Fotografie als Wissenschaft

Photography as Science: In 1908 the English physicist Arthur Mason Worthington published A Study of Splashes, a treatise on the physical behaviour of falling drops. The photographic experiments were performed by means of an electric spark „in absolute darkness”︁. Worthington's experimental practice dealt with two different areas of knowledge production: an area the operator could perceive control from the outside and a corresponding black-box where the photographic recording itself took place. The paper discusses the epistemic challenges of this specific shift from imperceptible events to their photographic representations. It shows to what extent the information revealed by the photographic apparatus had to be converted, for it did not speak for itself. Thus, Worthington's work went beyond the classical dichotomy between objectivity and imagination.     

Visualisierungen in der deutschen Geographie des 19. Jahrhunderts. Die Beispiele Robert Schlagintweit und Hans Meyer

Visualization in 19^th‐century German geography: Robert Schlagintweit and Hans Meyer as examples. – Visual representations of nature formed an essential part of 19^th‐century earth sciences. In particular, colonial photography – as a visual source, and as an instrument of the construction of national identities – serves essential research interests of current history and social sciences. The present paper is a case study on the role and function of photography in German geography of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. It focuses on the work of the Munich geographer Robert Schlagintweit (1833–1885) and the Leipzig colonial geographer Hans Meyer (1858–1929); the early history of photography in India and the function of images in the geographical exploration of overseas territories are discussed. Although there is nearly half a century between the work of R. Schlagintweit and H. Meyer, their photography shows remarkable parallels. The ideas of both on the practice of visualization are rooted in pedagogic and didactic concepts as well as in popular science. For both geographers photography was essentially a technical help, which often needed graphic revisions. And they both preferred photography to depict people and buildings (compared, for instance, to landscapes). Concerning the more comprehensive question of how far their photography transmitted a specific German ‘image of abroad’, it is indicated that such a specific image should have its essential roots in a peculiar visual culture of German earth sciences in the first half of the 19^th century. Thus the paper offers a starting point for further studies discussing the change from a ‘Biedermeier image’ of foreign cultures to a more ‘colonial’ one in 19^th‐century German geography.