Printing the Invisible: The Invention of Photography as a Cultural Technique.

FAIN: FEL-281665-22

Antje Pfannkuchen
Dickinson College (Carlisle, PA 17013-2896)

Completion of a book about the invention of photography in the early 19th century as a cultural technique. 

My book “Printing the Invisible” studies the birth of photography in the early 19th century as an innovation reaching far beyond the scope of a new technology or art form. Approaching photography as a cultural technique allows me to investigate influences on the beginning of the new imaging process that go further than traditional considerations of optics, chemistry and art history. My transdisciplinary examination integrates those canonical elements with so far unappreciated developments, such as 18th century electrical research and Romantic poetry, to reveal how photography originated less as a method to copy an existing view or object but as a process to make visible something that could not be seen before. This project should attract a diverse audience interested in new perspectives on visual culture. I also hope my introduction of the concept of “Kulturtechnik” to an American readership will become useful to other scholars working on the forefront of interdisciplinary research.

Associated Products

"in/visible" - special issue of the journal Modern Language Notes (137.3, German issue April 2022) (Book)
Title: "in/visible" - special issue of the journal Modern Language Notes (137.3, German issue April 2022)
Editor: Antje Pfannkuchen
Editor: Nicola Behrmann
Abstract: Through remote meetings, security cameras and social media, today's world presents itself hyper-visibly. The nineteenth-century scientific tradition of visual evidence and proof extended its reach into law, government, and entertainment, but now digital image production and dissemination are generating new modes of perception that structure discourse and experience. As a result, the current scholarly focus has shifted from considerations of the epistemological or phenomenological status of the visual toward questioning the ties between speech and visuality, silence and invisibility. Dissociated from its context, an image—blindly, at times arbitrarily—bears witness to something that can only be grasped in retrospect. Channeled and transformed by algorithms, streams of images are transmitted via broadcasts and networks around the globe. They promise total visibility while our constant cognitive shortcomings, our inability to grasp what happens in a specific political moment, continue to call for representational agency.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/mln
Primary URL Description: This is the main website for the journal Modern Language Notes of which our edited volume is currently the most recent issue.
Access Model: subscription only
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Type: Edited Volume
ISBN: ISSN 0026-7910
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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