RT Journal Article
T1 Made real
A1 Boris Jardine
YR 2014
VO 2
IS Autumn 2014
K1 scientific illustration
K1  Luke Howard
K1  James Nasmyth
K1  objectivity
K1  image production
K1  photography
K1  Romanticism
AB In their 1992 essay ‘The image of objectivity’, and again in Objectivity (2007), Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison describe the development of ‘mechanical objectivity’. Nineteenth-century scientists, they argue, pursued ‘truth-to-nature’ by enlisting ‘self-registering instruments, cameras, wax molds, and a host of other devices […] with the aim of freeing images from human interference’. This emphasis on self-recording devices and the morals of machinery, important as it is, tends to focus our attention away from the often messy and convoluted means of image reproduction – by lithograph, hand-coloured engraving or photomechanical process, and often involving steps that seem sharply at odds with narratives of increasing standardization and scientific restraint. This essay draws on the Science Museum’s pictorial collections in order to look again at the construction of objectivity, this time from the point of view of making and reproducing images. Case studies are presented of the Luke Howard collection of cloud drawings and James Nasmyth’s lunar photographs, suggesting that scientists were more flexible in their approach to depictions of the truth than has previously been supposed, and that ‘manufactured’ may be a better term than ‘mechanical’ when we talk of objectivity in the nineteenth century. But this is also a reflexive story, about the collections of the Science Museum – an institution whose own history is, I argue in conclusion, particularly tied up with issues of accuracy, depiction and genre. These are brought together in the consideration of ‘atmosphere’ – a term as important for the historian of science as for the exhibition curator.
NO For the period under consideration see Pang (2007). Historians of the early-modern period have tended to be more sensitive to matters of image-production; see, for example, Kusukawa (2012); Reeves (1997); Remmert (2011), Lambert, Wiegand and Ivins Jr (1952).
NO For this trend more generally see Klonk (1996), Ch IV, ‘Sketching from Nature’.
NO For a wealth of detail about Nasmyth’s observations and the composition of The Moon see (Robertson, 2006).
NO For example, both of the printing types used in Nasmyth’s book had themselves been the subject of Nature essays immediately preceding its publication – the writer on heliotypes even notes seeing Nasmyth’s illustrations coming off the press.
NO It is currently on display in the gallery Making the Modern World.
NO Sherwood Taylor to Alexander Barclay, 5 May 1952, Science Museum technical file 1953-452.
NO On the mechanics of showmanship see Altick (1978).
NO This kind of powerful circularity is described in Krauss (1986, pp 166 ff).
NO I take this to be a virtue of the ‘ideal type’ method that Daston and Galison themselves apply. That Daston’s and Galison’s ‘epistemic virtues’ (of which mechanical objectivity is one) are ideal types is argued in Jardine (2012). On deviations from ideal types in historical research see Watkins (1952, p 25).
NO The term is Umberto Eco’s; see his Travels in Hyperreality: Essays, translated by William Weaver (London: Picador, 1987).
PB The Science Museum Group
SN 2054-5770
LA eng
DO 10.15180/140208
UL http://journal.sciencemuseum.org.uk/browse/issue-02/made-real/
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WT Science Museum Group Journal
OL 30