5 Selenography

Between Sun and Moon

While Daguerre undertook to domesticate sunlight as his ghostwriter —a job the French language renders with the N-word—we will focus on the role of the Moon in the passage from pre-photography to photography.4 In the long duration of photocinema, the Moon was always the primeval picture show. Moving across the starry vault, it waxes and wanes, moves closer or farther from Earth, which alters its apparent size, and glides across the Sun during eclipses, becoming black. When crossing the Earth’s umbra, it turns orange to brown, and under various atmospheric conditions looks silvery, yellow, or nearly gray and white. Its tidal lock on our planet means that the same portion of its surface seems to be looking back at us, like a face that can take on virtually any color.

According to media historians, the word photography in its current sense was coined four times between 1834 and 1840.5 In actuality, the German word Photographie dates from 1826, when it denoted visual hallucinations (see chapter 3), and around 1830 a second meaning arose in French: the scientific study of light.6 This is why, in February 1839, the German astronomer Johann Heinrich von Mädler renamed Daguerre’s process die Photographie, rejecting Niépce’s term heliography as scientifically incorrect since light from all celestial bodies will register on sensitive plates.7 Mädler had just completed Mappa Selenographica (1834–1836), the first high-magnification cartography of the lunar surface, giving it the tangible feel of an inhabitable world.8 Interestingly, in 1792, Thomas Wedgwood tried taking the temperature of moonlight using a lens with a highly sensitive thermometer.9

The first mention of Daguerre’s photographic research work appeared in print anonymously in 1835. In September 1836, it was commented on at length by the well-informed architect Alphonse Eugène Hubert. He voiced doubts that Daguerre obtained anything more than a “night album” of unfixed photosensitive prints, insisting that they were viewable only by “moonlight,” since daylight would erase them. He continues: “Here is why the moon finds itself involved in this affair: M. Arago . . . said during his lecture three weeks ago that, ‘of all known substances, silver chloride [changes] color the most strongly and rapidly through the action of light, and yet, if exposed for a [long] time not to [direct moonlight but moonlight focused by a very large lens, a sheet] of this chemical compound does not lose any of its natural whiteness.’”10 Hubert states that he too had conducted photographic experiments “seven or eight years ago” (circa 1828–1829), adding that, due to the long exposure time, objects he shot were placed on a clockwork-driven contraption to prevent shadow-blurring. Hubert’s remarks demonstrate an advanced knowledge of photochemistry and optics, explaining why Daguerre hired him as a collaborator in 1837.

Daguerre understood early on that photography could succeed as near-instantaneous imaging technology only by rendering grayscale. Attention to light’s gradations had made his Diorama shows popular in the 1820s. These picture shows displayed landscapes painted on several stacked semitranslucent surfaces that light sources illuminated from above in succession, giving the overall impression of seeing a landscape illuminated from morning to night—from sunlight to moonshine. They belong more to the archaeology of cinema than that of photography. Among the plates that Niépce left behind during his trip to England in 1827–1828, one was a gift to Francis Bauer of Kew. It is titled Le Clair de Lune (Moonlight). It depicts the ivy-covered vaults of a ruined abbey lit by the Moon. As Stephen Pinson documents, this photograph is perplexing because it reproduces an engraved sketch made by Daguerre himself for the set of an Orientalist play adapted from the Old Testament.11 Researchers who analyzed its chemical composition consider it the finest among Niépce’s early production. Pinson conjectures that Daguerre asked Niépce to reproduce his chiaroscuro artwork to test heliography’s capacity to render grayscale prior to entering into an association with him.12

Arago too thought moonlight was the true testing ground for photography. After Daguerre first approached him in 1838, Arago presented him with the challenge of photographing the Moon. He writes: “At the request of the academicians above-mentioned Mr. Daguerre projected the image of the Moon, formed at the focus of a common lens, upon one of his screens, and it left a perceptible white imprint. When a commission of the Académie composed of Mr. Laplace, Malus and Arago made a similar experiment with silver chloride, we obtained no appreciable effect. Perhaps exposure to light was not long enough. In any case, Mr. Daguerre was the first to produce a sensible chemical modification with luminous rays from our satellite.”13 This comment reveals an overlooked episode in the history of pre-photography. Since Étienne-Louis Malus died in 1812, this photochemical experiment took place prior to that year, likely in 1811 when Arago was investigating the polarization of moonlight.14 It represents the earliest known attempt at photo-picturing a specific object: the Moon. According to Hubert, Arago made another experiment with silver chloride around 1835, which is why he opted to assess the sensitivity of Daguerre’s process with moonlight. In March 1840, using a heliostat, astronomer John William Draper produced the first known photograph of the Moon from the roof of the City University of New York. In a lecture of 1848, Arago concluded that “we can very easily obtain photographic images of our satellite, as I had predicted already in 1840.” Then he added the following, without segue: “One cannot find . . . proof that the blackening of skin cannot be attributed to a direct action of lunar light.”15 This odd quip ostensibly addresses beliefs from antiquity addressed in his talk. But delivered in 1848—at the very time Arago had empowered Victor Schoelcher to draft immediate abolition legislation—the quip testifies to the constancy with which Black skin acted as a revelator of photography.

Photoimaging Technics, Black Skin, and Black-and-White Rhetoric

Recent scholarship explores linkages between race and early photography. Tanya Sheehan finds that in nineteenth-century photography, black-and-white contrast in “the medium serves as ready metaphor for racial difference.”16 Alessandra Raengo points to recent studies showing how nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographs reinforced race as a “visualizable fact” that “further sutured race to the body,” leading to “an investment in the indexicality of the photographic image facilitated by its analogy with the black body.”17 Descriptive comments on light values in pre-photography and early photography deploy indeed conspicuous racial valences, attached to both the difference and the convertibility between positive and negative images. In December 1829, Niépce stated, for instance, that “the discovery of . . . heliography consists in spontaneously reproducing through the action of light, with value gradients [dégradations des teintes] from black to white, images received in a camera obscura.”18 He does not address whether his prints are positives or negatives for a good reason: Researchers suspect—with deterioration complicating the assessment—that his tin heliographs were only marginally positive and rather somewhere in between. In 1836, Hubert used a photochemical commonplace when stating that photography’s challenge is “to convert in the camera obscura lit areas into shadows, and shadows into lit areas.”19 By 1839, Arago celebrated the daguerreotype for doing just the opposite: “On the screens of Mr. Daguerre, the drawing and the object are exactly alike: white corresponds to white, half-tint to half-tint, black to black.” By contrast, other experimenters (like Talbot) were stuck with “white reproduced as black, and reciprocally.”20 In his 1840 article on photography, John Herschel celebrated Talbot’s photonegative-to-paper-positive process making reproduction easier, adding: “To avoid much circumlocution, it may be allowed me to employ the terms positive and negative, to express respectively, pictures in which the lights and shades are as in nature, or as in the original model, and in which they are the opposite, i.e. light representing shade, and shade light” (“On the Chemical Action of the Rays of the Solar Spectrum,” 3). As we saw in chapter 3, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg adapted Benjamin Franklin’s positive and negative electrical polarity to his electrical “projections” in the 1770s, and so did Johann Kaspar Lavater for his anti-Black physiognomic theory of silhouetting. John Herschel bolstered the in-built racial valence of positive/negative imaging in 1840 when remarking that on photonegatives “fair women transformed into negresses.”21 This belies an identification of positive natural representations with whiteness and negative representations—connoted as counternatural—with Blackness.

Certainly, black-and-white chromatic rhetoric in racialized visual culture predated photography. Let us examine two case studies. In 1816, just as Niépce began experimenting, a Haitian mixed-race political thinker who identified as Black emphatically deconstructed centuries of binary racist thinking. Sickened by the recurrence of polygenic arguments, he wrote:

It is the most absurd reasoning to deny the identicalness of the human species. . . . After having proven the sameness of negroes and whites, I should still need to prove the sameness of Africans and negroes, and probably also the sameness of Haytians with the former; as for me, being born of an African woman, I consider myself very much identified [très-identifié] with Africans; yet . . . I should still need to demonstrate whether the peoples from the South of Europe form a particular species with the peoples of the North; whether sameness exists between the French and the Laps; and the Spanish and the Russians. What miserable sophisms! What puerile constructs!22

The author was King Henry Christophe’s political adviser Pompée Valentin Vastey, among the most influential antiracist diasporic Black intellectuals at the start of the nineteenth century.23 The 1805 Haitian Constitution defined all its citizens as Black regardless of their color—that is, suspending the divisive taxonomies of the Code Noir. Vastey extrapolated this juridical clause into a critical project for his 1814 book The Colonial System Unveiled. In it, he debunks white enslavers’ anti-Black discourse, denounces France’s reluctance to outlaw the slave trade as England did, and sketches a detailed indictment of white Europe for crimes of slavery and conquest. Well read in medicine and chemistry, Vastey refers pointedly to Thomas Beddoes’s 1790s experiment applying “muriatic acid” to lighten the skin of a Black patient (see chapter 4). He proposes a reverse process: “Without being a chemist, I hold the secret of blackening a white person by simple immersion.”24 This sarcastic barb sends up the only right of enslaved people—being baptized and thus saved—by alluding to photochemical blackening as the photonegative of supposed white benevolence. Vastey’s political project is “to make the shadow of the white man disappear” (Vastey, Le Système, 92–93). This is a subtle formulation implying that the proslavery Enlightenment eclipsed access of Black subjectivity to the light of reason, exercising obscurantism willfully. Vastey likely leverages the black light discoveries of physical optics in 1800–1802 to debunk the false equation of whiteness with reason, invoking a higher reason: “What white person, from any nation, would be so ungenerous as not to applaud the design animating us, and not join us?” (96).

In his follow-up 1816 work, Vastey went one step further. Invoking Georges-Louis Leclerc, count de Buffon’s notion of “prototype”—that is, the base type for a species’ subsequent variations—he argued that if Black people are more primitive than white people, as Enlightenment thought propones, from a biblical perspective it means that they are closer to the prototype that God made in his image, which also entails that God is Black (Vastey, Réflexions, 8–10). Racist history is rewritten in photonegative. Vastey shared with abolitionist thinkers like Constantin-François de Chasseboeuf, count de Volney, Mungo Park, Henri Grégoire, J.-C.-L. Simonde de Sismondi, and later Martin Delany the belief that Greek culture came from Egypt and that Egyptians were Black. He wrote: “It is from this primitive hearth/focal point [foyer], says M. Lesage, from which most certainly the spark of antiquity was issued, which in subsequent centuries engendered the whole mass of light/enlightenment [toute la masse de lumière] which today illuminates [éclaire] Europe” (34). Invoking the symbolic lexicon of fire, lens optics, the Enlightenment, and illumination, Vastey suggested that Western civilization originated in black light. While William Hyde Wollaston had located a few black lines in the spectrum in 1802, by 1815 Joseph von Fraunhofer had observed and imaged over five hundred black absorption lines.25 Light was increasingly black.

In his 1816 book, Vastey mentions Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre as an ally in undoing anti-Blackness. A friend of Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet within the Society of the Friends of Truth, Bernardin was a radical abolitionist. Famous for the maudlin Rousseauist bestseller Paul et Virginie, his true lifework was a metaphysical synthesis of natural philosophy based on a system of correspondences or “harmonies” between “souls” and “natural powers,” whose combinations account for everything in the universe. One soul called “celestial” has “solar” and “aerial” powers, while a fundamental harmony is “soli-lunar,” amalgamating the Sun and Moon.26 In his unfinished summa Harmonies of Nature, which displays deep familiarity with Herschelian cosmology, we find a fictional coda titled “Empsaël; an Episode, or Dialogue, Illustrative of Human Harmonies” (1815).27

Mixing prose and dramatic dialogue, this text leverages a rhetoric of black-and-white inversion to denounce the absurdity of slavery. Arguments against abolition or for gradual abolition with compensation rested on enslavers’ propaganda that slavery was benevolent and humane. Bernardin assails this premise in the foreword: “I thought that nothing was more apt to make one feel the weakness of the reasons with which the white inhabitants of our islands in America justify the slavery of blacks than to put these very reasons in the mouth of a black man from the Barbary coast towards some inhabitant of our islands having himself fallen into slavery in Africa.”28 The play is loosely based on a real seventeenth-century Black Muslim minister of the dey of Morocco who counted a white woman among his wives. Bernardin presents her (Zoraïde) as a loving wife of the righteous Empsael without either caricaturing Muslims or critiquing polygamy. The play’s antagonist is Ozorio, the now enslaved former owner of Empsael. “I know white people,” Empsael’s Black overseer declares, inverting the terms of anti-Blackness, “as soon as there is the slightest friendship between two white slaves, they plot against their master. To govern them, remember this maxim: separate those who love each other, put together those who hate each other” (Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Empsael et Zoraïde, 39). This was of course a structural containment feature of the “plantation machine.”29 Later, an imam echoes hypocritical Christian benevolence, again in photonegative: “The only thing missing to this white man, to be perfect, is to be black,” and “We should not despise Zoraïde because she is white. God gave her a soul as he did to you and me” (47, 49). Bernardin casually catalogs anti-Black violence in his satire: “Whites are made to serve blacks. In fact, there is no better mount than white men. Donkeys are too slow, and our Arabian horses too speedy. But with white slaves you go fast and stop whenever you want” (65). He is nonetheless careful to let Empsael speak of the psychic trauma he’s endured as a Black person: “Men of your country who form respectful, sweet, and obliging feelings at your contact because you are white, experience in my presence feelings of contempt, hatred, and ferociousness, because I am black. They have no reason other than the color of my skin, for, had you been black like me, Zoraïde, even though you are the best among creatures, they would have hated you as they hate me, and had I been white like them, even if I were as perfidious a scoundrel as they are, they would have respected me as one of their own” (148–49). The rapid succession of pronominal markers—you, me, they—together with chiasmic racial markers—white, black and black, white—foregrounds white prejudice from the side of Black subjectivity. These works of Vastey and Bernardin, leveraging prephotonegative discursivity to confound anti-Blackness, disclose critical intersections between the long emergence of photocinema and the implementation of emancipation.

“Abolition and Astronomy”: Blackness and Photocinematic Hyperpresence in the Great Moon Hoax

A salient illustration of such intersections is the 1835 Great Moon Hoax reprising seventeenth-century motifs (see chapter 1) of Moon and Earth mirroring each other while locked in a master-to-subaltern relationship. The episode occurred in the context of heightened anxiety in the United States about the foreseeable end of slavery. In August 1835, while the astronomically savvy awaited the return of Halley’s Comet (a paying telescope was installed near Central Park in New York City), the one-year-old abolitionist newspaper The New York Sun released a fictional story in installments relayed from the imaginary Edinburgh Journal of Science.30 It was the brainchild of Richard Adams Locke, a British radical polymath who had fled England after publishing a history of the Polish revolution found subversive by the Crown. At seventeen he had penned “a poem, in six cantos, of nearly a thousand lines each, entitled ‘The Universe Restored’ which illustrated the theory of the alternate destruction and reproduction of all things throughout the universe of space.”31 A central feature of post-Kantian kinemorphic cosmology, cyclical cosmogony embodied the threat of secular naturalism for nineteenth-century Anglo-American Protestantism.

Later called the “Moon Hoax,” Locke’s “Great Astronomical Discoveries, Lately Made by Sir John Herschel, L.L.D., F.R.S, &c, at the Cape of Good Hope” was published in installments in August 1835. The spoof describes what Herschel supposedly observed on the Moon with a powerful new telescope he invented. Locke depicts lunar vegetation, goatlike animals, and two species of inhabitants resembling hybrids of humans and bats. Hotly debated, each installment sent The New York Sun’s sales through the roof. The story was covered by the European press and figures among the first global media phenomena. A vivid reaction came from Edgar Allan Poe, whose “Hans Phaall—A Tale” had appeared in June 1835. He believed that “the idea of Telescopic discoveries in the moon, his original intent before sending a balloon observer, was his.”32 Having liberally plagiarized John Herschel as well as Abraham Rees’s Cyclopaedia in his short story, Poe hardly had a leg to stand on (Goodman, Sun and the Moon, 160–61). Within a month the story was debunked, forcing Locke to justify his intention. He fell back on antislavery sarcasm: “We are curious to know whether Lynch Law exists amongst our lunar neighbors, or whether they have not yet arrived at this degree of refinement!” He ultimately argued that “abolition and astronomy being the only matters of exciting interest on the tapis,” his newspaper had sought to tamp down the virulence of the former with the dreaminess of the latter (Locke quoted in Goodman, Sun and the Moon, 220–21).33

In truth, the convergence of abolition and astronomy in the United States began on February 12, 1831, when an annular eclipse cut a sickle-shaped swath from New England to Louisiana, linking the abolitionist Eastern Seaboard to the enslaving South. As the first solar eclipse in the United States since 1811, news of its occurrence was broadly disseminated. Abolitionists took it as a divine sign of emancipation: “The oppressed and enslaved of every country, Hayti and Virginia as well as France and Poland, have a right to assert their ‘natural and inalienable rights’ whenever and wherever they can,” The Massachusetts Journal enthusiastically claimed in 1831.34 An enslaved Virginian man envisioned the eclipse as manifesting the cosmic struggle between whiteness and blackness: “I had a vision—and I saw white spirits and black spirits engaged in battle, and the sun was darkened—the thunder rolled in the Heavens, and blood flowed in streams.”35 His name was Nat Turner. After the rebellion he led failed and he was arrested, his antiracist and mystical confessions transformed emancipation debates in antebellum America.36 The wake of the Turner affair surfaced, for instance, in the 1834 Tappan Riots of Manhattan when white people hounded abolitionists and killed hundreds of African Americans because of a rumor that forced intermarriage had become a tenet of the abolitionist movement.37 Locke hoped the Moon Hoax would distract the New York populace from the past year’s murderous fake news.

His tale begins by painstakingly explaining the improvement in optical scale achieved by Herschel’s twenty-four-foot mirror telescope—a size well beyond mirror-making technology of the time.38 The telescope combined “artificial light” from a “hydro-oxygen” lamp with a solar microscope magnifying the image to project it “on the floor or on the wall of the apartment” with “a diameter of nearly fifty feet” (Griggs, Celebrated “Moon Story,” 63, 69).39 The telescope was mounted on a clock-driven mechanism enabling observers to “detain the object upon the field of view for any period” (72). This design had been famously enacted in 1825 by Fraunhofer for the new meridian telescope at Dorpat, Estonia. Locke stated that Herschel changed the lens of the eyepiece to progressively heighten magnification, intensifying the sense of cinematic telepresence in his account. Lunar trees became visible “for a period of ten minutes” and “were followed by a level green plain” after which the observers “immediately perceived that we had been insensibly descending, as it were, a mountainous district” (73). Of course, lens changes can only produce an axial zoom effect, but Locke skillfully dovetails credible and incredible optics to generate a ubiquitous Oculus-like perception of the lunar surface. As a herd of unicorn goats appears into view, Locke writes: “The mimicry of its movements upon our white painted canvas was as faithful and luminous as that of animals within a few yards of a camera obscura, when seen pictured against its tympan [i.e., glass screen]. Frequently, when attempting to put our fingers upon its beard, it would suddenly bound away into oblivion, as if conscious of our earthly impertinence” (80). Accentuating moving image hyperpresence and haptic perception, this passage reveals Locke’s familiarity with screen immersion projected from a camera obscura. Soon, humanlike creatures come into view, “four feet in height” and “covered, except on the face, with short and glossy copper-colored hair,” with “wings composed of a thin membrane, without hair” (95). Their faces “of a yellowish flesh-color, [were] a slight improvement upon that of a large orang-outan, being more open and intelligent in [their] expression,” and their mouths were “very prominent” with “lips far more human than those of any species of the simian genus” (95–96). This description of Lunarians as human–animal hybrids scarcely conceals racist stigmatization. Indeed, the telescope locates a second group of humanlike inhabitants of “a larger stature than the former specimens, less dark in color, and in every respect an improved variety of the race” (107–8). Locke’s tale thus appears to be but another example of astroracialization transparently rehearsing anti-Blackness on the Moon. The fact that both races have dark skin, and that the “improved variety” built pyramids—hinting at Black Egyptian culture—does little to compensate for his traffic in racist stereotypes. Nor does his conclusion that a “universal state of amity among all classes of lunar creatures” reigns (109).40

During the whole affair—of which he heard with some delay—the real John Herschel resided in Cape Town, completing the laborious task entrusted by his late father of cataloging the southern skies.41 He’d arrived in late 1833 when colonial administrators debated the time frame and logistics of freeing enslaved Khoisan, !Kung, and Xhosa peoples subsequent to the abolition act. As Elizabeth Green Musselman notes, among his first sights in South Africa was the taxidermized remains of a Khoisan woman kept by a local physician as a specimen of a “Venus Hottentot.”42 Herschel interacted with “coolies” hired for his astronomical work and described “Abdul” in a letter as “a fine Sultan-looking fellow” with “a noble intelligent good-natured black countenance” in contrast with “Thom,” who was but “a low-looking thicklipped ugly Negro” (Herschel quoted in Musselman, “Swords into Ploughshares,” 425). This purely visual racial hierarchy relies on just about the same stereotypes as Locke’s. In a letter from Cape Town, Herschel starkly transduced visual racialization to the Moon itself: “The Moon at full—as it rises it presents a round, dull blotchy human face, with broad nose sulky mouth and standing perpendicularly has just the effect of some preternatural being—Demon—or god—of some barbarous nation looking down on its African territory & sniffing with sullen pleasure the scent of some bloody rite or looking down on the whole region as a scene of carnage agreeable to his nature & will. The European face is quite lost, by the reversal of its position” (425). The man in the Moon of the Northern Hemisphere appears transfigured from the antipode from a tacitly white face into the racialized mien of a cannibalistic African divinity—a photonegative. “The European face is quite lost, by the reversal of its position,” Herschel fessed up, speaking about the Moon, his own loss of face, and the small white community surrounded with Black Indigenous people. Musselman argues that Herschel endeavored with local British representatives to dampen armed conflict between freed Khoisan peoples and Afrikaners and British troops, especially after a military massacre in December 1834. He vowed to work toward erasing “the humiliating distinction between master and slave” through education and social initiatives (429–30).43 That distinction proves hard to overcome in his own words.

In 1852, New York Sun reporter William N. Griggs gave the Moon Hoax a second life in book form. In his commentary, he makes technical observations worth citing at length for their photocinematic insightfulness:

It will be seen, on reperusing [Locke’s] description of the new Herschel telescope, that [Herschel] magnified the shadow or “focal object” of his mammoth lens, as projected upon a receiving screen, or tympan, like that of a camera obscure . . . and in the same manner that the solar picture in a daguerreotype may be indefinitely magnified, developed, and rendered more exquisitely distinct, by means either of that or any other magnifying instrument. In fact, the optical process suggested in this part of the “Moon Story,” with some slight modifications, and so far as its mere magnifying and “distinctifying” functions are concerned, remains unexplored. . . . Indeed, it is . . . an anticipation, to no small extent, of the daguerreotype discovery, for it teaches the important principle, now fully verified, that focal objects, whether permanently fixed, or merely transient, after being received on any surface, may be further magnified, and rendered, at the same time, more distinct, when exposed to additional or artificial light. The realization of this fact, in relation to the telescopic image, was a desideratum in optical astronomy worthy of the profoundest research. (Celebrated “Moon Story,” 29)

What Griggs’s halting and flowery language suggests is that the tale was prescient of how a high-resolution daguerreotype plate lends itself to progressive optical magnification, revealing more and more details, as if new images could flow from the single original plate. In so doing, Griggs embeds the cinematic purview of Locke’s account within the daguerreotype—an oblique confirmation of the polyvalence of the photocinema as a matrix.

Pre-Photography and Abolition

Among the overlooked early precursors of photography was Henry Peter Brougham, who spearheaded the passage of emancipation legislation in 1833 as lord chancellor. In his posthumously published autobiography, Brougham claimed that in the summer of 1795 he submitted a draft paper to Charles Blagden, editor of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, where he described “having observed the effect of a small hole in the window-shutter of a darkened room, when a view is formed on white paper of the external objects, I had suggested that if that view if [sic] formed, not on paper, but on ivory rubbed with nitrate of silver, the picture would become permanent. . . . Now this is the origin of photography.”44 Helmut Gernsheim dismissed this claim as a “myth” but offered no justification for his assessment.45 When Brougham attended the University of Edinburgh, he took chemistry classes with Joseph Black and counted Thomas Young as a fellow student. Brougham revered Black, who considered himself a disciple of Carl Wilhelm Scheele, and it is likely from Black that both Young and Brougham were trained in photochemistry (Brougham, Life and Times of Henry, 66). Edinburgh at that time was a hotbed of abolitionist thought—especially among medical doctors and chemists all too aware of the reliance of Scotland on Caribbean enslaving industries for its wealth.46 Still a student, Brougham published two youthful articles on optics in the Philosophical Transactions, in 1796 and 1797, about the “flexion, or the bending of the rays in their passage by bodies,” a nodal topic for the wave theory of light (WTL) as we saw throughout chapter 4.47 Brougham experimented in a dark room with a pinhole and a prism to observe patterns of diffraction generated by interposing thin objects (blades, pins, holes), also using mirrors and putting some objects in motion. In 1853, he revisited these early experiments, sending two new essays to the Philosophical Transactions on “interference fringes” and the WTL, but the journal declined publication.48

Early surviving letters between Blagden and Brougham tend to confirm Brougham’s version of events. After receipt of Brougham’s first paper draft in 1795, Blagden sent back comments to Brougham, who responded in October 1795: “The Newtonian philosophy having now given way (in its turn) to the wonderful discoveries of modern chemistry and this induced me to add many of the queries which connect the two sciences together.” With these words, Brougham explained the draft’s disquisitions he proposed to take out, to which Blagden assented in February 1796.49 These disquisitions must have concerned photochemistry, the clearest intersection of optics and chemistry, which Blagden must have judged beyond the paper’s scope. Brougham’s two articles multiply approximate, vainglorious, and confused hypotheses (akin in this to Jean-Paul Marat’s claims). Occasionally, an inspired proposal pops up, such as the use of “an inclined mirror” to produce “flexions”—the idea Arago and Augustin-Jean Fresnel used in their twin mirror setup.

Brougham soon left natural philosophy behind to become a lawyer. He advocated for social causes like the democratization of education and in 1802 cofounded The Edinburgh Review. In 1803, he mounted an intense jingoistic attack against his former comrade Thomas Young, indicting his work on the WTL as anti-Newtonian and pro-French. His campaign succeeded and put an abrupt end to Young’s research in physical optics. It is reasonable to assume that Brougham felt that Young, who made no bones about belittling Brougham’s scientific achievements, cheated him out of his own ideas about interferences and perhaps photoimaging too, which were certainly earlier (but not of the same stature) than Young’s.50

In 1803, Brougham published An Inquiry into the Colonial Policy of the European Powers, critiquing slavery from moral and realpolitik perspectives. He nonetheless called enslaved and free Black people, Haitian rebels, and Africans alike “savages” incapable of “industry.”51 Brougham turned into a dogged reformist and democratizer advocating for stigmatized populations, including workers and women, later playing a key role in the rise of the popular astronomy culture of the 1830s.52 Starting in the 1810s, he made the abolition of slavery his signature mission, working on curbing the slave trade and pushing antislavery legislation for two decades, progressively amending his anti-Black sentiments. Elected to the House of Lords, then named chancellor, he finally passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833. It was a gradualist measure deferring full emancipation until 1840 and compensating enslavers for their economic losses—not enslaved people.

Brougham’s 1795–1796 experiments with photochemical imaging, together with Arago’s similar research in 1811 and 1821, suggest a tantalizing correlation between their pre-photographic work and their abolition legislation. As mentioned in the introduction, however, that correlation is dubious and likely weak, albeit not inexistent. A third unacknowledged proto-photographic experimenter, astronomer and anatomist John William Draper, allows us to probe it further. Originally from Lancashire, England, he was in the first class to attend University College London in 1829—a secular institution founded by James Mill and Brougham himself. After moving to the United States and receiving an MD, Draper was appointed head of chemistry in 1839 at New York University’s planned medical school. Between 1834 and 1837, he conducted photochemical research in the hope of clarifying the relationship between visible light, chemical light (ultraviolet), and thermal light (infrared).53 In 1834, he made the first attempt at photoimaging Fraunhofer’s black “fixed lines of the spectrum” using “silver bromide.”54 In 1837, he replicated Arago and Fresnel’s photochemical imaging of interference fringe patterns that confirmed the WTL: “The conclusion to be drawn from this result possesses no common interest . . . that light consists of undulations of an elastic medium.”55 Draper made sketches of the photoimaging prints showing interferences both via Newton rings and intersecting light waves forming a pointed oval (Draper, “Experiments on Solar Light,” 44).56

He also found in 1837 that silver bromide could not register the light of the Moon—the third failed attempt at photographing the Moon. In 1842, he succeeded in making daguerreotypes of both spectroscopic lines of sunlight and interference fringes (Draper, “Experiments on Solar Light,” 115–16; Hyde, “John William Draper,” 1727). He also noticed that silver compounds do not react to refracted light the same way as the human eye, understanding at about the same time as Daguerre that photography required lenses leaning toward the blue end of the spectrum. Draper’s theoretical and empirical understanding of physical optics, photochemistry, and pre-photography was comparable only to that of John Herschel and Arago at the time. His overlooked work confirms the thesis that physical optics and the testing of the WTL were central to the development of photography. After learning of the daguerreotype, Draper quickly worked out a new paper process and produced the first photographic portrait in 1840: that of a white woman who was his assistant, her face covered with a thin layer of flour enhancing contrast. Over the next few years, Draper believed he discovered a new kind of ray that he called “tithonic,” bridging the natural philosophy of William Herschel’s “black-making rays” in the late 1790s with Thomas Edison’s infamous experimental discovery of the “etheric force” in the 1870s.57 Around the time of the Civil War, his appointment as dean of New York University’s medical school led him to enter national debates about abolition—which he favored. After emancipation, nonetheless, refocusing his research on dynamic physiology, he became a central proponent of the new scientific racism connecting human phenotypes and craniology to civilizational attainments. I examine this work in chapter 6 because it parallels that of physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey as factoring in the emergence of precinema. As to the correlation between pre-photography and abolition, what Draper confirms as an astronomer is that photologists like Brougham and Arago (and, before them, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, David Rittenhouse, and Condorcet) seemed prone to engage with the optical aspects of racial difference, which may have influenced their favoring abolition. But that did not prevent most of them from adopting racist and especially anti-Black stances.

Photography and Abolition: Frederick Douglass

During the short-lived revolutions of 1848, as soon as he was named minister of the navy and colonies in late February, Arago declared that abolition was integral to the revolution’s call for liberty. He informed colonial governors that immediate emancipation was forthcoming.58 In March, he named Victor Schoelcher head of the Commission for the Abolition of Slavery, charged with drafting a law to be ratified by the National Assembly. By April, however, opposition by enslavers and delays with electing the assembly convinced Arago to adopt Schoelcher’s draft abolition without further delays by executive decree. Arago and eleven members of the provisional government signed it into law.

Arago’s overall views on race were divergent, especially when it came to the Arab Muslim populations of the Maghreb, which came under French control after 1830. While he explained in his memoirs that he owed his life to Muslim sailors who refused to give him up to a force dispatched by the dey of Algiers in 1809, as a French elected official he voiced anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiments.59 Raised in a liberal centrist family with ten siblings, Arago progressively embraced republicanism and democratic rights in the 1830s and 1840s.60 His younger brother Étienne was close to Schoelcher after the latter turned toward immediatism in the early 1840s. A radical socialist and Carbonari, Étienne turned to journalism and theater before becoming a leader of the 1830 July Revolution.61 In 1836, he collaborated in a vaudeville act titled “Paris in the Comet”—leveraging popular excitement over the 1834 comet—which included a cameo played by “a man half-black, half-white, African on one side, European on the other,” dramatizing the plight of mixed-race peoples. This showed—like the Great Moon Hoax a year later—how astronomy lent itself to racial commentary.62 A close friend of the Arago brothers was Alexandre Dumas, the leading mixed-race figure in 1830s France and the prime target of newspapers controlled by the enslaver lobby. A third brother, Jacques Arago, gave international antislavery efforts higher visibility. A member of a circumterrestrial scientific expedition from 1817 to 1820, Jacques published Voyage Around the World upon his return. This four-volume account of his travels turned into a bestseller by 1823 when it was translated into English, in part because its ethnotourism denounced slavery graphically from firsthand observation in Brazil, the Caribbean, and the Southern United States.63 Documenting Pacific Islander culture, some of Jacques’s drawings are now considered a primary source of information for historians and Native activists, although Jacques exoticized and exploited Native women.64 The fourth brother, Jean Arago, was an army soldier who fled France and joined the Mexican War of Independence in 1817, taking the side of Antonio López de Santa Anna and ending as a general in the corps of engineers. The Arago brothers certainly counted among the most prorevolutionary and antiracist families in early nineteenth-century France.

When Frederick Douglass heard of the revolution of 1848 in France, he wrote an editorial in The North Star entitled “France” on April 28, 1848—not yet apprised of the emancipation decree signed the day before:

Thanks to steam navigation and electric wire, we may almost hear the words uttered, and see the deeds done, as they transpire. A revolution now cannot be confined to the place or the people where it may commence, but flashes with lightning speed from heart to heart, from land to land, till it has traversed the globe, compelling all the members of our common brotherhood at once, to pass judgment upon its merits. The revolution of France, like a bolt of living thunder, has aroused the world from its stupor.

. . .

There are only two classes in this country who are in a position sincerely to sympathise with France in her present glorious struggle in behalf of liberty, and these are the negroes and Abolitionists.65

Douglass was aware of Arago’s abolition program prior to the decree and took the revolution in France as a global event that would hopefully recharge the momentum of abolition in the United States. The instantaneity rhetoric of “lightning speed” and “bolt of living thunder” “travers[ing] the globe” combines revolutionary energy, new technics of photography and the telegraph, and, of course, immediatism. Celebrating the burgeoning African American press, Douglass declared in January 1848, “Facts are facts: white is not black, and black is not white,” a justification for an independent Black press and something of a final rejoinder to the black-and-white rhetoric crisscrossing race and pre- and early photography.66

Douglass’s now well-studied approach to photography aimed at undoing the racial and racist rhetoric that caricatured and mischaracterized Black experience without giving African Americans the right to self-represent. He made his own self-portraiture into an activist weapon, posing for hundreds of photographs, most often sporting an uncompromising demeanor as if to command the recognition of Black dignity.67 In a famous 1863 lecture on photography, “Pictures and Progress,” Douglass wrote: “Daguerre, by simple but all abounding sunlight has converted the planet into a picture gallery. . . . Men of all conditions may see themselves as others see them.”68 For Douglass, the power of the daguerreotype came from sunlight at last put in the service of the global equality of representation—an objective form of photoimaging issued from our nearest star in the cosmos. Henry Louis Gates Jr. keenly analyzes the chiasmic mastery with which Douglass leveraged photography to recast at once the black/white binary and the power of self-representation within the horizon of abolition.69 For Gates, the technical gaze of photography served first “to erase the astonishingly large storehouse of racist stereotypes,” to replace it with the opportunity of “visualizing ourselves doing an action and reflecting upon it as we do it, rendering the subjective ‘objective,’ giving it form” (Gates, “Frederick Douglass’s Camera Obscura,” 46, 59). In this purview, photography is more an apparatus of visualization than vision, an emancipative instrument for reconstructing Black sovereignty to come, not just memorializing one’s likeness.

Commenting on “Pictures and Progress,” Ginger Hill notes that this “perceptual constitution of interiority” for African Americans was construed by Douglass through what he calls “thought pictures.”70 These visualizations represent for Hill a “universal vernacular” enabling anyone regardless of their level of instruction “to internally imagine forms” and develop an “object-seeking drive” that could foster a sense of agency toward the goal of changing the world (Hill, “‘Rightly Viewed,’” 55). Douglass writes that “rightly viewed, the whole soul of man is a sort of picture gallery[,] a grand panorama, in which the great facts of the universe, the tracings of time and things of eternity are painted” (“Pictures and Progress,” cited in Hill, “‘Rightly Viewed,’” 42). These thought-pictures correlate not to photographs but rather to photoimaging as spontaneous imprints from nature, unbiased by prejudiced culture, especially the gamut of white calibration. Thought-pictures together with photographic portraits confound fictional and phobic racist representations disseminated by cheap reprography technologies such as stereotyping in the first part of the nineteenth century. But thought-pictures cannot be static since they form a virtual reserve of future representations and actions, while they also bear the marks and movements of history. These “tracings of time,” then, are more akin to the self-traced graphs at the origin of cinema.