The Sedimented Image: Transforming Photographs and the "Lac Asphaltite" into Historical Testimony

This paper considers two intertwined projects concerned with the stabilization of uncertain elemental and temporal objects in the mid-19th century. The first is a little examined 1864 scientific expedition to the Dead Sea led by French nobleman and archaeologist Honoré d’Albert de Luynes. In mapping and documenting the fabled asphaltite lake of antiquity, the expedition had the underlying aim of furnishing definitive material evidence – geological and archaeological – of the cataclysms of the Old Testament, thus reconciling biblical chronology with the expanding horizons of human prehistory and geologic “deep time.”

Concurrently, the duke was the sponsor of an important competition addressing the chemical instability that threatened early silver photographs' longevity and thus undermined their purported utility as a mode of cultural preservation. To address this temporal anxiety, the competition incentivized the development of carbon-based photographic processes that would yield permanent, more easily reproducible images that could serve as reliable visual records the distant future.

Examining these historical episodes, this paper shows how the particular properties of silver-, carbon-, gold-, and bitumen-based image making processes were employed to discursively frame and materially “fix” a wide range of natural phenomena, including minerals, water, and weather, as legible forms of historical testimony. It foregrounds the tension between the popular claims and material realities of photography’s application to the study of the past in the 19th century and contributes to contemporary materialist and environmental discourses reframing photographs by foregrounding how their material forms and cultural meanings fluctuate and accumulate (sediment?) over time.