Abstract

There is, it is claimed, a long-standing link between photography and the realist novel. Nancy Armstrong in particular argues that the pictorial veridicality of literary realism is at least partly premised upon the rapid propagation of photographic images through late 19th century culture. In doing so, Armstrong argues that photography and realist fiction were mutual participants in an epistemological project wherein the horizons of the ‘real world’—at least within the context of literary fiction—were continuously and unconsciously drawn and redrawn. Meanwhile, within the context of science and technology history, it is often taken for granted that late 19th century science photographers assumed that photographs provided direct, untrammelled access to an entirely different notion of the real: a real unviolated by the messy business of human perception and agency. While this notion is a gross misrepresentation of the facts of the matter, this is not to imply that late 19th century science photographs were ‘fictive’, at least in the sense intended by Armstrong, Novak, Helen Groth, and others. Although it might be the case that non-scientific applications of photography in the late 19th century were conducted in a fictive register, science photography proves a rather more challenging case. In the wake of this observation, this chapter first demarcates and define these conflicting notions of realism, in which I will demonstrate that the epistemic commitments of literary and metaphysical realism (specifically Cartesian realism) are categorically incompatible, though they share a common intuition. Subsequently, I then explain the value of photography to scientific practitioners by appealing to the formal properties of photographs. Third, I argue that although photographic processes guarantee that photographs are traces of the world, there is no further guarantee that those traces will be isomorphic to experience; whilst 19th century science photographs were undeniably visions of the world, they are parts of the world hitherto unseen by human eyes. Finally, I contend that science photography in the late 19th century anticipated key developments in philosophical realism—not least the transition from 18th and 19th century Cartesian realism to 20th century scientific realism. By revealing an invisible universe entirely unlike the one of our phenomenological experience, late 19th century science photography helped reintroduce humanity to a world in which we lack ontological rank or priority.