Abstract

Photography as Science: In 1908 the English physicist Arthur Mason Worthington published A Study of Splashes, a treatise on the physical behaviour of falling drops. The photographic experiments were performed by means of an electric spark „in absolute darkness”. Worthington's experimental practice dealt with two different areas of knowledge production: an area the operator could perceive control from the outside and a corresponding black-box where the photographic recording itself took place. The paper discusses the epistemic challenges of this specific shift from imperceptible events to their photographic representations. It shows to what extent the information revealed by the photographic apparatus had to be converted, for it did not speak for itself. Thus, Worthington's work went beyond the classical dichotomy between objectivity and imagination