1 Photosophia

The Telescope in Racial Context

Innovative and striking means of visualizing the heliocentric solar system—its outer planets, the Moon, the Earth, and light itself—appeared during the seventeenth century. They contributed to a new universal framework linking physics, politics, visual culture, and race, within which the first lineaments of photocinema began to combine. The telescope’s arrival in the early 1600s was a catalyst, obviously improving upon older astronomical instruments but also profoundly altering the texture and reach of visualization.1 Since that apparatus is found at every stage in the development of photography and cinema down to Camille Flammarion’s 1867 telechronoscope, we will regard it as a prototype for the entire matrix. However, a careful archaeology of the instrument complicates its paradigmatic role in the “scientific revolution.”

First, there was never such a thing as the telescope. Optician Hans Lippershey built the first models in the fall of 1608 in The Hague, but various apparatuses were then quickly put together by others in France, Italy, and England. Bearing different names attesting to different uses and conceptual framing (“spyglass,” “perspective cylinder,” “lunettes,” “occhiale,” etc.), they came in both monocular and binocular configurations. While synonymous with astronomy, their initial application was in fact battlefield weaponry. We know this from an anonymous pamphlet in French that describes Lippershey offering his new device to Maurice of Nassau, the leader of Dutch states in rebellion against their Spanish occupiers. With these “field-glasses [lunettes],” the pamphlet states, “we can distinctly [distinctement] discover and see things distant from three or four leagues, as if we saw them a hundred yards from us.”2 Applications for reconnaissance and sharpshooting were instantly recognized by the warring parties, and both Maurice’s brother Henry and the Spanish general Ambrogio di Filippo Spinola offered to pay Lippershey not to divulge his new technology.3 The pamphleteer muses in passing that telescopes could magnify “even stars.” About a year later, Galileo pointed his three-foot-long wooden tube with two lenses toward Jupiter, discerning four orbiting blobs that he concluded were moons. Only eight celestial bodies were then known in the solar system—Earth, the Sun and Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. The telescope increased that number by a whopping 50 percent. More importantly, because these four celestial bodies did not orbit Earth, their discovery challenged the Church’s geocentric orthodoxy.

Historians of the telescope have paid little attention to this military context and disregarded the other two-thirds of the pamphlet that concerns lavish gifts Maurice received from two ambassadors from Siam. The latter are portrayed as “of a brown color, the nose pushed in, with thick hair black and coarse like a horse-mane,” while “their language is very barbarous & very difficult to interpret, & letters are all the same: words are not distinct [distinguez]” (Ambassades du Roy de Siam, 11). This last word discloses the tacit logic of the pamphlet. Precisely what the racialized and animalized envoys lack—distinguishability—becomes the new power the telescope provides to white Europeans: enhanced optical distinction. Signaling Holland’s ramped-up ambitions among colonial powers, the pamphlet is a geopolitical and racial declaration.4 As is well established, European governments from the seventeenth century onward funded astronomical research to foster the global navigation technology requisite for intercontinental commerce, colonization, and the trading of enslaved peoples.5 Astronomy was never disinterested. The following vignette from an eighteenth-century play bears this point: “Are you not dispatched, said John the Black, to observe the Transit of Venus?—Pray God, answered the Captain, I carry out upon the coast of Africa both below and above the line, the trade of Negroes, which is much more interesting & lucrative than all your astronomical observations.”6 “Interesting [intéressant]” is to be read here as synonymous not with “knowledge-seeking” but with “interest-bearing.” Massive slaving enterprises kept European states afloat and a number of Enlightenment thinkers solvent.7

This stark polyvalence of astronomy and telescopes did not go unnoticed. In 1617, Peter Paul Rubens worked with Jan Bruegel the Elder on The Allegory of Sight, featuring among the earliest depictions of telescopes.8 Rubens was a close friend of Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, who purchased a telescope in 1610 and corresponded with Galileo. In the painting, two such instruments lay amid Holland’s colonial panoply: a compass, coins, a ship painting, and two capuchin monkeys with poor eyesight and tacit exotic and racial overtones. At the left edge of the canvas lies a confounding exhibit: the sculpted head of a Black “Moor,” mouth frozen in a shout, surrounded by sharp-edged astronomical instruments looking like tools of torture. Among the few premodern European artists to depict a Black person with keen dignity (Four Studies of a Head of a Moor, 1614–1616), Rubens took for granted the telescope’s entwinement with colonial and slaving enterprises.

The Camera Obscura and Telescope Setup: Motion, Visualization, Illustration

Telescopes were not the first astronomical instrument with a lens; the camera obscura was. Likely developed in China and mentioned in the thirteenth century by Ibn al-Haytham and Roger Bacon, the camera obscura rendered visible astronomical phenomena hitherto unwatchable with the naked eye—solar eclipses. The earliest known illustration dates from 1544 and shows a solar eclipse with the Moon in “blackface.”9 In 1567, Venetian astronomer and architect Daniele Barbaro designed a camera obscura equipped with a convex lens.10 Johannes Kepler built a similar device in 1607 to observe a transit of Mercury across the Sun, and Lippershey may have gotten wind of it.11

By the 1630s, telescopes were routinely combined with camera obscuras to form a projection device that proves critical for media prehistory because it inaugurated an objective and automatic regime of mediated vision (I return to this key topic shortly). As a historian of premodern optics puts it: “The use of the camera obscura for solar observation is thus an important, and long-standing precedent to telescopic astronomy, and the publicly visible projected image, as a source of astronomical knowledge, precedes the privately discernible telescopic image. Small wonder, then, that both Scheiner and Galileo would use the telescope to project images of the sun onto a screen, to observe the movements of sunspots.”12 The magnified image of the Moon, the Sun, or its spots spontaneously moving on a screen in the dark represents an underappreciated precedent for projected cinema, especially since it brought attention to “continuous motion [mouvement continu]” in optics.13 It also heightened the telescope’s sense of projected telepresence, which instrument designer Johann Zahn, who devised the first portable camera obscura, called “teledioptricus,” lensed observation at a distance.14 This dynamic aspect of celestial phenomena dovetailed with new objects and concepts such as that of trajectory, a word coined for comets in the 1660s. Comets’ eccentric orbits in turn confirmed heliocentrism and were crucial to Isaac Newton’s modeling of universal gravitation.15 Late Renaissance astronomical handbooks trained students to “transform representations of specific heavenly phenomena into moving mental images of the structure of the cosmos,” like Tycho Brahe’s infamous epicycles.16 But such images were merely of captive or cyclic motion, as in armillary spheres.17 Continuous visual motion phenomena tracked by camera-obscura-telescope setups, such as drifting sunspots and arching trajectories, acculturated seventeenth-century vision to three-dimensional time-lapse and plastic deformation. They were the first kinemorphic objects attended to as such.

Camera-obscura-telescope observations also helped transform practices of visual record. Trigonometric coordinates with textual descriptions were increasingly complemented with sketches, diagrams, trajectories, multiphases, and finely rendered illustrations by the mid-seventeenth century. A signal issue was how to reconcile multiple and disparate observations of an object or phenomenon into a single image disclosing its contours and structure. Omar W. Nasim documents how, by the mid-eighteenth century, astronomers engaged in skillful composite picturing, crafting “working images” through a serial process of drafts, touch-ups, collation, and synthesis. The resulting images were not mimetic copies but synthetic visualizations of what the object ought to look like.18 Behind their apparent stasis, such images concealed visual continua and mitigated observational discontinuities. Astronomers like Christoph Scheiner and later Johann Heinrich Lambert symptomatically developed scalar devices called pantographs that replicated a line drawing at a larger scale. Telescopic observations, camera obscuras, composite illustrations, and early reprographics technics were thus coextensive.19 Such assemblages, I claim, represent early and recognizable iterations of the matrix of photocinema.

A case in point is Athanasius Kircher’s 1646 Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, which is especially pertinent since Laurent Mannoni borrowed its title for his own 1981 study The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema. Mannoni’s book ambitions to track “the dream of being able to project moving illuminated images” across four centuries of sources, ranging from optics and philosophical toys to spectacles of magic. It emphasizes visual pleasure, wonder, philosophical toys, and illusion (Mannoni, Great Art of Light and Shadow, xvi). Mannoni describes Kircher’s opus thus: “With its 935 folio pages, thirty-six engraved plates and over 500 drawings, Kircher’s work is certainly one of the best optical compendia of the seventeenth century. All aspects of catoptrics and dioptrics are dealt with: light, shadow, illusions, colours, refraction, reflection, projection, distortion, mirrors, lenses, and so on. It also discusses astronomy: the sun, the stars, the moon, comets, and eclipses” (21). This account is rather misleading, since the ten parts of Kircher’s book respectively address light, optical science, astronomy, astrology, horology, projective geometry, gnomons, cartography and comparative ephemeris, geodesy, and telescopes. His book thus represents a systematic program of investigation of how light and vision properly understood through projective geometry disclose the three-dimensional structure of the visible macrocosm.20

A Jesuit from Germany, Kircher is legendary for his automatons, firework displays, and polymath interests in Egyptian hieroglyphs, China, music, and volcanoes. Both Siegfried Zielinski and Mannoni consider him a subversive parascientific bricoleur who complicates linear models of media history.21 However, astronomy and cosmology were Kircher’s main concerns. He held the prestigious chair of mathematics at the Rome Collegium, counting René Descartes and Christiaan Huygens among interlocutors. In Avignon, France, he built a planetarium with mirrors projecting the light of the Sun and Moon and the exact time at various locations around the globe: an early cosmorama. He also collated accounts of comets and meteors, becoming the “acknowledged if unofficial clearinghouse for all eclipse sightings.”22 According to a recent biographer, his covert activity in spreading Copernican astronomy remains underacknowledged.23 Even the last part of Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, titled “Magia [magic],” concerns telescopes, parabolic mirrors, and their combination with camera obscuras under the label of “helioscopes.”24 Mannoni mentions neologisms by Kircher but omits the determinant coinage: photosophia (Kircheri, Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, 17). This word denotes wisdom from light as a divine principle, through light via observation and visualization, and about light as a still enigmatic element. It is the first compound with the prefix photo-. Subsequently, Lambert coined the term photometria in 1760, while John Herschel crafted the words photology (1827) for research on light and photography in 1840. The lexical continuum in light inquiries from wise knowledge (-sophy), to quantification (-metria), discipline (-logy), and finally imaging (-graphy) outlines the broad arc of astronomy’s shaping of the matrix of photocinema. Yet the prefix photo- also conceals a deeply racialized subtext in visualizing the universe and understanding light.

On the Origin of Species

In a later work of 1664 (The Subterranean World), Kircher examines the formation of all being. He invokes a hypothetical divine seed made of “salino-sulfuro-mercurial vapor” and endowing through “plastic power [virtus plastica]” its specific shape, color, and characteristics to each mineral, plant, and animal.25 To explain how a single seed can contain so many forms, Kircher defers to the camera obscura through whose pinhole all parts of a landscape and all “species” of light pass through before recomposing a detailed colored image on screen (Hirai, “Kircher’s Chymical Interpretation,” 83). Kircher’s conjecture shows that the problem of the generation of living species intersected with the epistemology of light. This conceptual intersection was also lexical, through the Latin word species from the verb specere (“to look”). Since at least Saint Augustine (fourth century CE), species denoted various aspects of the transmission of verisimilitude from light in the world to the eyes and the brain. Well into the eighteenth century, the term conflated images, reflections, refractions, distortions, colors, impressions, misperceptions, even ideations, whether in the world, the viewer’s mind, or the viewing apparatus. Roger Bacon’s late thirteenth-century treatise De multiplicatione specierum (On the multiplication of species) already debated this plurality of visual information channels.26 Premodern discussions of optical matters still centered the term species.27 The long subtitle of Christoph Scheiner’s 1619 watermark opus The Eye, That Is, the Foundation of Optics includes: “the unseen spectacles of visible species both inverted and upright.”28 A French Copernican author explained in 1627 how the camera obscura produces images “because visible species [espèces visibles] are only perceived in darkness.”29 The developer of the microscope argued in 1675 that “there should be a cavity in the Optic Nerve, through which the Animal Spirits, representing the species of images in the Eye, might pass into the brain.”30 Even in his 1704 Opticks, Isaac Newton still described colors as “Species” while referring to “one entire Species or Picture.”31 Until the physics of light and the physiology of visual perception were better understood in the first half of the nineteenth century, species was the skeleton key unifying light, vision, imaging, and visualization.

For Kircher, species of light and animal species were directly connected because they could be classified only through their aspects (a word coming from "specere" too) and also because light was the divine principle of animation. The biological meaning gradually supplanted its optical precedent, starting with Carolus Linnaeus’s 1753 Species Plantarum (On Plant Species) down to Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859).32 For our purpose, optical and living species relied on the same cognitive model of making visible what cannot be seen, whether it be the hidden mechanisms of light and vision or the long-duration diversification of plants, animals, and humans around the globe. The threaded polysemy of species forms the epistemic substrate against which, for more contextual reasons, racial discourses and astronomy became intertwined along the seventeenth century.

Astronomical Illustration and Visual Motion

One of Kircher’s correspondents and followers was Copernican astronomer Johannes Hevelius of Danzig. In 1647, he published Selenographia, a vanguard review of astronomical technologies aiming to optimize Moon (Selene) recording (-graphia) through both text and images.33 The monograph probes the eye, vision, lenses, telescopes, drawing practices, etching and printing technics, even the composition of astronomy books.34 Selenographia opens with a frontispiece showing Ibn al-Haytham next to Galileo, a rare acknowledgment of astronomy’s non-European sources. It displays forty sequential illustrations of phases of the Moon drawn by Hevelius himself. They are shown waxing from a sliver to full, then back to a sliver. A second series shows another cycle of phases with a different lunar tilt. By focusing on only one section of lunar surface at a time and leaving the dark part blank, Hevelius underscored the ever-shifting appearance of the Moon—from its relative diameter, shadow angles, and the variable size of its overall visible area to its complex motions.35 Our satellite was no longer a flat disk going through a sequence of illuminated sectors but a complexly moving sphere whose appearance was constantly morphing. This is partly why the Moon became a paradigmatic object in the genealogy of photocinema.

The sequential images of the Moon suggest a flipbook (also called a “mutoscope”), a nineteenth-century device in which a sheaf of pages with serial morphing images, when riffled quickly with the thumb, induce a visual motion effect. Although the images scattered through Hevelius’s book render such an application difficult, subsequent works of his—including Cometographia (1668) and Machinae Coelestis (1673)—show sequential illustrations together, inviting readers to visualize for themselves the dynamics of the phenomenon. Indeed, sequential illustrations of phases of a solar eclipse drawn by Hevelius can now be animated into a striking motion picture.36

Animated visualizations and sequential illustration soon produced scientific knowledge of their own. Astronomer Christiaan Huygens, another correspondent of Hevelius, is a case in point. In 1659, he solved the riddle of Saturn’s puzzling changes of appearance. The story is well-known: telescopic observations showed Saturn at different times resembling a circle, an oval, a circle with two symmetrical outside dots, or a jug shape with two handles. Galileo was befuddled. To reconcile the data, Huygens visualized the orbit of Saturn from two parallactic purviews. One shows Saturnian profiles as seen from Earthbound telescopes (outer series) and the other depicts them as seen from a point of view located above the ecliptic (inner series). The irrational sightings of Saturn made sense only when simultaneously viewed and visualized.

After twenty-nine years of observations—a half orbit of Saturn—Huygens’s model was verified. While confirming that Jupiter orbits the Sun, the deeper lesson was that in the new visual culture of heliocentric astronomy, precise pictorial visualization was just as crucial as observation. This troubled the difference in seventeenth-century optics between pictura and imago.37 Pictura as a physical image projected on a screen or the retina was thought qualitatively inferior to imago, its truer mental representation. Huygens’s double series of drawing demonstrated a new and complex symbiosis: visual observation productively enhanced by an unseeable imago, but the latter being in fact a pictura itself: a real, albeit virtual, view.

It was during work on his Saturn pamphlet that Huygens sketched the first known depiction of the magic lantern.38 Below the sketch, he drew ten skeleton figures, four of which display motion blurs (dots) while three others show overlapping arm contours. The four figures enclosed in circular outlines suggest slides sequentially projecting a short tragicomic scene inspired by Hans Holbein the Younger’s Dance of Death engravings: a skeleton taking off its head and putting it back on. Media historians hold Huygens’s magic lantern animation as a protocinematic device, yet they have not connected it to Saturn’s sequential profiles that derive from a common kinemorphic insight. It matters little which came first. The point is that precinematic pictorial animation and astronomical visualization were entangled from the start. Huygens certainly understood the yield of dynamic visualization. In the late 1660s, he went on developing a new theory of light. Rather than made of atomistic corpuscles or instant rays, Huygens envisioned light as a kinemorphic phenomenon: a propagating wave. As chapter 4 will show, reworking Huygen’s model in the early nineteenth century proved instrumental for the emergence of both the wave theory of light and working photography.

Micrographia: Magnification, Objectivity, and Blackness

Few books better instantiate how lensed medias reorganized seventeenth-century relationships between vision, imaging, and the macrocosm than the 1665 Micrographia of Robert Hooke. As it happens, it was one of the explicit sources for Huygens’s wave theory of light.39 We must not be misled by the monograph’s title: It concerns not just the microscopic realm but magnification as such, Hooke’s primary occupation being astronomy.40 His work endeavors to reflect on and document the full scalar range of lensed optics through “Ocular experiments”: “Hence there is a new visible World discovered to the understanding. By this means the Heavens are opened, and a vast number of new Stars, and new Motions, and new Productions appear in them, to which all the ancient Astronomers were Strangers. By this the Earth it self, which lies so near us, under our feet, shows quite a new thing to us, and in every little particle of its matter, we now behold almost as great a variety of Creatures, as we were able to reckon up in the whole Universe it self.”41 Like Kircher, for Hooke the varieties of seeing become coextensive with varieties of the living. In such hermeneutics, empirical observation through “Hands and Eyes”—experiments, drawings, and observations—inform deductions of “Reason” through a “continual passage round from one Faculty to another.” Hooke metaphorizes this hermeneutic circle as blood circulation within the “grand Oeconomy of the Universe” where we can find no “body whose particles are at rest, or lazy and unactive” (Micrographia, vii, 16). The main lesson of magnification is then all at once far-ranging scalability and relentless motion: the words to move and motion figure over three hundred times in Micrographia.

Exemplifying what Lorraine Daston and Peter L. Galison call the “truth-to-nature” creed of early modern illustration, Hooke seeks access to the “true appearance” of objects to transmit to readers their “plain representation” (Hooke, Micrographia, xxiv).42 Hooke is proficient with optical projection devices, including the camera-obscura-telescope assembly, pantographs, and the perspectograph of his friend Christopher Wren. That last device allows an operator looking through an eyepiece to trace the contours of an object in her sight line with a stylus connected to an articulated pencil simultaneously drawing the object downscaled.43 The remarkably three-dimensional rendition of Micrographia’s illustrations belie a combination of lensed observation with mechanically aided drawing. His practice thus also conforms to the imperative of “mechanical objectivity” that Daston and Galison locate mostly in the post-photographic era (Objectivity, 27). Yet, projective apparatuses such as the camera-obscura-telescope assembly and the perspectograph, as well as late seventeenth-century axonometric perspective that mitigates foreshortening to produce “orthographic” drawings, already integrated a form of mechanical objectivity.44 They did so by foregrounding the actual geometrical “apparentia [appearance]” of objects over their seeable “proiectione [projection]” distorted by distance and stereoscopic vision.45

This overlooked early stage of mechanical objectivity produced what human vision cannot see: the parallel rays of the sun (and stars) shaping and shading an object. It is a strange kind of seeing as if from the viewpoint of a celestial object—as in the second series in Huygens’s drawing—that sees objectively (i.e., without the distortions of human vision). The word objectivity stems from this view by the object. It was catalyzed by the French verre objectif (objective glass), which denotes the lens closest to the object, in contrast to the eyepiece, le verre oculaire (ocular glass or eyepiece), closest to the eye.46 In Micrographia, Hooke was among the first to champion the expression “Object-Glass,” and over the following decades parallel light rays were called “objective lines.”47 The tensions between this mode of nonhuman objective seeing and human vision undergirds our reconstruction of photocinema’s origins.48

Hooke tackled this objective seeing through lunar shadows cast by the objective lines of sunlight in order to solve the problem of how to read the three-dimensional structures shadows both reveal and conceal.49 Like Hevelius and Kircher, he was trained in drawing, etching, and printing techniques, in particular perspectival rendering.50 He was particularly interested in shading techniques, leading him to digress about why certain bodies “look black.” Starting from a statement he attributes to Aristotle, “black being nothing else but a privation of light,” Hooke speculates on the microchemical process of light absorption. Invoking Aristotle’s equation of whiteness with water and blackness with fire, he reasons that heat, by “agitating and rarifying the waterish, transparent and volatile water . . . which before filled the pores,” leaves “burnt bodies” empty and “opacous” with “all [light rays] that enter into the pores of the body, never returning, but being lost in it.” While his pragmatic concern is how to interpret shadows seen through his eyepiece, Hooke invokes an implicit racial discourse in which light becomes objectively “lost” in the “pores” of a black “body.” Writer and scientist Margaret Cavendish, for one, saw through Hooke’s racial implications. When he affirmed that in black bodies the “reflective quality is deficient,” Cavendish countered that “black was as much a colour as any other colour,” so that “saying that black is made by want of reflection” is optically nonsensical (Hooke, Micrographia, 101–2).51 In another work, she adds that if Hooke were right, then “a black Moor would have larger Pores than a man of white complexion,” suggesting that both were acutely aware of the slippage between chromatic blackness and racial Blackness.52 Indeed, it was no slippage at all. As suggested by Robert Boyle’s transition from silver nitrate medicine to Black skin, within late seventeenth-century debates at the Royal Society, racial Blackness, optics, and astronomy directly bore on each other from multiple directions, which I unfold in this chapter and the next.53

Hooke explicitly addresses racial Blackness only once in Micrographia, in a tangent that reveals the racial underlayment in much seventeenth- and eighteenth-century speculations about light and the macrocosm. A section titled “On the Wandring Mite” considers microorganisms and tiny insects, collectively called “mites,” that adopt different forms depending on soil and food sources. Hooke postulates that they correspond to bioadaptations of a single nomadic stem species (akin to Kircher’s “plastic seed”). He adds that mites “might leave their off-spring behind them, which by the change of the soil and Country they now inhabit might be quite altered from the hew of their primogenitors, and, like Mores translated into Northern European Climates, after a little time, change both their skin and shape” (Micrographia, 205). Such a flip comment demonstrates the shared currency of the thermometabolic etiology of skin color among his readers, together with the fiction that Black people transplanted to northern climates turn into white people—not just with respect to skin color but also phenotypically (“shape”). Hooke returns to the topic a few paragraphs later: “We find by relations how much the Negro Women do besmeer the of-spring of the Spaniard, bringing forth neither white-skinn’d nor black, but tawny hided Mulattos” (206–7). After alluding to environmentally triggered racial morphism, Hooke contradicts himself with an alternative cause of mutation through mixed parentage, with a doubly racist disparagement of staining (“besmeer”) and animality (“tawny hided”). Earlier, Hooke wrote breezily of “Black, or some dark and dirty colour,” making explicit his subjacent anti-Black prejudice (78). The absence of a reliable theory of reproduction and inheritance of traits makes either of Hooke’s scenarios of racial mutability plausible for the time (Malcolmson, Studies of Skin Color, 43–58, 87–89). Of course, racial mutability was no disinterested matter. It correlated to a rising anxiety in Caribbean plantocracies concerning mixed-race offspring resulting from the sexual exploitation of enslaved women by white planters. Among other things, it troubled the ontological separateness of white people since it invalidated polygenesis—then widely held. My overall point is this: From the moment Micrographia turns to “intermixtures of Black and White” as a matter of pictorial reproduction of the objective world, the stakes of mixed-race reproduction in slaving colonies pop up, framed by anti-Blackness (Hooke, Micrographia, 68).54

Toward the end of his treatise, Hooke turns to the riddle of lunar features seen in telescopes. Are they convex mountains or concave craters? The optical and chromatic challenge “to distinguish between a prominency and a depression, between a shadow and a black stain, or a reflection and a whiteness in the colour” again evinces the racist register of reflection and staining, as well as the rhetoric of distinction from the 1608 pamphlet on the telescope (Hooke, Micrographia, xxiv). To assay 3D lunar reliefs, Hooke experimented with boiling alabaster, concluding that lunar reliefs must be volcanic craters. This led him to muse that “could we look upon the Earth from the Moon, with a good Telescope, we might easily enough perceive its surface to be very much like that of the Moon” (246).

This statement is rather puzzling. Our planet was thought already to look bluish from space, quite unlike the silver-yellow Moon, even though astronomers of the time took for granted—some even observed—the presence of seas, mountains, and forests on our satellite. While Hooke emphasized the resemblance between Earth and Moon, recognizing, for instance, that the latter is held together by gravitation like the former, he also noted that the Moon is “only secondary, or attendant, on the bigger, and more considerable body of the Earth” (Hooke, Micrographia, 244). The question I will follow in the next sections is the extent to which Hooke’s objective pictorial query about chromatic blackness veering to racial Blackness might connect to the widespread interrogation about the resemblance between Earth and the Moon, its subaltern (“attendant”), and thus about the resemblance between humans and Selenites. At stake, then, is the inherence of racial thought within seventeenth-century astronomical visualizations that, I contend, shaped the conceptual and visual culture of photocinema.

The Lunar Theater of Race

The genre of space travel dating back to the “Dream of Scipio,” a vision of the celestial spheres written by Cicero in North Africa, was relaunched in 1541 by Juan Maldonado’s Somnium. It narrates a dream journey to a city on the Moon whose inhabitants rule by Erasmian reason. The return journey ends among Mesoamerican Indigenous people embodying Christian principles by natural virtue—an instance of the “good savage” myth in the context of Spanish settler colonialism.55 Indeed, from the 1620s onward, hypothetical travel to the Moon was expressly envisaged as a colonial project.56 Johannes Kepler likely knew Maldonado’s work when he sketched his own Somnium in the 1590s (it was published posthumously in 1634)—a similar dream travel journey to the Moon, but with the didactic aim of undoing geocentric orthodoxy. Kepler’s frame story concerns an Icelandic boy kidnapped by demons from the dark side of the Moon.57 Its visible side is peopled by naive creatures taking Earth as their satellite, which they call “Volva” since they see it rotating.58 Denizens of the dark side are monstrous crawling creatures. On the visible side constantly flooded by sunlight, Kepler construes Lunarians as comparable to “Africans” who “expose themselves naked to the sun.” In a 1605 letter he opined that “Africans are akin to reptiles in nature,” as solarization makes their skin purportedly thicker than that of white people.59 While the bulk of Kepler’s text consists of an astronomical mind experiment, the pointed association of Lunarians with Africans is highly significant. It shows that to probe the living conditions of celestial bodies, European thinkers leveraged their own prejudiced views of racialized peoples. Hooke’s Micrographia and Kepler’s Somnium refract race in the same tangent yet structural way. Raz Chen-Morris notes that to encourage his readers to flip their geocentric perspective, Kepler construed “the treatise itself as a camera obscura,” projecting “an inverted picture of the terrestrial world view.”60 The depiction of Africanized Lunarians plays, to my mind, a congruent didactic role in evincing among white readers an inverted picture of the Moon as a Black world.61 The camera obscura, forming the core of Kepler’s celebrated theory of vision and imagery, thus comes with its own racial lens.

The emergence of heliocentrism in the first half of the seventeenth century gave a boost to the old hypothesis of the plurality of worlds, according to which celestial bodies must be inhabited like Earth. Both Kircher and Huygens wrote treatises on the topic. Now that our globe was but a planet among others, human exceptionality as divinely elected was put in doubt. This occurred at a historical hinge when encounters with Indigenous Peoples of the New World and East Asia upset the Bible’s human classifications, and thus white exceptionalism, just as the latter was boosted by colonial appropriation and the trade of enslaved Africans. The relativization of whiteness concurrent with and compensated by its global hegemony informed what we may call astro-racialization: race-inflected conjectures about the makeup of extraterrestrials.

The first wave of astro-racialization occurred in lunar fictions in the wake of Kepler’s Somnium. What interests me here is how reimagining the heliocentric solar system through travels to a nonhuman community on the Moon entailed foregrounding skin color and enslavement together with prekinemorphic insights. Francis Godwin’s fanciful 1638 bestseller The Man in the Moone is the paradigm. It follows the tribulations of the protagonist-narrator Domingo Gonsales, a Spaniard returning to Europe after reaping wealth from the East Indies. Having fallen ill, Gonsales is “set ashore with a Negro” named Diego on Saint Helena Island in the mid-Atlantic.62 Uninhabited until the 1500s, the island became a port of call for slaving ships coming from the Gulf of Guinea. By Godwin’s time, it was a notorious haven for maroons, fugitives from slavery, and enslaved persons summarily discarded because of illness or insubordination.63 Godwin did not choose it randomly. Gonsales mentions an attack from “a Savage kind of people” whom he calls “slaves” (Godwin, Man in the Moone, 85). While the narrative suggests that Diego is Gonsales’s enslaved manservant, Gonsales describes him only as a “Blackmoore” who, “though hee were a fellow of good parts, was ever content to be ruled by me” (76–77). Before even launching on space travel, the narrative alludes to the geography of the slave trade and invokes the most perverse figment of slavery: willing subservience and beneficent enslavers.64

Godwin splits the two protagonists on Saint Helena to expound on a pet idea: telegraphic systems.65 Like the telescope, his telegraph reinforces racial distinction, and indeed Diego soon vanishes from the narrative. Gonsales’s telegraph consists in a flock of domesticated wild geese bearing messages, and they are repurposed for aerial locomotion to the Moon. Gaining altitude, he ponders on the similarity of the two celestial bodies, seeing Earth “like another Moon” and it like “another Earth,” observing: “a Spot like a Pear, with a Morsel bit out on one side. . . . This is no doubt the mainland of Africke. . . . After this succeeded a Spot almost Oval, just as we see America described in our Maps . . . so that it seemed to me no other than a huge mathematical Globe turned around leisurely before me, wherein successively all the Countries of our earthly World were within twenty-four hours represented to my View” (Godwin, Man in the Moone [1640], 95–96). With partly consumed Africa as starting point, the tale revels in the rotation of Earth unfolding a cinematic spectacle that instantiates the paradigmatic formula of all precinema insights: an automatic spectacle “successively . . . represented to . . . View.” Reaching the Moon, Gonsales makes out its “very body” with “his natural colours,” contrasting with Earth’s “lurid and deadly colour of blue” (97). The anthropomorphizing of celestial bodies, doubled with an insistence on surface differences, makes way to overt racialization. The Lunarians Gonsales soon meets are described as having a “colour and countenance most pleasing,” which is “neither blacke, nor white, yellow nor red, green nor blew, nor any colour composed of them. . . . Neither can I decipher this Moon-Colour . . . a colour never seen in our earthly world, and therefore neither to be described unto us by any nor to be conceived of one that has never seen it” (100). While Lunarians’ “never seen” skin color seemingly transcends human races, note that black and white top the antiphrastic list. Godwin’s sketch of a colorblind utopic Lunarian society conceals a dirty secret: They maintain an egalitarian system through eugenics. They get rid of “children . . . who are like to be of a wicked and debauched Humour” and “send them, I know not by what Means, into the Earth, and change them for other Children.” These lunar changelings are kept in limbo “till that the ayre of the Earth may alter their colour to be like unto ours,” Gonsales stipulates. The substitutions occur mostly “in the North of America, whose People . . . are wholly descended from [Lunarians], both in regard of their Colour, and their continued use of Tobacco.” Occasionally, Lunarians “mistake their aime” and the children land in “Christendome, Asia, or Affricke,” explaining perhaps the puzzle of mixed-race children (111–13).

Beneath its exoticization of Native Americans as extraterrestrials, the narrative proposes a sophisticated model of racial latency. While Earth’s “ayre” precipitates racial traits according to the thermometabolic model, on the Moon Lunarians remain neuters (literally, “neither nor”) incarnating the zero degree of race and inviting readers to rethink racial classification. Lunarian language too is primeval, comprising but a few words that “signifie divers and several things, and they are distinguished onely by their tunes that are as it were sung” (Godwin, Man in the Moone, 108). Like the Siamese ambassadors’ language, Lunarian speech is nigh indistinguishable, forming the zero degree of linguistic articulation: music. What is determinant for our purpose is that Godwin rethinks racial etiology from a neutral skin substrate that precipitates into various skin colors. Through the rhetoric of latency, exposure, development, and fixation that belongs to photochemistry, skin figures as filmstock from the perspective of Kepler’s camera obscura of the Moon. Indeed, it is most likely that Godwin, like Boyle, was aware that silver nitrate darkens light skin. Either way, his fiction converges with Kircher’s plastic seed and Hooke’s mites in similarly retheorizing the origin of species from a photosophic perspective with pre-photographic features.

Translated into French in 1648, Godwin’s tale was sent up by libertine writer Cyrano de Bergerac in The Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon (1656). Cyrano’s tale opens on a French protagonist and narrator strapped with bottles of dew as he ascends the atmosphere, discovering anew that “the Moon is a world like this one to which ours serves as Moon.”66 When the ascent fails, he tumbles down among unclothed people, meeting an “olive-colored old man” whose language sounds like “the hoarse chirping of a deaf man” (Cyrano, Histoire comique, 9). Convinced he is on the Moon, the protagonist has in reality landed in Canada—then called “New France”—again associating First Nations peoples with extraterrestrials. A second try with fireworks succeeds and he reaches the hinge point between Earth and Moon where gravitation reverses: “I suddenly saw myself flipping heels over head without having fallen over in any way—and scarcely would I have noticed had not my head felt the load of my body” (27–28). This flipping viewpoint embodies the inversion of Kepler’s didactic camera obscura in Somnium.

Cyrano’s tale is a satire staging upheavals of gender and race. Brought to the Lunar Queen, the Frenchman is deemed “the female” of a caged “monkey” who turns out to be a male Spaniard. The Queen wants them to breed “the race [la race] of these small animals” (Cyrano, Histoire comique, 75, 93). So, we have a female Lunarian attempting to breed two males from colonial empires to breed monkeys. Cyrano holds up a sarcastic mirror to Europe, parroting claims by state-sponsored slave-trading companies that their noble enterprise means to enhance the “dignity of our nation on behalf of whom the Universe produces men only to give us slaves” (74). When the protagonist learns Lunarian language, a law is passed to remind Lunarians (in the protagonist’s voice) that “it is forbidden to believe that I possess reason,” showing how racism begets concepts and law. Enticed female Lunarians are warned to resist impulses of “mixing with beasts & shamelessly committing with me sins against nature,” a prohibition conflating miscegenation and same-sex desire, since the protagonist is identified as female by the Lunarians (97, 107).

The protagonist is guided on the Moon by a mysterious spirit who reincarnates Socrates’s demon and the transmigrated souls of philosophers like Pierre Gassendi—Cyrano’s real-life teacher (Cyrano, Histoire comique, 30). The guide is an incorporeal inhabitant of the Sun who adopts the guise of a human body by using compressed air (55). This part of the satire comprises long disquisitions by the Sun-spirit on Lucretian atomism, while couching Lunar culture as a photonegative of European mores. The tale closes when the Sun-spirit gifts two boxed books to the narrator. One looks like a diamond and contains maxims of paradoxical solar philosophy such as “that white is black & that black is white,” parenthetically undoing the color line (164). The second book looks like a large pearl and comes with a twist: “Upon opening the box I found something made of metal, akin to our clocks, full of little springs: it is indeed a book, but a miraculous book without pages or characters; a book for whose learning eyes are useless, only ears are required. When someone wants to read, they power the machine by tightening numerous strings [nerfs] then turn the needle on the chapter they want to hear and instantly there resounds as if out of a human mouth or musical instrument all the distinct [distincts] and different sounds which great Lunarians use to express language” (166).67 Well-versed in physics, astronomy, and the arts through his mentor Gassendi, Cyrano was acquainted with the gamut of new portable devices (thermometers, barometers, pantographs, compasses, squares, telescopes, air pumps, etc.) that were the hallmark of mid-seventeenth-century instrumentalization.68 His audiobook is certainly among the first portable audiovisual media to be imagined and technologically visualized. Young Lunarians walk around with “thirty” of these attached to their belts in lieu of attending school (167). Granting Lunarians learning and their language distinction, Cyrano adds in the voice of the white protagonist regaining Earth, “Already I could distinguish [distinguois] Europe from Africa,” as if restoring the ontological distinction enabling slavery (188). The distinction axis remains ever-present when it comes to assessing the languages—and minds—of racialized peoples teleported to the Moon. It unites the telescope, Godwin’s telegraph and proto-photographic theory of skin color, and Cyrano’s portable media.69

Anti-Blackness in Popular Cosmology

Bernard Le Bovier, sieur de Fontenelle’s 1686 blockbuster Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) expanded astro-racialization to the entire solar system and made it unapologetically racist. Plagiarizing the work of Gassendi and François Bernier, Entretiens was a watershed in astronomical vulgarization and visualization.70 Below I examine how Fontenelle translates astronomical didacticism into advanced animated visualization while embedding racist discourses into late seventeenth-century popular cosmology.

The book comprises five conversations between the Marquise de G., curious about celestial matters, and a male narrator expert in astronomy—transparently Fontenelle—tasking himself with “ordering without confusion vortices and worlds in her head” (Fontenelle, Entretiens, ix). This theoretical insemination takes, since the Marquise confesses on the penultimate page, “I have in my head the whole system of the universe!” (358).71 To properly reproduce the cosmos in her head, the narrator trains her in “pure imagination,” ridding her of misconceptions like “Indian” cosmogony’s stack of giant elephants (45, 62). Proper visualization of the macrocosm shows its civilizational cards. The Marquise becomes proficient enough to envision herself free-floating in space but is then overtaken by vertigo. The astronomer instructs her on how to develop her cinematic capability: “Sometimes for instance I figure myself suspended in the air & staying there motionless while the Earth turns under me in twenty-four hours, & I see passing under my eyes all these different faces [visages différents], some white, others black, others dark, others olive-skinned, and I see first hats & then Turbans then hairy & shaven Heads, here Cities with belfries, there Cities with long needles and Crescents, here Cities with Porcelain Towers, there large Countries with only Huts; here vast seas, there awful deserts; in short, this infinite variety that is upon the Earth’s surface” (69–70). The objective spectacle of rotating Earth visualized from orbit rehearses lunar journeys. But here, Fontenelle combines kinemorphic visualization with the rotational unfolding of earthly geographical, racial, and cultural diversity. The Marquise interprets his visualization as ethical and cosmopolitical interchangeability: “Hence in this very location where we are now, not in this park per se but in this location from an airborne purview [à le prendre dans l’air], other people have continuously gone through, taking our place, and after twenty-four hours we come back to it” (73). She also quips that it would be “quite pleasing” to have “the freedom to hasten or stop the motion of the Earth,” a striking adumbration of cinema’s accelerated motion and freeze-frame (76).

As the advertised topic of the Entretiens arises—inhabitants on other planets—Fontenelle leverages astro-racialization with unabashed prejudice: “I do not think that there are Men on the Moon. See how the face [face] of nature changes between here and China: other miens [visages], other figures, other mores, & almost other principles of reasoning. From here to the Moon the change must be much more considerable. When one goes to certain newly discovered lands, the inhabitants one finds are scarcely Men—they are animals with a human figure still rather imperfect but almost without human reason. Whoever could reach the Moon, surely they would no longer find Men there” (Fontenelle, Entretiens, 135). Fontenelle’s radical racial distinction echoes Sylvia Wynter’s diagnostic that white Europeans monopolized the term Man, rejecting nonwhite people to indistinct subaltern “humanity.”72 Fontenelle occasionally brackets his racism, remarking that the “faces” of “Europeans” and “Africans” follow “two particular models” but form nonetheless “a small family, in which all faces look alike” from the purview of cosmic speciation (210). This monogenic purview remains nonetheless racist and colonial, describing Mercurians as possessing “no more memory than most negroes, who never reflect on anything, act only by self-interest and with sudden movements” (223). The popularization of astronomical visualization with its protocinematic sensibility was of a piece with the epistemic promotion of anti-Blackness as a universal law not just on Earth but in the whole macrocosm.

The astronomer’s biases were maybe not shared by the real-life friend of Fontenelle on which the Marquise is based.73 After his racist exposé, she concludes: “There is not in men a fixed and determined character; some are like the inhabitants of Mercury, others like those of Saturn, & we are a mix of all the species [espèces] found on other planets” (Fontenelle, Entretiens, 289). That is certainly a subversive reading of the treatise: Humans devolve from universal miscegenation. Fontenelle quickly corrects this multiracial perspective by having her add that since “we” are “on the most temperate planet of the universe, & in one of the most temperate places of that planet,” white peoples are supremely sited, thus supreme. The astronomer assents since from its middle position, Earth can panoptically “see all the other worlds in miniature” (290). The notion of Europe’s central positioning on the globe, away from extremes, correlating with Earth’s congruent central positioning in the solar system was a significant astronomical argument for white supremacy. Within this analogical framework, while Black and Inuit peoples are associated respectively with Mercury and Saturn, let us note that white people have no counterpart in the solar system. Hence, white people are the only true natives of planet Earth—all other races have cosmic affinities with another planet.

Fontenelle’s racist conjectures acquired the status of scientific truth, especially after he became head of the French Academy of Sciences for forty-three years (1697–1740). The leap from fictional Moon travel to popular astronomy reflects a shift in cosmic visualization and its racial discourses toward universalization. At the same time his opus was published, France and England enacted new legislation regulating the enslaved people in Caribbean plantocracies, which were by then major economic engines for their superpower status. Before the Jamaica Slave Act of 1684 and the infamous Code Noir of 1685, enslaved people were regulated through a medley of local legislations. Fontenelle’s 1686 astro-racialization partook of the same panoptic regulation of the universal macrocosm as Newton’s publications from 1683 to 1685 on gravitation as a universal law.74

Cosmic Anti-Blackness

Before turning to the Ur-tale of photography, let us briefly see how universal astro-racialization migrated to the actual context of enslavement, on the one hand, and astronomy, on the other. In a vignette from 1684 by Thomas Tryon, an enslaver turned critic of slavery, an enslaved African man in Jamaica poses a rhetorical question to his enslaver:75

Casting my Eyes to that glorious Eye of Heaven, which (they say) at one view beholds half the World . . . I had a thousand different Notions offered themselves to my Mind, and amongst the rest, I was thinking, what if the Sun should forget to Rise to morrow Morning, whether your Man, (our Over-seer) would make him get up, as he does us, by blowing his Horn? Or else how we should do to work in the Dark? Or if the Sea should swell a little higher, and wash the tops of your Sugar-Canes, I might not then lawfully swim Home to my own Country, without being beaten to a Jelly for a Run-away?76

This complex oration—which Tryon may have heard directly from an enslaved person—pits optics and the desperate dream of magical return to Africa against celestial mechanics. Acting like a magic lantern, the Sun projects into the narrator’s mind a scenario of resistance whereby it refuses to shine on the plantation, sabotaging its forcible labor. In a complementary scenario, the Moon joins the revolt with a catastrophic tide enabling the narrator to rejoin Africa, eluding the vicious corporeal punishments listed ad nauseam in the new slave codes. The analogy hinges on the word lawfully, in that the Sun and Moon would be in the right to cause malfunctions in the laws of celestial mechanics on behalf of a higher justice. The stark moral of the tale, of course, is that no such ethical miracle ever takes place on the plantation—any more than in the heavens. Both are subject to unbreakable laws of force relations. No amount of solar projection or visualization can undo slave cosmology (even though emancipation ultimately resulted from envisioning such unthinkable scripts).

A contemporary book from 1690 shows, conversely, how arcane debates about universal cosmological laws evince race. A polemical fiction by anti-Cartesian Jesuit historian Gabriel Daniel, A Voyage to the World of Descartes sends the eponymous philosopher’s soul on a cosmic journey to illustrate the shortcomings of the Cartesian theory of the cosmos and body-mind dualism. During the soul’s absence, the body of Descartes is placed under the care of the soul of “a little negro [un petit nègre],” tersely stereotyped as “not a devil so much as black.”77 The fictional assistant of a real-life nemesis of Descartes (Henricus Regius from the University of Utrecht), the unnamed youth’s scientific expertise is disparaged with another negative: “While a Negro, he is far from a fool [sot]” (Daniel, Voyage du monde de Descartes, 50–51). How the young man died attests to deep anti-Blackness: Two policemen (Dutch, it is assumed) found him asleep near the site of a rape and, extrajudicially, “instantly hung [him] to a tree” (47).

Daniel’s intent in connecting Descartes to lynching is unclear. As Justin E. H. Smith points out, Cartesian dualism precludes the soul being racialized, so Daniel might be obliquely critiquing slavery.78 More likely, however, Daniel ridicules such antiracist dualism through the obviously absurd exchangeability of Descartes’s soul for that of a criminalized Black youth. After touring the dysfunctional Cartesian cosmos—in which Daniel demonstrates that vision and motion are equally preempted—Descartes’s soul returns to its body. But the Black youth’s soul refuses to leave it while claiming credit for having “rectified [Descartes’s] ideas” (Daniel, Voyage du monde de Descartes, 246). Failing to resolve the cohabitation of these two souls in one white body, the narrative ends without another mention of the youth. Black subjectivity and agency—like Diego’s in Godwin’s fiction—become dispensable rhetorical ornaments.

We find a similarly callous juxtaposition of cosmology with expendable Black life in a work of Aphra Behn. The same year she published Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave (1688) celebrating the leader of a rebellion of enslaved people in Suriname, Behn translated Fontenelle’s bestseller.79 In her translator’s introduction, she tries toning down Fontenelle’s racism but dutifully renders the egregious passages cited. In 1687, Behn adapted a French farce, Emperor of the Moon, which culminates in a pageant not found in the original, with the following directions: “The Scene in the Front draws off, and shews the Hill of Parnassus; a noble large Walk of Trees leading to it, with eight or ten Negroes upon Pedestals, rang’d on each side of the Walks. Next Keplair and Gallileus descend on each side, opposite to each other, in Chariots, with Perspectives in their Hands, as viewing the Machine of the Zodiack. Soft Musick plays still.”80 While the play satirizes colonial enrichment schemes, this scene serves no purpose in the plot. Other, that is, than reifying Black persons as garden ornaments adorning Galileo and Newton, the new gods of the scientific revolution, brandishing their telescopes (“Perspectives”) as scepters of white universalism.81

From Universal Anti-Blackness to Proto-Photography

It is against this same backdrop of anti-Black rhetorical ornamentation that we find what historians point to as the earliest reference to photography, from 1690. Its author is archbishop François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon, a theologian and writer, and the tutor to the French dauphin (Louis XV). Titled “A Purported Journey,” the tale depicts an island in the Red Sea reached after a trip from Marseille through Egypt. On the island, the air is always scented and the temperature ideal, sounds are melodious, and, made of chocolate, the ground is “black”: “There was no painter in the land, but when one sought to make the portrait of a friend, a beautiful landscape, or a picture [tableau] representing some other object, one would pour water in large gold or silver basins, then place this water opposite the object to be painted. Soon, the water froze, turning into a mirror surface in which the image of that object was indelible.”82 Photography historians consider this the earliest origin of the dream of photography. But again, they disregard the rest of the tale, especially its intent. Fénelon adds that older men on the island go into a cave whence they emerged “blond” with their “wrinkles erased” and that to avoid intellectual labor, islanders “imported slaves from foreign countries and had them think for them” (Fénelon, Oeuvres, 4:572–73). The intent is clearly the same anti-Black pejoration as in Daniel or Behn. The story is not at all about utopia but rather about the toxicity of dreams. It is a cautionary tale against wish fulfillment eclipsing Christian virtue. The desires described—plenty, youth, thinking enslaved people, and fixed images—are poisonous to the faithful because they are against nature. The pointed location of the black-soil island between Asia and “Africa, where there are so many monsters,” evinces all at once Islam, teratology, and Blackness (573). Archbishop Fénelon did not intuit photography at all: The basins’ horizontal surface could capture only Narcissus’s face—perhaps that is Fénelon’s point.83 This allegory makes the automatic reproduction of visual reality a theological and epistemic aberration comparable only to the possibility of Black agency and cogency. “A Purported Journey” is antiphotographic to the exact extent that it is anti-Black.

In prior heroic accounts of the scientific revolution and seventeenth-century media prehistory alike, disinterested thinkers using innovative scientific instruments effected a paradigm shift to uncover new truths (heliocentrism) and enact age-old dreams (copying human vision in fixed pictures). This chapter shows that military and colonial prospects, as well as the yield of human enslavement and concomitant anti-Blackness, inhered to and generalized within post-Copernican visualizations of the cosmos through the multiple world hypothesis. Old apparatuses like the camera obscura and new technologies of automatic visual objectivity were catalysts with telescopes in a slow shift in visual practices toward serial and synthetic visualizations of the visible world, with features of kinemorphosis present in Moon travel tales. Proto-photographic ideas were also present, notably by invoking chemical exposure followed by the slow development of a latent substrate into a fixed visual expression: skin color (Godwin). These precinematic and pre-photographic ideas had nothing yet to do with making pictural copies of visual reality. Instead, they dealt with organizing the global terrestrial polity by locating and controlling the mechanisms of skin color and racial difference to shore up colonization and slavery.