Week 5

Chapter 5: Science and Social Science: 
Although they increasingly used photography as evidence, science and social science were not firmly differentiated until the end of the nineteenth century. In India, the Schlagintweit brothers combined geological study with landscape photography, and took time to practice some ethnology by making plaster heads of Indian subjects. Their successors, the Western military and civilian amateur photographers stationed in India, spent years amassing statistical data as well as photographs for the multivolumed The People of India (1868-1875)  Even the 1874 transit of Venus (when the planet Venus passes directly between the earth and the sun, causing a small round dot on the sun) scientists traveled to distant points. With the relentless expansion of Western political and economic interests during the mid-nineteenth century photographers increasingly sought to highlight cultural, gender, and physiognomic differences among people. Sexuality and ethnicity merged in images of the exotic; often the normal was implicitly defined with reference to images of people with mental disabilities.  As popular and professional science and social science proliferated, they helped to make photography a global activity. Local powerful people saw the advantages of photography and sometimes took it up as amateurs.  Westerners routinely trained assistants, who having learned the trade, went on to found their own photographic enterprises. 
Photography and the Social Sciences:
Photography participated in the production of evidence in many fields. Geology, biology, botany, medicine, astronomy, and chemistry used photography to collect and exhibit evidence.  The intense discussions around Charles Darwin's writings on evolution and the origin of the human species fueled this exploration into the theories about multiple origins of human beings.
Ethnographic studies and display: Grand schemes to compare and contrast races and to photograph them were launched throughout the later nineteenth century.
The proposed Calcutta exhibition of 1869 was to bring together "tribal" peoples from Asia, Polynesia, and Australasia for the purposes of examination and photography. The scheme failed, but ethnographic studies and exhibitions extensively illustrated by photographs, flourished throughout the 1860's and 1870's.

Part Two: The Expanding Domain Chapter 3-5 Slides 
 
Even today photographers like James Mollison use photography in his work Typologies 


Photography in Medicine: Clara Barton- the first woman clerk in the US patent office organized relief efforts for wounded soldiers. Veterans photographs.  
Photomicrography and Astronomical Photographs: Lewis Rutherford, Nasmyth and Carpenter
Roman Vischniac Photomicrography (1950-1970)
Pierre-Cesar Jules Janssen


Journal Quote 7.)"No place is boring, if you've had a good night's sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film."   ~Robert Adams
Quiz 2
Part 3: Photography and Modernity
Chapter 6- The Great divide 
Mass media and mass markets 

Journal Quote 8.)  "Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be."  ~Duane Michals