During the nineteenth century, the discovery, invention, and extraction of new materials and technologies of illumination such as limelight, magnesium light, and electricity signaled an important shift from photography’s reliance on the light of the sun to photography’s engagement with materials dislodged from the earth’s crust or made by human hands. Artificial light made photography possible in spaces no sunlight reaches, and as early as 1866, photographers seized artificial fire to conquer the depths of darkness and bring forth pictures of the deepest and most remote recesses of caves.
In this paper, I investigate deployments of magnesium light to expose and develop photographs in the underground passages of Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave during the second half of the nineteenth century. Drawing together materials from an array of cultural practices including Charles Waldack’s stereocard views “Magnesium Light Views in Mammoth Cave” (1866) and Frances Benjamin Johnston’s editorial and photo book “Mammoth Cave by Flashlight” (1893), I attend to artificial light’s materiality and aesthetic effects and the interplay between artificial light and natural darkness in processes of photographic exposure and development.
Far from being a passive and transcendental source of illumination, the magnesium light used by nineteenth century photographers to illuminate Mammoth Cave exploded, created dust, and obscured images, thereby materially affecting the very matter and representational space of photographs. Indeed, burning magnesium created billowing clouds of smoke that slowly filled cavernous spaces, obscuring visibility and enshrouding and at times suffocating photographers and photographic subjects alike in dense clouds of toxic smoke. How might the materiality and agential capacities of magnesium light—which explodes, creates dust, and can potentially cause blindness—confound ambitions of scientific objectivity and unbounded expansion? What connections can be drawn between the practice of photographing and shining a light on subterranean networks and the illumination and development of the underground to support terrestrial industries? In this paper, I argue that the materiality and agential capacities of magnesium light foiled ambitions of photographic visibility and unbounded exploration and challenged conceptions of photography and artificial light as new technologies that could illuminate the cave to alternatively emphasize how natural and artificial, and human and nonhuman forces collide to produce images of the cave and shape the very matter of its subterranean space.
artificial light, subterranenan photography, magnesium flash, stereosopic views, extraction
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Isabelle Lynch is a French-Canadian art historian, writer, curator, and a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation, "Artificial Light: Photography and Alternative Illumination c. 1860-1910" interrogates how photography by artificial light sought to recast the limits of the visible world from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. She is currently living in Chicago, where she teaches art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Artificial light made photography possible in spaces no sunlight reaches, and during the second half of the nineteenth century, photographers seized artificial fire to conquer the depths of darkness and bring forth pictures of the deepest recesses of caves. In this paper, I investigate deployments of magnesium light to expose and develop photographs in the underground passages of Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave. Far from being a passive and transcendental source of illumination, burning magnesium created billowing clouds of toxic smoke. I argue that the materiality and agential capacities of magnesium light foiled ambitions of photographic visibility and unbounded exploration.