The relationship between photography and science is almost as old as the invention of various photographic procedures. William Henry Fox Talbot’s photogenic drawings, frames of various botanical specimens, are in the heart of the age of the invention of photography.
Although, it can be argued that Talbot was an amateur botanist, as early as 1845 (just six years after the official announcement of the invention of the daguerrotype), the scientific world saw the first microphotographs appear, become immortalised on daguerreotype plates. Astronomical photography would have to wait a little longer, but by the 1880’s technical advances, astronomers were beginning to record what their eyes saw through the telescope.
Regardless of the scientific value of these images, it is clear that, for men and women of science in the 19th century, photography was beginning to fulfill some of the promises made by François Arago in his speech presenting the daguerrotype to the French Academy of Sciences in 1839.
In a similar way and -although is seems contradictory- this same belief in the supposed objectivity of the photographic image, made it possible for photography to be used to make visible supposed supernatural events. Confidence in the veracity of photography added to the tricks that photographers learned over time, made credible - albeit only for a few- images of ghosts among other prodigies, which somehow were in accordance with the mysterious and almost alchemical procedures associated with the emergence, as if by magic, of the latent image printed on negatives.
All this must be understood within a culture that, while marveling at the continuous technical inventions that profoundly changed society and promised a future of continuous and unstoppable development, was beginning to have fantasies, delusions and suspicions about the technical and scientific development. It is not surprising, the apparent contradictory combination of romanticism and realism longing for the arcane and faith in science, had already given birth by the hand of Mary Shelley’s pen, to one of the founding novels of science fiction: Frankenstein of the modern Prometheus (1818). By the end of the 19th century, novelists such as Jules Verne or H.G. Wells cultivated this genre of fiction with a mixture of idealism and suspicion of what science might hold for humanity in the future.
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It is this universe that, in some way, serves as the background to Grace Hoyle’s Remembrance project (2019). The artist, secluded in her dark room, began to create photograms of small waste found in her home. A chicken bone, a moth and other remains of everyday life were converted by the effect of light and photographic emulsion, into phantasmagoric images capable of suggesting, in those with fine-tuned sensitivity and imagination, fantastic realities. Turned into a sort of archaeologist from her home world, Grace created in the laboratory, per- haps like Dr. Frankenstein himself, specimens typical of the classic science fiction books that at that time she avidly read. Thus, the small home-made vestiges, interpreted in the light of Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, Jules Vernes’ 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, of H.G. Wells, announced astonishing worlds suspended on the paradoxical threshold between the science of the past and the future that, at once amazed and terrified, glimpsed the fables of yesteryear. Fro these visions filtered through Victorian science fiction, Remembrance’s images fire our imagination and suggest the ominous side of scientific development, that, inevitably, after more than a century later have been anchored in the subconscious.
It is not by chance that this is so. In a world inevitably altered by the digital revolution, our relationship with the photographic image has been transformed. We not only live in post-truth times, we also live in post-photography times. And a logical response to this scenario is the review of sources, both technically -the return to nineteenth-century photographic procedures- as well as sensitive -the beautiful materiality of photographic emulsion- as well as conceptually -acceptance and even longing of a fiction that doesn’t try to pass itself off as reality.
(translated by Grace Hoyle)