New Images for the Earth Sciences

Nothing seemed to alarm earth scientists in the mid-nineteenth century as much as the threat of chance or contingency. When Carl Ritter in 1850 presented a paper to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin, he confessed to feeling uncanny and confused whenever he looked at the “wild exterior” of a terrestrial globe, “as if torn apart by blind natural force.” But encouraged by recent findings in fields such as physics, botany, or crystallography, which had discovered regularities even on the smallest scales, Ritter was not willing to surrender the surface of the earth to an “accidental, system- and meaningless, chaotic neptunian and plutonian dictatorship.” Quite the contrary, he was sure that progress in science and history would finally unveil the spatial regularity of nature. Ritter argued that the random appearance of the earth's crust was in fact deceptive, due only to the “weak images” with which the scientists had been working so far (Ritter Reference Ritter and Ritter1852, 206–210).

What is a weak image? Even though Ritter uses the expression “weak” several times when talking about representations of the earth (schwache Lineamente, schwache Repräsentanten, schwache Abbilder), he gives no definition of the term. But clearly it marks images that are not up to the task of challenging the threats of contingency. It seems that weak images have the double flaw of being both too close and too far away from what they represent: they follow the deceptive contingent appearances, but are not able to bring out the more real though not so obvious regularities. Obviously, new images were urgently needed. While as a geographer, Ritter was interested in the global disposition of whole continents, many geologists of the time were chiefly concerned with the problem of the origin of mountains (Greene Reference Greene1982, 76). But the basic hypothesis was similar: by finding regularities, as in the arrangement of mountain chains, they hoped to learn more about their emergence and their history (Kennedy Reference Kennedy2006, 10). One famous example is the French geologist Léonce Élie de Beaumont. During the 1820s and 1830s he had been working, together with Armand Dufrénoy, on the first geological map of France. Following the publication of the map from 1841 on, he became one of the most influential scientists of his time. In 1853 he followed François Arago as perpetual secretary of the Académie des Sciences. As Ritter did, so did Élie de Beaumont feel the threat that chance presented to scientific inquiries. Somewhat uneasily, he began his ambitious 1500-page Notice sur les systèmes des montagnes, published in 1852, by reassuring his readers that the arrangement of mountains was by no means random, but rather the expression of strict laws: “The mountains that diversify the surface of the globe are not distributed by chance like the stars in the sky. They constitute groups or Systems, in which, by rigorous analysis, elements of a general regularity can be distinguished, of which the celestial constellations show no trace” (Élie de Beaumont Reference Élie de Beaumont1852, 1).

This strong emphasis against contingency comes as no surprise: generations of travelers in the Alps had attributed the ugliness of mountains precisely to their chaotic appearance (see e.g. Groh and Groh Reference Groh and Groh1991; Reichler Reference Reichler2002). And still by the end of the eighteenth century, naturalists had arrived at similar results. When Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, professor of philosophy in Geneva, climbed Mont Blanc in 1787, he also was hoping for a better understanding of the arrangement of mountain chains. Standing on its summit, he indeed saw the surrounding mountains as never before:

However, instead of finding an order in their alignment, what astounded him most when looking at the surrounding summits was the “kind of disorder that predominate their disposition.” What from further below seemed to be a continuous mountain chain turned out to be single massifs, arranged “as by accident, and without any regularity” (ibid., 179). “This observation excludes every idea of a regular formation,” Saussure declared (ibid., 180).

However, by the mid-nineteenth century a remarkable shift had taken place in what Saussure had called an apparence trompeuse, a “deceptive appearance.” While for Saussure, the order that was sometimes observable from medium summits had been deceptive, now it was the chaotic appearance of mountains that had to be mistrusted.

Élie de Beaumont's basic idea, which he had first presented to the Académie in 1829 (Élie de Beaumont Reference Élie de Beaumont1829–30) and since further developed, was grounded on earlier considerations by Alexander von Humboldt and Leopold von Buch: The relative positions of whole mountains chains were seen as key indicators of their age. Particularly, Élie de Beaumont argued that parallel chains had emerged at the same time by violent revolutions. As David Oldroyd explains, the underlying notion was “that as the earth had slowly cooled it had contracted, and so its solid crust had buckled up from time to time. The popular analogue came to be that of the wrinkling skin of a drying apple. Simple as it was, this concept came to be the paradigm theory of the earth for most of the nineteenth century” (Oldroyd Reference Oldroyd1996, 170 f.) (see fig.1).

Fig. 1.

In 1874, Alexander Nasmyth photographically illustrated the metaphor of a shrinking planet as a drying apple and an aged hand. From Nasmyth and Carpenter Reference Nasmyth and Carpenter1874.

But in contrast to a drying apple, Élie de Beaumont thought the earth to have followed regular patterns while “wrinkling.” He maintained that the different stages of mountain building would ideally form a geometrical pattern consisting of twelve pentagons. This became known as the réseau pentagonal. It also became somewhat infamous, because Élie de Beaumont had tremendous problems in proving his theory. Regarding the réseau pentagonal, his biographer Auguste Daubrée, a geologist himself, stated in 1897 that “as remarkable as the development of his theory had been, the maître did not succeed in making it widely accepted, and the admirers of his genius justly regretted that he had absorbed himself so exclusively in the defence of a thesis drawn on such a small number of coincidences” (Daubrée Reference Daubrée and polytechnique1897).

But even though contemporaries of Élie de Beaumont doubted the reality of the réseau pentagonal, his idea to look for “systems” in the arrangement of mountain chains was well received. The more so as Charles Lyell's uniformitarianism – the notion that all terrain forms were due to slow, continuous and repetitious geological processes – was remarkably quiet when it came to explaining the origin of mountains. Mott T. Greene has observed that “between 1850 and 1875, . . . the ensemble of ideas put forward by Élie de Beaumont was generally accepted not only in France but by many geologists in the rest of Europe and in North America” (Greene Reference Greene1982, 93–94). Greene sees Élie de Beaumont's theories as forerunners of modern geotectonics (ibid., 121). Other historians of geology such as Martin Rudwick understand Élie de Beaumont's “parallelism” as one of the first coherent geohistorical explanatory models (Rudwick Reference Rudwick2008, 133).

The problem remained, though, that these systems were not only very large, but also remarkably complicated – and therefore did not reveal themselves easily. “The Mountain systems are at the same time the most delicate and the most general traces of the relief of the globe's surface,” Beaumont wrote in 1852. At that point, he had already increased the number of his systems from initially four to more than twenty, but had to admit that “their number is yet undetermined” (Élie de Beaumont Reference Élie de Beaumont1852, 2, 3). But not only their number was undetermined, it was also still unclear what exactly had to be looked for. “What lines may eventually be found to prevail will . . . require much time and great patience to discover,” Henry de la Beche had already noted in 1835 with regard to Élie de Beaumont's systems (cited in Greene Reference Greene1982, 98). Twenty years later, this uncertainty still remained.

Aimé Civiale's Photo-Geological Project

Like Ritter, Élie de Beaumont seems to have been in need of new forms of visualization that could make those delicate traces evident. Maybe for this reason, he supported a photographic project that had begun in 1858 in the Pyrenees (see Thomas Reference Thomas1997, 88). Aimé Civiale, polytechnicien and once officer in the engineer corps of the French army, came back from a trip to the Pyrenees with two photographic panoramas and several detail views that he believed “may be of interest to geology and geodesy” (Civiale Reference Civiale1859, 730). One year later, encouraged by Élie de Beaumont and the physicist Victor Regnault, who was also an amateur photographer (see Dahlberg Reference Dahlberg2005), Civiale photographed in the Bernese Oberland and brought back four panoramas. But this was just the starting point. Over the next decade, he took photographs of the Alps every summer, aiming for a complete “photographic reproduction of the Alps” (Civiale Reference Civiale1869, 985). Each spring he reported to the Académie about his previous year's journey, each time handing over an album containing his newest panoramas and detail photographs.

By 1868 he had traveled across almost the whole Alpine range. He had produced more than 40 large panoramas and more than 600 photographs of details (see figs. 2, 3, and 4). His last report to the Académie des Sciences, in which he recapitulated his project, was published in the Comptes rendus of the session of 26 April 1869: “This work, commenced in 1859 and finished in 1868, lasted ten years without interruption. I aimed to provide, as much as I was able to, a complete idea of the great Alpine chains from the geographical and geological point of view. I ask the Académie to accept my thanks for the benevolence and encouragement it offered to me during these ten years of work” (ibid., 989).

Fig. 2.

La Frontière Française à Barberine. From Aimé Civiale's album Le Mont Blanc et la Vallée de Chamounix, 1860/61, Bibliothèque de l'Institut de France. In the album, containing 56 photographs in total, each print (about 27 × 37 cm) occupies its own page.

Fig. 3.

Glacier et village d'Argentière. From Aimé Civiale's album Le Mont Blanc et la Vallée de Chamounix, 1860/61, Bibliothèque de l'Institut de France.

Fig. 4.

Les Aiguilles Rouges. From Aimé Civiale's album Le Mont Blanc et la Vallée de Chamounix, 1860/61, Bibliothèque de l'Institut de France.

What Civiale meant by providing “a complete idea of the great Alpine chains” can perhaps be best appreciated by looking at a map that accompanied his final publication in 1882, Les Alpes au point de vue de la géographie physique et de la géologie (Civiale Reference Civiale1882) (see fig. 5). The map shows the horizon lines – the boundaries – of the panoramas using red, blue, and green lines. Together, these form a meandering belt that covers almost all the high Alps. Civiale had chosen to place his camera on the summits so that the horizon lines “form secants or at least tangents” of each other (ibid., 2). Looking at this map, one grasps how the virtually impossible “complete idea” of the Alps was to be realized: in Paris, perhaps in the library of the Académie des Sciences, the different panoramas could be rolled out, looked at and compared synoptically. Taken together, all the panoramas would constitute one super-panorama that showed the Alps as no one had ever seen them before.Footnote ¹

Fig. 5.

Aimé Civiale, Carte des Alpes pour servir aux voyages photographiques (detail), 1882.

Nobody had ever tried to photograph the Alps in such a systematic way. In its striving for completeness, it resembles the French Mission héliographique in 1851, which had aimed for a complete recording of the historic monuments in France (see Mondenard Reference Mondenard2002). During its course, Civiale's photo-geological project was well received by geologists and seems to have raised high expectations. Charles Saint-Claire Deville, geologist and disciple of Élie de Beaumont, commented on Civiale's work extensively before the members of the Académie in 1866. After having remarked upon geology's “imperative need for precision,” he went on to say:

Much as Civiale's project is praised here, it is nevertheless left unclear what the “results” of it were, and in which way exactly they were “useful.” The praise seems to aim more at general qualities of photography, as well as at the fact that Civiale had tried everything to arrive at useful results – but not so much at the result itself. If the project made a promise, it was a pretty open one – and one closely connected to the need for new images in the earth sciences.

It seems strange, though, that photography of all things would promise to bring about those much sought for new images. Wasn't photography considered to be the superficial medium par excellence, reproducing all contingencies, but unable to reveal the deeper truth in nature? A “reproduction of a place, exact without doubt, but cold and mute,” as one of the early critics of photography had remarked (Töpffer Reference Töpffer and Kemp1980), the perfect example of a “weak image” in Ritter's sense?

Obviously, photography's status was not so unambiguous. There seems to have been something in the medium (or its usage) that legitimated high expectations and made Civiale's project worthy of support – something that went beyond its “precision.” Somehow, it must have been thought that photography was able to deal with the threats of chance and contingency that so much haunted scientists like Ritter or Élie de Beaumont. It seems that the contingencies of geology and those of the medium itself were not identical – in fact, the latter may well have been thought to “tame” the former.Footnote ² As perhaps with all hopes, it is not so easy to extract them from the written documents of the time – instead, we need to take a closer look at Civiale's practice of photography and at the images themselves.

3030 Meters above Sea Level

Long before dawn on the morning of 22 July 1866, a group of men and mules led by Aimé Civiale departed from the little village of St. Luc in the Valais to ascend the summit of the Bella Tola. Their luggage consisted mainly of 250 kilograms of photographic equipment (see Deville Reference Deville1866, 875; Stenger Reference Stenger1929–30, 194). Only four hours after departure and before seven o'clock in the morning, the party reached the summit. The camera was then positioned “3030 meters above sea level” (Civiale Reference Civiale1882, 256).

A week earlier, Civiale had reached Sierre, coming from Martigny through the Rhone Valley via the medieval town of Sion. Mules had been necessary to travel the last kilometers to St. Luc. The village was pitiful, Civiale later wrote, but there was a friendly guesthouse, the Hotel de la Bella Tola.Footnote ³ He found the hotelier “of a rare disinterest” and added, somewhat enigmatically: “I met in this hotel two very amiable Englishmen; they were deaf and mute” (ibid., 255). The Bella Tola, the main attraction for the growing number of tourists coming to St. Luc, is a mountain of medium height and as such was ideal for Civiale's project – high enough to offer a spectacular view but not so high as to dwarf the surrounding mountains and make them appear less impressive. In good conditions, more than 500 summits are visible from its summit.

On that day, when Civiale and his companions reached the summit, the weather was perfect. The view was clear, and the Weisshorn, sixteen kilometers away, appeared in all its splendor. The photographic work immediately began, taking up the best part of the morning. For a complete 360° panorama, Civiale needed fourteen successive, slightly overlapping photographs. The shooting required intense concentration and an elaborate procedure. Not only did the surrounding glaciers and snowfields reflect sunlight and threaten to overexpose the negatives, the changing position of the sun during the day, and with it the varying conditions of visibility, also had to be taken into consideration. Civiale began at seven o'clock with the first exposure facing north and worked his way around counter-clockwise (Deville Reference Deville1866, 876). “To connect the prints it is indispensable,” Civiale explained, “to place the camera in a horizontal position; the instrument turns around its own axis in such a way that the first sheet covers the second by around one and a half centimetres, and so on for the following sheets” (Civiale Reference Civiale1860, 828). Due to the low sensitivity of the dry wax paper negatives, every exposure took between twelve and fifteen minutes.Footnote ⁴ At noon Civiale took the last pictures facing east. At this point, the sun had changed position, and while nothing could be seen in the backlight of the morning, mountain chains and single ridges had now become visible (Civiale Reference Civiale1862, 602; Civiale Reference Civiale1866, 312; Deville Reference Deville1866, 876).

The outcome of Civiale's efforts can still be viewed today in a number of Parisian libraries, for instance at the Bibliothèque de l'Institut de France. The panorama is stored, together with twelve others, in a large cylindrical container. Unrolled, it measures over four meters in length and covers the huge table of the reading room (see figs. 6 and 7). Like all panoramas that are not arranged in a circle, but laid out flat, it is somewhat disorienting.

Fig. 6.

View of Aimé Civiale's Panorama circulaire pris de la Bella Tola lying on a table at the library of the Institut de France. Photo by the author.

Fig. 7.

Aimé Civiale's Panorama circulaire pris de la Bella Tola seen from the gallery of the reading room of the Institut de France. Photo by the author.

The two ends of the image do not quite meet, they do not seem to point in the same direction. The perceptible rupture in the circular image, however, is one of time rather than space, since between the two pictures at both extremities lay not twenty minutes (the approximate interval between successive photographs), but four or five hours (fig. 8).

Fig. 8.

Aimé Civiale, Panorama circulaire pris de la Bella Tola, photograph/photogravure, 1866–1882. From Thomas Reference Thomas1997, pp. 86–87.

The photograph of the southeast view gives a good impression of the mountain landscapes that Civiale may have been interested in (see fig. 9). A large ridge in the middle ground leads the eye into the depth of the image, where the summits vanish in the mist. “To provide physical geography and geology with the indications they await,” Civiale wrote, “the photographs have to be oriented such as to reproduce in the best possible way the structure of the rocks, the disposition of the layers of the terrain, the forms and inclination of the glaciers” (Civiale Reference Civiale1863, 523). In the foreground, the little plateau of the Bella Tola – where Civiale was standing – takes up a lot of space. A closer examination of the panorama shows that, despite the full circle panoramic view, neither the photographer nor his crew are anywhere to be seen. One imagines how the whole crew, including luggage and equipment, moved around the camera on its tripod, to stay out of the field of view. This odd absence perhaps best captures the particular time structure of the photographic panorama. While giving the impression of simultaneity – as if one were standing on the summit of the Bella Tola, looking around ad libitum – it really consists of many disparate points in time: fourteen moments, each a quarter of an hour long, a long glance over a whole morning in the year 1866.

Fig. 9.

Aimé Civiale, Panorama circulaire pris de la Bella Tola, 1866 (detail of figure 6).

As we have seen, the panorama from the Bella Tola is only a small fragment of Civiale's photographic project. Since 1859, he had traveled every summer through the Alps and made photographs of rocks, valleys, glaciers, and mountain chains. In his first note concerning his Alpine photographs, read to the members of the Académie des Sciences by Élie de Beaumont, he reflected on the difference between former uses of photography and his approach:

But the division line between picturesque and scientific usages of mountain photography had never been as clearly marked as Civiale suggested. Since the 1840s, only a few years after Daguerre and Talbot had presented their respective processes, mountains had been the subject of photographic interest. Some of the early daguerreotypes of Joseph Philibert Girault de Prangey, for example, taken between 1846 and 1850, can hardly be accounted for by solely picturesque appeal. The pictures give evidence of a scientific interest in the limestone structures of the Jura (see figs. 10 and 11) or in glaciers like the Mer de GlaceFootnote ⁵ near Chamonix (see Barger and White Reference Barger and White1991, 74; Mauron Reference Mauron2008).

Figs. 10 and 11.

Joseph Philibert Girault de Prangey, Limestone rocks in the Jura. Daguerreotypes, 1846–50. From Mauron Reference Mauron2008, pp. 165 and 160.

Also in the 1840s, an eminent figure like John Ruskin made a series of daguerreotypes in the Alps. He claimed to have made the first photograph of the Matterhorn (Ruskin Reference Ruskin1879, 4); other pictures show the aiguilles around Chamonix or, again, the Mer de Glace. Ruskin, although known today mainly as an art critic and theoretician, was much concerned with geological questions and even published some scientific papers, e.g. in the Geological Magazine (Ruskin Reference Ruskin1865). His case strikingly shows how close scientific and aesthetic interests in photography could be intertwined by the mid-century (see e.g. Gully Reference Gully and Casteras1993; Harvey Reference Harvey1984; Haslam Reference Haslam2005; Wildman Reference Wildman2006).

Around 1850, photographic inquiries in the mountain regions became more numerous; they can be mentioned here only partly. One example is the Comte Joseph Vigiers, who made a photographic excursion to the Pyrenees in 1853. Twenty of his salt-paper prints are stored today in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris (Heilbrun Reference Heilbrun, Cartier-Bresson, Desroy-Hamouda and Dalarun-Mitrovitsa2003). Another example is Paris-based Friedrich Martens, who, after having experimented with panoramatic daguerreotypes in the 1840s, sent a photographic panorama of the Swiss Alps to the Académie des Sciences in 1854. La Lumière reported proudly that Élie de Beaumont himself had presented it and had remarked that “it renders with the wonderful exactitude of photography the geological aspect of those icy regions” (Anonymous 1854; about Martens, see e.g. Breguet Reference Breguet1981, 13–15).

As early as 1849, the Mulhouse-based manufacturer and glaciologist Daniel Dollfus-Ausset assigned the photographers Jean-Gustave Dardel and Camille Bernabé to take photos of Alpine glaciers;Footnote ⁶ in 1855, he took a share in the newly found photographic enterprise of the Bisson brothers and commissioned them to make pictures in the Bernese Alps (Lagoltiere Reference Lagoltiere1986; Morand and Kempf Reference Morand and Kempf1989, 107–112; Steiner, Zumbühl and Bauder Reference Steiner, Zumbühl, Bauder, Orlove, Wiegandt and Luckman2007, 88). Louis-Auguste and Auguste-Rosalie Bisson were among the most famous photographers of their time, and their Alpine subjects aroused broad public interest. In 1860, they accompanied Napoléon III and his wife on a voyage to the province of Savoy, which had become part of France just a year earlier. This resulted in an album called Souvenir de la Haute-Savoie, Le Montblanc et ses Glaciers, par MM. Bisson frères, Photographes de l'Empereur. Between 1859 and 1861, the Bissons also tried to climb Mont Blanc and make the first images from the summit (Chlumsky, Eskildsen, and Marbot Reference Chlumsky, Eskildsen and Marbot1999; Decker Heftler and Spies Reference Decker, de and Spies2003).

The spectacular images of the Bissons inspired many others to photograph the Alps, among them the Austrian Gustav Jägermayer, who in 1863 made a sumptuous photographic expedition in the Austrian Alps. In choosing the right viewpoints for his large wet collodion plates, Jägermayer was supported by a landscape painter (Gröning Reference Gröning and Faber2008).

It becomes obvious, by these few examples, that mountains – and especially the Alps – were by no means unknown photographic territory when Civiale started his campaign in 1859 (see also Baier Reference Baier1965, 444–449; Faber Reference Faber2008; Guichon Reference Guichon1984; Holzer Reference Holzer2006; Stenger Reference Stenger1929–30). Many photographers, among them the Bissons, had also already underlined the scientific value of their images (see the entry Geology in Hannavy Reference Hannavy2008). None of them, however, had made a clear distinction between artistic, touristic, or scientific usages of photography. It seems that before 1860, it was widely accepted that aesthetic and epistemic qualities of images did not interfere. Now, it suddenly seemed necessary to draw a strict line between the two. “The picturesque side is here only of secondary importance,” Civiale wrote (Civiale Reference Civiale1862, 602). Charles Saint-Claire Deville, geologist and member of the Académie des Sciences, was more resolute when praising Civiale's photographs in 1866:

Deville used the notion that photography was unable to produce landscapes to underline his argument that it was especially fit for the exact sciences of geology and geodesy. He compared Civiales' photos with the artistic movement called “realism” – a notion he found “deplorable” in art, but of eminent use for scientific purposes.Footnote ⁷

Interesting enough, many of Civiales photographs do not seem to differ much aesthetically from contemporary productions by “landscape” photographers such as Adolphe Braun or William England – with the one major distinction that Civiale never used human figures as scale unit or repoussoir (see figs. 2, 3 and 4). Many of the subjects are similar, though, and besides glaciers and mountains also include houses, villages, or valleys. The difference lies not so much in the purely visual, but in the way these images were made: “photographs taken under neatly defined conditions,” as Civiale himself had put it. This meant controlling and recording the circumstances of the photographic process as completely as possible, so that everything would be as reproducible as possible; for that end, Civiale not only chose summits of comparable height, kept the camera rigorously horizontal, and tried to take photos under the same atmospheric conditions; he also collected numerous mineralogical samples,Footnote ⁸ measured angles, took barometrical readings, made drawings, and wrote diary entries (Tissier and Staszak Reference Tissier, Staszak and Loiseaux2006, 160). Unfortunately, those do not seem to have survived.

The Unexpected

When taking a closer look at Civiale's photographic panorama from the Bella Tola, a few details come to our attention that might have remained unnoticed at first sight. To the North, a signal prominently marks the highest point of the summit, making it clear that the Bella Tola had already been topographically surveyed (see fig. 12). A little closer to the camera lens, a wooden bench can be seen. A piece of Alpinist infrastructure, it points to the fact that this is a comparatively accessible peak, and a good spot for those seeking an impressive view of the Valais Alps. Years before Civiale had taken his photographs, travelers had sat here and enjoyed the panorama. In figure 9, another small object can be seen. In the foreground, a forgotten bucket leans on a rock, reminding us of the photographic labor that had to be done on the spot, and of the participants involved.Footnote ⁹

Fig. 12.

Aimé Civiale, Panorama circulaire pris de la Bella Tola, 1866 (detail of figure 6).

Neither the signal, nor the bench, nor the bucket seem to be really part of what Civiale's panorama is about. They just happened to be there, more or less by accident. In the case of the signal, Civiale even reports that he tried to bring down the flag, but didn't succeed (Civiale Reference Civiale1882, 256). Obviously, he wanted to control what was in the photographs as much as possible, or at least avoid anything that could distract from the mountain view. On the bench and the bucket, Civiale doesn't comment, and at least for the bucket, it is probable that he just overlooked it when exposing the image.

So why then bother with these small and obviously not very important details? Admittedly, none of them gave any of the geological or geographical information that earth scientists were hoping for. The challenge in approaching Civiale's images today is that there seems to be a gap between what those images seemingly promised, and what they could in fact deliver. Nowhere is it stated that those images were actually used by earth scientists, that they produced new insights, or that they helped in formulating new theories – they probably didn't. Only this is something Civiale couldn't have known when conducting his project. Rather, he and his supporters at the Académie des Sciences must have had good reasons to hope for impressive results. As I said before, it is not so easy to localize those hopes. Photography promised something, but it might not even have been clear to the contemporaries what this “something” was exactly. When writing about hopes, we therefore have to allow for a certain amount of historical speculation.

This is where the signal, the bench, and the bucket come in. Even if at a first glance the mountains on Civiale's images didn't reveal anything spectacular, those small details could have made manifest photography's potential. They spoke not only of the surveying of the Alps, of touristic activities, or of the labor that mountain photography required; they also alluded to a quality of photography that may have been one of the main reasons that it was so attractive to earth scientists in need of new visualizations. It was unpredictable what all would be visible on a photo, what later viewers would discover. This represented a certain threat on the one hand, and one can see in Civiale's case how much he tried to control the photographic conditions to minimize those contingencies.

But on the other hand, the appeal of photography was largely due to exactly this capability: to bring things to the attention of the viewer that the operator of the camera could have overlooked. “It is most remarkable that often things are found in photographs that cannot be noticed on the natural objects themselves,” a visitor at the first international photographic exhibition in Berlin in 1865 remarked (Landois Reference Landois1865, 452). From the very beginning, photography was known for recording such little unnoticed details. It seems that all the exactness, precision, and truth of the photographic image that everybody talked about so much was based on this ability to show what nobody had expected or even hoped for, but what had been there all the same. These small elements of chance were what arrested the attention of so many observers in the early decades of photography. “In a picture you can find nothing the artist has not seen before you; but in a perfect photograph there will be as many beauties lurking, unobserved, as there are flowers that blush unseen in forests and meadows,” the American physician and essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in 1859, also contrasting artistic image production against the “mechanical” photography. He added: “This distinctness of the lesser details of a building or a landscape often gives us incidental truths which interest us more than the central object of the picture. . . . The more evidently accidental their introduction, the more trivial they are in themselves, the more they take hold of the imagination.” As so many others, Holmes saw a photograph as something that could be fully appreciated only retrospectively, and that had to be looked at over and over again (Holmes Reference Holmes1859). A similar argument was brought forward in 1864 by the French astronomer Hervé-Auguste Faye, who was surprised to find that certain “defects” he saw on photographs of a solar eclipse were in fact not defects, but sunspots. “As a general thesis,” Faye noted, “one sees only the things that are of interest at the moment of observation; the rest almost always escapes one's attention. Automatic observation, on the contrary, registers everything: that which one is looking for at the moment and that which one will be looking for later” (Faye Reference Faye and Rouillé1989, 452).

One of the most pertinent examples of what could be called the “subsequentiality” of photography (for want of a better translation of the German Nachträglichkeit) is perhaps Henry Fox Talbot's description of the photo Boulevard des Capucines, the second plate in his “Pencil of Nature” (fig. 13):

It is remarkable what happens to all those accidental details in the course of Talbot's description: they not only become much more important than they probably would have been if somebody had looked out of the same window of the Hotel de Douvres at the same time, they are also supplied with reasons for their being there. One could say that everything that Talbot describes was completely contingent: the shutter could have been closed, the road already repaired, the watering machines come ten minutes later. It was really a product of chance that all those incidents that happened, happened (as it is, in a way, always), they were as meaningless or meaningful as anything else, and nobody would have had a reason to notice them anyway. But the fact that Talbot stood in the window with his camera, and later looked at the result, did something to those contingencies. Being on the image and being looked at, every detail became potentially meaningful. Every detail was able to tell a story about the reasons for its being there, or became a trace of something else – like the “broad bands of shade” that point to the watering machines, but also tell us about the weather on that particular day (“hot and dusty”), or the efforts of the municipality in mid-nineteenth-century Paris to make city life in the summer more endurable. One of the most interesting examinations of this often-cited passage comes from the historian of photography Timm Starl. He remarks that in his text, Talbot distinguished between the production and reception of the image. Starl writes:

However, Starl is not only interested in photography's capability to record contingent elements, he also analyzes the change those elements undergo when being captured. According to him, even though still accidental when they happen during the exposure, they change their status in the image: “Making chance visible cancels out its unique quality, which is lost between the creation of the image and the recognition of the result” (Starl Reference Starl1987, 82–83; see also Starl Reference Starl and Galerie1992).

Fig. 13.

Henry Fox Talbot, Boulevard des Capucines, calotype print, ca. 1843. From Amelunxen Reference Amelunxen1988.

Strangely enough, something seems to happen to those details between the exposure and the examination of the image: they somehow lose some of their contingency. “A mirror with memory” Holmes had called the daguerreotype (Holmes Reference Holmes1859). However, this memory was certainly not only an accessory, but changed the status of the “mirror” completely. The “subsequentiality” of photography – the fact that, in contrast to traditional forms of scientific representation, its epistemic value was not so much based on the act of its making but more on the later perception of the imageFootnote ¹⁰ – made all the elements in an image potentially readable. Photography's promise to bring out the unexpected included both: to make things visible that nobody would have thought of, and to give meaning to details that nobody had deemed important. Seemingly, contingency in the world and contingency in the photographic image were two different things. Objects or events entered the photographic image unexpectedly and by chance, but on their way lost some of their contingency.

Explorative Photography

When thinking about the question of what made photography so attractive for earth scientists in the mid-nineteenth century, and especially for the representation of mountains, I believe we have to consider photography's promise to bring out the unexpected at least as much as photography's “exactness” or “objectivity” (see Daston and Galison Reference Daston and Galison2007). We might even have to regard those classic qualities of photography as a by-product of the unexpected – meaning that its capability to bring out unexpected details was the proof for its precision, and the fundament of the possibility to even notice this precision. So when Charles Saint-Claire Deville talked about geology's “imperative need for precision,” adding that this need could only be satisfied by photography (Deville Reference Deville1866, 874), there might be already an understanding of “precision” at work that is at the core photographic.

For scientific mountain photography around 1860, and especially in Civiale's case, we have to take into account that the promise of the unexpected must have been particularly attractive. As we have seen, earth sciences were in need of new representations that would make it possible to identify patterns in the arrangement of mountain chains (see also Thomas Reference Thomas1997). But there was neither a commonly accepted orogenic theory that only had to be proved by those new images, nor was it clear what could count as a relevant pattern. A successful new medium needed to give answers to questions that hadn't even been posed yet. Photography gave hope of doing so: “The true means to answer the questions I am asking here, and moreover those that the future is still retaining, is photography,” the astronomer Faye stated in 1862 (Faye Reference Faye1862, 547). What held for observations of the sun seems to have applied to the study of mountains as well. If photography was considered a medium that might replace the usual “weak images,” it might have been precisely because it promised to produce results that were unforeseeable.

In a recent article, Peter Geimer examined “the unforeseeable” in photography. To localize the point where the intentions of the photographer and the momentum of reality touch, he uses the term “incident” (Vorfall, Ereignis) – something that happens to the image, and that the photographer can only partly control. This, however, is not a defect, but basic to many scientific applications of photography. “Visualizations in the sciences would be a redundant affair if scientists could exactly anticipate the resulting images of their apparatuses at any one time,” Geimer remarks (Geimer Reference Geimer and Belting2007).

Beginning with Ian Hacking (Hacking Reference Hacking1983), historians and sociologists of science have pointed out that experiments are not simply testing theories, but are generative for them (e.g. Heidelberger Reference Heidelberger, Heidelberger and Steinle1998; Pickering Reference Pickering1992; Rheinberger Reference Rheinberger2001). For his study on electrodynamics around 1820, Friedrich Steinle has coined the term “explorative experiments.” Steinle focuses on periods of “epistemic uncertainty,” when concepts and theories have become unreliable. “To test a hypothesis or expectation, there has to be a reliable language, in which it can be formulated and that allows to ask the experimental question, to design and to evaluate the experiment. When an abstract concept is missing or shaken in its reliability, the experimental labour will have a different character” (Steinle Reference Steinle2005, 20).

Around 1850, orogenic theory in Europe was in such a state of uncertainty (see e.g. Greene Reference Greene1982, 93–121). And even though Civiale's project is hardly an experiment in the narrow sense, it shows elements of an “explorative” approach. With allusion to Steinle, one could call it “explorative photography.”Footnote ¹¹

What is won when we use this label “explorative photography” to describe Civiale's work? First of all, it helps us to understand why photography was so attractive at a time when its usages were anything but well-defined. More importantly, though, it makes clear that what Civiale did was by no means the odd enterprise of an eccentric outsider, but good scientific practice. What may have seemed an unprofessional fumbling, a being-in-the-dark, turns out to be a valid approach. Photographing the mountains and hoping that something useful will appear can, under certain conditions, be as justified as trying to find something specific or to prove a hypothesis by photographic means.

What distinguishes Civiale from a scientist or an experimenter, though, is that he himself had no ambition to evaluate his images. He obviously understood himself as a supplier of images, not as a theoretician; their utilization he left to others. This was, as we have seen, one of the basic characteristics of photography: it separated the process of image-making from that of perception. It seemed to make no difference who made the photo (and this notion underlay many of the arguments during the nineteenth century concerning whether photography or drawing were more suitable for scientific purposes); it was important that it could be potentially used afterwards. The forgotten bucket or the wooden bench were certainly not the kind of unexpected that anybody was hoping for. What they were speaking of, however, was photography's potential to record things nobody had thought about, and to make contingent appearances seem less contingent. What was possible for a bucket, could have been also possible for traces hinting at mountain systems.