense of immediacy, which relied on loose and quick handling. This threatened to undermine the need for rules (and therefore for manuals). So the sketching manuals asserted that freedom could be won only by familiarity with the rules, necessary to discipline both eye and hand. In a footnote, Sha links this to Terry Eagleton’s description of custom, habit, and sentiment as central to hegemony in contrast to absolutist rule. Power becomes aestheticised when it becomes embodied, spontaneous, “lived out in unreflective custom” (Eagleton 20).
The earliest Ilford
Manual of Photography, by Charles Herbert Bothamley, first published in 1891, includes a Rule of Thirds grid (in the interwar edition I consulted), and emphasizes that this is a simplification of more complex techniques, a basic device which should not be adhered to “slavishly” since, “A true artist is not a slave to these principles, but is master of them, and utilizes them for the more satisfactory realization of his own ideas” (Bothamley 45). Similarly, the American M. Carey Lea’s
Manual of Photography (1868) advises against “slavish” adherence to rules (Lea 174).
Slavery (incidentally, only abolished in the United States in the 1860s) is not contrasted to a freedom to ignore rules, but rather to an “acquaintance” with, and internalising of, such rules. This is Eagleton’s softer, hegemonic power, operating through taste, habit and custom, through the practice of a certain way of looking that is rooted in property relations. The value of the Rule of Thirds therefore, is not in the extent to which it helps a photographer produce “good” compositions (whatever those are) but in the extent to which it helps a photographer feel they are “master” (owner) and not slave. Through the overlaying of a simple grid, the world can be appropriated.
After all, if we have no rules, how will we know we are free?
Sources
Friedberg, Anne.
The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 2006.
Howard, Frank,
The Sketchers Manual, or the Whole Art of Picture Making reduced to Its Simplest Principles by which Amateurs may Instruct Themselves without The Aid of a Master, London, 1837.
Kemp, Martin. “Talbot and the picturesque view: Henry, Caroline and Constance.”
History of Photography 21, no. 4 (1997): 270-282.
Sha, Richard. “The power of the English nineteenth-century visual and verbal sketch: appropriation, discipline, mastery.”
Nineteenth-Century Contexts24, no. 1 (2002): 73-100.
Bothamley, Charles Herbert,
Ilford Manual of Photography, London: Ilford Limited. n.d.
Eagleton, Terry,
Ideology of the Aesthetic., Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.
Lea, M. Carey,
Manual of Photography, Philadelphia, 1868.
Fiends and Lovers
19 November 2018 | Lucia Moholy, Pelican Specials and Amateur Photographers
Over the last two weeks I have taken a break from my AHRC funded research on Ilford Limited to speak at two conferences: first,
Sites of Interchange: Modernism, Politics and Culture in Britain and Germany , 1919-1951, at the Courtauld Institute in London; and then
Photography Off the Scale at FAMU in Prague. In this blog post I will discuss ideas from the first conference, and how they might bear on my Ilford work.
The opening paper of the conference was by Leah Hsiao (University of York) and called “Dislocation of Amateurism: Moholy-Nagy in Britain 1935-7”. László Moholy-Nagy was by this time separated from his first wife, Lucia Moholy, whose 1939 book,
A Hundred Years of Photography, I discussed in my own paper. I argued that this text was a key means by which a British readership were introduced to the perspectives on photography that were in circulation in the late 1920s and early 1930s among central European modernists. Here, I also want to link Moholy’s book to the concept of the amateur as discussed by Hsiao.
The Pelican Specials series, in which Moholy’s book appeared, was launched by Penguin books in 1938 to bring topical issues and quality writing to a wide reading public in the form of affordable sixpence paperbacks. This public was potentially receptive to ideas relating to new technology and democratization, even if they came via the European avant-garde. The Specials were intended to be educational and culturally improving, with a strong empirical and internationalist emphasis. They were linked to “an optimistic reformist social agenda” and the promotion of certain “democratic, rational and moral principles” (Rylance 56, Joicey 35, 37). Moholy’s book is in keeping with this orientation, emphasising technical and social phenomena, avoiding universalising or metaphysical statements, and addressing a wide range of photographic practices (not just art practices).
Moholy also explicitly discusses amateurism. She begins one chapter by arguing that the distinction between professional and amateur is not a distinction that relates to “the value of work done” (Moholy 168). She says many serious photographers are amateurs “in the old sense of the word”. The root of the “amateur” in the Latin
amare — love — suggests a commitment to the medium. The “old sense of the word” leans towards this notion of love, rather than the notion of hobbyists with poor grasp of their equipment or of technique. Moholy’s readership would no doubt have included many amateurs (photography lovers).
As Hsiao pointed out in her paper, amateurism in England was originally associated with the authority of an aristocratic class that did not have to work. Internationally, and especially in photography, amateurs were not so well regarded: in the United States, amateur photographers were described as “Kodak fiends”, understood as faddists and often as public pests (Mensel); in photography, amateurism was identified with women in the shape of the “Kodak Girl” (Armstrong 103, f.4).
Avant-garde photographers were just as likely to be aligned with the amateur as the professional. Moholy herself, though technically trained, struggled to earn a living as a photographer (though as someone else at the conference pointed out, this was one of the few professions open to immigrants in 1930s Britain). Armstrong writes of the connections between amateurism and art photography in the work of late-nineteenth century women photographers, but Hsiao brought this directly into Moholy’s milieu by discussing the importance of the concept for Moholy-Nagy.
Given the popularity of the Specials (Moholy’s book sold approximately 40,000 copies), it is likely that there was significant overlap between the readership of
A Hundred Years of Photography and that of the
Ilford Manual of Photography, and that many of her readers would see themselves as keen amateur photographers. Perhaps my next task is to link my two projects and compare Moholy’s
A Hundred Years of Photography to the Ilford photography manuals, in its account of photography history but also in the way it speaks to the amateur.
Sources:
Armstrong Carol, “From Clementina to Käsebier: The Photographic Attainment of the ‘Lady Amateur’”,
October 91 (2000), 101–39.
Joicey, Nicholas, “A Paperback Guide to Progress: Penguin Books 1935–c.1951”,
Twentieth Century British History 4:1 (1993), 25-56.
Mensel, Robert E. “ ‘Kodakers Lying in Wait’: Amateur Photography and the Right of Privacy in New York, 1885 -1915”,
American Quarterly, 43:1 (1991), 24-45.
Moholy, Lucia,
A Hundred Years of Photography, Penguin Books Ltd., 1939.
Rylance, Rick, “Reading with a Mission: The Public Sphere of Penguin Books”,
Critical Quarterly 47:4 (2005): 49-66.
Mechanisation and Maintenance
29 November 2018 | First Thoughts on Photography Factories, Automation and Sensitivity
Yesterday I visited the Harman Technology Ltd. factory in Mobberley, south of Manchester, where Ilford films and photographic papers are still produced. This site was originally the Rajar factory (est. 1903) and bought by Ilford Limited in 1928-9. By the 1930s, Ilford had turned Mobberley into its specialist site for paper coating, and in 1983 Ilford Limited (then owned by the Swiss firm Ciba AG) moved all production to Mobberley. I was taken on a tour of the present factory, which was fascinating. The machines are very different from those used in the early period, and the present buildings date mostly from the 1980s — but the experience has helped me to reflect on aspects of early mechanisation and automation...
Mechanisation began at Ilford Limited in the late 1880s. The early coating and drying machines worked a little like an assembly-line conveyor, moving the product through a series of processes, yet their movement was determined by the need to heat, cool, or dry the materials. Among the first tasks that Alfred Harman mechanised was the fine and fast rotary actions of brushing and polishing the glass plates. Factory workers fed the glass plates into the machine and removed them at the other end, placing them on racks to dry. The task of coating the plates with emulsion was also subsequently delegated to machines which then passed them on a conveyor belt through a chilling tunnel to set the emulsion.
Such machines were initially hand-cranked, and when steam and then electric motors were introduced, speeds were still programmed by the workers according to the thickness of the emulsion required. The plates were still fed into the machines and collected at the other end, work carried out in the dark. Using this system “a skilled team” could coat 1000 plates an hour in the 1890s but by the 1930s, they could do 3,600 an hour (Hercock and Jones 131). It’s clear that even in this early period the “team” was small: photographs from the 1930s show two people, a young man and woman at the feeding end of the machine, and the same young woman at the racking end, where the plates were removed for drying. These photographs were posed, since the work would have been done in darkness, and it is likely that there was just one person at each end. Today, the coating machines for paper and film are operated by computers, watched over by one person in a control room using infra-red cameras, and by a group of people who analyse samples and scans from the machine to identify and anticipate any flaws in the paper or emulsion.
The increase in output, from 1000 to 3,600 was due in large part, not to new machines or rationalisation, but to the acquired tacit knowledge and maintenance skills of the humans working with the machines. David Edgerton has argued for accounts of technology to be sensitive to use, maintenance and repair, not just to innovation. Against the conventional notions of the economics of scale and of technological progress, he says that increases in production and efficiency happen as people become confident in their understanding of their machine, quick in their ability to anticipate or diagnose problems as they arise, and able to maintain the machines. Edgerton writes that “the maintenance schemes, programmes and costs are not programmable in advance”, instead people learn informally by doing and by coping (Edgerton 90). The neglect of maintenance and repair in accounts of technology often prevents recognition of this living alongside, tuning and responding to machines.
Photographic manufacture is heavily shaped by the extreme sensitivity of the product. Not only is it sensitive to light, but also to temperature, to humidity, air velocity, dust, contaminants in the air and in liquid or on skin, the metals in the machines. The sensitivity of emulsion to contamination meant that copper and iron could not be used in the machinery, so that Ilford’s earliest hydraulic shredder for emulsion was actually made from solid silver (Hercock and Jones 131). The sensitivity to heat meant great care had to be taken when the plates were removed from the conveyor belt for drying, because warm fingertips could melt the emulsion (Hercock and Jones 132). This suggests not that the delicacy and dexterity of hands suited humans to this work, but rather that people had to develop a certain dexterity as a result of their own contaminative potential.
Each machine and each worker is also situated in an environment designed to be hospitable to the sensitive emulsion. From very early on, Ilford worked on controlled air systems to dry plates and prevent contamination. Their cooling tank and filtration system recirculated, dehumidified and cleaned the air from the drying rooms, while the walls were washed down with glycerine solution (Hercock and Jones 135, 140). The company even introduced cotton fabric filters coated in silver nitrate solution to enable them to remove sulphurous gases from the air
(see my blog post on fogging). The temperature and humidity of the atmosphere was controlled as far as possible to limit curling of baryta (fibre-based paper coated with barium sulphate), and sheet film required a humid atmosphere to allow it to be separated from the glass plate base on which it had been coated (Hercock and Jones 136).
One way of thinking about this is that photographic emulsions are like living creatures replete with their own habits and peculiarities, dependent on a very particular ecosystem, reactive and temperamental. Their proclivities determine particular kind of human and machine interactions in which various tendencies of machines and humans must be suppressed or developed in new directions. The temperamental chemical emulsions, the skilled and habituated human body, the highly specific and purpose-built machinic environment (including air conditioning), all co-produce one another. Maintenance and repair can be understood here not just in terms of the human actions on the machine but of a caring or attuned relationship between all three participants. Automation is something more than machines replacing people, and might be better understood in terms of such responsive and elaborate collaborations.
Sources:
Edgerton, David,
The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900, London: Profile Books 2006.
Hercock, Robert J. and Jones, George A.,
Silver by the Ton: The History of Ilford Limited, 1879-1979, Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill, 1979.
From Surface to Skin
10 December 2018 | Collodion, Celluloid and Artificial Nature
I have been trying to think about the sensitised surfaces of film, glass plates and paper in photographic processes. Surfaces can be understood as impermeable or permeable, as interfaces, membranes, barriers or boundaries, or as entities in themselves. Human skin, for example, is understood as a surface separating body from world, mediating between inside and outside, but also as itself a bodily organ. The photographic surface might be conceived as a kind of sensitive skin, insofar as it is flexible, laminate, semi-permeable, reactive to light, and to pollutants in the atmosphere, even though made up not of living cells but of crystals.
Photography has been long understood as lacking in facture — the textural disturbances to the surface found in painting. Yet Chitra Ramalingam draws attention to the way that conservators regard photographs as “much more than just an image”, as something stratified, made up of different layers with various functions, properties and different rates of response to light and speeds of disintegration or decay (Ramalingam 319). This suggests the medium is no mere support or carrier, and not inert, static or neutral.
Two closely related materials, collodion and celluloid, are central to the history of photographic surfaces. Both derive from gun cotton, originally made in the 1830s – ’40s from combining cotton (a source of cellulose) with sulphuric and nitric acids. A highly combustible and volatile explosive substance, it was quickly put to military use, although it was difficult to manufacture and store safely. Its manufacture coincided with the early development of photography, and in the form of collodion it was adopted for photographic purposes in 1851, in Frederick Scott Archer’s wet-plate collodion process.
Collodion is gun cotton (also known as nitrocellulose or pyroxylin) dissolved in a mixture of ether and alcohol to form a gluey, syrupy substance. It was used first on glass negatives, then on photographic papers, increasing light sensitivity. It was also deployed in medicine to heal wounds and as a cosmetic covering for skin disorders or scars. Sometimes described as “artificial skin”, it forms a smooth film that tightens as it dries, pulling wounds together.
Nitrocellulose products maimed soldiers, then patched them up, and documented the results: both the Crimean war and American Civil war were photographed with wet plate collodion, and photographs were used as aids to plastic surgery. Yet nineteenth-century doctors’ tales of collodion use described not wounded soldiers but young women whose mild disfigurements affected their social prospects (Scoffern 68-70; Wilson 553). In both photography and cosmetic medicine, collodion was recruited to shape ideals of gender and class. While, they speculated, dipping an entire body in the artificial skin would no doubt result in death (as in Ian Fleming’s
Goldfinger), the substance conjured the male fantasy of an entirely artificial woman. Yet its perfection undermined its realism, since, as one advocate pointed out, it lacked the soft down of natural skin (Scoffern, 70).
>Based on his observations of the drying of photographic collodion, a Birmingham man named Alexander Parkes produced a new collodion-based substance called Parkesine (patented in 1862). In the US, a very similar substance named celluloid was produced by John Wesley Hyatt from around 1869. A legal dispute led to the material being called Xylonite in Britain, and celluloid in the United States. George Eastman adopted celluloid for his Kodak film in the late 1880s, while Ilford’s flat films were sliced from celluloid blocks supplied from America, in a process developed by John Carbutt in Chicago. Much later, Ilford collaborated with British Xylonite in a joint company for making their film base.
Hyatt was not a trained chemist but a printer who had seen an offer of $10,000 to anyone who could find a substitute for ivory for billiard balls. Certainly a substitute was overdue, as around 44,000 African elephants alone were being slaughtered every year to sate the Western lust for ivory (Walker 134). When Hyatt’s celluloid-coated billiard balls collided, they made a characteristic gunshot sound. As celluloid was adopted for cinematography and photography, it was used to document the murderous trade in ivory and the big game hunt.
It was, therefore, an ivory substitute that built George Eastman’s Kodak empire, but it failed to destroy the desire to kill elephants. In 1928, the same year that Kodacolor movie film was launched, Eastman went on an African safari. On February 19th 1928, he telegrammed home that he “GOT ELEPHANT TODAY EVERYTHING LOVELY”. The elephant had particular meaning for Eastman since it was also the symbol of the Republican party to which Eastman contributed $25,000 that year. In a move that adds resonance to Oliver Wendell Holmes’ famous analogy between photography and the hunting and skinning of exotic animals, Eastman had the dead elephant taxidermied (Holmes 1859).
His correspondence over the next four months is filled with discussion about the preparation and mounting of the elephant’s head, which was approximately 9 foot from ear to ear. Eastman's extravagant conservatory / music room was “ideal for such a large trophy”, gushed the taxidermist Jonas. Artificial nature in the form of celluloid did not end elephant hunting but preserved it as a leisure practice of wealthy monopoly capitalists (see Haraway on the heady mix of imperialism, realist photography, taxidermy, and eugenics in Eastman's social circle).
Celluloid film can be understood as a “film” in the most literal sense, and also as a kind of artificial skin. Unfortunately, gun cotton’s reactive, explosive quality lingered in celluloid film, which was notoriously unstable and flammable. Nevertheless, by the 1920s, the United States was producing 40,000 tons of celluloid a year (Kaufman, 45). In its wide variety of forms, this was one of the first plastics to go beyond the imitation of organic materials, shaping what Janet Ward describes as the “surface culture” of 1920s urban modernity (Ward).
Sources:
Chandler, Charles F. “Presentation Address.”
Industrial & Engineering Chemistry 6, no. 2 (1914): 156–158
Eastman correspondence 1928, George Eastman House Study Center.
Haraway, Donna. “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936”,
Social Text, no. 11 (Winter, 1984-1985): 20–64.
Holmes, Oliver Wendall. “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph.”
Atlantic Monthly, June 1859.
Kaufman, Morris.
The First Century of Plastics: Celluloid and its Sequel. London: Plastics Institute, 1963.
Parkes, Alex. “On the Properties of Parkesine and its Application to the Arts and Manufactures.”
Journal of the Society of the Arts XIV, no. 683 (1865): 81–6.
Ramalingam, Chitra. “Dust Plate, Retina, Photograph: Imaging on Experimental Surfaces in Early Nineteenth-Century Physics.”
Science in Context 28, no. 3 (2015): 317–55.
Scoffern, John,
Stray Leaves of Science and Folklore, London: Tinsley Brothers, 1870.
Walker, John Frederick.
Ivory's Ghosts: the White Gold of History and the Fate of Elephants. Grove Press 2010.
Ward, Janet.
Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001.
Wilson, Erasmus. “Observations on Collodion in the Treatment of Diseases of the Skin.”
The Lancet 52, no. 1316 (1848): 553–554.
For the process of producing collodion for photography see:
Woodbury, W. E.
The Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Photography. New York: Scovill & Adams Co., 1898 Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1979.
Vulcanite Goggles
4 February 2019 | On Archives, Writing and Being Distracted
It has been a long while since I last wrote for this blog. This is mainly because I have been trying to write up my findings for the first (possible) journal article to come out of this research. Though I have published lots of book chapters over the years as well as writing and editing books, I have only written a few journal articles. It took me a very long time to get over the first unsympathetic rejection letter that I received in my early twenties. Even now, without a definite commission, I struggle to know how to pitch a journal article. The weight of making a “contribution to the field”, of trying to add something worthwhile to theory or historiography, makes my writing so slow: I rewrite, and rewrite, I labour on it to the extent that it grows to the size of a short book and then shrinks back down again. Of course, the blog format has its own limitations, several of them set by myself — not to write more than about eight short paragraphs, for example — but it feels as though it allows more spontaneity, more tentative links and imaginative stitching-together of ideas.
In the last two months I have made several archive visits, to the Walgreen Boots Alliance Archive in Nottingham, the Ilford Limited archive at Redbridge and the Kodak Limited collection at the British Library in London. Both in the archives and in the journal article, it is hard to resist the attractions of the odd and the idiosyncratic. In my research, I am fascinated by one man, who as well as inventing new photographic processes, and experimenting with photo-telegraphy, patented radioactive bath salts and pioneered new uses of powerful electromagnetic fields in farming. I imagine abandoning academic work to write popular (or unpopular) biographies of eccentric inventors with double-barrelled names. In the Walgreen Boots Alliance archive, I find myself lingering over “Cleevis Sun Spectacles”, vulcanite goggles with narrow horizontal slots to peer out through, resembling the eyes of a goat.
These are reproduced in the Boots Merchandise Bulletin, which gives useful insight into the activities of the high street chemist’s photography department. During the 1920s and early 1930s the photography season only really lasted from May until September, so the Boots photography departments diversified, selling other electrical or optical goods such as bedside lamps, torches and flash lamps during the winter, and sunglasses during the summer. A note on sun goggles in June 1925 says, “Will everyone note that the frames of these goggles are inflammable when exposed to an open flame. Every assurance can be given to our customers that in normal use there is not the slightest danger”. I have visions of 1920s sunbathers casually lighting cigarettes and setting fire to their own glasses.
In this archive I also discover that photographic companies were promoting their films through vouchers in cigarette packets. In the late 1920s, Rajar, Ensign and Kodak all issued such vouchers in collaboration with tobacco companies such as BDV and Standard. And, both here and in the Kodak Limited collection, I discovered more discussion of fog (see my blog post on fog
here). In the Boots in-house magazine in 1935, one writer describes a train journey delayed by fog, in order to emphasise the importance of “prompt and decisive action” among salespeople, which requires “no mental fog”. In the Kodak Limited collection there is a report compiled in 1930 on experiments aimed at discovering the “chemical nature of the London fog, with the object of devising some means of removing those constituents from foggy air which render coating of sensitised material impossible”. Kodak bottled the fog and attempted to analyse it, but found no way of purifying it, and failed to identify the “emulsion-fogging constituent”.
If the Boots archive is particularly rich in distractions, with its double page spreads of swimming hats and rubber underwear, the Kodak Limited collection, though supposedly the records of a disciplined scientific research laboratory, also has its oddities and gems. I found a “Dufay airphoto” of a mother and child (Valerie and Peg) from 1943 and a report on visit to an inventor of a new kind of safety film in 1930, in which “the inventor is convinced he has something of such value that the cinematographic world will have to adapt its methods to suit his film” — as the tone of the report suggests, Kodak’s representatives were not impressed. Elsewhere, testing the relative flammability of different brands of safety film, the Kodak researchers set fire to their own film, Agfa and Pathé film, the Daily Mail, the Berliner Tageblatt, fine-spun silk, nuns’ veils and Turkish towelling (among many other materials).
Some years ago, I ran some AHRC-funded workshops on archives, in collaboration with Julian Warren, who at that time was the archivist for Arnolfini, Bristol. Together with a group of archivists, artists, academics and audience members (everything in that project seemed to begin with “A”), we addressed questions of preserving the ephemeral and the performative, and the relationship of the archive to governance. We thought about the thin line between the archive and the rubbish dump, about the tensions of the archive between order and disorder, frozen time and decay, memory and forgetting. We discussed the overwhelming impossibility (and undesirability) of the total archive, and we talked about the fluidity and instability of archives. In the final plenary, one of the things we discussed was how “The increased mobility (of bodies, of documents) and increased intangibility (of art, of culture) seems to be matched with an ever more aggressive drive to capture and secure in the archive”.
I now find this aggressive drive in myself, armed with a digital camera and an overanxious approach to journal article writing. Anxious about the possibility that I might one day need to discuss such things, I photograph every page of the Kodak reports of fog and film-burning, as well as swimming hats, announcements about “foot comfort week”, and vulcanite sun goggles. I am creating my own parallel archive, which is, as much as anything, a record of my own distractibility.
Sources
Boots Merchandise Bulletin, Walgreen Boots Alliance Archive.
Harrow Research Report H196, E.E. Jelley, “London Fog — A Chemical Investigation”, 22 December 1931, Kodak A2827, Kodak Collection, British Library.
Harrow Research Report H118, “Preliminary (first draft) Report on Burning Rates of Film, Paper and Textile Fabrics”, 17 April 1930, Kodak A2827, Kodak Collection, British Library.
Worldsy
1 March 2019 | On Photographic Worlding
I have been thinking about ways to articulate or express the relationship between photographs
as representations, representations
of photography — for example, in advertising and in the photographic press — and photography as a practice that is part of a wider set of material practices.
One of the terms I have been thinking about is “worlding”. I first came across the word years ago, in an essay by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1985a). It is from Heidegger, and it’s used by other writers in more strictly Heideggerian ways. However, writing at the height of poststructuralism, Spivak was concerned with texts and with the archive rather than phenomenology. Though she is probably a better reader of Heidegger than most, in another essay from the same year she wrote of her use of worlding as a deliberate “vulgarization of Martin Heidegger’s idea” (Spivak 1985b, 260).
Spivak was referring to Heidegger’s essay “The Origin of the Work of Art”. It’s notoriously difficult and I am aware that attempting to write about Heidegger in a short blog post on photography is probably a bit daft and could justifiably be viewed as simplifying. Nevertheless, and ploughing on, this passage stands out to me:
“The world is not the mere collection of the countable or uncountable, familiar and unfamiliar things that are just there. But neither is it a merely imagined framework added by our representation to the sum of such given things. The world worlds, and is more fully in being than the tangible and perceptible realm in which we believe ourselves to be at home.” (Heidegger 43)
Worlding is a process of establishing meaningful relationships, it emerges in and through communication between people but also importantly in our use of equipment, our coping with things. This is in contrast to earth, which (for our purposes) I am going to take to mean stuff in general, entities that are not yet gathered together, brought into use and into sense.
Spivak pointed to the rift that Heidegger posits between earth and the world, to question the way in which colonized space is treated by the colonizers as “uninscribed earth” though she acknowledged this is a false analogy (Spivak 1985a, 253) . She reinvented worlding as a process of overwriting an already existing world, as if it were a tabula rasa. Worlding produces a cartography, produces subjects and “others”, and simultaneously produces a historical record (an archive).
As Spivak’s analysis suggests, by making “world” into a verb, you can start to talk about an ongoing productive process which both writes and overwrites; which divides and defines and yet at the same time always posits an entirety; which is simultaneously meaningful and material, not a projected-on representation or superimposed “social construction” but integral and lived. The oddness in the word “worlding” is to do with the fact that we think of worlds as wholes — as self-sufficient ecosystems, as spheres, contained domains, not as something incomplete. It’s this counter-intuitive aspect that makes it a good word to think with.
Where Heidegger sees bare earth, Spivak sees another world, violently overwritten, and impossible to reconstitute. Returning to Spivak’s essay to find a word has made me rethink the work I want that word to do. It has reminded me that I need to see the photography archive as also, inevitably, an imperial and colonial archive (this is hardly a stretch in my research on Ilford Limited — it’s indicative that one of the companies Ilford absorbs circa 1930 is the Imperial Dry Plate company).
Some concept of worlding might offer a way to consider how photographic promotional materials come together with technology and materials. In this context photography is understood not only as a means to make pictures, but as helping to shape a way of being in the world, of moving through it, and of being with and handling equipment. The world does not pre-exist photography, instead, making and looking at photographs is experienced as an ongoing process of the coming into being of a world. This worlding is both productive (of practices and sensory experiences) and erasing (it worlds an already existing world).
Far from being explicitly repressive, photographic worlding is about the production of new sensations, and these are not only optical or visual, but include the feelings attached to new ways of moving and being in relation to acts of photographing, being photographed, and viewing photographs. As the word “worlding” suggests, it takes constant work to world a world. What we find in the archive is not a past world, which in many ways is lost to us. Instead, among the labels and letters, the financial records, chemical formula and instruments (including cameras and darkroom equipment), instruction booklets and leaflets, books and articles providing technical and aesthetic guidance, we find the very means by which the work of worlding was conducted and overseen.
Sources
Heidegger, Martin, “The Origin of the Work of Art,”
Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York, 1977), 17-87.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, “The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives”,
History and Theory, 24: 3. (1985a), 247-272.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism”,
Critical Inquiry, 12: 1, (1985b), 243-261.