This article argues that the idea of light modelled by the nineteenth-century daguerreotype signifies a radical departure from its elitist historical associations and makes the claim that, under the precepts of early daguerreotypy, light underwent a democratizing process that bore a new relationship with the perceiver and the objects they perceived, which had a profound influence on the development of material culture. This study finds, first, that nineteenth-century daguerreotypy initiated a new technological relationship with objects, because objects were henceforth regarded for their luminosity, and secondly, that in the wake of the Enlightenment period, light was conceptualized by new ideologies which imagined the individual as creator, as opposed to God. Newton had already exposed the Romantic mind to the indiscriminate character of `Nature's', or light's, colouring, but Goethe's Colour Theory (1830), with its descriptions of the subjective nature of seeing and the subtleties of light's properties in relation to the eye, deeply promblematized the concept of `light Divine'. The article concludes that the daguerreotype's ambivalent negative/positive reflections are paradigmatic of the collapse of binary moralizing and emblematic of the ambiguity of `truth' in the new framework of perceptual vision.
...MoreDescription Looks at the impact of the daguerreotype on changes in optical and color theory.
Similar Citations
Article
Kargon, Jeremy;
(2014)
The Logic of Color: Theory and Graphics in Christine Ladd-Franklin's Explanation of Color Vision
(/isis/citation/CBB001201297/)
Essay Review
Nieto-Galan, Agustí;
(2015)
Revisiting Colour History
(/isis/citation/CBB001566478/)
Article
Olaf L. Mueller;
(2016)
Prismatic Equivalence – A New Case of Underdetermination: Goethe vs. Newton on the Prism Experiments
(/isis/citation/CBB847582954/)
Article
Gopi Krishna Vijaya;
(2020)
Colour, Wavelength and Turbidity in the Light of Goethe’s Colour Studies
(/isis/citation/CBB439576491/)
Book
Mary Virginia Orna;
(2022)
March of the Pigments: Color History, Science and Impact
(/isis/citation/CBB950630081/)
Book
Lauxtermann, Paul F.H;
(2000)
Schopenhauer's Broken World-View: Colours and Ethics between Kant and Goethe
(/isis/citation/CBB000101529/)
Book
Renzo Shamey;
Rolf Kuehni;
(2020)
Pioneers of Color Science
(/isis/citation/CBB068086372/)
Chapter
Marschler, Thomas;
(2011)
Sicut se habent colores ad visum, ita se habent phantasmata ad intellectum. Aristotelische Licht- und Farbmetaphorik in der Erkenntnislehre des Thomas von Aquin († 1274)
(/isis/citation/CBB001200437/)
Article
Retucci, Fiorella;
(2010)
Un nuovo testimone manoscritto del De luce e del De coloribus di Teodorico di Freiberg
(/isis/citation/CBB001200451/)
Book
Georges Roque;
(2018)
Quand la lumière devient couleur
(/isis/citation/CBB905348407/)
Book
Elisa deCourcy;
Martyn Jolly;
(2020)
Empire, Early Photography and Spectacle: The Global Career of Showman Daguerreotypist J.W. Newland
(/isis/citation/CBB337695195/)
Article
Marcum, James A.;
(2009)
The Nature of Light and Color: Goethe's “Der Versuch als Vermittler” versus Newton's Experimentum Crucis
(/isis/citation/CBB000932276/)
Chapter
Lucia De Frenza;
Augusto Garuccio;
(2016)
Immagini di luce: l’Accademia delle Scienze napoletana e i primi esperimenti di dagherrotipia scientifica
(/isis/citation/CBB541050943/)
Article
Gage, John;
(2008)
Signs of Disharmony: Newton's Opticks and the Artists
(/isis/citation/CBB000831782/)
Book
Otter, Chris;
(2008)
The Victorian eye: A political history of light and vision in Britain, 1800--1910
(/isis/citation/CBB001180635/)
Book
Watson, Roger;
Rappaport, Helen;
(2013)
Capturing the Light: The Birth of Photography, a True Story of Genius and Rivalry
(/isis/citation/CBB001500372/)
Thesis
Rossi, Michael Paul;
(2011)
The Rules of Perception: American Color Science, 1831--1931
(/isis/citation/CBB001567292/)
Article
Erich Weidenhammer;
(2015)
August Kirschmann and the Material Culture of Colour in Toronto’s Early Psychological Laboratory
(/isis/citation/CBB916234268/)
Article
Jacobs, Gerald H.;
(2014)
The Discovery of Spectral Opponency in Visual Systems and Its Impact on Understanding the Neurobiology of Color Vision
(/isis/citation/CBB001420789/)
Article
Nicholas Gaskill;
(2017)
The Articulate Eye: Color-Music, the Color Sense, and the Language of Abstraction
(/isis/citation/CBB204426688/)
Be the first to comment!