SESSION: Materiality of the Unseen in the Long Nineteenth Century
The nineteenth century has often been called the “frenzy of the visible” as new theories, technologies, and artistic practices attempted to visualize the previously unseen. Motivated by a greater interest in invisible, hidden, and out-of-reach phenomena such as the climate, the non-visual senses, areas of the globe or cosmos that were generally untraversable, or health-related subjects, artists and makers experimented with ways of visualising such topics for both specialist and general audiences. While photo-histories have played a large role in cementing the “frenzy” narrative, this panel seeks to look beyond telling narratives of augmented sight that are limited solely to photography. Instead, we ask: what was considered unseen, and how was it made material? If something is materialized, is it necessarily made visible?
By focusing on materiality, this panel investigates the limitations and possibilities of the sense of touch in the nineteenth century, alongside those of sight. “To make material” in addition to “to make visible” means to centre other encounters with objects, concepts and phenomena of the period, including surfacing ethical implications. In other words, what were the ethical considerations of making previously obscured phenomena tangible and touchable? Possible papers may include: relationships with social stigmas or conventions of revealing something unseen; transmission or circulation of images of the invisible; processes or materiality of visualization of invisible phenomena; the balance between aesthetics and social function; or the reification of social concepts through material means. This panel is interested in proposals that span geographies and media throughout the long nineteenth century.
Session Convenors:
Jennifer Marine, University of Virginia
Rosalind Hayes, Durham University
Session Speakers:
Richard Taws, University College London
Epistolary Drift: Underwater Post and the Siege of Paris
In 1870-1871, during the Siege of Paris, several ways to communicate into the city were developed. Famously, these included messages sent by pigeon and by balloon. Less well known are attempts to send letters underwater into the besieged city. Letters were encased in specially constructed zinc spheres—known as boules de Moulins—which were dropped into the Seine. The hope was that the river’s stream would carry them into Paris, where they might be retrieved. The system failed—no boules were found before the end of the Siege and the Paris Commune that followed. Yet, for years later, boules de Moulins were discovered, as far north as the Normandy coast and in the English Channel, disgorging their contents once found: mournful and anxious letters written by those exiled from the city, worried about family and friends. Most boules have not been discovered and are presumably still making their slow passage through France’s waterways. Taking its cue from an enigmatic painting of a boule de Moulins, by Hélène Vonoven, an underwater scene that figures an otherwise invisible subject, this paper will consider how the aleatory migration of these objects might have something to tell us about materiality in times of crisis. I ask how materials—paper, water, and zinc—were central to technologies of communication, memory, and representation in nineteenth-century France, and how, lurking unseen, the subaquatic mail of the boules de Moulins, rendered semi-visible in Vonoven’s work, speaks to forms of latency and endurance as well as failure and obscurity.
Tairan An, ETH Zurich, Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture
Surface Contact: Robert Mallet’s Forensic Seismology
In the aftermath of the 1857 earthquake in South Italy, Irish geophysicist Robert Mallet embarked on an expedition to reconstruct the shock waves. Determined to redefine the earthquake as a purely mechanical phenomenon “within the range of exact science,” he dismissed eyewitness accounts and turned to cracked walls and fallen arches as “objective” traces of seismic motions. By commissioning the French photographers Alphonse Bernoud and Claude Grillet to capture the post-seismic landscape, Mallet produced what became the earliest photographic archive of earthquake destruction. Yet for Mallet, photography entered scientific practice not as a representational tool but as an evidentiary register of the unseen. When converting his field survey into the Great Neapolitan Earthquake of 1857 (1862), he lithographically reproduced his photographs only to overwrite them with analytical lines and vectors. In transcribing destruction from the surface of the earth to that of the page, each photograph performed a kind of environmental forensics, its chemical contact on paper an analogue to the earth’s own impress of force upon the aboveground built world. Drawing upon original archival sources, this study traces how Mallet, in pursuit of an event that by its nature resists immediate visual scrutiny, operated within a research economy fundamentally mediated by contact, from architectural ruination impressed upon photographic paper to the lithographic stone and the printed page. Mallet’s seismological imagination, I argue, reorients mid-nineteenth-century scientific imaging into a tactile, operative field, shifting photography from a prosthesis of sight toward a dense material ecology of layered surfaces.
Sophie Lynch, University of Chicago
Through Glass, Darkly: The Photographic Resolution of Celestial Nebulae
On September 30, 1880, the amateur astronomers Henry Draper and Mary Anna Draper captured the distant light of the Orion nebula on a photographic glass plate for the first time. The introduction of dry plates—glass plates coated with a gelatin emulsion of silver
bromide—significantly expanded the scope of astronomical photography, bringing the recording of indistinct or otherwise invisible celestial objects such as nebulae within reach. Photographic glass plates thus served a crucial function: they materialized and stabilized remote celestial bodies as visible objects of scientific knowledge. Photographs on glass were often prone to surface flaws, and astronomers often pondered whether indistinct effects emerged from actual celestial objects or the limitations of telescopic and
photographic technologies. Today, cracks in the glass photographic plates collapse the distinction between what is seen and how it is seen, revealing astronomical observation to be not only technologically mediated but also inherently partial and contingent—shaped
as much by imperfections and limitations of its instruments and materials as by the phenomena it seeks to capture. While photographic plates could capture nebulae that could not be perceived without telescopic photographic mediation, these visual forms
emerged within a zone of opacity that gave rise to speculation, imagination and the expansion of epistemic possibilities. As this paper argues, what remains beyond the grasp of technological capacities manifests a zone of visual indeterminacy, where what is blurred, unresolved or ambiguous provokes speculative thought and opens onto new epistemic horizons.
Vivienne Roberts, Independent/Freelance
Felt Presences: Women, Art and Mediumship in Britain and America in the Nineteenth Century
Since the emergence of the Modern Spiritualist movement in 1848, art created by mediums has been regarded as evidence of the possibility of communicating with invisible entities. Focusing on pioneering Anglo-American women mediums, this paper explores the felt presences in mediumistic art that reveal how unseen energies were “made material” through touch and feeling rather than sight. It is art that proposes a radical redefinition of artistic perception and spiritual experience within the nineteenth century’s “frenzy of the visible.” The trance-induced or automatic spirit drawings of Georgiana Houghton and Anna Howitt Watts, the “water pictures” of Elizabeth Blanchard, and the precipitated images of Elizabeth French exemplify women who sought to materialise immaterial energies through their clairsentient abilities. Embedded in the interrelated discourses of mesmerism and spiritualism, these works redefined what it meant to “make material” by locating spiritual revelation within embodied experience rather than optical vision. Through the materiality of their bodies and chosen art media, these women reconceived artmaking as a form of spiritual transmission, producing works that rendered invisible forces tangible without necessarily making them visible. Their bodies and art became both vehicles and evidence of spiritual encounter, offering solace, communication, and insight that transcended aesthetic function. This collaborative and embodied practice raises ethical questions about agency, authorship, and the responsibility of giving form to the ordinarily unseen. Imbued with palpability and purpose, it was art that defied the Victorian ideal of domestic decoration, asserting spiritual and creative agency that challenged artistic and gender hierarchies alike.