H.1 In Dark Rooms: The Cave and the Photographic Imaginary
Sat Oct 21 / 15:30 – 17:15 / KC 202
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- Sophie Lynch, University of Chicago
This panel investigates the space of the cave as site, subject, material, and metaphor for the making and viewing of works of photography, film, and media. Bringing together papers, presentations, and performances by scholars and artists working across geographies, mediums, and time periods, the panel interrogates the enclosed and underground space of the cavern as a site of speculative world making. Several scholars and artists have analogized the cave’s obscurity to spaces of cinematic viewing, mined their acoustics for musical performances, or excavated their potential as spaces of revelation or portals to the past or other worlds. Caves have also served as important storage facilities for art, media, and data. How does the secluded space of the cave allow for the re-thinking of questions concerning historical conceptions of the deep time of the earth, the history and present of resource extraction and colonial expansion, and the industrialization of the underground to support life and infrastructure on earth?
keywords: underground, caves, photography, media, geology
session type: panel
Sophie Lynch is a PhD Candidate in At History and Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Chicago studying modern and contemporary art, photography, and film from the late 19th century to the present. Following her interests in historical intersections of bodies and technologies and relations between visual representations and belief, her dissertation considers blurred images in works of photography and film from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She has held curatorial and museum positions at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smart Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Art.
Subterranean Fire: Photography by Artificial Light in the Dark Rooms of the Earth
- Isabelle Lynch, University of Pennsylvania
Artificial light made photography possible in spaces no sunlight reaches, and as early as 1866, photographers seized artificial fire to conquer the depths of darkness and bring forth pictures of the deepest and most remote recesses of caves. How was the desire to manipulate photography’s light—to take charge of releasing a blinding flash of magnesium instead of waiting for the sun—imbricated in ambitions to transcend photography’s entanglement in particular material and environmental relations by envisioning an alternative world unbound from the shackles of the singular sun?
In this paper, I investigate deployments of artificial light to expose, develop, and project photographs and films in the underground passages of Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave between 1866 and 1927. I challenge conceptions of photography and artificial light as new technologies that could illuminate the cave to alternatively emphasize how natural and artificial, and human and nonhuman forces collide to produce images of the cave and shape the very matter of its subterranean space. I emphasize the ways in which Mammoth Cave thwarted ambitious of photographic exposure as the burning flares of magnesium light that illuminated the cave slowly obscured its cavernous spaces, enshrouding and at times suffocating photographers and photographic subjects alike in dense clouds of toxic smoke. Analogizing the space of the cave to the photographic darkroom, I explore Mammoth Cave’s role in the development of images underground and reveal the ways in which the cave’s particular environment stalled photographic development. In this way, I argue that Mammoth Cave played a significant role in generating or foiling its own visibility: the cave’s walls contained and formed the clouds of magnesium smoke that illuminated its interiors and obscured its spaces, its rocks and minerals reflected and refracted the blazing flames of artificial light, and its inky depths provided the darkness necessary for the development of images in the darkrooms of the earth.
keywords: artificial light, darkness, exposure, darkroom, caves
Isabelle Lynch is an art historian, writer, curator, and a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania who studies modern and contemporary art. Her dissertation focuses on the role of artificial light in processes of photographic exposure, development, and projection. Previously, she studied philosophy and art history at the University of Ottawa and McGill University. She is currently living in Chicago, where she teaches art history to art students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She enjoys thinking and working with artists and has worked as a curator and researcher in galleries, museums, and art spaces in the US, Canada, and Iceland. She is an avid explorer of worlds both under and above ground.
Tunnel Vision: Coal and Photography between the Mine and Factory
- Katerina Korola, University of Minnesota – Twin Cities
A photograph of Ruth Hallensleben from the mid-1950s shows the photographer emerging from the tunnels of a mine: donning a hardhat and work clothes, teeth flashing white, skin stained black with coal. Taken on the surface of a coal pit in the Ruhr, Hallensleben’s self-portrait offers insight into the challenges photographers faced when it came to picturing dark and constricted underground world of the mine. At the same time, it also suggests an analogy between the business of photography and that of extraction, crystallized in the miner’s lamp hanging from her neck. Such lamps, fitted with red filters, had long served as standard equipment in the production of photographic plates and film, carried out by a largely female workforce in the dark. Taking Hallensleben’s self-portrait as a starting point, this paper examines how photographers of the mid-century attended to this analogy when depicting the female labour of photographic manufacturing and the dark rooms in which it took place. At the same time, it also adopts a materialist perspective to trace historical links between the photographic industry and the extraction of coal, which not only served as fuel, but also formed a key ingredient in the chemical dyes utilized in the production of orthochromatic, panchromatic, and eventually colour emulsions. Moving between the mine and photographic factory, it argues that picturing the work of emulsion plant does more than shed light on the often invisible work of photographic manufacturing, it also anchors photography in larger ecology of industrial extraction, production, and waste.
keywords: extraction, labour, darkness, photography, colour
Katerina Korola is an art historian and media scholar whose research explores the history of photography and film through an ecological lens. She holds a joint-PhD in Art History and Cinema & Media Studies from the University of Chicago and is currently working on her first book, Picturing the Air: Photography and the Industrial Atmosphere, which tells the history of air pollution as a photographic problem. Her research, which has appeared and is forthcoming in the Journal of Visual Culture Representations, Transbordeur, and Photographica, has been supported by the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst (DAAD), the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. She currently holds an appointment as an Assistant Professor in German Studies at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities.
Viewmaster NFT: From Oregon Cave National Monument to Swiss Fort Knox
- Kate Palmer Albers, Whittier College
This talk will link geologic caves with human womb imagery and encyclopedic visions of DNA data storage, considering the relation of each to photographic technology, questions of access, and the subjective values of capacity and storage within both artificial and organic generative work.
The Oregon Cave National Monument is today designated as the 1938 “birthplace” of the View-Master, the beloved red plastic toy that brought millions of children into immersive 3-D proximity with far-away places and enticing adventures through vivid Kodachrome reels. While the View-Master experience is most closely associated with children and entertainment, this talk will take up the work of David Lee Bassett who, from 1952 – 1962, created with View-master inventor William Gruber a pioneering work of full color stereoscopic anatomic images, the 24-volume Stereoscope Atlas of Human Anatomy. Notably, Reels 153-174 were devoted to the pelvis, including some of the earliest 3-D imagery of that most human of metaphorical caves: the womb. Bassett’s educational and medically-oriented imagery opens onto a key cultural moment of in utero photography, the famed 1965 LIFE magazine cover story by Lennart Nilsson depicting in mass media, for the first time, a fetus in a womb.
The generative capacities and future investments of both humans and photographic technologies will come full circle with the recent NFT work of the New York-based artist Penelope Umbrico and her 2021 series Range: Of Swiss Fort Knox, which asks viewers to consider the role of Swiss Fort Knox—one of the world’s most secure sites for data storage, located in a former military bunker, ie: man-made cave, in a mountain in the Swiss Alps—and the promises of synthetic DNA data storage as a deep time repository for our profoundly vulnerable cultural photographic heritage.
keywords: photography, 3-D, immersive vision, generative
Kate Palmer Albers (she/hers) is Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at Whittier College. Her most recent book, The Night Albums: Visibility and the Ephemeral Photograph (UC Press, 2021) focuses on the role of ephemerality throughout the history of photography. Emerging from her first book, Uncertain Histories: Accumulation, Inaccessibility, and Doubt in Photography (UC Press, 2015), Albers has ongoing interests in the roles of narrative, biography, and archive in relation to visual art and personal photographs, and the impacts of emerging technologies on art, individuals, and culture. Her current projects include an archivally-based history of the American writer and curator Nancy Newhall; research on histories of transgender representation in photography; and a study of family photographs. Her online writing project, Circulation/Exchange: Moving Images in Contemporary Art was supported by a 2015 Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and she currently co-directs the Mellon-funded Poet StoryLab at Whittier College.
A new Versailles: Life magazine and the first colour photos of Lascaux
- Mark Sheerin, University of Sussex
In February 1947, Life magazine published a report on the world’s most celebrated prehistoric painted cave – Lascaux in France. It was a technical feat, requiring resources and skills which, in the immediate post-war context, were a publishing coup for a best-selling magazine and a star photojournalist, Ralph Morse. When the story appeared, readers in homes across the US were the first to see a colour, panoramic sweep of the many painted bulls and horses. of the world’s most famous painted cave.
The presentation of these spectacular images, bathed in golden light, with theatrical depth of field, supported a notion that palaeolithic parietal works were to be understood as works of art, rather than utility. The short text compares them with the palace of Versailles: a pinnacle of civilisation opposed to the social realist aesthetic of a Soviet Union perceived as barbaric.
Images from Lascaux are presented as ‘stone age art’. The story expresses formal symmetries, scholarly details, and media Spectacle. As a rare instance of colour editorial within Life, its appearance across the centrefold offers an antecedent to those large, expressive, abstract works which were to establish New York, rather than Paris, as the centre of the art world. On the eve of the Cold War, Life had moved to consolidate Lascaux as, not only art, but an ‘American’ instance of art.
keywords: colour photography, Lascaux, Life magazine, Cold War, abstract expressionism
Mark Sheerin is an art writer and NCTJ-certified journalist with 15 years’ worth of experience across a range of titles, both online and print, most frequently reporting for the Arts Desk (UK) and Hyperallergic (US). He also maintains an art blog at criticismsim.com, for which he has interviewed many prominent artists including several Turner Prize winners. Prior to this, he gained a BA in English Literature and Spanish American Literature from from the University of Warwick and an MA in English Literature (with a focus on Critical Theory) from the University of Sussex. In the past five years he has been most interested in visual culture, in particular representations of art works made to educate the public in museums or to preserve fragile originals and justify their sequestration from the public gaze. He has submitted his thesis for a PhD at the University of Sussex and is awaiting a viva. For this, his research topic has been historic representations of parietal art in prehistoric caves across Franco-Cantabria in Europe.
Notes on the Underground Photograph
- Brittany Ellis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The refinement in the mid-19th century of magnesium as an artificial light source for photographers seemingly promised to banish darkness, to bring to light – metaphorically and physically – that which had previously been obscured. Nothing quite emphasized this potential like the growing number of photographs made underground by magnesium light beginning in 1865 with Alfred Brother’s stereograph of the interior of the Blue John Caverns, Charles Piazzi Smyth’s images taken inside the Great Pyramid, and Charles Waldack’s stereograph set produced in Mammoth Cave. In its darkness, the underground had represented a final frontier for human perception, let alone for a medium dependent on light, yet here were images that suggested even the most remote, alien of subjects could be revealed by its power. The significance of such images is best summarized in the words of one nineteenth-century writer: “What other strange places may be visited we know not, but one thing is palpable – that henceforth it will be next to impossible for a mortal man to hide himself from the lens of the photographer.”
This paper centers early photographs of underground spaces – including, tombs, caves, and mines – as a way of exploring the co-constitutive relationship between photography and the underground. In its illumination of subterranean spaces, magnesium-aided photography made the underground imaginable and consumable in new ways. At the same time, caves served as a testing ground for “nature’s pencil,” proving the capability of the medium of photography to extend perception to the very interior of the earth. I suggest these early underground photographs offer an aesthetics of latent potential in the way that they facilitated and embodied emergent epistemological, social, and, ultimately, economic relations to the underground.
keywords: photography, 19th century, Mammoth Cave, consumption, underground
Brittany Ellis is a third year PhD student in the Theory, and Criticism of Art and Architecture program at MIT, where she is also a fellow in the Aga Khan Program of Islamic Architecture. She is interested in 19th and 20th century visual and material culture and questions of representation, particularly as they relate to the history of photography and the understandings of the past produced through geological and archaeological encounters. In her research at MIT thus far, she has theorized archaeological media, explored material histories of photography and mining, and developed an aesthetic approach to histories of the modern unground. Brittany received a B.A. in Anthropology from Harvard University and an M.Phil. in Visual, Material, and Museum Anthropology from the University of Oxford. She has worked on archaeological excavations in Macedonia and Jordan as well as at cultural institutions including the National Gallery of Art and the Pitt Rivers Museum.
Tunnel Vision: Stereoscopic Depth Effects in the Photographs of Alfred A. Hart
- Meg Hankel, Bryn Mawr College
The period between 1861 and 1874 in the United States witnessed a rich moment of photographic production; photographers like Timothy O’Sullivan, Carleton Watkins, and others produced some of the earliest photographs of the American West as they accompanied state-funded geological surveys of California, the construction of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads, and four federally funded geological surveys of the regions between California and the continental divide. While the aims of these various endeavors reflect a complicated mixture of scientific curiosity, ecological preservation, capitalist gain, and colonialist exploitation, they took place in the aftermath of the discovery of the Comstock Lode and against a backdrop of mining camps and the promise of silver—a material integral to photography—below the earth’s surface. Photographs of rocky outcrops, mountain waterfalls, and winding rivers, particularly those by O’Sullivan, have since found their legacy on the gallery wall as emblems of an early modernist tendency in photography. At the time, however, they circulated amongst the public in the form of hundreds of three-dimensional stereographs. In this paper, which presents a small portion of my dissertation’s research on the history of three-dimensional pictures, I argue that by producing depth optically, rather than linearly, the conditions of stereographic composition redirected visual emphasis to the features of the foreground and the outermost margins of the image. Nowhere were the depth effects of such tunnel vision more pronounced than in stereographs of railway tunnels by Central Pacific photographer Alfred A. Hart. With the repetitious placement of concentric rings that narrowed towards the center, the stereograph’s surface transformed from a flat plane in two-dimensions, to a dynamic concave interior that mimicked the cavity of the tunnel itself. By rendering the landscape into a strange image of architectonic depth effects, the stereograph presented the American West as an optical curiosity that defied the traditional conventions of the picturesque.
keywords: stereography, photography, American West, Alfred A. Hart, landscape
Meg Hankel is a doctoral candidate in the history of art. She specializes in modern and contemporary art, with a focus on the history of photography and new media. She earned an MA degree in art history from the University of Georgia in 2017, and a BA in art history from Columbia College Chicago in 2009. Her dissertation research focuses on the history of the stereograph and other 3D technologies (such as VR) and their use in modern and contemporary artistic practice. Other research interests include the intersection of art, gaming, and the theory of play, as well as the development of color technology in analog and digital photography.
