Beyond Ocular Vision
In August 1835, a camera obscura looked towards the light emanating from a latticed window at the home of William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877). This ‘looking’ fixed an image onto a piece of light sensitised paper, a process that saw Fox Talbot create one of the very first ever photographic images. In April 2017,1 an array of telescopes across the globe ‘swivelled, turned and stared at a galaxy 53 million light years away’.2 This ‘staring’ created the very first image of a black hole. The first photograph of the unphotographable — the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy. Whilst 182 years of photographic and scientific development and achievement separate these events and images, they hold deep synchronicities across light, time, and space and act as marker points for the beginning and potential ‘end’ of the photographic medium...Read the full article in the printed issue. Get OVER Journal 2
Image above: William Henry Fox Talbot, Latticed window negative, August 1835. Photograph taken by the author
at Fox Talbot Museum at Lacock Abbey, November 2018.
1 Whilst the ‘black hole photograph’ was unveiled in April 2019, the data collected to ‘take’ the image occurred in April 2017.
