Photographic Hygiene in the Industrial Era
This essay takes Man Ray’s Élevage de poussière (1920) as the departure point for an investigation into the history of dust as a photographic problem. Approaching Man Ray’s picture above all as a study of dust on glass, it considers how photographers grappled with dust in representational, material, and environmental terms. For even as advances in photomicrography brought dust into view with unprecedented detail, the photographic plate also rendered it perceptible in more vexing ways. The accumulation of dust on glass represented one of the most persistent challenges facing photographers, leading to the development rigorous routines of photographic hygiene, aligning the practice of photography with an emergent discourse of modernist hygiene. As I argue, photography contributed to this discourse not only as a means of representation, but as a hygienic practice in its own right, prompting us to reconsider the place of photography – and photographic hygiene – within a larger ecology of industrial extraction, production, and waste.
Man Ray et Marcel Duchamp, Élevage de poussière, New York, 1920, tirage argentique (circa 1967), 23,9 × 30,4 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. © Man Ray et Marcel Duchamp / 2024, ProLitterris, Zurich
Katerina Korola is an art historian and media scholar whose research explores the history of photography through an ecological lens. She holds a joint-PhD in Art History and Cinema & Media Studies from the University of Chicago and is at work on her first book, Picturing the Air: Photography and the Industrial Atmosphere, which tells the history of air pollution as a photographic problem. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and a Research Affiliate at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University.
Keywords: dust, photography, pollution, hygiene, modernism, environment
Citation: Katerina Korola, « Verre et poussière. L’hygiène photographique à l’ère industrielle », Transbordeur. Photographie histoire société, no. 8, 2024, pp. 52-65.