Dear all,
Please join us for the third Mass Culture Workshop of the year, this Friday! Details below. Please note the room change for this session.
The pre-circulated paper is provided through the Mass Culture listserv.
Your 2023–24 Mass Cult coordinators,
Joel and Hugo
Through Glass, Darkly: The Photographic Resolution of Celestial Nebulae
Sophie Lynch, PhD Student, Cinema and Media Studies/Art History, University of Chicago
Respondent: Carl Fuldner, Assistant Instructional Professor, MAPH, University of Chicago
November 3, 2023, 11 AM–12:30 PM, Classics 312
Henry Draper, 50-minute exposure of the Orion Nebula, September 30th 1880.
Throughout the nineteenth-century, nebulae—vast clouds of glowing gas and dust in interstellar space—were among the most mysterious objects in the celestial sphere. While the resolution of these elusive cosmic objects fluctuated alongside the emergence and technical developments of the photographic camera and the telescope, optical devices that can expand the visual field outside the range of human sight, nebulae remained clouded in uncertainty: did true nebulosity exist in the heavens, or were all nebulae clusters of stars far enough away to appear nebulous? This paper considers the ways in which the photographic resolution of nebulae swayed with the technical and epistemological challenges that practices of photographic visualization encountered to represent and imagine the farthest limits of the visible and knowable world. By emphasizing the blur that characterizes and pervades early tentative attempts to record nebulae, I consider the ways in which indistinct visualizations seemed to entail the amorphous possibilities of visualizing technologies.
Sophie Lynch is a PhD candidate pursuing a joint-degree in the departments of Cinema & Media Studies and Art History 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 Arts.