“Take a picture, it’ll last longer.”
It’s a jeer or a taunt, but it’s also a truth: the photograph outlasts the glance, the scrutinizing stare. It’s true in a technological sense, as well. The photograph outlives its own taking. A fast shutter—on a film camera or a smart phone—blinks for a fraction of a second, but what that blink produces almost immediately supersedes the time spent blinking.
Michelle Henning’s new book, A Dirty History of Photography, traces photography’s endurance, particularly its ecological legacy, as found in riverbeds, farm soils, and atmospheres. Henning focuses on the popular film producer Ilford, and its activities during the 1920s and 1930s, but she roams to places and times far beyond these limits. This proves necessary, as the photosensitive dyes on which Ilford relied were derived from coal tar, a by-product of the extraction and burning of fossil fuels in continental Europe and throughout England’s colonies. Presented as thirty-six short essays, A Dirty History of Photography, connects Ilford to the River Thames, Mount Everest, magenta dresses, swan dives, air conditioning, advertisements in Lagos, and much more, demonstrating the diffuse, atmospheric functions of photographic technology.
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Dani Lamorte: A Dirty History of Photography opens with the story of a monster who travels through dark spaces, being transformed along the way. Who is this fascinating monster?
Michelle Henning: It’s interesting that you use the word “monster.” In the book I generally use the term “Creature,” adopted from Mary Shelley, but of course it does refer to Frankenstein’s monster.
In one sense, the Creature is photography itself. I decided to try and tell the story of photography as something that is born at a certain point and that has sensitivity. So, I wanted to give this impression that, in a way, chemical photography is like something animate because it reacts to the environment and to different kinds of substances in the air and water, the oil in our hands, and so on.
In Frankenstein, the Creature laments that, despite his qualities, all anyone could see was his hideousness. There’s a lack of recognition of what the creature can do, which I think is true of photography, too. Photography senses things beyond the carefully framed image, and that sensitivity is labeled “contamination” or a “mistake.” I’m advocating that we pay attention to those “mistakes,” that we pay attention to those “flaws,” and ask what the photograph is trying to tell us.
DL: Not unlike Frankenstein’s monster, photographs — especially early photographs — have a body which has to be cared for, sometimes shaded from light.
MH: I was giving a talk about my book the other day and someone else mentioned the presence of bodies in photography. And I thought, ” Yes, gelatine.” Of course, the photographic processes that dominated, and that still exist today in chemical photography, use gelatine emulsion made from animal bodies. Gelatine has these weird properties: it can sweat; it’s mobile and, depending on the temperature, it can melt. So there’s something very lively, very bodily about chemical photography.
DL: Liveliness is a central theme of A Dirty History of Photography, but it’s a two-way street. Photography literally transforms the atmosphere but, at the same time, photography as a technology is shaped in response to the atmosphere.
MH: I decided to focus on atmosphere because it seemed to be something that you can pick up very early in the history of photography. One of the earliest inventors was William Henry Fox Talbot, and he writes that taking photographs in London was difficult because there was something wrong with London’s air. He can’t quite put his finger on what it is, and he’s writing in the early 1840s — the peak of the toxic London fogs.
So you’ve got these fogs, caused by a lot of the industries that photography will become connected to, particularly the production of gas. Coal fires and heavy industry are producing this fog, as well. And these fogs are really yellow — they’re called “pea soupers” in London because they’re so full of sulfates. Early photographic emulsions really struggled with this yellowy fog, translating yellows and reds into blacks. At the same time, the fog is actually contaminating the photographic factories, leaking in and destroying glass plates. So there’s a real sense in which photography is insensitive to the fog—it can’t see through it—but it also senses the fog which literally “fogs” the image.
Later, as sophisticated emulsions can penetrate the fog, photographers start using the fog to create an emotional or aesthetic atmosphere. They’re making use of the fog to create mystique, to create a shallow depth of field
DL: X-ray photography and infrared photography, which you discuss in the book, might be thought of as “advanced” photo technologies, allowing us to see things that we can’t see with our eyes. But your mention of early photography’s sensitivity to yellow makes me think that these “advanced” qualities were always present.
MH: In fact, it’s actually the same thing. Dye company researchers discovered that dyes weren’t just for making things colorful; they could be photosensitive in specific ways. Infrared film is sensitive to the red end of the spectrum and insensitive to the blue end. Ultraviolet film the other way. These examples are useful for denaturalizing photography, because it took a long time to make photographs correspond to how our eyes see color. It’s important to note, too, that infrared films used dyes that were originally based on coal tar, a byproduct of gas works. This, again, is how the photography industries and the polluting coal industries are all connected.
DL: In Pittsburgh, images of yesteryear’s air pollution are almost celebrated in their strangeness. When we see these photos, we remark on the quality of the air, on the car headlights used midday. It’s uncanny. Based on what you learned writing A Dirty History of Photography, what else might we see in these images?
MH: We can think about this from the example of London and the London fog. In London, there are river mists that sit in the river basin, and coal is being burnt along the river. And what happens is that the moisture droplets in the air mix with smoke to create heavy particles. They’re sticky chemical compounds that then get stuck inside your lungs and can kill you. In the nineteenth century and right up to the 1950s, these London fogs were dense, dangerous, and toxic.
The London fogs were made of different chemical components from the gas works in London, which were also manufacturing ammonia from coal gas. All these gas works were producing things like hydrogen sulfide. So, these cities — London and Pittsburgh — often stank, which photographs can’t show. It smelt heavily. It tasted disgusting in your mouth and it was unpleasant to breathe. It made your throat sore, got in your nose and you would have black coal dust in your nose.
Photos of Pittsburgh’s pollution have a kind of romanticism. If you think for a moment about trying to walk through that heavy fog, it would be unpleasant, but you’ve also got sunlight penetrating it sometimes, which creates these really beautiful shadows. I think that there’s a kind of nostalgia for industry, and almost a celebration of industrialization that gets encoded into the foggy photos, even though the fog itself was recognized as dangerous and toxic. In London, foggy photographs were almost a celebration of imperial London, the center of the British Empire. They aggrandized London, even though it was so unpleasant in real life. And that unpleasantness is something the photographs act ideologically to conceal.
But the other thing you can see is, if you look at the surface of those photographs, crazing — cracks, bubbles, or marks on these images. It’s very hard to know if it’s caused by the fog, because there are so many other moments in the production of a chemical photograph where contamination can happen. But we know that the photograph can sense the fog, because we know that sulfate in the air will make the photographic film foggy or hazy. Compounds like hydrogen sulfide actually damage the photographic image. So I think the images that circulate as images of fog are also quite damaged images. And it seems to me that the photographs are sensing those chemicals in the air whether they’re doing that in camera or in the dark room, because the fog would penetrate into houses through keyholes, it would get into dark rooms, it would get inside the camera and the film studios.
DL: Those “crazed” photos and foggy city snapshots can seem far away in an era of digital photography and (somewhat) cleaner air. Are we just dredging up the past when we talk about photography in atmospheric terms? Is this conversation still relevant?
MH: I really like that idea of dredging up the past, because it reminds you that history is just below the surface and it can come back. So, if you look at river pollution for example, scientists talk about buried legacy contamination. In the book, I give the example of silver from chemical photography actually killing the creatures in the River Thames. The Thames was officially declared dead at one point because, although silver seems harmless, in certain forms it can kill embryonic aquatic life — it is used as an antimicrobial. The river is no longer considered dead, but this silver still remains in the Thames, buried underneath the mud. It can be literally dredged up.
I think the relationship between photography and atmosphere has, in fact, changed in the digital era, in both senses of the word atmosphere. First of all, the electronic sensor that’s in your digital camera doesn’t have the same sensitivities that film had, or that other chemical emulsions had. Photographers who were part of the generation who made the shift from chemical to digital — my age group, really — often complain that the digital lacks atmosphere. And they mean that in the terms of an aesthetic or emotional atmosphere. You might think it’s because digital photos don’t have this chemical reactivity or something natural about them. But actually, Walter Benjamin wrote that chemical photography in the 1930s lacked aura, by which he meant a kind of atmosphere or mystique. Film studios had even begun deliberately using softening effects and filters, or dramatic lighting to get back that mystique.
You can still think about digital photography in relation to questions of atmosphere, but digital photography isn’t immediately polluting the soil and water in the same ways that chemical photography did. At the point of digitization, the River Thames came back to life. Digital photography did seem to clean up the world, but of course it just moved the pollution somewhere else. The data centers that digital photography relies on are heavy energy users, and most of the ones in the United States use energy from fossil fuels because they’re concentrated in the fossil fuel consuming states. So there are parallels, but it’s not the same.
DL: And digital photos themselves are diffuse or atmospheric, in a way. They aren’t stored in one discrete file. They’re reassembled each time they’re opened, and can be stored in multiple places. And they have a diffuse atmospheric environmental impact: I can’t easily differentiate the energy that I need to charge my camera battery or upload photos, from the energy that’s used to read a note from my doctor or send an email to you. But with silver in the River Thames, there were only so many industries that were likely to put silver in the river, so we could guess where that was coming from.
Sometimes we still can easily find the source of pollution, though. We see photos of oil refineries burning in Tehran, fossil fuels literally suspended in the atmosphere. War, and the military more generally, has always been part of photography, as you show in A Dirty History of Photography. How has your study of the materiality, the diffuseness of photography shaped how you look at these sorts of images?
MH: When the First World War happened, people worried that the photography industry would collapse, but it didn’t. The absolute opposite happened. It flourished, partly due to amateur photography — people wanting photographs of their young men before they went off to war and so on—but in large part it was the war itself that kept the photography industry going. Aerial warfare meant that factories were producing photographic film and glass plates for the military, and this has continued in every war since. So, photographic manufacturers are very tied up with their major consumers which are armies, navies, munitions companies, and hospitals as well. Today, you see tech companies benefiting the same way that photographic manufacturers once did. If you think of the role that digital imaging plays in drone warfare, for example, you can see that the companies who are making our photographic technology also benefit from war. They may not deliberately set out to benefit, but nevertheless, they benefit.
When I saw pictures of the smoke in Tehran, I thought about chemical legacy, the long-term legacy. The effects of these pollutants don’t just happen immediately. That refinery has been bombed, and people have been killed, but there’s a long-term effect on ecosystems, and therefore on the food chain, on the air you breathe. Every time a building is destroyed, particles are flung into the air which are then breathed in. One way of conducting warfare, which starts in the First World War with gas warfare, is to attack the environment. If you attack the air someone breathes, they almost kill themselves in a way, because they can’t stop inhaling. It’s a hideous, terroristic way of attacking people.
Destroying infrastructure is a way of ensuring that life becomes unlivable, but the photograph itself can’t quite capture this because infrastructure is often invisible. I think smoke sometimes comes to stand in for all of those invisible forms of warfare because smoke, like particles of dust lit by a shaft of light, can solidify the air and make air visible. We don’t think about air in a photograph of a sunny day. We’re seeing through the air to the scene. But when there’s smoke, when there’s mist, we see the air and we think about the atmosphere.
