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Measuring the Heavens: Charles S. Peirce and Astronomical Photography

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Measuring the Heavens: Charles S. Peirce and Astronomical Photography History of Photography ISSN: 0308-7298 (Print) 2150-7295 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/thph20 Measuring the Heavens: Charles S. Peirce and Astronomical Photography Aud Sissel Hoel To cite this article: Aud Sissel Hoel (2016) Measuring the Heavens: Charles S. Peirce and Astronomical Photography, History of Photography, 40:1, 49-66, DOI: 10.1080/03087298.2016.1140329 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2016.1140329 Published online: 16 Mar 2016. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 212 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=thph20 Download by: [Universidad Pablo de Olavide] Date: 22 September 2017, At: 02:01 Measuring the Heavens: Charles S. Peirce and Astronomical Photography Aud Sissel Hoel Taking its point of departure from the current digitisation of the Harvard Astronomical Plate Collection, this article follows the plates back to the time when the status of photography as a research tool for astronomers was still to be established. It focuses on Charles S. Peirce, who, while employed by the US Coast Survey, made astronomical observations and contributed to the deliberation over visual and photographic methods. Particular attention is paid to Peirce’s involvement in early explorations of photography’s potential as a measurement tool. The guiding assumption is that approaching photography as a tool, rather The archival work for this article was under- than as a sign or representation, offers new inroads into the old problem of taken while I was a Visiting Scholar in the photography’s revealing powers and its capacity to serve as a means of discovery Department of the History of Science at in science. Drawing on Peirce’s scientific practice as an alternative resource for Harvard University in 2012. I wish to thank theory construction, this article contributes to the ongoing efforts to conceptualise Janet Browne, Peter Galison, and Jean- the productive or generative dimension of photographic methods. It concludes by Franc¸ois Gauvin for their hospitality and sti- pointing to the diagrammatic notion of evidence developed late in Peirce’s mulating discussions. I also wish to thank philosophical career, proposing that photography be reconceived as a diagram- Alison Doane, Curator of Astronomical matic tool. Photographs at the Harvard College Observatory, and Maria C. McEachern, Keywords: John Adams Whipple (1822–91), Jules Janssen (1824–1907), Joseph Library Assistant at the John G. Wolbach Library and Information Resource Center at Winlock (1826–75), Charles Wolf (1827–1918), Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914), the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for astronomical photography, photometry, solar eclipse, scientific observation, measure- Astrophysics, for their helpful assistance. My ment, photographic evidence, mechanical objectivity, indexicality, diagrams thanks also go to James Cleveland of the Shelby County Historical Society. An early version of this article was presented in the Department of the History of Science Down a set of corkscrew stairs, in the crammed basement of a historic building on Downloaded by [Universidad Pablo de Olavide] at 02:01 22 September 2017 Incubator Series, and I want to thank Everett Observatory Hill in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a handful of people are busily I. Mendelsohn and the participants in this engaged in photographing, cleaning, and scanning old glass photographic plates seminar for their valuable input. All transla- tions are my own unless otherwise indicated. of stars. Their task seems overwhelming; three floors of the building are lined with This work was supported by the Research rows of filing cabinets brimming over with more than half a million dry plate Council of Norway under Grant 203311. negatives. The plate collection, which spans a century of celestial photography from 1885 to 1989,1 is currently being digitised – not for museum purposes, but in Email for correspondence: [email protected] order to come alive again as a resource for present-day astronomical research. The one-hundred-year coverage allows astronomers to study temporal variations in the 1 – The collection has a gap from approxi- universe, and the digital access to the old views of the sky has already started to mately 1953 to 1968, referred to as the yield new discoveries.2 This remarkable fact prompts the guiding question of this ‘Menzel Gap’ after the director Donald Howard Menzel (1901–76), who tempora- article: what is it about photography that allows scientists to make new discoveries rily halted the plate-making operations in by way of photographic views taken up to more than a hundred years ago? order to reduce costs. The ongoing digitisation of the Harvard Astronomical Plate Collection speaks 2 – See the project DASCH – Digital Access directly to the main concern of this article: the revealing powers of photographic to a Sky Century @ Harvard, available at http://dasch.rc.fas.harvard.edu/project.php methods and their potential to serve as research tools or as means of discovery in (accessed 25 January 2016). science. The current use of the dry plate negatives indicates certain characteristics History of Photography, Volume 40, Number 1, February 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2016.1140329 # 2016 Taylor & Francis Aud Sissel Hoel that call for further elucidation. First, photographic methods afford comparability across time and space; they transcend the limited scale of individual observers situated firmly in the here and now. Second, they involve a peculiar repeatability – peculiar because what they repeat is not strictly speaking ‘the same’: what today’s astronomers are able to see and detect by way of the plates is not the same as astronomers saw and detected at the time the astronomical views were taken. The latter characteristic connects with a third – namely, that the revealing powers of photographic methods transcend the intentions and uses envisioned by the people who devised the instruments and produced the photographs. Taking its point of departure from the current digitisation and use of the Harvard Astronomical Plate Collection, this article explores the problem of photography’s revealing powers by following the plates back to the time when the status of photography as a research tool for astronomers was yet to be established. In this context, the choice of the term ‘tool’ is no coincidence. What I hope to show is that approaching photo- graphy as a tool, rather than as a sign or representation, offers new inroads into the old problem of photography’s realism. Contemporary researchers on science and technology emphasise the non- 3 neutral roles of technologies in scientific practices, and along with these, the 3 – See for example Bruno Latour, interventional, transformative, and co-constitutive roles of instruments and tools Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to in knowledge.4 Likewise, historians and philosophers of science accentuate the Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005; and Representation in ways that objects of knowledge are not simply given but gradually discerned and Scientific Practice Revisited, ed. Catelijne 5 fixated in specialised and mediated instrumental settings. Following these lines of Coopmans, Janet Vertesi, Michael Lynch, thought, conceiving photography as a tool implies that photography, like all and Steve Woolgar, Cambridge, MA: MIT scientific instruments, plays an active role in the process of discovery. In the Press 2014. 4 – Ian Hacking, Representing and words of Josh Ellenbogen, who offers a revisionist analysis of the scientific practice Intervening: Introductory Topics in the of E´ tienne-Jules Marey, ‘visualization, as it generates data on events, does something Philosophy of Natural Science, Cambridge: with the data that helps discover law’.6 Ellenbogen’s point is that photography, as Cambridge University Press 1983; Don put to use by Marey, acquired a productive or generative role and, hence, ‘ceased Ihde, Expanding Hermeneutics: Visualism in 7 Science, Evanston, IL: Northwestern to function as a reproductive technology’. This article contributes to the ongoing University Press 1998; and Peter-Paul efforts to conceptualise the productive or generative dimension of photographic Verbeek, What Things Do: Philosophical methods, which is not sufficiently accounted for by the notions commonly evoked Reflections on Technology, Agency, and when the evidential status or scientific value of photographic methods are to be Design, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press 2005. explained. 5 – See for example Bas C. van Fraassen, Scientific Representation, Oxford: Clarendon Press 2008; and Peter Galison ‘Images of Peirce and Photographic Evidence Self’, in Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science, ed. Lorraine Daston, Photography has, since its inception, been claimed to be ‘special’. Early advocates New York: Zone 2004, 257–94. of the new method celebrated it for its almost mathematical precision and for the 6 – Josh Ellenbogen, ‘Camera and Mind’, way that it putatively ridded the image-making process of human intermediaries. Representations, 101:1 (Winter 2008), 99; The potential of the new method to serve as a useful tool for scientists was original emphasis. See also Josh Ellenbogen, Downloaded by [Universidad Pablo de Olavide] at 02:01 22 September 2017 Reasoned and Unreasoned Images: The recognised from the beginning,
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