Brought to light :photography and the invisible ; 1840-1900

[on the occasion of the Exhibition "Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840 - 1900, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, October 11, 2008 - January 4, 2009, and Ausstellung Fotografie und das Unsichtbare, Albertina, Vienna, March 20, 2009 - June 6, 2009]
We cite from the COVER:
"For a new scientific culture emphasizing the value of empirical observation, the camera's status as a dispassionate, mechanical observer made it an ideal instrument: the light-sensitive plate was likened to a more perfect version of the human retina, and the camera to an infallible eye. Photography's relationship to vision and to scientific knowledge became more complicated, however, when the subject was invisible. Over the course of the nineteenth century, amateur and professional scientists applied the camera to the microscope and telescope, photographing worlds infinitesimally small and unimaginably far away. They used photography to try to see, stop, and analyze motion — not only that of humans and animals but also of heavenly bodies, wind, sound waves, and electricity. In 1895 the discovery of X-rays upset the conventional understanding of opacity and transparency, pointing up the perceptual limitations of the human senses. Discoveries such as these inevitably led to pseudoscientific exploitation of the medium; practitioners of spirit photography, for instance, used it to lend credence to claims of ghosts and supernatural phenomena.
This striking volume asks readers to imagine what pictures of the invisible meant in the nineteenth century, when the worlds revealed by modern imaging technologies such as scanning electron microscopes, satellites, and PET scans would have been utterly inconceivable."
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Facsimile of Table of Contents please click URL.