Photography in science

Abstract

The science of photography dates back to the 1830s, but its widespread use in science had to await the 20th century. One reason was the arrival of reliable and standardisable photographic emulsions, enabling scientists to trust photographs as evidence. Another, by historical coincidence, was the discovery of radiographs by Wilhelm Röntgen just before the turn of the century. Together, they gave an enormous boost to scientific photography, especially in medicine. “It was as if photography had been born again”, writes Kelley Wilder, “As teaching tools, photographs were much more vague than good anatomical drawings. X-ray photography soon changed all that.”Wilder's Photography and Science explores and illustrates three basic themes: the pictorial representation of scientific objects or phenomena; the detection and measurement of phenomena with photography; and photography's development as a science. She also aims to shed light on the never-ending debate, with its roots in Robert Hooke's wonderful microscope drawings of the 1660s, about whether scientific photography is more science than art, or vice versa.Many of her chosen images, such as Henri Becquerel's breakthrough photograph of a ghostly cross taken without a camera in 1896, revealing the new phenomenon of radioactivity, have little aesthetic appeal. Others confirm photography's ambiguous status as an artistic science, for instance, the famous false-colour Hubble space telescope image of the Orion nebula, or the black-and-white Lichtenberg figures showing the effects of positive and negative charges on various gases under various pressures, made by Arthur von Hippel at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1930s. These illustrations are copious, pertinent, and well reproduced, but the drawback is the lack of scientific information in the captions, which leaves some questions unanswered.Some scientists become so entranced by the photographs they originally create for experimental purposes that they continue to make them as a form of art, as happened with von Hippel. Among the most striking are the X-ray diffraction photographs of atoms and molecules made by crystallographers like Dorothy Hodgkin, which were later turned into textile designs for the 1951 Festival of Britain and exhibited last year in the Wellcome Collection exhibition From Atoms to Patterns. Surprisingly, there is no mention of these, or of Lesley Jackson's excellent catalogue, in Wilder's book. Nonetheless, the breadth of Photography and Science—from astronomy and medicine to anthropology and art—is admirable. The science of photography dates back to the 1830s, but its widespread use in science had to await the 20th century. One reason was the arrival of reliable and standardisable photographic emulsions, enabling scientists to trust photographs as evidence. Another, by historical coincidence, was the discovery of radiographs by Wilhelm Röntgen just before the turn of the century. Together, they gave an enormous boost to scientific photography, especially in medicine. “It was as if photography had been born again”, writes Kelley Wilder, “As teaching tools, photographs were much more vague than good anatomical drawings. X-ray photography soon changed all that.” Wilder's Photography and Science explores and illustrates three basic themes: the pictorial representation of scientific objects or phenomena; the detection and measurement of phenomena with photography; and photography's development as a science. She also aims to shed light on the never-ending debate, with its roots in Robert Hooke's wonderful microscope drawings of the 1660s, about whether scientific photography is more science than art, or vice versa. Many of her chosen images, such as Henri Becquerel's breakthrough photograph of a ghostly cross taken without a camera in 1896, revealing the new phenomenon of radioactivity, have little aesthetic appeal. Others confirm photography's ambiguous status as an artistic science, for instance, the famous false-colour Hubble space telescope image of the Orion nebula, or the black-and-white Lichtenberg figures showing the effects of positive and negative charges on various gases under various pressures, made by Arthur von Hippel at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1930s. These illustrations are copious, pertinent, and well reproduced, but the drawback is the lack of scientific information in the captions, which leaves some questions unanswered. Some scientists become so entranced by the photographs they originally create for experimental purposes that they continue to make them as a form of art, as happened with von Hippel. Among the most striking are the X-ray diffraction photographs of atoms and molecules made by crystallographers like Dorothy Hodgkin, which were later turned into textile designs for the 1951 Festival of Britain and exhibited last year in the Wellcome Collection exhibition From Atoms to Patterns. Surprisingly, there is no mention of these, or of Lesley Jackson's excellent catalogue, in Wilder's book. Nonetheless, the breadth of Photography and Science—from astronomy and medicine to anthropology and art—is admirable.