TALK: The Form of History: Nineteenth-Century Experimental Photography and A Tale of Two Cities
Susan Cook (English, UCSB)
Friday, May 9 / 2:00 PM
South Hall 2716
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On September 4, 1857, English photographer William Jackson announced that he had “discovered” a photographic process that came to be known as solarization or, after a photographer who later claimed responsibility for the discovery in 1862, the Sabattier Effect. Exposed to unfiltered light during the development process, solarized images emphasize the distinction between reality and representation: hardly faithful copies of real life, these pictures look metallic and contain properties of both the positive and the negative image. In the nineteenth century, solarization was generally treated as a mistake: a failure of photography’s scientific method as well as an artistic failure. Yet solarization was, as Jackson’s and Sabattier’s documentations reveal, not always accidental. Furthermore, its simultaneous purpose and contingency embodies a nineteenth-century ambivalence towards photography and representational realisms more generally. Cook reads Charles Dickens’ 1859 historical novel A Tale of Two Cities as photographic in a precisely solarized way. Arguing that Dickens was aware of and incorporated visual realism into his own literary realist fictions, she will discuss the way in which this focus on realism is destabilized when we consider his work alongside solarized photography. Susan Cook is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of English at UCSB.
Sponsored by the IHC’s Culture, Gender and Aesthetics RFG.
