Photography as Experimental Practice: Thresholds between Coding and Affect in Scientific Imaging

Material Semiotic approaches from science and technology studies understand objects as co-constituted by the ideological and the material: physical matter is enmeshed and caught up in social meaning and social meaning is itself generated by matter. Thus, imaging technologies like photography are not mere representations of the “real” but experimental techniques that produce new forms of reality. Walter Benjamin's “Optical Unconscious” famously embraced the spatial and temporal disruptions photo media enacted upon the senses, pointing to the possibilities of transforming one’s everyday psychic reality. Pointing to lived realities of gender, race and sexuality as already shaped by new technologies, Donna Haraway goes further and asks that we embrace, not disavow, the existing hybridity between apparatus and body if we are to “recode” or subvert the real.

This paper thus revisits photography in the biological sciences at the end of the 19^th century wherein bodily sense and the technological were deeply intertwined and scientists sought to understand vital processes, evolutionary growth and physiology. Thinking in terms of “Materialized Epistemology” where knowledge production depended upon forms of embodied understanding, I take on early microscopy and colour imaging in the fields of marine biology, histology and microbiology as my case studies. I demonstrate how experimental imaging practices continually reconfigured relations between subject and object, nature and culture; in turn, I ask how the ongoing play between photography’s ineffable affect and “objective” quantification, between the invisible and the visible, came to determine what was “normal” or “pathological”; “evolution” or “regression”; human or non-human.