Introduction The Matrix of Photography and Cinema

Visualization

Historians agree on the broad outlines of how technicians and industrialists implemented photography and cinema, in the 1820s–1830s for the former and the 1880s–1890s for the latter. What prompted these innovations, however, is far from established. Until recently, it was assumed that reproducing the visible world was a universal dream that technological advances at last made feasible. This conjecture is now no longer tenable, for several reasons. First, visual reality in its crude ordinariness wasn’t regarded very highly prior to photography; it never warranted such a dream.1 Second, media archaeology shows that optical apparatuses after the Renaissance developed out of a myriad of motives, including wonder and magic, entertainment and aesthetics, and occult and polymath quests—none of which felt the need to privilege visual verisimilitude.2 Finally, photography and cinema emerged during the era of positivism that invoked supposedly universal history to justify Western hegemonic politics, tainting any common dream of visual reproduction. For all these reasons, an alternate scenario is needed.

Today, nearly everything from deep space to the atom and the brain has become picturable and seeable. But from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, the unseeable held a powerful cultural appeal in Europe, in part through the Christian injunction of attending to “the evidence of things unseen.” With the shocking early seventeenth-century revelation of heliocentrism, the introduction of the telescope, and faraway lands and peoples newly accessed, unseen reality grew exponentially, with spiritual realms still in play in the background.3 Novel kinds of inquiry fastened on the new contours of the unseeable to make it imaginable: inquiries about how the universe came about and developed, how humans appeared on Earth and diversified, and whether human history conformed to or diverged from natural history as reconstructed then. Such questions induced new modes of visualization consonant with the “scientific revolution,” and I claim that the long maturation of photography and cinema can be traced back to them. Recent scholarship justifiably appends scare quotes to “the scientific revolution” because it never had been disinterested or “pure” science.4 Rather, it tended to mold natural and human history in order to legitimize white peoples’ cultural and geopolitical domination, enabling the three-century-long transatlantic industrialization of slavery that figures centrally in this book.5

What is notable about seventeenth-century visualization practices is that they generally deprioritized present states of affair.6 They were deployed instead to render the long past of the cosmos, Earth, and humankind tangible, the better to prepare for the organization of the future under the naturalized dominion of white Europe.7 In other words, the new art of visualization was bookended by the divine and natural origin of the cosmos at one end and Europe’s hegemony-to-come at the other. The chapters of this book rethink the long emergence of photography and cinema from the arrival of the telescope onward through this alternative purview: visualizing and imaging within the broad context of racial and global supremacy what lies beyond the currently observable.

Natural Philosophy

At stake, then, is the worldview of so-called natural philosophy, an umbrella term for antecedent scientific practices from the early 1600s to the early 1800s. While it begat our modern technoscientific approach, which rests in principle on actual, neutral, measurable, and replicable facts, natural philosophy’s spirit of investigation was rife with competitive attachments. It cleaved often expressly to diverse preoccupations from theology, aesthetics, systematization, and analogism, to antiquarianism, mercantilism, jingoism, white supremacy, etc.8 These were not considered extraneous because reality was never taken to be neutral, objective, or autonomous. Reality was not data (meaning “givens”) but rather a divine gift meant to be deciphered by unraveling signs to better approach the invisible transcendent order. Rationality in the seventeenth century conformed to such preconceptions about harmonious relations (ratio) in a deistic universe. For René Descartes and his contemporaries, reason was synonymous with “natural light.” Enlightenment methods favored extrapolating the invisible or unseeable from accepted models of the visible, of vision, and of light—whose problematic nature is at the core of this study. This is why astronomy, the discipline of both optics and space-time, was preeminent for visualization practices and germinal for the matrix of photocinema.

This method of extrapolation entangled astronomy with race. One supposedly rational conviction of most natural philosophers in the wake of heliocentrism was that all planets must surely be inhabited like Earth. This came to be known as the multiple worlds hypothesis. Its correlate was that extraterrestrial inhabitants could be envisioned by simply extrapolating earthly races, resulting in a natural universe conceptualized through racial lenses for nearly three centuries. The rational invention of racialized extraterrestrials was a crucial step for how visualization, astrophysics, light research, and racist constructs began coalescing in the 1600s into a substrate for long-maturing technologies of visual reproduction. By the 1700s, more recognizably pre-photographic and precinematic insights began emerging, further crystalizing the matrix of photography and cinema by the early 1800s. This last step took place within a transformational epistemic tension. On the wane was the legacy of natural philosophy’s overreliance on approaching the nonobservable from unreliable extrapolation; on the rise was nineteenth-century technocratic science grounded in observation, mathematics, and precision instrumentation, culminating in the ideal of mechanical objectivity.9 It is within that tension that the common episteme of photocinema yielded innovations after the first decades of the nineteenth century.

To make these ideas more tangible, let us consider Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an emblematic figure of this hinge. Belonging to the first generation of white thinkers for whom slavery finally lost its supposedly rational basis, he was a lifelong abolitionist from his days at Cambridge in the 1790s. At the inaugural meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at the same university in 1833, he called upon scientific specialists to drop the title “philosopher” and leave it to actual practitioners of philosophy. The word scientist was adopted soon after.10 His mature work as a poet-philosopher focused on the faculty of imagination and the cognitive dimension of poetic images. He debated those ideas in the late 1790s with his close friend Thomas Wedgwood, the vaunted inceptor of photography. Wedgwood’s photochemical experiments, however, proceeded more from his father’s ceramic plating business and the conceptual ambiguity of image-making probed by Coleridge and others in the Darwin–Wedgwood circle than from the project of copying the visible (see chapter 4). I argue that the views on race, supposed science, and imaging held by Coleridge and contemporaries are just as structurally interrelated to the development of photography and cinema as Wedgwood’s marginal experiments.11

Fostering visualization over vision, this book relativizes the weak imperative of copying while offering a more comprehensive rationale for the emergence of photography and cinema.12 The term visualization itself dates from 1816, just as Nicéphore Niépce in Burgundy, France, was experimenting on the earliest working photographic process. It was indeed Coleridge who coined the verb to visualize to denote the perceptual tangibility and philosophical import of envisioning.13 The Oxford English Dictionary defines visualization as “the power or process of forming a mental picture or vision of something not actually present to the sight; a picture thus formed.”14 The clause “not actually present to the sight” is germane. It accentuates the multiple temporalities of visualization in contrast with the present of vision. It also brings attention to one central puzzle of natural philosophy: how light forms and carries images through the eyes into the brain and, even more fundamentally, what light really is. This remained a fundamental mystery until about the 1820s. Prior to that, the uncertain nature of light fostered wide skepticism regarding the reliability of optical images—another factor for the devaluation of the visually mundane.15 We should note too that “not actually present to the sight” points equally to unseeable but real facts—the physical universe, the development of an embryo, or the physiological abnormality of Blackness (a given for Enlightenment racial thinking, as we will see)—and to mystical or fabulous realms, traces of the divine within a universe seen as a Creation, and false reports on animals and peoples, such as tiny homunculi thought to be observed swimming in sperm and human-animal hybrids.16 Finally, visualizations form equally and synthetically from texts, ideas, biases, exchanges, visual aids, imagination, instrumentation, and projective geometry.17 The coining of visualizing by Coleridge as a central mode of knowledge-making marks the end of natural philosophy, as visualizing began splitting into heuristic theorization, imagination as a cognitive and philosophical faculty, and emergent technologies of imaging.

Photoimaging

This study articulates the development of photocinema around two interrelated streams: photoimaging and kinemorphic visualization (explored in the next section). Photoimaging is my term for a protoformation from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries that was part visualization and part image-making technic. It is defined as images made by light, whether actually or conjecturally, with two overarching characteristics: they are produced by spontaneous alterations within a material substrate that displays a pattern or image and they are caused by “light” (in scare quotes for reasons explained below). Photoimages straddled the divide between experimental and mystical branches of natural philosophy, especially in the German tradition of Naturphilosophie. For that metaphysical movement, light was the central cosmic riddle linking human and transcendental realms. It was thought to encompass all forces of nature: electricity, magnetism, chemical reactions, heat, sound, perhaps ideation and even the life principle itself. Yet because this transcendental unity of light was unseeable, metaphysical experimenters were in search of physical-chemical patterns materializing its hidden nature.

The most paradigmatic of such photoimages were produced by physicist and philosopher Georg Christoph Lichtenberg in the 1770s. He pressed sheets of sticky black paper on the body of an electrical machine to retain the fantastic electrostatic patterns formed by dust. His comments show that he thought they were windows into the unity of nature. They were unlike other images previously produced and, importantly, could not be considered direct copies. As chapter 3 explains, such images were often called natural “hieroglyphs.”18 Curiously, in 1769 Lichtenberg noted that an acquaintance named Jøns Matthias Ljungberg had mused about “making the images of the camera obscura remain on paper,” leading Lichtenberg himself “to imagine landscapes and other illuminated unmoving objects remaining still for a short time by means of a camera obscura.”19 Significantly, Lichtenberg did not pursue this prescient photoreprographic insight. For him, the electrostatic prints that he called “projections” were more akin to Diana’s Tree (Arbor Dianae). In this spectacular chemical reaction treasured by seventeenth-century alchemists, silver nitrate—the prime reactive of photochemistry as it happens—precipitates into awe-inspiring arborescent crystals.20 Like Lichtenberg’s electrical prints, these concretions were sneak peeks into the metaphysical script of the Book of Nature. Such photoimages, I claim, are the true antecedents of proto-photographic prints.

One of the central actors in this book is doctor and physicist Thomas Young, who made decisive advances in understanding light. Sharing the holistic and analogical creed of Naturphilosophie, he worked across linguistics, physiology, physics, and acoustics. Convinced that light and sound alike were wave phenomena, in 1804 he made photochemical prints of light interference patterns in a camera obscura to prove it. These unfixed photo prints, at the hinge between natural philosophy and science, are the first photographic pictures ever described. Yet like Lichtenberg’s projections, they were not images of anything known but rather visual specimens or tests opening new realms of knowledge. As such, they served twin purposes: disclosing the hidden nature of “light” in the framework of Naturphilosophie and producing evidence that light is a wave. This dual purpose is attested at the core of pre-photography by the names Niépce gave his earliest photographic processes: heliography (1825) and physautotype (1832). The first means “sun writing” and the second “self-imprint of physical nature.”21 None of their five Greek roots indexes either human vision or copying. To make his novelty intelligible, Niépce associated it with the established class of chemical concretions, physical patterns, graphs, silhouettes, sparks, and other natural figures transducing the unseeable. Such attempts had little to do with making copies—although not nothing.

Apposite to such hieroglyphs, photoimaging stems from a second path: the long association of silver nitrate with Black skin. Known since at least the Islamic Golden Age (eleventh to twelfth centuries), photosensitive substrates were never used in the context of imaging until the late eighteenth century. Prior to this, they were exclusively connected to human skin and skin Blackness, because it was common knowledge that both silver nitrate (AgNO₃, also called “lunar caustic” or “lapis infernalis,” “hell stone”) and silver chloride (AgCl, luna cornea, “horned silver” or “horned Moon”)—the whitish compounds that became central for modern photochemistry—darken light skin. They were widely used to treat skin ailments and at times other conditions, always accompanied with a warning regarding their darkening properties.22 In his 1664 book on color theory, Robert Boyle mentions a “merry” experiment with silver nitrate described as “a Snow-white body [substance]” that when laid upon “White Skin should presently produce a deep Blackness.”23 Right after mentioning this paradoxical equation—white + white = black—Boyle segues into his next chapter: “The Cause of the Blackness of Negroes.” Photography historians have never considered this racial discourse as integral to the genealogy of photography. This study recovers and elucidates the constitutive role of race for both proto-photography and protocinema.

Let us consider this decisive point in more detail. In late 1827, Niépce traveled to the Royal Observatory town of Kew to present his new photographic process (heliography) to British optical physicists and instrument-makers. They found his low-contrast artwork reproductions on tin plates underwhelming and did not encourage commercialization. After fruitless months, he returned to France and began collaborating with Louis Daguerre, who finalized photography in 1838. A single British scholar, the anatomist Everard Home, was intrigued enough by Niépce’s plates to report on them. The then-secretary of the Royal Society (later disgraced for plagiarizing the manuscripts of his dead brother-in-law, the colonial surgeon and anatomist John Hunter), Home published the following passage in 1828, without mentioning heliography or Niépce by name: “A French gentleman has just discovered a substance by means of which he can so prepare any polished surface of silver or tin, that the sun’s rays reflected from any object will be so fixed as to leave its image. The discovery he considers not brought to perfection, and therefore has not promulgated it: he has presented me with a specimen of this art, which will prove a very valuable discovery, since the outline of the representation must be perfectly accurate, however much it is diminished.”24 It has long been known that this measured endorsement is the earliest known reference to working photography in print. Yet no historian to my knowledge has mentioned the title of the section of Home’s anatomy manual where it appears: “On the Rete Mucosum.” This is the infamous Latin name of the epidermal layer in which white natural philosophers obsessively sought to locate the wellspring of Blackness. Home affirms that since in utero “the child of a black woman” is indistinguishable from that of a white woman, Blackness must “require light for its formation, or, at least, for its being rendered visible” (Home, “On the Rete Mucosum,” 280). For Home, the main utility of photography is to confirm white thinkers’ racial constructs: Blackness is latent before birth and is a complication of native whiteness. Photography entered the archive not as a means of visual reproduction but as a new cipher of Black subalternity.

Home had already conducted experiments in 1820 on himself and two unnamed Black men, seeking to quantify the effects of sunlight on their respective skin.25 Availing himself of a partial annular solar eclipse, he employed on his own skin “two lenses” (a field telescope) to focus sunrays. The article detailing his results has a single illustration: the serial phases of that solar eclipse, drawn by Francis Bauer (coincidentally, Niépce’s 1827 contact at Kew). Observing that only his own skin reacted intensely and painfully, Home consulted one of the most celebrated scientists of the day, Humphry Davy. He confirmed his hypothesis that Black skin absorbs the heat of sunlight better than white skin and most likely mentioned to Home the article he’d written in 1802 on the pre-photographic experiments of Wedgwood. Home and Davy thus represent a direct connection between Wedgwood’s 1790s photonegative stencils and Niépce’s 1827 heliographic plates. Their connection is not the desire to automatize visual copies but the enduring compulsion to explain Black pathology.

Photoimaging helps relativize notions that photography is an objective media. When film historian André Bazin defined the “objective character” of photography in 1945, he famously wrote: “For the first time an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man.”26 Bazin glosses over the history of automatic photoimages outlined above and mischaracterizes the objectivity of photography. As Charles Sanders Peirce astutely notes, photographs are “physically forced to correspond point by point to nature.”27 In other words, their copies are not spontaneous but calibrated to the range of the human eye. Indeed, recent scholars show how photography was always calibrated for white subjects and white viewers.28 But photography does not register the objective world for a more fundamental reason: There is no objective world, visually speaking.29 Flies, owls, humans, and x-ray satellites do not just see the world differently, they access separate windows of the electromagnetic radiation spectrum, which is unseeable as a whole. The realization early in the nineteenth century that “light” comprises not only invisible ranges but also black components and blackening properties was a major inducement for taking photoimaging toward photography and for beginning to depathologize Blackness (see chapter 4).

Kinemorphosis and Animated Visualization

The second mode of visualization we focus on concerns protocinema formations stemming from natural history. Natural history comprised investigations of the development and diversification of both the inanimate (cosmology and geology) and the animate (plants, animals, and humans). In the wake of the Copernican turn, natural history increasingly sidestepped biblical origin scenarios in search of other logics explaining the genesis of animate and inanimate beings. Jessica Riskin documents how a hybrid construct of biology and clocklike mechanics came to govern the explanation of animate beings well into the nineteenth century.30 What I suggest in this study is that, for post-Copernican cosmology and astronomy, the new logic was not a construct but a new modality of visualization that I call “kinemorphosis.” I define it as envisioning the sequential and uneven plastic transformation of matter and structures over time. Think of the growth of an embryo or the malleability of clouds. Emerging in astronomy around the beginning of the eighteenth century, I argue that kinemorphosis acted as a potent inducement toward visual animation heuristics and constituted a tangible source of protocinematic sensorium.

We are today so thoroughly shaped by moving images that it is a challenge to imagine an era when visual animation had zero conceptual and sensorial power and no human-made analog. Yet until roughly the second half of the seventeenth century, notions of animated images and visual plasticity were nearly unthinkable. Let’s recall that none of the evolving processes we take for granted—the Big Bang, geomorphology, organic evolution, embryogenesis—were yet understood. Cinematic visualization arose in astronomy when interest in the path of comets confirming the heliocentric model produced a momentous new word and concept—a trajectory—highlighting visual motion. At the same time, precise illustrations of Moon phases, drifting sunspots, and solar eclipse phases leveraged sequential pictorial strategies. In medicine, William Harvey modeled blood circulation and especially epigenesis, the uneven growth and aggregation of embryos, eschewing the preformist theory of tiny homunculi inflating in the womb. However, these ways of visualizing dynamic metamorphosis remained marginal in the seventeenth century. For the early Enlightenment, René Descartes’s attributes of reason as “clear and distinct” were projected on the world itself, implying that true states of fact could only be static or in captive motion.31 As Klaas van Berkel, a scholar of seventeenth-century theories of motion, puts it: “Motion requires an explanation because it is not normal.”32 Visual motion as such remained nigh unpicturable, as philosopher George Berkeley neatly summarized in 1709: “Visible Motion is not of the same Sort with Tangible Motion.”33 While things are obviously moving, for Berkeley the eye can only register clear and distinct sights, making visual motion a derivative formation, if not some kind of hallucination or illusion.34

Kinemorphosis gradually normalized after the 1730s, under the impetus of the new cosmology (see chapter 2).36 It was recognized as such around 1802 when two natural philosophers independently published studies of paradigmatically kinemorphic objects—clouds.37 London pharmacist Luke Howard stated that “the power of connecting [cloud types] . . . resides only in the mind before which their relations have passed, though perhaps imperceptibly, in review.”38 This comment symptomatically fuses the malleability of clouds with their comparative observation and visualization as though all share the same cinematic character. The other researcher was French botanist and anatomist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who studied cloud taxonomy through a setup used for observing astronomical trajectories: “A visual line having one end at the observer’s eye and the other at the examined portion of the cloud” allows for “the movement of the observed cloud [to be] better sensed.”39 Lamarck’s work on clouds partook of his general theory of transformism.40 He is known for foreshadowing Darwinian evolution by positing the gradual transformation of animal physiologies into each other. But his larger framework aimed at explaining the origin of the Earth and life through long duration and dynamic interactions between gravitation, sunlight, and organic chemistry.41

Meteorology, the new science that Howard and Lamarck inaugurated, became a subset of nineteenth-century astronomy. So it should come as no surprise that a key inspiration for both meteorologists was the astronomer William Herschel and especially his revolutionary research on nebulae (literally, “cloud-like things”).42 In the late seventeenth century, astronomers began using nebula and nebulosity to refer to perplexing blobs of light in the firmament. Astronomer Charles Messier published a nebulae catalog in 1771 just so his colleagues would not mistake them for comets.43 Formless cosmic chaff with neither rhyme nor reason, nebulae incarnated—like clouds at the time—what Enlightenment rationalism abhorred: shifty things and nebulous ideas. Herschel flipped this indictment on its head after observing thousands of star clusters and clouds of dust and stars, concluding that they all followed a similar process of kinemorphic development. In summing up that process, he outlined the cognitive and technical prerequisite for cinema: that thousands of discrete dissimilar static shapes can be understood through a single sequence of temporal metamorphosis (see chapter 3). This very formula underpins the animation of sequential chronophotographs in the late 1880s.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, kinemorphic visualization and visual displays of motion—such as phantasmagoria shows, the Diorama of Daguerre, and moving panoramas—permeated visual culture. Media scholars have long acknowledged their protocinematic character. Visual motion was further mainstreamed by the 1830s, when physicist André-Marie Ampère coined the word kinematics (cinématique) for the study of all motions irrespective of force (thus distinct from mechanics). The term was then applied in the 1860s to the inner movements and design of all machines.44 By the 1860s and 1870s, kinemorphic visualization pervaded scientific practices. It was theorized, for instance, by science popularizer G. F. Rodwell in “On the Perception of the Unseen” (1873):

Let our eye revolve with infinite velocity in a circle, and let the circle rotate upon one of its diameters. A sphere whose surface consists of eyes will be the result, and let this be our instrument of vision; and let us call it for avoidance of repetition the Oculus, and with it travel space. Grant also to the Oculus power of contraction to the size of the atom, expansion to the size of the sun, infinite velocity in every direction, faculty of seeing in the dark, of distinguishing the most rapid motion, of seeing the imagined but unseen. . . . In the study of nature there are many unseen actions which it behoves us to visualise.45

Rodwell’s mind experiment describes not vision or picturing or, strictly speaking, visual reality but a virtual, transscalar optics navigating through the space-time continuum to visualize it. My claim is that cinema emerged neither solely nor directly from chronophotography, as is premised by the canon of media history. Rather, its long maturation began somewhere around the 1650s with the visual animation insights of astronomers and physiologists; it was articulated in 1784 by astronomer Herschel’s equation of static observations with a kinemorphic array in time; and it was technologically incepted by astronomer Camille Flammarion in 1867.

The Matrix of Photocinema

In 1807, three years after producing ephemeral photochemical prints, Thomas Young imagined a “chronometer.” It was a weight-driven cylinder upon which a sensitive stylus attached to a vibrating body traced a sinuous graph of its vibration. Young’s chronometer is recognized as a prototype that inspired early phonograph design in the 1870s. Yet, before that it served as the paradigmatic setup for a class of instruments that has been overlooked in the prehistory of cinema: chronoscopes and chronographs. Developed in the 1840s, these machines transduced moving phenomena into visual and measurable traces and directly influenced the invention of chronophotography (see chapter 6). Indeed, the cinematic apparatus Flammarion described in 1867 was an imaginary planet-size chronoscope (see chapter 7).

Young’s preeminent role in both photoimaging and kinemorphic visualization signals the convolution of both paths. Though this study will characterize and reconstruct them separately for more clarity, they should be thought of as intertwined. The final technical emergences of photography and of cinema have traditionally been split into distinct disciplinary historiographies. Yet recent scholars of media in the long duration question this divide. Laurent Mannoni shows that protocinema insights are in fact much older and wider than comparable insights regarding proto-photography.46 A key premise of this book is that photoimaging and kinemorphosis, though developed from separate insights, gradually combined into a common matrix—roughly from the arrival of the telescope as a paradigmatic visualization media onward (1608).47 One further reason to soften the differentiation between photoimaging and kinemorphosis is that they refracted in very similar ways the entanglements of history and race within the macrocosm of natural history.

Synopsis of the Historiography of Photography and Cinema

Before moving to the fullest version of this book’s argument and especially the place of racial discourses in it, a quick historical overview of scholarship on the origins of photography and cinema is in order.

• 1791–1797: Thomas Wedgwood makes unfixed silver nitrate contact prints of objects and of images painted on glass
• 1816: Nicéphore Niépce makes unfixed photographs of the view from his bedroom window
• 1816–1826: Niépce experiments with various substrates (metal, limestone, glass) and chemical compounds (gum arabic, guaiac, bitumen of Judea, etc.)
• 1826: A mysterious actor affirms he has fixed images in the camera obscura (according to Charles Chevalier)
• 1827: Niépce commits to “viewpoints from nature,” renouncing reprography at the behest of Louis Daguerre
• 1827–1828: At Kew, Niépce presents low-contrast, fixed “heliography” plates to British optical scientists; Alphonse Eugène Hubert (later working with Daguerre) experiments with silver chloride imaging
• 1829: Collaborating with Niépce, Daguerre critiques the poor quality and lack of progress of heliography
• 1831: Daguerre, using iodine on a silver-coated metal plate, compares copies using a camera obscura and a solar microscope (a mirror reflecting solar rays into a lens)
• 1833: Niépce dies
• 1834: William Henry Fox Talbot makes “photogenic engravings” in Geneva, advised by astronomer John Herschel
• 1835: Daguerre makes a positive from a negative; Talbot reduces exposure time to ten minutes in miniature cameras but soon stops experimenting
• 1837: Daguerre takes exposure time down to seven to ten minutes; isolated experimenters explore photographic processes (John William Draper, Paul Gustave Froment, etc.)
• 1838: Daguerreotype perfected
• 1839: François Arago, head of the Paris Observatory and member of Parliament, makes Daguerre’s process public and open source; John Herschel quickly retroengineers Daguerre’s process and coins the word photography

• 1860s: Plans and patents for setups of animated photography by several researchers (Louis Ducos du Hauron, Charles Cros)
• 1873: Astronomer Jules Janssen has Eugène Deschiens build a photographic revolver to record the passage of Venus across the Sun
• 1875: Astronomer Camille Flammarion publishes the authoritative description of Janssen’s apparatus in the journal La Nature
• 1878: Eadweard Muybridge takes sequential photographs with a twelve-camera battery, projecting them in a magic lantern, later a zoopraxiscope; Étienne-Jules Marey publishes The Graphic Method based on drum electro-chronographs
• 1881: Muybridge meets Marey and shows him 1/500th-second exposures
• 1882: Marey constructs a single-camera chronophotographic setup to document animal and human locomotion
• 1885: Marey republishes The Graphic Method with a new section on the use of chronophotography; Kodak innovates celluloid film
• 1887: Muybridge publishes Animal Locomotion, a compendium of chronophotographic research
• 1888: Thomas Edison and William Kennedy Laurie Dickson patent the kinetograph/kinetoscope, a cylinder that can record and project as animation microphotographs arranged in a spiral
• 1888: Émile Reynaud projects canvas strips holding painted gelatin slides in a magic lantern
• 1889: Ottomar Anschütz exhibits his electrical tachyscope; Edison procures Kodak celluloid film for a new design of the kinetoscope
• 1891: Edison demonstrates the celluloid kinetoscope; several animated photographic projection patents and setups (e.g., Victor von Reitzner)
• 1893: Edison commercializes the celluloid kinetoscope
• 1894–1895: Several experimenters and showmen display cinematographic projection setups (Max Skladanowski, Grey and Otway Latham, etc.)
• 1895: Auguste and Louis Lumière commercialize a compact camera/projector with a cam and Maltese cross projecting celluloid films

For historians, until the mid-twentieth century, photography and cinema were inventions, the product of technical geniuses who realized the ageless dream of picturing reality. Proprietary and nationalistic biases were the norm. In the late nineteenth century, a pair of French advocates dethroned Daguerre, until then the official inventor of photography. They did so in favor of Niépce but without considering William Henry Fox Talbot.48 Similarly, in the 1870s Eliza Meteyard proclaimed Thomas Wedgwood to be the inventor of photography, as did R. B. Litchfield in the 1900s (a Wedgwood descendant).49 In the 1930s, Austrian chemist Josef Maria Eder attributed photography entirely to the German chemist Johann Heinrich Schulze’s 1720s dabbling in photochemistry.50

Postwar historians like Beaumont Newhall, Helmut Gernsheim, André Bazin, and Georges Sadoul offer more nuanced genealogies focusing on better-documented technological developments.51 They invoke a convergence model: for photography, the camera obscura combined with photochemistry; for cinema, still photography combined with serial projection via Muybridge and Marey. An important turn occurred in the early 1980s when the historiographic paradigm of early cinema shifted toward empirical research, the study of early spectatorial experience, and the polyvalence of “attraction” in the apparatus. Personal computing and the internet then enlarged notions of media beyond traditional audiovisual models. Deac Rossell’s conclusions that “everything written before 1980 is suspect, and much that was written thereafter,” reflects the mindset of current media scholarship.52

In the 1980s and 1990s, the influence of Michel Foucault and other critical theorists opened media studies to cultural studies in works by Paul Virilio, Friedrich Kittler, Jonathan Crary, and François Albéra and Maria Tortajada, among others.53 They balanced archival documentation of technogenesis with social and cultural analysis. They bracketed grand narratives in favor of finer-grained studies on subsegments of media apparatuses, such as screen practices, spectacular culture, sound studies, magic lantern exhibitions, moving panoramas, etc. Simultaneously, well-researched monographs on individual precursors began dispelling the clichés and approximations of earlier biographers.54

The more recent trend of media archaeology reopens horizons far and wide. Gabriel Rockhill summarizes this approach as favoring “metastatic emergence” through “a variable-speed transformation unevenly distributed across social space” and a combination of heterogeneous factors.55 Media archaeology currently rejects biological/genealogical models relying on birth, growth, death, inheritance, lineage, etc., finding such metaphorical language complicit with Western biopolitical hegemony. Instead of a vertical logic of preexisting ideas about separate media waiting for implementation, the field favors horizontal rhizomes of intersecting and transnational media practices and variants. Media archaeologists probe long durations down to the medieval era with growing attention to non-Western sources.56 They also develop original research motifs such as vital temporality, insects, or geology while often dialoguing with contemporary art practices.57 This strategy was summarized by Vivian Sobchack as “re-presencing” media history with the stated goal of advocating for diverse origins in the face of alarming industrial uniformization in audiovisual media.58 One tenet of media archaeology is that no media variant is valued over another, since their final success reflects contingent cultural discourses and commercial pressures, not necessarily a superior technical potential. Introducing the English translation of Mannoni’s 1995 cinema archaeology The Great Art of Light and Shadow, Tom Gunning explains this stance as ridding media history of back-shadowing and the fallacy of preformism.59

Today’s studies of media prehistory, in sum, rest on an inverted funnel model in which implemented media at the tip are de-emphasized while the broad base of alternative antecedents, components, motivations, and practitioners are revalued. Media archaeology accordingly abstains from unifying scenarios. While this book is beholden to the new perspectives inaugurated by the field, it breaks with it in two significant ways: First, it proposes a comprehensive matrix accounting for the development of photocinematic ideas, practices, and technics over nearly three centuries; second, it delves into the racist underpinnings that have shaped much of media prehistory but have scarcely been investigated at all.

Race and Astronomy in the Matrix of Photocinema

This book is premised on the idea that the matrix of photocinema was coextensive with premodern and modern Europe’s imperatives to visualize the world within a horizon of power. We should first qualify the concept of “world” as polysemic, multilayered, and fragmented. The Earth had long been visualized as a globe by the seventeenth century, but it included large terrae incognitae (unknown lands) and its distances and longitudes remained approximate. Lands previously unknown (the Americas, Australia) and more actively accessed (West Africa, East Asia) had not yet coalesced into a global sense of smooth geography that became a hallmark of the mid-nineteenth century—notably in Alexander von Humboldt’s four-volume Kosmos (1844–1856). As Benjamin Schmidt suggests, in the seventeenth century such lands were envisioned through an exoticizing lens of travel accounts, fanciful illustrations, and merchandise flows, all of which contributed to a contrastive Eurocentric identity.60 Hence, geographical, racial, and cultural otherness did not add more difference to a global commons. They were different worlds, truly otherworldly by European norms, reinforcing the racialized multiple worlds hypothesis.61 Indeed, in most European languages, world denoted disparate objects, from Earth to the whole universe.62 A world could also mean any planet or star, the secular realm of human life, a continent, its peoples, even an era of the past. The world was also synonymous with high society—earthlings that matter.

Such a composite world picture facilitated speculative cross-linkages by natural philosophers from one layer to another.63 A single session at the newly formed Royal Society in the 1660s, for instance, intermixed discussions about the Moon and gravitation, the hypothesis of beings inhabiting other planets (other worlds), conjectures regarding “pre-Adamites”—thought to be a prehuman species—and the origin of skin color differences.64 These were not pell-mell topics belonging to different disciplines but complementary inquiries about world constitution. For instance, as we will see in chapter 1, in the seventeenth century the term species denoted not only sets of humans or animals but also varieties of light and imaging.

This epistemic fluidity makes it less surprising that the first application of the word race for subdivisions of humankind came from an astronomical purview. It occurred in a short text of 1684 by François Bernier, a French doctor who long resided at the Mughal court, titled “A New Division of the Earth According to the Various Species or Races of Men Inhabiting It.”65 This foundational essay distributes peoples into four “races”: sub-Saharan Africans, Far East Asians, Lapps, and a capacious fourth race composed of Europeans as well as Maghrebi, Levantines, subcontinental Indians, Southeast Asians, and northern Native Americans—in spite of their being “different from us in the shape of their face and their color.”66 Commentators interpret this odd racial distribution as crossing phenotypical boundaries (Robert Bernasconi), fragmenting Christianity’s human unity (Justin E. H. Smith), or weakening monogenism.67 Siep Stuurman emphasizes its prurient exoticizing of nonwhite women.68 But no commentators provide a rationale for this confounding fourth race.

Its source was Bernier’s teacher, the astronomer and natural philosopher Pierre Gassendi, whose Latin works Bernier edited and translated into French. An anti-Cartesian empiricist and atomist, Gassendi believed that other planets were inhabited, making explicit the link between racialization and conjectural extraterrestrials: “& if . . . things born in Europe, Africa & America are wholly different from each other it is believable that those born on the Moon would be even more different. . . . If those born and raised in cold lands have such difficulty living in hot ones, and those from hot ones in cold ones, what would happen to a man whom we imagine was transported to the Moon whose torrid zone is so much more intemperate than ours?”69 For Gassendi, latitude was a better index for classifying people than skin color or climate. He established a system of correspondence between peoples living at equal distances from the equator, whether in the same hemisphere but opposite meridians (“Periscians”), opposite hemispheres and the same meridian (“Antoecians”), or opposite hemispheres and opposite meridians (“Antipodes”). For Gassendi and Bernier, race was not primarily phenotypical but astronomical: It grouped humans together according to the length of the shadow their bodies project at noon.70 It is only in this gnomonic perspective that European, Middle Eastern, Indian, and Native American peoples were deemed coracial. Modern racialization was ushered in by a procrustean photocinematic apparatus projecting human silhouettes on an earthly screen.

The larger stakes of racial classification lay of course in Europe’s most consequent practice from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries: the mass-scale enslavement of Africans and Afro-descendants. The origin and global distribution of Black peoples and the optics, physiology, and feared mutability of Black skin were pivotal for envisaging the natural history of Earth within the solar system—and justifying slavery. For white natural philosophers, not a few of whom (like Boyle or Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis) were personally beholden to the transatlantic slave trade, Blackness was enmeshed in the maintenance of wealth and class, national, and civilizational standing. As the example of Home makes plain, Black peoples were ready subjects of investigation in both mind experiments and medical experimentation because the conjectural etiology of Blackness amounted to a central test for the validity of any system of natural philosophy. This resulted in a twin presumption shadowing the Enlightenment period: Humans were naturally white—in an aboriginal and exemplary sense—and Blackness was unnatural and in need of pathological explanation.71

While recent media scholars have increasingly examined racialized discourses and representations in early photographs and movies, almost no existing research addresses the role of racialization in the long emergence of media. This book outlines some of the racial constructs hardwired into the architectonics of photocinematic media. Part of its aim is to keep undoing “the investment in [the] exclusion” of race as an explanatory factor—an investment still extant in much early media and early science studies.72 I adhere to the premise of race studies: All aspects of the Western episteme since at least the seventeenth century should be gauged for their reliance on racial and racist assemblages. Sylvia Wynter and Denise Ferreira da Silva, notably, rearticulated the “scientific revolution” through such racial analytics. They show how the sociohistorical death and ontological subalternity of peoples of color resulted from an epistemic program of reserving subjective transparency for white people. By objectifying racial others, the white Enlightenment legitimated its position of absolute legislator over the visible. Ferreira da Silva states that “the racial is an effect and a tool of the productive violent act that produces the global as a modern context of signification” (Toward a Global Idea of Race, 29). In this global racial context, what she calls the “play of universal reason” tames human inner motions (affects) in philosophy and outer motions (Newtonian laws) in astronomy to position white scientific subjectivity as an unaffectable and unmovable center for universal cognitive dominion. This accounts for why, as in Bernier’s text published the same year as Isaac Newton’s “De Motu” (1684), vision, visualization, astronomy, motion, projection, and race coalesced into a tight and powerful discursive formation, as Wynter points out.73 It is from within that same formation, I argue, that the matrix of photocinematic media unfolded.

We are now equipped to formulate the central argument of this book: astronomical and cosmological visualization within the purview of natural history—together with the accounts of racial differentiation and Blackness that linked Earth to the cosmos, as well as photochemistry to skin color—were integral to the new modes of imaging that progressively shaped the matrix of photocinema from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. There were three main racial discourses in this process, all focusing on Blackness as the polar opposite of aboriginal and normal whiteness.

The first is the thermo-metabolic thesis of Blackness, which concerned the purported cause of Black skin, associated with hot climate and nutrition since Aristotle. It breaks down into several components: one is the notion that Blackness proceeds from an unseen or latent biological structure not found among white people and that must be located in Black bodies (the crypto-latency thesis). A later hypothesis—inflected by the new photochemistry of the 1780s—is that Black skin results from photosensitivity alone: the photological thesis of Home. The latter was strongly reinforced by the arrival of photonegative images making white people look Black.

The second is the astro-racial thesis, tied to heliocentric astronomy. If other planets revolve around the Sun like the Earth does, they too must be inhabited, and their inhabitants should be envisioned through the same thermo-metabolic thesis of race, using a planet’s distance from the Sun instead of latitude. Though purely speculative, it had a strong perverting effect: It confirmed racism as if it were dictated by the cosmos itself.

Finally, there is transracial and panracial morphism. This was an evolutionary and teleological discourse fomented in reaction to white fears of collective devolution and occasioned by mixed-race populations in Caribbean colonies. As neither the purported cause of Blackness nor the genetics of race-mixing were known, white fears included at times individual transracial morphism, with tanning as an early symptom. In panracial morphism, nature—assisted by nefarious means including conquest, so-called civilizing, eugenics, and extermination—directs the future mutation of all human races into whiteness as a universal telos. Present for instance in the work of Immanuel Kant (see chapter 3), panracial morphism was boosted in the nineteenth century by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s philosophy of history and later by biased interpretations of Darwinism. It played an active and sustained role in cinematic visualization.

It should be added that these various racial constructs were invoked at various times by proslavery and polygenic views (considering humanity as formed of separate species) and by proponents of abolitionism and monogenism (humanity as a single species). In this regard, the matrix of photocinema was just as contested as the dominant culture it refracted.

Such racial discourses may seem at first far afield from tangible reconstructions of photography and cinema. However, while this book’s insights into long duration intersections between race and visuality are novel in media studies, they are old news for race studies and diasporic Black thought. Thinkers of color have always known that optics and the visual sphere at large were forcibly policed in racial terms through modes ranging from total invisibility to hypervisible profiling.74 In 1791, African American astronomer Benjamin Banneker argued to Thomas Jefferson that the “deepest dye” of his skin was irrelevant in gauging his intellectual capacities.75 Frederick Douglass pointedly leveraged photographic portraiture as an active antidote to visual prejudice, while Frantz Fanon made plain how Black existence felt photographically “fixed” by white people’s gaze, and Édouard Glissant famously claimed opacity as a right and a poetics of resistance (see chapter 5).76

That Blackness has long been culturally enmeshed in protomedia is the original proposal put forward by philosopher Fred Moten with “the black apparatus.” “It’s no accident,” he writes, “that the story of the disciplinary animation of the image comes more fully into its own by way of the black apparatus.”77 This statement points in part to the biopolitical coercion of Black bodies coeval with Étienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotographic work on human locomotion. More generally it directs us toward the mechanized surveillance of racialized laboring bodies. For Moten, a constant historical constraint on Black life was that “the Negro must be still, but still be moving”—that is, kept socially inert the better to extract forced labor (Black and Blur, 71). This suggests that the still/moving dialectic central to photocinema is also at the core of the black apparatus.78 Moten defines the latter as “the sound/image of the black in the modern Euro-American audiovisual imagination,” encompassing, for instance, “motion capture and composite imaging” in connection with “seriality and esthetic criminality,” as well as plantocracy’s “reproductive reproduction” (74, 76).79 That expression refers to the sexual exploitation of Black women and the control of childbearing on the plantation, as a subtext for any articulation of media reproducibility. He suggests that the “montagic, dissonant, syncopated abstract; the criminal disruption of narrative; the grapho-reproductive improvisation of narrative,” constitute a “portable dark continent” (120). In that virtual space, Black experience can signify and reappropriate the black apparatus while it keeps struggling against its strictures. For Moten, modernity at large needs to be retheorized, taking full account of enslavement, abolition, segregation, and discrimination in their reciprocal relations with media technicity.

He calls this recursive relationality “the anorigin of modernity” since it reaches to and keeps reviving earlier eras (Moten, Black and Blur, 120). This premise resonates with the media “anarchaeology” of theoretician Siegfried Zielinski in his critique of any media history that discounts Western autofoundation (arché meaning “foundation”). Significantly, Zielinski and Moten derive some of their inspiration expressly from Caribbean philosopher Édouard Glissant, whose poetics of relation refigures the Middle Passage and the Black Atlantic as the sunken subsurface of modernity.80

Early formations of photocinema proceeded from this subsurface as well. For instance, Thomas Wedgwood came from one of the most actively proabolitionist families of Georgian England. The British abolitionist movement famously adopted a cameo produced in the ceramics factory of his father, Josiah Wedgwood, that depicted a kneeling, enchained Black man encircled by the motto “Am I not a man and a brother?” Thomas Wedgwood most likely conducted his pre-photographic experiments there too. This opens the possibility of direct connections between abolition and photocinema. Several striking coincidences reinforce this possibility: Henry Peter Brougham and François Arago, the two state officials responsible for the passage of abolition legislation (England in 1833 and France in 1848), also conducted pre-photographic experiments (see chapter 4). A correlation between the context of abolition and the emergence of photography appears, therefore, to exist. But what is its exact tenor? Wedgwood toured the Caribbean in 1799 without making the slightest mention of slavery or enslaved peoples in his correspondence. As for Brougham and Arago, they made at times strikingly racist statements and, as state politicians, their abolitionist motivations were mixed with expediency and compromises. Such correlations must remain for now noncausal, though they do illustrate the continuous connective tissue between photocinema, Blackness, and slavery. Overall, while this connective tissue occasionally yielded arguments for emancipation and, in rarer instances, for equality, it was overwhelmingly rife with brutal anti-Blackness and so-called scientific—that is, unscientific—racism.

One of the most cynical aspects of Western modernity is its endless capacity to conceal the violence of its autoproduction. This concealment, Charles W. Mills notes, means that Black students studying philosophy in college who “have grown up in a universe” centered on the “African-American experience” of racial discrimination are suddenly “asked to pretend they are living in the other.”81 This split world informs the history of photocinema. Katherine McKittrick reminds us in Dear Science, with pressure on the word dear, that our academic work today remains beholden to the disinterested pursuit of Enlightenment science in continuing to elide at once nonwhite peoples and the history of their elision. This study takes such interpellations to heart by continuing to document “the unmet promise of modernity” from the depths of its own archive.82

Methodology

This book adopts a transhistorical scope and a panoramic method, relying on multiple case studies to reach a critical mass of material shoring up its central argument. Ranging across centuries and disciplines—foremost being media studies, science studies, and race studies—presents significant challenges in terms of the composite nature of the findings and their reception by disciplinary readers. I share McKittrick’s commitment to explore “disobedient relationality” by locating crossovers in fields not usually dialoguing with each other, with the aim of “producing work at the edge of new meanings” (Dear Science, 45, 48). That is to say, this book’s ambition is not to be the final word about photocinema’s origination but to center historical connective tissue too long left unexamined.

There are two signal problems in media prehistory studies. The first is the problematic constructs of origins and origination that media archaeology has rejected—perhaps hastily. In taking the telescope’s arrival in 1608 as a starting point, I am not subscribing to strict origins. Following Foucault’s genealogical debunking, this study retraces lines of descent down to this overlooked paradigmatic setup for photocinema media only in order “to make visible all of those discontinuities that traverse us.”83 The notion of matrix points to this discontinuous rhizome of formation processes. These include, per the Oxford English Dictionary, “a place or medium in which something is originated,” “the epidermal layer,” “the elements which make up a particular system,” “any mould in which something is cast or shaped,” “a copy (positive or negative) of an original disc recording,” “an array of symbols,” “an array of circuit elements,” “a rectangular array of potential image points,” and finally the unseeable substrate of visual reality as in The Matrix trilogy.84 The matrix of photocinema amounts to a complex set of media, epidermal layers, systems, molds, copies, arrays, circuits, and image points within sources that include texts, pictures, events, and instruments.

The second problem is historicization. While technical innovations and their components may be dated often quite precisely, it is more difficult to articulate the larger cultural and political processes conditioning their formation. This book attempts to do just that by locating specific cultural paths of emergence at specific hinge periods for specific features of the racialized photocinema matrix. The roughly chronological exposition begins with the arrival of the telescope in 1608 and ends in 1867 with Flammarion’s fictive cinema apparatus, the telechronoscope, twenty years prior to Edison’s kinetoscope with the same cylinder design. This chronological arc, meant to ease the task of readers confronted with a vast amount of new material, should not be mistaken for a vector of historical necessity. Indeed, for Flammarion, the cinema apparatus was inherently antitelic since it was predominantly a machine for traveling back in time to visualize at last the whole of human and natural history (see the conclusion).

Envisioning human history as a whole was a major imperative of the Western matrix of photocinema. Methodologically, this fractured wholeness remains present in this book’s racial nomenclature. There is much productive disagreement among Black studies thinkers regarding the capitalization of Black/black. For instance, La Marr Jurelle Bruce writes: “I use a lowercase b because I want to emphasize an improper blackness: a blackness that is a ‘critique of the proper’; . . . a blackness that is neither capitalized nor propertized via the protocols of Western grammar; a blackness that centers those who are typically regarded as lesser and lower cases, as it were.”85 Fred Moten makes the same choice along similar philosophical lines. Others, such as Lori L. Tharps and Kwame Anthony Appiah, adduce quite different reasons for capitalizing Black. A secondary but apposite debate is whether to capitalize white/whiteness. Nicholas Whittaker provides a useful encapsulation of the debate in “Case Sensitive: Why We Shouldn’t Capitalize ‘Black.’”86

The usage I opted for in this book should not be considered normative. I use black and blackness to refer to chromatic blackness outside of an overt racial context—at the same time as this study shows ostensibly nonracial blackness to have been racialized since at least the seventeenth century. Conversely, I use Black and Blackness whenever there is an overt racial context. Hence, I always use Black skin, even though, as we know, there is no such a thing because it is neither black nor different from any other human skin.

I do not capitalize white and whiteness in racial contexts for three antithetical reasons. First, whiteness was an unexamined historical norm until Black peoples rebelled against that norm. Thus, whiteness must be conceptually and historically regarded as subordinate to Blackness. Second, whiteness needs no elevation from social justice and, consequently, not in terms of stylistics either. Finally, most of the white thinkers treated in this book did not capitalize white/whiteness, but they often capitalized Black/Blackness to differentiate both races and reject Blackness as nonhuman and quasi-animal. My overall style choice is, then, in Fred Moten’s apt phrase, to keep open “the case of blackness” rather than to renormalize it for the purposes of consistency or equity—cruelly latecomer directives in the Western historical record.87

In his 1785 indictment of slavery, British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson wrote: “Suppose we were to take a common globe; then begin at the equator to paint every country along the meridian line in succession from thence to the poles; and to paint them with the same colour which prevails in the respective inhabitants of each, we should see black, with which we had been obliged to begin, insensibly turn to an olive, and the olive, through as many intermediate colours, to a white. . . . The difference would consist wholly in shades of the same colour.”88 Visualizing our globe’s continuum from white to black as if he were on the Moon, Clarkson affirms that it is—that we are—“the same colour.” Instrumental for the development of photocinema since the seventeenth century, this racial overview effect remained deeply ambivalent in motivating both the maintenance of white supremacy and its unravelling.

Chapter Outline

Chapter 1, “Photosophia: Visualizing the Racialized Cosmos in the Seventeenth Century,” addresses entanglements of astronomy, instrumentation, illustration, and anti-Blackness in seventeenth-century natural philosophy. I examine the racial subtext of the telescope’s arrival and its early combinations with the camera obscura, before reviewing key sources of visualization: Athanasius Kircher’s “photosophia,” in Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (1644)—the first word with the prefix photo-—and sequential illustration strategies in Johannes Hevelius’s Selenographia (1647), Christiaan Huygens’s Systema Saturnium (1659), and Huygens’s magic lantern slides (1659). With Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), we turn toward the intersection of racial discourses and astronomical visualization present in Johannes Kepler’s Somnium (1634), Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone (1638), Cyrano de Bergerac’s The Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon (1657), and Bernard Le Bovier, sieur de Fontenelle’s racist treatise Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686).

Chapter 2, “Kinemorphosis: Cosmological Animation and History’s Whiteness,” expands this protocinema path via the role of animated visualization in eighteenth-century cosmogenesis from Thomas Wright to Kant. It shows how Kant embedded anti-Blackness as a structural feature in the first truly kinemorphic cosmology. After examining William Herschel and Caroline Herschel’s nebular cosmology, which provided the base equation of cinema, I turn to the first two-reel prototype of cinema: Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg’s chronographic machine. It opens up interrelations between astronomy, race, abolitionism, and progressive models of history in David Rittenhouse, Adam Smith, Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, and L.-M. Henriquez.

Chapter 3, “Photoimaging Hieroglyphs: Blackening, Anti-Blackness, and Proto-Photography,” explores the paths of emergence of photography in the context of enslaved rebellions in the Caribbean. We connect the earliest fiction about photo-picturing, sited in Africa (1760), to Jean-Baptiste Demanet, a slave-trader in Senegal whose racist 1767 mineral theory of Blackness reshaped late eighteenth-century views on race. The chapter segues to photoimaging unseen forces of nature through nonmimetic traces, often called “hieroglyphs,” from Lichtenberg’s electrostatic figures to the anti-Black silhouette theory of Johann Kaspar Lavater, the photochemistry of Jean Senebier, and the photochemical silhouetting of Jacques Charles.

Chapter 4, “Photology: Black Light, the Wave Theory of Light, and Pre-Photography,” documents the role of photochemistry in British physical optics (1800–1803) and French physical optics (1807–1839). After the discoveries of infrared and ultraviolet, new species of so-called black light emerged, including William Herschel’s “black-making rays” (which have never been analyzed). We reexamine the photochemical picturing of Wedgwood, Davy, and Young, together with the wave theory of light (WTL), against the background of abolitionism and the new photological paradigm of Black skin. The second part turns to French photochemical experiments in the 1810s. They were conducted while confirming the WTL and inflected pre-photography through Parisian instrument-makers who worked with Niépce, Daguerre, and the Paris Observatory. François Arago figures centrally as the leader of research on photochemistry, astronomy, and the WTL. He was also a precursor of photography who trained William Henry Fox Talbot in 1824, advised Daguerre in 1838, and was entrusted by John Herschel to reveal his father’s “black-making rays.”

Chapter 5, “Selenography: The Moon, Slavery, and the Dark Side of Photography,” contrasts the scientific emergence of “heliography” or “sun writing” with an apposite path focused on moonlight. We examine photonegative discourses in early photography and in the work of Haitian thinker Pompée Valentin Vastey and abolitionist Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, who both debunked anti-Blackness. Racial selenography resurfaces in the infamous 1835 Great Moon Hoax written on the heel of race riots, which describes the racial hierarchy of Lunarians on the Moon. They are observed through a telescope supposedly built by John Herschel that displays a mobile vision and cinematic telepresence. The chapter ends with Brougham and Arago, who each conducted photoimaging research and ushered in abolition legislation in England (1833) and France (1848). To elucidate the problematic connection between photography and abolition, we turn to Frederick Douglass, who leveraged the daguerreotype and “tracings of time” to combat racist stereotypes.

Chapter 6, “The Graphic Method: Time-Tracing, Colonial Supremacy, and Astrophotography,” amends the accepted view that Marey’s chronophotography is the proximal source for cinema. Examining the history of self-tracing apparatuses since the seventeenth century, the chapter argues that Young’s cylinder chronometer recorder, John Herschel’s 1840 cylinder-camera, electro-chronograph drums, and moving-plate photography in the 1850s qualify Marey’s “graphic method.” The chapter segues into the role of time and ophthalmic hieroglyphs in optical perception and simulation instruments from the 1830s to the 1850s. Marey is also approached as a proponent of dynamic physiology, in parallel with John William Draper, a pre-photographic experimenter whose racist theories include transracial morphism, while leveraging photoimaging and kinemorphosis. The chapter closes with colonial astrophotography in the 1860s, when sequential photography was first deployed (for capturing solar eclipses), which inspired Jules Janssen’s photographic revolver for the 1874 transit of Venus.

Chapter 7, “Flammarion’s Telechronoscope: The End of Natural History and the Beginning of Cinema,” argues that the astronomer Flammarion was instrumental for precinema, the inception of cinema, and early film. His mind experiment Lumen (1867) describes a photosensitive planet on which the animated history of Earth is optically imprinted—an astronomical conceit formulating a working cinema apparatus. Edison would use the same setup—spiraling microphotographs on a rotating cylinder—twenty years later. I document Flammarion’s familiarity with all aspects of physical optics, his cylinder photometer, various fictional models of cinema (1867, 1891, 1894), and the astronomical animation shorts he created and exhibited (1897–1898). Flammarion interacted closely with four other precursors of precinema: Marey, photographer and balloonist Nadar, media inventor Cros, and Janssen. A key popularizer of science mixed with parascientific beliefs, he promulgated a macrohistorical model of history as an alternative to the supremacist ideology of positivist progress.

“Conclusion: The Matrix of Photocinema and the Moral Universe” steps back from this study’s scholarship to reflect on its overarching thesis in connection with contemporary views on racial justice, especially Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s proposals for global reparations. I also examine how important films like Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon (1902)—refracting the French conquest of Madagascar in 1896—dovetailed with the racist matrix of photocinema. Finally, I focus on a recurring feature in this study: intertwinements between protocinematic forms and modern history. I examine two stories of W. E. B. Du Bois and a short film by Jean Renoir showing how the film apparatus, racial injustice, and astronomy remained entangled in the postcinema era. One of Du Bois’s stories includes a virtual movie of racism that was inspired by a cinema technology he discovered at the 1899 Paris Exhibition where his booth was not far from Marey’s, the “chromo-megascope”—a film apparatus prototype bringing color to the big picture.