3 Photoimaging Hieroglyphs

The Seven Years’ War and Its Aftermath

The backdrop against which natural hieroglyphs took on new meaning was the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), a global conflict pitting France against England—the two superpowers of the day—and their respective allies. The war marked a decisive turn for enslaved populations and free peoples of color in Caribbean plantocracies, heightening debates about ending slavery. Resistance from enslaved peoples themselves amplified considerably during the war.4 In Saint-Domingue, hundreds of peoples of all races died of poisoning in 1757–1758, as did cattle.5 Enslavers held maroon leader François Mackandal responsible for a purported plot, and he and other rebels were captured, publicly tortured, and viciously executed. The spread of voodoo and obeah religious practices unifying enslaved communities—Mackandal was considered an oungan—as well as the forced enrollment of free and enslaved Black men during the war, which gave them field experience and insight into colonists’ military practices, factored heavily in planned revolts by enslaved people.6 In 1760–1761, a well-organized group of enslaved fighters launched Tacky’s Revolt in Jamaica, an asymmetrical warfare that was one of the “major battles” of the war, according to historian Vincent Brown.7 It was followed in 1763 by the Berbice Uprising in Dutch Guiana, led by the enslaved person Coffij and involving several thousands of enslaved and maroon rebels.8 Leaders of all these armed revolts were caught, tortured, and publicly executed with such appalling atrocity that it jump-started early abolition movements.9

The war caused major shifts in the triangular trade. On the Senegambian coast, new-sprung trading networks rivaled national enslaving companies, increasing the sourcing of captives from inland Ceddo states but also occasioning more insurrections in staging camps and widespread marooning.10 In the Caribbean, growing mixed-race and free Black communities vied for political representation, while the fear of uprisings led enslavers to harden the color line and rescind the social acceptance of passing. “The result was two societies [Jamaica and Saint-Domingue] that by the eve of the American Revolution were remarkably caste conscious, racially obsessed, and racially exclusive” (Burnard and Garrigus, Plantation Machine, 163). For Gene E. Ogle, across Caribbean colonies, “a visual economy relating subordination to skin color” overtook prior and more racially porous social markers like status, wealth, and education.11 As Black diasporic intellectuals concomitantly began claiming their place in European and American public spheres, transatlantic culture in the decades following the 1760s saw growing tensions between abolitionists and enslavers. In turn, such debates heightened attention to skin Blackness and human reproduction, as well as chromatic blackness, portraiture, and visual reproduction.

About that time, the word reproduction mutated in both English and French. Until then, it narrowly denoted the replenishing of resources or the regrowth of a limb in animals and plants.12 From the 1760s and into the 1800s, the word shifted to mean animal and human procreation from insemination to birth, a process exclusively denoted by generation prior to that. Then, new reprographic technics like mezzotint and lithography added the meaning “a copy” to reproduction around the turn of the nineteenth century.13 What this double lexical shift suggests is that the enigmatic process, whereby new beings form from progenitors, resonated closely with innovations in visual reproduction.14 In 1755, Louis de la Caze, a medical doctor from Montpellier, France, proposed a curious optical theory of embryogenesis. Since sexual pleasure feels intensely electrical, he reasoned that the male and female bodily contours of the procreators “were impressed into the seminal liquor, akin to how light rays reflected by objects, whose image they somehow carry, go and paint themselves upon various foci, & notably the retina.”15 He thus envisioned human reproduction as a photo composite within the camera obscura of the womb. That theory was far from marginal: In the article of L’Encyclopédie on “Génération,” it bookends the authoritative model of Georges-Louis Leclerc, count de Buffon together with Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis’s epigenetic model (see chapter 2).16 The article’s editor (Arnulphe d’Aumont) doubts that light “whose effects bear only on the surface of matters” (Diderot, “Génération,” 7:573) could govern embryogenesis. But Buffon’s own theory of reproduction hinges on a similar conflation of surface and depth, arguing that an “inner mold [moule intérieur]” shapes the embryo—a keen oxymoron.17 The puzzles of genetic resemblance and embryogenesis may seem far afield from photocinema. What they have in common is a need to visualize unseen processes regarding the imprinting of matter by physical forces, with light as a model, on the one hand, and the uneven morphing of animate and inanimate matter over time, on the other. Photoimaging and animated visualization, I argue, became central and complementary modalities through which eighteenth-century natural philosophy envisioned the world, its racialized species, and their genetic and visual reproduction.

The Idea of Photography Comes from (the Idea of) Africa

Media historians have long ascribed the earliest fictional account of a recognizably photographic process to the 1760 picaresque fiction Giphantie, published anonymously by Charles François Tiphaigne de la Roche, a medical doctor from Normandy. His prior novel Amilec (1753) was quickly translated into English and German and favorably reviewed in leading European literary journals.18 Narrated by an extraterrestrial with an Orientalist name (Zamar), Amilec reprises the seventeenth-century cosmic travel genre, but now combined with the new dynamic cosmology of Thomas Wright: “[The universe] was once contained in a seed no larger than a pea. . . . There are many worlds we can compare to young shoots as it were only beginning to grow. These star clusters, these whitish blobs you inhabitants of the Earth perceive in the heavenly vault and call milky ways are nothing else but sets of small worlds” (Tiphaigne, Amilec, 23–24). Giphantie transplants this astronomical frame story to Africa as similarly otherworldly. Written at the height of the Seven Years’ War, the novel begins with an unnamed French narrator arriving on the “coasts of Guinea” (Tiphaigne, Giphantie, 1:6). A sandstorm teleports him to the center of Africa, where he awakens in a deserted city. A “benevolent shadow” in “human form” explains that his pre-Adamic “elemental spirit” people built sophisticated edifices and technologies (1:17–18). The latter include a giant glass replica of Earth that, by placing a glass rod at any spot, allows the operator to hear what is said at that location on the globe (1:46–47). Another device is equally panoptic: “By shifting the mirror in various directions, one can see different parts of the Earth’s surface. One can see them all in succession if one places successively the mirror in all its possible positions” (1:79). The idea of Africa serves here as a phantasmatic origin site for audiovisual media, in a way congruent with the Moon for the seventeenth century (see chapter 1).

In a vast underground hall, large windows appear to open onto different landscapes, but the guide explains that they are not windows but a new kind of image:

You know that light-rays reflected on various bodies form a picture [tableau] and paint these bodies upon any polished surface, the eye’s retina, for instance, or water and mirrors. Elemental spirits sought to fix these fugitive images [fixer ces images passagères]; they fabricated a very subtle and viscous substance, which dries and hardens quickly, with which a picture is made in the wink of an eye. They coat a piece of canvas with this substance and present it to the objects they want to paint. The first effect on the canvas is that of a mirror: we can see all objects close and faraway whose images may be carried by light. But—what a mirror cannot do—the canvas, with its viscous coating, preserves the simulacra. A mirror faithfully renders objects but keeps none; our canvases render them no less faithfully and keep them all. This imprinting of images [cette impression des images] takes place in the first instant the canvas receives them. We quickly remove it to a dark place. One hour later, the coating is dry and a picture is obtained, all the more precious that no art can imitate its truth, and time can in no way damage it. . . . Nature . . . with its undeniably inflexible course, traces images on our canvases. (Tiphaigne, Giphantie, 1:132–33)

Media historians consider this a prescient account of photography—and they are quite right but also quite wrong. Certainly, fixing images of visual reality by chemical impression resembles a photographic process. However, the absence of a camera obscura with a pinhole precludes the formation of anything like a photographic image. Moreover, Tiphaigne’s equation of such images with mirror images is plainly mistaken, since the latter display horizontal inversion. This lack of the basic knowledge of optics for the time disqualifies Tiphaigne’s account as truly pre-photographic.

Indeed, the context of the novel makes clear that Tiphaigne’s chemical impressions do not mean to copy visual reality at all. The hundreds of canvas prints, the guide explains, revive and illustrate the history of the world as it really happened: “Let your eyes run over . . . the most remarkable events that have shaken the Earth and made human destiny,” he enjoins, confessing that this archive exhibits mostly “actions of violence” (Tiphaigne, Giphantie, 1:139–40). Hence, like the contemporaneous chronographic machine of Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg (see chapter 2), Giphantie envisions a totalizing perspective on humanity’s history. It also trains the reader to adopt a cosmological purview by “seeing the Earth as a dot in the immensity of space, the spectacle of the centuries as an instant in eternal duration” (2:161). The guide denounces the slaughter of Native Americans (1:50) while calling on European monarchies to attend to the “public good” of the masses (2:129, 2:143). A tree that sheds lenses in lieu of leaves (the French feuilles means both “leaves” and “pages”) brings attention to the biases of historiography: “Hence, according to the point of view [point de vue] through which these leaves will present themselves to the brain of the historian, he will see things as good or evil and write accordingly. Such books should not be titled, History of What Happened in Such a Time, but Manner in Which Such Writer Saw What Happened” (2:91). The chemical canvases, by comparison, purport to be objective renditions of historical facts—making unseeable past history visible at last. Tiphaigne himself is not devoid of the biases he denounces. He writes: “[Mahomet] soiled humankind with a stain that will likely never be erased,” a formulation echoing Robert Hooke’s racist tropes of staining while combining anti-Islam sentiment with a rhetoric of dye fixation (1:172).

The oddity of Giphantie is that it makes no reference whatsoever to Africans. The latter have simply vanished from the continent, engulfed by history’s violent machinery that the novel both decries and emulates. This absence is symptomatic because slavery figures in palimpsest in the novel’s narrative conceit. Readers of the time would have been fully aware that there is but one reason for a European to travel to Guinea circa 1760: to engage in the slave trade that was concentrated there. Slavery, in other words, is the very real flip side of a fictional and failed envisioning of photography. François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon’s anti-Blackness and Tiphaigne’s ghosting of Africans both tether the notion of spontaneous fixation of images to what Christopher L. Miller aptly calls the “blank darkness” of Africanism—that is, European discourses imprinting fantasies upon Africa and its inhabitants.19 Giphantie is an Africanist tale imagining the continent as a moonlike desert on Earth, emptied of the millions of actual peoples who disappeared into the Middle Passage.20 As the origin text of photography, what it ultimately makes visible is the double violence of history: that which the West failed to acknowledge and represent and that which historians keep disavowing.

Nonetheless, Tiphaigne’s photo-impressions, befitting more the metaphysical tradition of photoimaging than the prototechnics of photography, may well have had a direct influence on the latter. Literary journals of Paris, London, and Amsterdam favorably reviewed Giphantie, often citing from its magical photoimaging process.21 There is no doubt that voracious readers belonging to the Lunar Society in the Midlands or the Masonic Lodge of the Nine Sisters in Paris would have taken notice of these periodicals.22

Blackness Mineralized and Metalized

Tiphaigne’s evocation of Africa as an empty stage for future technics is directly connected to France’s global geopolitical setbacks during the Seven Years’ War and the hope that Africa might mitigate them. In 1763, a Catholic priest named Jean-Baptiste Demanet went to Senegal as chaplain for French troops reoccupying Gorée Island—the portal of the West African slave trade. Tasked with restoring Catholicism after years of British occupation, he freelanced in the trade of enslaved peoples. Back home, he published A New History of French Africa in 1767, calling on France—after its losses of Canada, India, and several Caribbean colonies—to relocate its plantation industry to Africa. The wishful formula “French Africa” is all the more eerie that it became the official name of West Africa under French domination from the mid-nineteenth century until the era of independences. Demanet returned to Africa in 1772 as a full-fledged enslaving entrepreneur with the “Société d’Affrique [sic]” and the Compagnie de la Guyane founded by French tax collectors—including chemist Antoine Lavoisier.23 Demanet petitioned the pope to be named Bishop of Gorée, promising to gain new souls for the Church in exchange for a monopoly on the slave trade.24

A New History of French Africa quickly dispenses with geopolitics to prosecute its real aim: encouraging the commerce of human beings. It is a shameless brochure for would-be investors. The first volume provides a detailed how-to guide on the best business areas and local practices, including a blood-curdling table of bartering rates for purchasing “captives,” given in the regional currency: an iron bar nine feet long by two inches wide and a half an inch thick.25 The second volume closes on a topic that “I was advised to add to my New History of Africa,” the author states: namely, “Physical and Historical Dissertation on the Origin of Negroes and the Cause of Their Color” (Demanet, Nouvelle histoire de l’Afrique françoise, 2:329). Again, the justification for slavery rested on the unceasing pathologization of Black skin.

That long appendix revolves on an utterly paradoxical claim: “Blackness is so extrinsic & accidental to the Negroes that it vanishes in several ways” (Demanet, Nouvelle histoire de l’Afrique françoise, 2:243). Demanet mentions birth, migration, natural discoloration, excessive emotion, scarring, and old age as evidence. Africans are thus “really” white, albeit latently. As Andrew S. Curran documents, Demanet plagiarized Maupertuis’s 1745 Physical Venus, twisting it to his purposes.26 Demanet first approaches Blackness via an analogy with the darkening of white dough in breadmaking, tacitly making Black people into consumables (2:211). But soon he undertakes, rather ineptly, a chemical explanation: “The air is full of an infinity of intangible corpuscles endlessly emanating from the womb of the Earth & which are in continual & very quick motion, notwithstanding what we receive from sweating: they pierce us, penetrate us & mix in our blood. These corpuscles are nitrous, sulfurous, or metallic, depending on the place” (2:237, with near verbatim echoes in 232, 239, 286). Fast-acting chemical-metallic corpuscles were never part of the classic thermometabolic theory of Blackness. As evidence, Demanet indicates that locals living near mines in France “have a tan complexion [teint brun]. . . . They are more than brown [basanés]” (2:238). Untroubled by differences between tanning, soot, and phylogeny, he makes a second puzzling claim: White and Black people are fungible into each other.

On the isle of Gorée, where a third of the inhabitants originate from the Frenchmen who passed through, & who, in the fashion of Negroes, allied themselves with Negresses, whose children display through the different gradations of their color the constant process of physical causation upon the skin of inhabitants of the Torrid Zone, in each generation, until the complete metamorphosis of whites into blacks which occurs more slowly, & of blacks into whites which occurs more rapidly—for to get [parvenir] from white to black takes four & even five generations, & to pass [passer] from black to white only three. (2:316)

This passage exemplifies the routine conflation, found in many premodern chroniclers of skin color, between mixed-race reproduction (phylogeny) and individual mutation (ontogeny). Maupertuis’s own equivocation on the topic opened the way (see chapter 2). The big question with Demanet is why, in order to propone the colonization of Africa and the enslavement of Africans, he so insists on their latent whiteness and fungibility with white people.

The answer lies in his perverse theory of Africa. He posits the continent as a giant motherlode of “nitrous, sulfurous, or metallic” ore so potent that it toxifies aboriginally white Africans by blackening. Although he never mentions the blackening property of silver nitrate on white peoples, it seems very likely that this compound represents his concealed paradigm. Demanet’s black toxification has two corollaries, the first of which is his most chilling statement: “The African seems to be a machine that can be assembled and disassembled spring by spring, like soft wax to which we can give whatever figure we want” (Nouvelle histoire de l’Afrique françoise, 2:1, cited by Miller, Blank Darkness, 3; Curran, Anatomy of Blackness, 119). That is a foundational concept for Fred Moten’s black apparatus: Black peoples considered as objects, parts, or automatons.27 Demanet’s candid clause “to which we can give whatever figure we want” directly links ontological racism to visual mediation and reproduction. Achille Mbembe glosses this passage as Blackness evincing raw materiality and malleable objectification but also visual distortions among the white Enlightenment.28 The second corollary is that slavery and conquest are therapeutic. By removing polluted Black Africans to plantations while digging up the minerals that poison them, enslavers would restore the continent to geophysical normalcy, progressively ridding Africans of their chemical-metallic poison, making them healthy—that is, white—again.

This detoxification thesis requires Demanet to delve into physiological processes within the infamous Malpighian layer of skin: “[The corpus reticulum] is a small velvety cover upon which light’s globules find no resistance, and in the meantime penetrate it & lose their momentum; if instead they found some hardness they would be reflected & produce in our eyes enough of a violent motion to make a white pass for [passer pour] black” (Nouvelle histoire de l’Afrique françoise, 2:276–77). The first part of this statement conforms to Hooke’s and Isaac Newton’s notion that chromatic blackness results from light’s arrest in microstructures of black matter. The second part—sheer nonsense—exhibits Demanet’s Black phobia. He fails to notice that he meant to say that the hypothetical “violent motion” of light reflected outward would make a Black person pass for white, not the reverse. But science serves him only as a veneer legitimizing his enslaving enterprise, as his book’s misleading subtitle attests: Enhanced with Maps & Astronomical and Geographic Observations. It contains not a single reference to astronomy.

The reason we bother with Demanet’s pitiful constructs is their disproportionate influence. Because of them, Guillaume-Thomas Raynal and Denis Diderot changed the explanation of Blackness in their antislavery monument, History of the Two Indies, between the 1770 and the 1780 editions, adopting verbatim Demanet’s “nitrous, sulfurous, and metallic” nonsense.29 In the 1770s, taking Demanet as authoritative source, économistes and physiocrates proposed moving the plantation system from the Americas to Africa to eliminate the slave trade—a supposedly progressive idea shared by British abolitionists Granville Sharp and William Wilberforce (Røge, Economistes, 97).

Neither Tiphaigne nor Demanet, eliciting different fictional versions of Africa, came up with the idea of photography. Yet together they inscribed race and racism into the two halves of future photo-picturing technology: the chemical fixation of images for the first and optical-metallic blackening for the second.

Enter Photochemistry: Light Becomes Matter

In terms reminiscent of Demanet, Jean Senebier professed that “[my book] makes us see that those corpuscles, which hit our eyes & rejoice our souls through the spectacle of NATURE, contribute to the maintenance and dissolution of parts of this spectacle by combining with them.”30 Light is no longer an abstract principle or just an aid to visibility: It changes matter. That is the physical condition of possibility of photography. Senebier may be credited with launching modern photochemistry with his four-volume study Physico-Chemical Memoirs Upon the Influence of Sunlight in Modifying Beings of the Three Realms of Nature & All Those in the Vegetal Realm (1782). Named city librarian of Geneva in 1773, he researched plant growth and botanical chemistry under the tutelage of naturalist Charles Bonnet and geologist Horace Bénédict de Saussure, contributing to the elucidation of photosynthesis together with Dutch chemist Jan Ingenhousz.31 The first two volumes of his opus concern debates about light, phlogiston (oxygen), dephlogisticated air (carbon dioxide), and plant growth. In the third volume, tackling animals and minerals, Senebier observes that “it is evident that man’s skin bears the impressions of light,” fugitively so for white people like peasant women whose “complexion, burnt in the countryside” later “dons a lily-whiteness in the city” (Senebier, Mémoires physico-chymiques, 3:172, 174). He comments ever so briefly on skin color: “I believe that the different color of peoples around the globe is due to the combined action of heat & light. The looser the Malpighi layer, the more it favors the action of light. This is what happens in the burning hot areas of Africa. At least, this is what Europeans experience there, soon losing their whiteness. After a few generations they would likely become as black as these unfortunate Africans whom they believe they have the right to enslave” (3:175–76). Like Demanet and most Enlightenment thinkers, Senebier posits that skin color has an unseen physiological basis, and he conflates ontogenetic and phylogenic racial shifts.32 Yet he also argues on the basis of skin color shifting that enslavement by white people is illegitimate since they too can become Black. This provocative spin proceeds from his general conclusion that, across all animal species, color variations tend unidirectionally toward blackening.33 Demanet’s and Senebier’s simplistic models of mineral and photochemical blackening overtook more discerning analyses by contemporary anatomists like Petrus Camper, who demonstrated that Blackness has no physiological reality. In 1768, after dissecting the corpses of Black, white, and biracial persons, Camper declared about the Malpighian layer: “When this second layer is completely without color, then we are very white and pale: that is to say, we are white Moors, or rather; we are people similar to Blacks in every way except that we have this middle layer less tanned.”34 That is the simple scientific fact that the Enlightenment—and nineteenth-century scientific racism in its wake—could not admit. Armchair naturalists affirmed counterfactually that the organs of Black persons, from sperm and blood to brain, were black or tinted and that Black people transplanted to Europe turned white (Curran, Anatomy of Blackness, 120–28).35 The most racist advocates like Cornelius de Pauw proponed the eradication of “black sperm” by eugenically breeding Black women with white men—unsurprisingly, just what the plantation machine enabled. In this respect, Senebier’s paradigm of photochemical blackening refocused the thermometabolic theory of skin color to its surface alone and, increasingly, to the direct action of light. This partially depathologized Black bodies, although the fast-acting model of Demanet reinforces the framework of “affectability” theorized by Denise Ferreira da Silva, making nonwhite people more susceptible to materiality and thus less susceptible to reason.36

Senebier’s careful research on photosensitive compounds opens the era of modern photochemistry. His book cites the classic literature on silver compounds by Cesare Beccaria, Johann Friedrich Meyer, Johann Heinrich Schulze, and Carl Wilhelm Scheele, as well as Joseph Priestley—with whom he corresponded (Senebier, Mémoires physico-chymiques, 3:192).37 Senebier established three determinant facts for the history of photography: that only light, not heat, blackens silver salts; that the blue end of the spectrum is more photoreactive; and that lenses accelerate reactivity. “This change of color is due only to the impression of light,” he writes, and “reflected and refracted light produces the same effects” (3:194, 198). He gauged prismatic colors by using a heliostat, “a mirror that turns with the sun, and always keeps the sunray in place” (3:198–99). He timed darkening from fifteen seconds for violet rays to twenty minutes for red rays, a result surprising enough he mentions it twice (3:199–200, 315). His experiments not only circumscribed photosensitivity as a field of research—rather than a mere side effect of medication—they also established the basic pre-photographic setup comprising: a camera obscura; a plate treated with silver nitrate; a lens accelerating photochemical reactions; attention to timed exposure; and a focus on the sensitive blue end of the spectrum—a technical refinement William Henry Fox Talbot and Louis Daguerre rediscovered fifty years later. As for the heliostat developed by Dutch mathematician Willem 's Gravesande in the 1740s, it became a central apparatus for investigations of the wave theory of light, photochemical imaging, and precinema (see chapters 4, 6, and 7).

The one apparently missing component is chemical fixation. Paradoxically, however, fixation is everywhere in Senebier’s rhetoric, since his leading claim is that light changes matter: “This light that our eyes alone can seize up [saisir], is fixed [fixée], accumulated, more or less entwined in all the bodies around us” (Senebier, Mémoires physico-chymiques, 3:247). Fixation is also the dynamic motor of life: “This matter that light is, launched six thousand years ago, would serve only to hit our retina, and paint bodies on it? Can it have no other effects? . . . It seems that I see it animating vegetation [il me semble la voir animer la végétation]. . . . Without it, the Earth . . . would present but horrid crevices, bald stones, sterile ground, & the repulsive idea of dead matter, an inanimate mass” (3:301–2). Visualizing photochemical reactions as “animating” matter may have precluded Senebier from delving into their fixation of photochemical imaging. This is suggested by his book on scientific observation, which he defines as “a fine and quick touching [tact] that moves the soul, focusing [fixe] it first on those parts of objects the most apt to illuminate them.”38 The verb fixer (to fix) means both “to focus on” and “to affix” in French, and Senebier’s prose plays across both meanings. The privileged domain for observing observation in his treatise was astronomy, particularly William Herschel’s polyvalent dynamic practices, which he knew in surprising detail.39 This brings Senebier to ponder the visual perception of motion: “A circle can appear either oval, or as a straight line, like Saturn’s ring in certain circumstances. A body moved with a certain speed shows a continuous line, although it occupies parts of this curve only in succession. When we rotate a piece of burning coal at a certain speed, we see a flaming circular line” (Senebier, Essai, 1:173). The phenomenon had long been known, and Senebier explains that the eye’s “nervous fibers are moved in certain circumstances as though the objects were actually acting upon them,” because “the permanence of the impression may last longer than the permanence of the object producing it” (1:174). Senebier thus takes vision to be a durational phenomenon occurring between the eye and the brain, in contradistinction to the myth of retinal persistence, whereby motion can be perceived only as a series of static visual images. Bringing together optics and chemistry, light and visual motion, photoimaging, and the ever-present obsession with Black skin, Senebier’s work began the crystallization of the photocinema matrix at the hinge between natural philosophy and nineteenth-century science.

Nature’s Pictures: Photoimaging Hieroglyphs

While he produced test images via stencils and screens in his investigations of photosensitivity, Senebier had no interest in producing specific or verisimilar pictures. His approach to imaging conforms to the model of automatic hieroglyphs of nature outlined in the introduction and at the start of this chapter. Such imprints of spontaneous patterns expressly served the purpose of making visible forces that could not be directly observed. They too were test images of forces in action—slices of kinetic phenomena—amounting to visual and aesthetic ciphers of transcendent Nature. But they were not reproductions of the visible world.40

As mentioned in the introduction, physicist and astronomer Georg Christoph Lichtenberg publicized such natural hieroglyphs in the 1770s.41 Working with his electrophorus, a powerful Leyden jar, he noticed that dust stuck to it (electrostatically) in remarkable patterns:

At times, there were almost countless stars, galaxies, and larger suns. . . . Splendid little branches formed, similar to those produced by the frost on windowpanes; and small clouds in the most varied forms as well as some figures of a special shape could be seen. . . . If I carefully wiped the dust with a feather or hare’s paw, I nevertheless could not prevent the figures that had been destroyed shortly before from effectively reappearing again anew and in a more beautiful form. I therefore covered a piece of black paper with an adhesive substance, placed it on the figures and pressed softly. I thereby managed to create some impressions of these figures.42

The first resemblance of these “projectiones,” as Lichtenberg called them in Latin, is with astronomical objects, suggesting they partook of macrocosmic structures. Indeed, proponents of Naturphilosophie actively sought to materialize the higher graphology of the macrocosm in its nonhuman script.43 As Antje Pfannkuchen astutely notes: “It is almost uncanny how closely this process seems to resemble the processes of early photography—the effect of light projections onto a sensitive surface.”44 Lichtenberg thought so as well, albeit in passing, since such trifling experiments did not carry the yield of his projection’ standing to reveal the architectonic of the universe (see the introduction). He also sought to differentiate hieroglyphic projections: “Figures created by positive electricity differ from those produced by negative current like the Sun from the Moon” (Lichtenberg, Novi Commentarii, 387). He clearly hoped astronomy and electricity could be synthesized. I will return to how Lichtenberg’s positive/negative opposition migrated to silhouetting, racial discourses, light studies, and, ultimately, photography.

German Romantics and idealists like Johann Gottfried von Herder, Novalis, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe dreamed of reconciling nature with philosophical thought by producing or developing a universal language made of nature’s ciphered scripts that would circumvent the mechanical mathesis of Western science. They tended to associate (super)natural traces with older Eastern cultures from Egypt to India, according to a symbolics of civilizational youth associated with the east–west movement of the Sun. The fascination for cultural hieroglyphics as closer to nature has a long Orientalist history. It surfaced in Athanasius Kircher’s Eurocentric proposal to unify the West Indies and East Indies through a common script—as if their being connected by the same geographic name justified their colonization. The hieroglyphic impulse was always related to ideologies of nonwhite subjection as eighteenth-century scholars like William Warburton make plain when positing that nonalphabetical writing betrays civilizational underdevelopment.45

The fervor for supposedly scientific hieroglyphs rebounded in the 1780s when experimental philosopher and music-lover Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni published Discoveries in the Theory of Sound (1787). Inspired by his friend Lichtenberg, he placed fine sand on metal plates and rods, substituting vibration to Lichtenberg’s electrification. The strangely symmetrical figures generated when he struck the plates with a violin bow comforted proponents of the grand unified theory of forces.46 “The very first figure that presented itself to my eyes, on the above-mentioned round plate, resembled a star with ten or twelve rays,” Chladni writes, echoing Lichtenberg’s astronomical paradigm.47 Lichtenberg was well read in Herschelian astronomy and was (rightly) convinced that meteors were nonterrestrial objects—another type of hieroglyph from beyond Earth.48 Chladni shared that opinion and in 1794 published a work justifying Lichtenberg against the doxa that meteors came from volcanic eruptions, demonstrating instead that ferrous meteors could not have a telluric origin.49

The 1802 publication of Chladni’s full theory in Die Akustik not only launched acoustics but brought attention to the phenomena of wave motion, confirming Thomas Young’s related insights that led him to restate the wave theory of light (see chapter 4).50 What made Chladni’s sound figures remarkable was that “the different vibratory movements of a sonorous plate” shaped the sand kinetically through “different appearances” (Chladni, Traité d’acoustique, vii). Electrical figures, sound figures, and meteorites were congruent imaging concretions of the kinemorphic Herschelian cosmos. In 1803, Chladni’s friend Johann Wilhelm Ritter suggested placing “moist silver oxide, moist horn silver,” on his vibrating plates, hoping to produce photosonographs.51 That photoimaging is an apt term for this entire class of patterns is confirmed by another disciple of Naturphilosophie: naturalist, anatomist, and Romantic holist Lorenz Oken. He was the first to use the word Photographie in 1826 to denote “visual apparitions [Gesichtserscheinungen]” like ocular images and hallucinations (studied by his friend Johannes Müller) classified among forms of “natural writing [Naturbeschreibung].”52 Photoimaging as natural writing within the mystical branch of natural philosophy was foundational for pre-photographic thought. It also segued directly with the reemergence of time-graphing machines in the early nineteenth century, which yielded working models of moving pictures by the 1860s (see chapter 6).

Black Silhouetting

The most public technology of hieroglyphic photoimaging was silhouetting. The fad of silhouette drawings and cutouts, known as “profiles,” “shades,” and “black profile portraits,” arose across Europe during the Seven Years’ War as a cheap alternative to costly portrait painting.53 It piggybacked on new printing technics such as the mezzotint, which started with saturated ink from which elements of composition were progressively delineated—a “black manner” according to William Hogarth in his 1753 The Analysis of Beauty.54 The terms shade, meaning “nuance,” and backpainting, for mezzotints on backlit glass, point to a new approach to imaging and picturing based on light projection and screens with high black-and-white contrasts.55

The most important astronomical event of the eighteenth century contributed to the higher standing of silhouetting: the twin transits of Venus in 1761 and 1769. These global events occurred during the Seven Years’ War for the first and in its aftermath for the second—in the new geopolitical and racial context outlined at the beginning of this chapter. This is an important conjuncture for photocinema that deserves fleshing out. Timing exactly the few minutes it takes for the silhouetted dot of Venus to glide across the face of the Sun was expected to provide the dimensions of the solar system, improving navigational astronomy, and hence maritime supremacy. Despite the war, France and England—who had planned this event since 1724—guaranteed safe passage for astronomers of the other camp.56 The 1761 campaign involved hundreds of observers in Europe and America and dozens of expeditions to East Asia. In activating knowledge networks across national, colonial, and navy infrastructures, the event reinforced the cohesion of the astronomical community.57 As Andrea Wulf writes: “The transit projects revealed the importance of international communication and collaboration. Never before had scientists and thinkers banded together on such a global scale—not even war, national interests or adverse conditions could stop them. The intensity of their commitment was unparalleled and the international ties it fostered remained in place long after the transits” (Chasing Venus, 205). The second transit of 1769 involved 250 observers at 130 worldwide locations. The famed expeditions of James Cook and Louis-Antoine de Bougainville were funded for transit observation, bringing the South Pacific and its inhabitants into Europe’s purview.58 While British astronomers tended to produce curt scientific reports, French astronomers stranded on location published longer accounts mixing astronomy, journaling, and ethnographic reporting.59 Legentil de La Galaisière, for instance, was shown an elegant method of computing lunar eclipses by a Tamil astronomer from Pondicherry whom he calls “my Master [mon Maître]” unironically.60 Such firsthand accounts disproved armchair historians like Voltaire who opined that astronomical science on the Indian subcontinent had disappeared.

The Venus transits deeply transformed visual and media culture, while generating a new sense of the globe’s visual connectedness. A slew of pamphlets, conferences, plays, and caricatures sensitized urban populations to astronomy. In London, where it was not viewable, a simulated artificial transit was built, “a seven-and-a-half by five-foot depiction of the sky over London on the day of the transit, including a clock-type mechanism that moved a model of Venus across a painted sun” (Wulf, Chasing Venus, 187). Specialized transit devices like projector-telescopes brought further attention to the kinematic nature of celestial phenomena and to moving projections on screen.

The motion of the black silhouette of Venus across the solar disk was largely responsible for the scientific failure of transit observations. Not only was it difficult to coordinate time recordings at faraway locations because of unreliable longitude, but when the black dot reached the edge of the solar disk a strange optical phenomenon distorted the moment of contact: the so-called black-drop effect. As Jimena Canales shows, this problem precipitated the use of photography for the next paired transits of Venus in 1874 and 1882, occasioning the development of Jules Janssen’s photographic revolver (see chapter 6).61 Moreover, during transits and solar eclipses, Mercury, Venus, or the Moon turn into black bodies; this natural photonegative inversion was long glossed by alchemy in racial terms.62 In fact, the black-drop effect shares a deep rhetorical and epistemic connection with one-drop rules from the antebellum South. Both mobilize the phobia of black/Black impurity, and both expressions came into usage simultaneously in the 1830s.63

Anti-Blackness was woven into human silhouetting through its main proponent, Johann Kaspar Lavater. The inceptor of physiognomy, he commercialized his own silhouetting machines, an apparatus overlooked in the development of photocinema.64 It was improved upon by musician Gilles-Louis Chrétien with his 1786 physionotrace. Chrétien’s setup enabled the drawing of a full-size profile while an articulated pantograph simultaneously produced a small-scale version used to etch a copper plate for reprinting minisilhouettes or cartes de visite—early selfies.65 Around 1800, Chrétien’s device was sold in the United States by artist and naturalist Charles Willson Peale. His enslaved assistant Moses Williams became among the best artists of the new media and with his earnings paid for his own manumission in 1804.66

Lavater’s theory of physiognomy rested on silhouetting (Schattenbild). Published between 1775 and 1778, its founding claim, according to John B. Lyon, was that “external, physical features are readable manifestations of inner, spiritual qualities.”67 Reading bodily contours enabled human interiority to be visualized. In practice, there were multiple limitations to silhouetted reproductions: “If the light stands at a proper distance, if the face falls on a clean surface—is parallel enough with this surface,” then it yields “the truest and most faithful image.” But Lavater adds, “It is nothing positive, it is only something negative, only the outline of half of the face.”68 As we saw, Lichtenberg too invoked positive/negative electrical poles (proposed by Benjamin Franklin) for imaging: This illustrates the deep transduction across electricity, vision, and life force within Naturphilosophie. Lavater acknowledged the composite character of a silhouette outline, which combines “a series of moments that never coexist in nature” since “in nature there is no stationary point—movement, everything eternal movement” (Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente, 3:45, quoted in Lyon, “Science of Sciences,” 268).

Lavater’s comments point to structural tensions within the matrix of photocinema. On the one hand, a silhouette is an “immediate imprint of nature,” discursively close to photoimaging and later portrait photography (Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente, 2:90, quoted in Lyon, “‘Science of Sciences,’” 262). On the other hand, the inherence of movement in bodies makes silhouetting a simulacrum at best, signaling a major hurdle in the automatic picturing of the visible. Silhouetting spectacles in the 1780s leveraged motion, like the ombres chinoises (Chinese shadows) shows in the Palais-Royal in Paris, exhibiting moving shadows behind a screen with the same Orientalism as much photoimaging productions (Vigarello, Silhouette, 27). In the same years, Louis Carrogis Carmontelle displayed full-size rolling canvas panoramas at a nearby locale, showing elegant peoples in profile seemingly walking amid colorful parks.69

For Barbara Maria Stafford, Lavater’s physiognomic theory belongs to Winckelmannian aesthetics affirming the cosmetic supremacy of Greek sculpture’s depiction of (ostensibly) white male bodies.70 This white bent translates into Lavater’s systematic pejoration of chromatic blackness and racial Blackness. He contends that the profile of Black peoples’ heads indexes a lack of intellectual capacities, extending his anti-Blackness to birthmarks objectifying moral flaws and mixed-race bodies typifying faulty reproduction—another crucial intersection of visual and racial reproduction (Stafford, “‘Peculiar Marks,’” 189–90). In a particularly vicious circle, Lavater argues that because of their cosmetic “prejudice . . . Negroes lost . . . the natural sentiment of the beautiful.”71 Like for Demanet, blaming the victim serves to conceal limitless racism under a veneer of scientific-sounding fatuity.

While the Enlightenment by and large swallowed such nonsense hook, line, and sinker, Lichtenberg was incensed. An abolitionist and the bearer of a congenital malformation, he published an anonymous pamphlet in 1778, “On Physiognomy, Against Physiognomists,” denouncing Lavater for his utter lack of scientific rationale and protocol. “But where are the experiments, the facts?” he protested (quoted in Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, 2:279). Lavater asserted the impossibility that “in the head of a Moor, with flattened nose, eyes protruding from the head, lips so fleshy and round that hardly reveal the teeth, the planets could be tracked and a beam of light split [into its components]” (quoted in Bindman, Ape to Apollo, 112). Lichtenberg countered: “Why not the soul of Newton in the head of a negro?” (quoted in Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, 2:274). In response, Lavater produced no evidence: “It is not in the nature of things, not in the relation of cause and effect, that virtue should look like vice, or wisdom like foolishness” (2:278). There are few clearer acknowledgments that looking white was inherently normative for reason.

According to Victor I. Stoichita, Lavater opposed filling the inside of silhouettes in black because “the silhouettes must be precise, we must distance ourselves from the black arts [Schwarzkunst],” an expression conflating occult and racial meanings.72 On the screen of silhouetting machines, however, all people looked Black—a rare and striking intimation of universalism through Blackness. For the abolitionist movement, this universal silhouetting became a critical didactic tool, as Asma Naeem shows. She comments on the infamous cutout view of the slaving ship Brookes published in 1788. It displayed captive Africans stacked in the hold like merchandise, exposing “the magnitude of the brutality from the cumulative effect of the graphic patterning” while emphasizing the sheer dehumanization of “the silhouette form and its various structural operations of erasure, compression, and legibility.”73 The 1787 Wedgwood profile cameo of a kneeling, enchained Black man sought to personalize such mass carceral silhouetting. Yet just as in nefarious want ads of American colonial newspapers tracking fugitive individuals with generic Black silhouettes, thereby facilitating misidentification and poaching, the cameo is a stereotype, another just-innovated kind of reprographics—that is, profiling in the contemporary racist sense.74

Charles’s Photochemical Silhouetting

The first unfixed photographs were photochemical portrait silhouettes made by Jacques Charles in the 1780s. In his famous 1839 speech to the French Parliament presenting Daguerre’s invention, François Arago stated that “Charles, our compatriot, would use in his lectures an impregnated paper to create silhouettes by the action of light.”75 Arago repeated this account in 1850, suggesting it was well considered.76 The fullest description of this photo-silhouetting work appeared in 1874 with an illustration showing Charles’s setup. Its author, Gaston Tissandier, notes that the illustration shows the start of the experiment, with a black silhouette against a white background. When the subject moves away, “it is his shadow, now seen in black, that will appear white,” while the white background has blackened.77

In 1903, R. B. Litchfield, a descendant of the Wedgwood-Darwin families, undertook to debunk Arago’s claim and place Thomas Wedgwood as the sole inceptor of photography.78 Subsequent historians followed him unquestioningly. An examination of Charles’s work, however, strongly confirms he had the technical capabilities and motivation to produce pre-photographic silhouettes. In the late 1770s, Charles became a public lecturer and experimenter in physics and chemistry, giving two sets of lectures from 1781 to 1783 and again from 1784 to 1792.79 Experimenting with gases, he built the first hydrogen balloon, which he flew in 1783, making him an instant celebrity. Granted an apartment in the Louvre in 1786, he brought with him his famed trove of hundreds of the finest scientific instruments ever built. In 1792, revolutionaries let him continue his residence in exchange for ceding the instruments to the French Republic upon his death. Some entered the collection of the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, where dozens still exist, notably several portable camera obscuras of his design.80 According to Friedrich Johann Lorenz Meyer, a German tourist who visited him in 1796, Charles set up a person-sized camera obscura with periscopic mirrors projecting on a tabletop the image of people walking in the Cour Carrée below. Meyer indicates that Charles cohabited with a woman who assisted him with teaching and demonstrations (her identity is unknown).81 In 1804, Charles married the twenty-two-year-old Julie-Françoise Bouchaud des Hérettes, whose family owned plantations of sugar, coffee, and indigo in the Gonaïves area of Saint-Domingue, which they fled after the Haitian Revolution. In Paris, the Bouchaud family petitioned the revolutionary government for assistance as refugee planters, and we can only conjecture that Charles was aligned with the enslaver planter class opposing abolition.82 Charles was elected to the Académie des Sciences and became the librarian of the three national French academies (the Institut de France), though paradoxically, few documents by him exist apart from his course notes and anonymous articles.83

Charles figures in media history for his megascope, which Laurent Mannoni describes as a large magic lantern projecting the image of an object or a painting.84 He asserts that this apparatus was invented by Leonhard Euler in the 1750s and only renamed by Charles. Mannoni in fact confuses two different setups. In 1784, Charles described “an instrument that many amateurs know, to which I have given the name of megascope.” With it, “one can exhibit persons and any kind of objects. It contains a solar microscope, a camera obscura and a magic lantern. I am determined to magnify only through distances, and I use lenses with a very long focus.” He adds, “The most cumbersome is to throw enough light on the object.”85 Charles expressly mentions “persons” and a solar microscope, while Mannoni describes only “a small platform” and “a paraffin lamp” (Great Art, 131–33). Mannoni overlooks the fact that in early nineteenth-century Parisian scientific circles, Charles was considered a leading expert in optical and meteorological instrument design. He improved thermometers, hydrometers, and goniometers and trained a whole generation of experimenters and instrument-makers, including the intermediary through whom Niépce and Daguerre met: Charles Chevalier (see chapter 4). In his lecture, Charles demonstrated the use of the heliostat of 's Gravesande (which he improved): “a parallactic clock moving with the body of the mirror, following the direction of the sun,” and able to “still the sun for two hours without change.”86 With a solar microscope and a heliostat, “the sun residing in space” becomes “a torrent of light coming out of a lens [foyer],” and calling it “an artificial candle [une bougie artificielle],” he affirmed that “the image will have a strong intensity” and thus could project silhouettes.87 When he described Charles’s megascope in 1874, Tissandier himself worked at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, where he had firsthand access to Charles’s instruments, including the megascope.88 Hence, both Charles and Tissandier knew experimentally the amount of illumination required to produce photochemical silhouettes. The physicist Étienne-Louis Malus confirmed that he witnessed Charles using his heliostat with a camera obscura during his public lectures.89 In sum, Charles’s megascope may be described as a modular setup with a solar microscope, heliostat, and a portable camera obscura or a magic lantern, any of which could be used in combination.90

The notebooks of Charles’s courses confirm that he had the motivation, technical know-how, and scientific and philosophical curiosity to conduct photochemical experiments with camera obscuras.91 He describes experiments using silver salts, including “a solution of silver nitrate deposed on a plane of glass” reacting with copper.92 He certainly knew the photosensitive properties of silver nitrate and Senebier’s experiments with a heliostat and a camera obscura. His notebooks specify the use of portable camera obscuras for both optical experiments and artistic and topographical drafting.93 The projection of light rays seems of particular interest, as he explains in vivid language: “You see that the first thing to do in painting is to draw in one’s mind with an imaginary pencil [un crayon imaginaire] the image that pencils emanating from exterior objects would trace on the canvas [l’image que traceraient sur la toile des crayons émanés des objets extérieurs].”94 Sketching here amounts to hallucinating an image on canvas and letting imaginary light rays flow into one’s eyes and retracing them into the image. The polysemy of pencil meaning, in both English and French, “a writing instrument” and “a thin ray of light” informs Charles’s instruction. But what is most important is that here Charles is visualizing light rays bouncing from objects to trace their image by themselves on a canvas, a physical adumbration of photography. After mentioning how he uses an “optique [box]” together with “a camera obscura,” he adds: “If through some impossible art one could instantly fix [fixer sur le champ] on a canvas this admirable illusion, the most beautiful tableau would result.”95 Given Charles’s interest in generating, projecting, drawing, and fixing images from the camera obscura, combined with his familiarity with silver compounds and the role of the megascope in silhouette-making, we must conclude that he conducted proto-photographic experiments prior to 1784—as Arago always insisted.96 As we will see in chapter 4, Arago was undoubtedly the most knowledgeable experimentalist in pre-photography.

This chapter presented developments of the matrix of photocinema around the paradigm of photoimaging—imprints of natural forces bearing hieroglyphic patterns—between the 1760s and 1780s, within the context of the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War and enslaved peoples’ revolts in the Caribbean. These developments include the procrustean fiction about photography sited in Africa (1760), a racist theory of Black skin caused by nitrous and metallic toxification (1767), electrostatic and sonic images (1770–1780s), the emergence of photosensitivity and the protoapparatus of photography (1782), silhouetting, its tracing apparatus, and racist entailments (1778), and photochemical silhouetting made in a megascope (1780s). While photoimaging was the proximal antecedent to photography, we must emphasize that it was only very marginally driven by the aim of reproducing the visible world in fixed images. Rather, it aspired to obtain spontaneous visual imprints from kinetic nature to render visible transcendental signs, cosmic forces, and past historical events. Finally, as Black skin was increasingly explained via photosensitivity, while abolition movements amplified, Blackness and anti-Blackness remained, respectively, an enduring topic and an ever-present prejudice in the matrix of photocinema.