Artificial Suns: Photography and Alternative Illumination

Histories and theories of photography tend to take the sun’s light as a given: a freely available natural resource that illuminates everything equally everywhere. Displacing the centrality of the sun in discourses on photography, this panel investigates the use of artificial light in photographic exposure, development, and display from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Various forms of artificial light were developed over the course of the nineteenth century and were used in photographic processes as early as 1839. This panel seeks to bring together papers by scholars and artists working across geographies and time periods to examine artificial light’s material and aesthetic effects—its explosive materiality, toxicity, ecological costs, and its impact on vision and visibility—as well as its poetic or philosophical resonances. Additionally, the panel seeks to expand notions of photographic authorship by investigating the infrastructures of artificial illumination—light’s dependence on global economies and trade networks—as well as the collective labour of photographic lighting. How does the use of artificial light alter photography’s relationships to time, space, and the image? What new histories and connections emerge from emphasizing the materiality of something as ungraspable as light? And finally, how might an investigation of artificial light in photography reframe the relationship between light, visibility, and knowledge?