Revealing the Hidden History of Photography and Cinema
Christophe Wall-RomanaAuthor
Demonstrating how racial and astronomical thinking are interwoven throughout the development of visual media, Black Light shows how photography and cinema are entangled with two key preoccupations of the Enlightenment: visualizing the mysteries of the cosmos and managing Blackness. As he charts the pivotal period from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, Christophe Wall-Romana presents a groundbreaking historical framework with which to reenvision our dominant modes of seeing and understanding the world.
Background image: Moon map. Wilhelm Beer and Johannes Heinrich Mädler, Mappa Selenographica (Berlin: S. Schropp, 1836), plate III. Courtesy of ETH-Bibliothek Zürich.
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This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Learn more at the TOME website, available at openmonographs.org.
Every effort was made to obtain permission to reproduce material in this book. If any proper acknowledgment has not been included here, we encourage copyright holders to notify the publisher.
Portions of chapters 3 and 6 were previously published in a different form in “Kinemorphic Cursives: Self-Imaging and the Non-Mimetic Source of Photoimaging,” Philosophy of Photography 13 (2022): 35–59, https://doi.org/10.1386/pop000381. Portions of chapter 7 were previously published in a different form in “Camille Flammarion’s Flash-Forward: The Cinematicization of French Thought and Aesthetics (1867–1913),” in 1913: The Year of French Modernism, ed. Effie Rentzou and André Benhaïm (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2020); reproduced with permission of Manchester University Press.
Copyright 2026 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
Black Light: Revealing the Hidden History of Photography and Cinema is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
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978-1-4529-7708-9
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University of Minnesota Press
publisher place
Minneapolis, MN
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