PHOTOMICROGRAPHY and the PROBLEM

Photomicrography 41

INTAGLIO: University of Toronto Art Journal, Vol. 1, Spring 2019

KARL-MAGNUS GUSTAV BROSE*

In this paper I examine the history of scientific illustrations or “visualizations” as they

have been termed more recently.1 In particular, I will focus on nineteenth-century

photomicrography as a case study for the extent to which photographic visualizations

are able to provide an objective representation of reality. Prior to the age of

photography, drawing and engraving were the primary means of visualizing and

disseminating scientific knowledge of the natural world. These drawings were usually

subordinate to the text and served primarily as illustrations of verbal concepts; with the

*Art History, University of Toronto 1 Maria Evagorou, et al., “The Role of Visual Representations in Scientific Practices: From Conceptual Understanding and Knowledge Generation to ‘Seeing’ How Science Works,” International Journal of STEM Education 2, no. 1 (2015).

PHOTOMICROGRAPHY and the PROBLEM

of SCIENTIFIC REALISM

Karl-Magnus Gustav Brose 42


rise of empiricism, however, this began to change. The astronomer Johannes Hevelius’s

quarrel with Galileo over his depictions of the moon’s surface will serve to illustrate

changing conceptions of visual representation in science, indicating that the telos of the

early-modern image shifted from ‘visual accessory’ to ‘accurate depiction of reality.’ As

empiricism flourished in the scientific boom of the nineteenth century, the relationship

between art and science became increasingly tenuous. The artist’s work was

problematically subjective. With manual representation came the risk of introducing

something foreign to the object itself; any trace of the draughtsman’s own prejudice or

ignorance would undermine the veracity of his image. Initially, the camera seemed to

solve this problem. The notion of mechanical objectivity—the idea that the camera

objectively and faithfully reproduces or represents its subject algorithmically—cut the

artist’s subjective interpretive act out of the picture entirely. Sociologists and historians

of science have rightfully deconstructed this myth, but I will argue that mechanical

objectivity was, in fact, far from being trivially accepted by early practitioners of

scientific photography––it was, rather, seen to be deeply problematic from its

inception. Focusing on the late nineteenth century, I will discuss the work of

bacteriologist Robert Koch, who revolutionized the project of photomicrography and

brought its use into wide acceptance in scientific journals. It is a central claim of this

paper that Koch and his colleagues understood that the camera’s objectivity was not of

a metaphysical but of a procedural kind. This will be examined further in the final

section, in which I consider Koch’s work in relation to the modern debate between

social constructivists and scientific realists. This paper will argue that Koch understood

that mechanical objectivity did not do away with the problem of interpretation; he

recognized its ability to, instead, subject interpretation to a common ground of

procedural evaluation and, thus, obtain a measure of objectivity.

Empirical Science and the Hunt for Objectivity

In a passage from Historia Naturalis, Pliny considers the difficulty of visually

representing plants in botanical treatises, stating, “But not only is a picture misleading

when the colors are so many, particularly as the aim is to copy nature, but besides this,

much imperfection arises from the manifold hazards in the inaccuracy of the copyist.”2

His first objection resides in the recognition that painting and drawing can never be

2 Quoted in Mary G. Winkler and Albert Van Helden, "Representing the Heavens: Galileo and Visual Astronomy," Isis 83, no. 2 (1992): 200.

Photomicrography 43


identical to the objects they depict. Tales of Parrhasios and Zeuxis notwithstanding,

even the finest examples of trompe l’oeil illusionism hardly reproduce the experience of

perceiving a real object. The difficulty of rendering in two dimensions that which exists

in three and replicating the infinite variability of color and tone are just a few of the

challenges the mimetic artist faces. Pliny’s second remark in this passage concerns the

inevitable representational drift that occurs as a result of reproduction. With each new

copy the image of the plant strays further and further from the original, since the

copyist is unable to faithfully reproduce exactly what he sees, even where he possesses

the will to do so. Pliny continues to inform us that “[f]or this reason the other writers

have given verbal accounts only; some have not even given the shape of the plants and

for the most part have been content with bare names since they thought it sufficient to

point out the properties and nature of a plant to those willing to look for it.”3 What

Pliny reveals here is the decision of writers to banish images from botanical texts on

epistemological grounds. It is the “properties” and “nature” of the plant that are its

essentials, and these features cannot adequately be captured by visual representation.

It is beyond the scope of this paper to trace a genealogy of relations between

the text and image, but Pliny’s ruminations illuminate long-standing reservations

concerning an image’s ability to communicate truthful information about an object. It is

enough for the moment to recognize that since antiquity language and writing have

been privileged over visual perception and observation. This deeply entrenched

prejudice has left its mark on the history of art through precepts such as ut pictura poesis

— a notion that arose in the Early Modern period which asserted that painting must be

like poetry4 — and the preference for philosophy and theology over sensory forms of

knowing in the sciences. The intellect, and by extension language, deals in concepts and

essences, whereas vision and the mechanical arts trade in appearances and accidents.

This is not a monolithic claim about the history of art and science in Europe, but it is a

picture that remains largely intact until at least the seventeenth century.5 In both art and

science, the text serves as a paradigm against which the “truthfulness” of the image can

be (unfavorably) compared.

3 Winkler and Van Helden, “Representing the Heavens,” 200. 4 For this discussion see Rensselaer Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York: W.W. Norton, 1980). 5 Many major exceptions to this hierarchy are in evidence, from Aristotle to Leonardo. It is worth noting however that in their efforts to ennoble the arts of painting and sculpture during the Renaissance, artists labored extensively to establish parity with literature and poetry, and rarely did they assert the primacy of the visual arts.



In “Representing the Heavens: Galileo

and Visual Astronomy,” Mary Winkler and

Albert Van Helden contrast Galileo and

Johannes Hevelius’s (1611-1687) respective

approaches to astronomical observation,

highlighting a major turn in the development of

visual representations in scientific texts. Hevelius

heavily criticized Galileo’s drawings of the moon

in Sidereus Nuncius (1610) when he published his

own treatise containing his observations of the

moon’s surface, the Selenographia (1647). He

complained that “Galileo lacked a sufficiently

good telescope, or he could not be sufficiently

attentive to those observations of his, or, most

likely, he was ignorant of the art of picturing and

drawing, which art serves this work greatly and

no less than acute vision, patience, and toil.”6

Galileo’s drawings of the moon (fig. 1), no less

accomplished in their beautiful draughtsmanship than in their close study of the

moon’s surface, belie Hevelius’ critical estimation of Galileo’s talent. However, his

strictures reveal a fundamental difference in the two astronomers’ conceptions of the

image and its role in the production of scientific knowledge. Galileo’s engravings in

Sidereus Nuncius differed from his original studies of

the moon in that certain areas of the moon’s surface

were altered, such as the enlargement of a crater (now

known as Albategnius) well beyond its actual size in

relation to the surrounding topography (fig. 2).

Why would Galileo choose to reproduce an

image of the moon in his text that did not correspond

to what he ‘actually saw’? In this case, the image was

altered to suit the argument made in the text. In this

key passage, Galileo argues for his revolutionary claim

that the surface of the moon is not perfectly flat, but

rough and pockmarked. In order to support this claim,

6 Translated in Winkler and Van Helden, “Representing the Heavens,” 195.

Fig. 1 Galileo’s moon drawings.

Bibl. Naz. Florence.

Fig. 2 Copper engraving of the last quarter moon from Galileo, Sidereus Nuncius (1610)

Photomicrography 45


Galileo likens the topography of Albategnius to a valley in Bohemia surrounded by a

vast mountain range, which blocks the light from the sun, casting a shadow across the

valley. By enlarging the image of the crater, Galileo was able to support his comparison

with the Earth’s surface and more clearly demonstrate the cast shadow clearly visible

on the left side of the crater. As Winkler and Van Helden put it, “[h]e sacrificed the

accuracy of the visual representations (which were, finally, visual aids) to the demands

of the text, which carried the real - and accurate - message.”7 For Galileo, the purpose

of the image is to illustrate his verbal argument; he clearly believed he was conveying

more or better knowledge by adjusting the visual data to suit his written account. With

Hevelius’s Selenographia we see the early stages of the inversion of this model. His claim

that his text provides an accurate delineation of the moon and shows the nativa facies of

other celestial bodies more closely resembles modern practices of empirical

investigation, for which a ‘neutral’ and naturalistic representation of the object is the

starting point for the formation of knowledge. In this sense, the text explains the image

rather than the other way around; in this case, the image––so long as it is an accurate

depiction of reality––becomes the foundation upon which interpretation must occur.

The problem, however, is that even once the scientist has emancipated the

image from its servitude to a discursive model and tries, as Hevelius does, to “describe

what he sees,” there is still a subjective interpretive act involved. Ernst Gombrich

perceptively diagnoses the problem in Art and Illusion. In the second chapter, “Truth

and the Stereotype,” he relates an anecdote from the German illustrator Ludwig

Richter. Richter recounts a plein air drawing session with his students, during which they

attempted to draw the landscape before them with the “utmost fidelity,” using only the

sharpest pencils and most finely detailed execution possible. As one might expect, their

results varied widely, even though they all set out to faithfully represent the same scene.

In the discussion that follows, Gombrich argues that “[t]here is no neutral naturalism,”

for all of our representations are colored by the stereotype, or the visual vocabulary

which conditions our act of looking and copying what we see.8 Thus, even a genius of

Leonardo’s stature was impelled to draw features of the human heart that were

described in the Greek physician Galen’s famous anatomical texts, but which he could

not possibly have seen during dissection.9 The new epistemology embedded in

Hevelius’s Selenographia demanded that the object itself serve as the starting point for

7 Winkler and Van Helden, “Representing the Heavens,” 208-9. 8 Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press, (1960) 2000), 87. 9 Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 83.



scientific investigation. This inductive model of inquiry made it essential that the

scientific observer render only those properties which properly belong to the object

and not to his own imagination. Yet, as Gombrich demonstrates, the demand cannot

be met: the artist will always employ the stereotype––his visual vocabulary and

preconceived knowledge––in order to depict his object. The only conceivable solution

is to remove the artist from the equation altogether, thereby doing away with the

stereotype and allowing the object to speak for itself.

Photography and Mechanical Objectivity

“The reproduction of nature by man will never be a reproduction and imitation, but

always an interpretation… since man is not a machine and is incapable of rendering

objects mechanically.”10 The French art critic and novelist Champfleury (1821-1889)

was in agreement with Pliny in this regard—the artist cannot duplicate nature, just as

the botanist cannot visually replicate the appearance of the plant described in his text.

In addition to the epistemological concerns voiced by Pliny, Champfleury would have

added that it is not the proper task of the artist to render nature mechanically even if he

were capable of doing so. Whereas Champfleury sought “sincerity” over and above the

bare reproduction of nature, his early modern predecessors believed that it was the

artist’s duty to ennoble nature by refining its imperfections. This axiom of early modern

art theory was most evident in the persistent hierarchy of genres in the academies, in

which still life was held in low regard, and in the denigration of ‘naturalistic’ northern

art in comparison with idealized Italian painting.

What these various conceptions of art share is a conviction that the artist must

convey something other or more than the basic facts of his or her objects of

observation. In the nineteenth century, the scientist’s aims were dedicated to the

erasure of this interpretive act from their representations, cleaving the previously

intertwined roles of artist and scientist. The advent of photography brought with it the

exciting possibility of furthering this divide between art and science by reducing the act

of visual reproduction to a mechanical procedure free from human interference.

Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison describe this development in their classic

sociological analysis of mechanical objectivity in scientific photography: “What we find

is that the image, as standard bearer of objectivity, is inextricably tied to a relentless

search to replace individual volition and discretion in depiction by the invariable

10 Quoted in Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, "The Image of Objectivity," Representations, no. 40 (1992): 100.

Photomicrography 47


routines of mechanical reproduction.”11 The camera thus appears to isolate the object,

removing the potential biases involved in non-mechanical reproduction and thereby

offering an objective representation of reality.12

There are, however, several serious issues with this account of mechanical

objectivity. Joel Snyder raises a few powerful objections to photography’s privileged

status in his essay “Picturing Vision.” In addition to the photographer’s selectivity in

choosing and framing his subject, photographs are not optically identical to ocular

experience; moreover, they do not stand in a direct causal relation to their object in the

way that a fingerprint does to an individual’s digit.13 While his arguments are

convincing, we need not wait for Snyder to point out these issues with the supposed

objective realism of photography. Already in the nineteenth century, professional

opinion was divided on the matter of the efficacy of photographs for representing and

transmitting scientific knowledge of the world. Drawings and diagrams were often used

in scientific journals and atlases even when photographic depictions were available and

easily reproducible. In the field of microphotography, integral to the emerging

discipline of bacteriology, photographic reproductions came to be widely accepted only

after 1880 despite their availability in prior decades.14

With Hevelius’s Selenographia, the artist-scientist found himself in a new bind.

The new empirical science rested upon an inductive method that made demands on the

artist that he was ultimately unable to fulfill. In spite of his skill and good faith, the

stereotype would always impinge upon the process of representation, introducing a

subjective element foreign to the object itself. There was simply no way to capture the

object without distorting it. The advent of the camera offered the prospect of freeing

the scientist from this bind by making the representation of nature purely mechanical.

In the following two sections I will explore when and why scientists preferred drawings

and diagrams to photographic reproductions in bacteriological literature and draw some

conclusions regarding the claims of photomicrography to scientific objectivity. In

particular, I will argue that the epistemic value of scientific photography resides in its

production of procedural standardization rather than greater access to reality.

11 Daston and Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” 98. 12 Daston and Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” 100. 13 Joel Snyder, "Picturing Vision," Critical Inquiry 6, no. 3 (1980): 507. 14 Olaf Breidbach, “Representation of the Microcosm - The Claim for Objectivity in 19th Century Scientific Microphotography,” Journal of the History of Biology 35 (2002): 235.



Mechanical Objectivity and the Case of Photomicroscopy

Evaluating the merits of various forms of botanical illustration, Ludolph Treviranus

(1779-1864) writes:

“Beim Kupferstiche, bei der lithographirten Tafel für einen anatomischen

Gegenstand behält, wenn sie allen Anforderungen genügt, der Beschauer

immer noch einige Freiheit, sich selber ein Urtheil über die vorgestellte Sache

zu bilden: aber bei Betrachtung einer in Holz geschnittenen Abbildung dieser

Art ist dieses wohl selten noch möglich. Der Darsteller hat meistens dem

Beschauer seine Ansicht mit einer Zuversichtlichkeit übergeben, gegen welche

dieser keine Auswege, keine Rettung findet.”15

Curiously enough, Treviranus echoes

Pliny’s concerns about the

representation of plants in botanical

texts. Even after the advent of

engraving, lithography, and the camera,

Treviranus preferred the more schematic

woodcut precisely for its diagrammatic

simplicity. The key difference, of course,

is that Treviranus believed that the

essential features of a plant could be

communicated visually, whereas Pliny’s

contemporaries rejected the visual

representation altogether. Yet the two

approaches are not so different from

each other, for Treviranus’s diagrams do

not claim to describe any particular plant

as it appears in nature. Instead, his diagrams are essentially conceptual visualizations of

the essential properties of the plants they depict, which distinguish the plant’s

classification as a species. According to Treviranus, the woodcut conveys objective

information about the plant––more objective, in fact, than if one had hired a

scrupulous engraver (or photographer) to represent a specific member of that species

(fig. 3-4). An abundance of detail, to him, is not an index of objectivity; an excess of

15 Ludolph Treviranus, Die Anwendung des Holzschnittes zur bildlichen Darstellung von Pflanzen. Nach Entstehung, Blüthe, Verfall und Restauration (Leipzig: Weigel, 1855), 72.

Fig. 3 Photograph of a plantain

Photomicrography 49


visual detail may in fact obfuscate the essential features of a specimen, introducing

idiosyncrasies which may mislead the observer.

This principle was also applicable to the field

of photomicrography, especially since the difficulty of

producing a legible image at the microscopic scale

was far more troublesome than the task of

macrophotography. The microphotographer not only

needed the specialized knowledge of preparing

bacteriological specimens for the microscope, but

also was required to perform a series of delicate tasks

to ensure the production of a suitable photograph.

The slightest disturbance or misalignment of the lens,

insufficient or improperly situated light, and even

room temperature could all undermine the efforts of

the photographer. In addition, the bacteriologist had

to intervene quite heavily in the preparations in order

to make the specimen legible in a photograph.

Extensive staining procedures were required to

produce the desired chromatic effect in the finished

photograph. The number of variables involved in the

production of a suitable microphotograph gave rise to

reservations concerning the veracity of these images,

especially when the process itself could not be

observed.

Robert Koch (1843-1910), the most distinguished advocate of

photomicrographical images of bacteria, was ambivalent about their use in scientific

publications, declaring: “I think no one will blame me for only accepting with great

reserve drawings of micro-organisms, the accuracy of which I cannot substantiate by

examining the original preparation.” In the 1880s he advocated for the use of

photographic illustrations where possible but conceded that he “[did] not mean to say

that photographs should always replace drawings; that will never be the case, and in

many cases a drawing alone is possible.”16 These opinions are highly illuminating,

especially Koch’s unease about drawings because their accuracy cannot be

substantiated. In other words, there is no guarantee that the drawing corresponds to a

16 Quoted in Jennifer Tucker, Nature exposed: photography as eyewitness in Victorian science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 168.

Fig. 4 Plantago from Brunfels Herbarum Vivae Eicones (Strasbourg 1532)



preparation made by a skilled observer. The advantage of photography is that it is the

direct result of a procedure and thus allows a skilled viewer to assess the ability of the

person who made the preparation.

Olaf Breidbach considers Robert Koch’s contribution to the field of

photomicrography to consist, in part, of his treatment of the photograph as a

document: “[n]ot only its aesthetic qualities but the amount of detail it revealed about

the quality of the preparation, the adequacy of the techniques used and the technical

skill of the scientist, made it of scientific value, and information about overall

morphology should be provided in the illustrations.”17 In this sense, the photograph

becomes a testament not only to the features of the object depicted, but also to the skill

(and therefore authority) of the observer of the original object. In Breidbach’s view, it

was not until the photomicrographical procedure was standardized and subject to the

norms of an emerging scientific community that photographs became a widely

accepted form of illustration in bacteriology.

An interesting aspect of Breidbach’s argument is the prohibition of

photographic touch-ups in the period during which photomicrography began to be

codified and accepted more widely as a scientific practice. Prior to 1880, it was

common to darken or lighten areas of the photographic negative for the sake of clarity

and presentation in the final reproduction. Koch and his colleagues condemned this

practice, and it seems to have waned after the 1880s. I believe that Koch’s objection to

touching up photographs highlights the epistemological differences between

photographs and drawings. By improving the contrast of the image, the scientist can

increase its value as a pictorial representation by making it more legible and potentially

communicating ‘better’ information; in doing so, however, he has compromised the

status of the photograph as a trace of the original preparation. In this case, the image

no longer serves as a document of the original specimen and the conditions under

which it was photographed: its newfound visual clarity renders it deceptive. In a similar

fashion, Erwin Christeller proudly refused to eliminate extraneous fibrous protrusions

from his photographs of tissue sections in the 1920s.18 The surfeit of information,

which could potentially distract the viewer and hamper the image’s communicative

value, was retained as a mark of Christeller’s objectivity, located in his refusal to alter

the image in any way.

Christeller’s self-proclaimed restraint highlights the distinct epistemic functions

served by drawings and photographs. Drawings were for communicating information

17 Breidbach, “Representation of the Microcosm,” 243. 18 Daston and Galison “The Image of Objectivity,” 113-14.

Photomicrography 51


about the world by clarifying, generalizing and simplifying visual data. Photographs, on

the other hand, came to function more as a guarantee of the authenticity of an act and

the authority of the professional scientific observer.19 In a strange way, the photograph

has become detached from the object which it depicts. The relation between the

photograph and its referent is not the crucial marker of objectivity. Its objectivity lies

not in depicting things ‘as they really are’––in many cases, a drawing has a greater claim

in that regard. Rather, the photograph attests to the integrity of the procedure which

produced the image, demonstrating that photography’s objectivity is therefore

procedural rather than metaphysical.

In this section I have shown how the notion of mechanical objectivity, as it

pertained to photography, was deeply problematic from its inception. Following

Breidbach, I have argued that mechanical objectivity did not grant photography pride

of place in scientific publication and that the acceptance of photomicrography came

only as it was assimilated into a framework of professionalized standards that governed

its use and the authority of those who practiced it. In its duty to banish the interpretive

bias of the individual, mechanical objectivity merely displaces it; it instead becomes a

matter of who is fit to do science and interpret the data furnished by the picture. In the

final section I will assess the implications of this observation for the enterprise of

scientific realism.

Knowledge as Practice

The notion that scientific objectivity relies upon the codification of procedural

standards and institutional authority is, by now, a familiar concept in the history of

science. As Daston and Galison have shown, objectivity is tightly bound up with

cultural, social, and moral norms that change over time. In particular, they evoked an

aura of religiosity in the late-nineteenth-century pursuit of scientific objectivity, in

19 This is admittedly a condensed view of the very complex history of images in nineteenth-century science. Prior to Robert Koch’s influence in bacteriology, some scientists actually worked under the assumption that microphotographs were ontologically equivalent to preparations––a clearly false view––which Breidbach argues undermined photomicrography at an early stage by raising suspicions about its practice. This is to say that the “document” view of scientific photography espoused in this paper is only one of many alternative views which were discussed in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It is nonetheless clear that Koch’s view of photography as document made a major impact upon the professionalization of the sciences in this period and therefore provides important insight into the distinctions between drawing and photography in scientific literature. For another closely related discussion of the different functions of drawing and photography at the end of the nineteenth century, see Jane Meienschein. “From Presentation to Representation in E. B. Wilson’s The Cell,” Biology and Philosophy 6, no. 2 (1991): 227-54.



which the individual purified himself of any interpretive bias in order to achieve moral,

and perhaps political, authority.20 Sociological approaches such as Daston and Galison’s

tend to emphasize the socially constructed character of scientific objectivity, motivating

the view that what counts as objective is really a function of the society that sets the

standards. At the opposite extreme is the hardline scientific realist, who claims that

science gives us accurate and reliable information about how objects ‘actually’ are. This

position, though increasingly uncommon today, helps explain the pursuit of mechanical

objectivity. As we have seen from Galileo and Hevelius’s drawings of the moon, a shift

occurred in the seventeenth century during which the object became the essential

starting point for scientific discovery. Mechanical objectivity was a solution to the

essential problem of the stereotype, or the inherent subjectivity of the observer. As

Robert Koch and many others discovered in the nineteenth century, mechanical

objectivity was no guarantee of truth or accuracy, hence the continued use of drawings,

engravings and diagrams in scientific publications. This narrative seems to definitively

undermine the claims of the scientific realist and unravel the fantasy that science can

provide objective data about the physical world.

What Robert Koch and his colleagues discovered, however, was that even if

photography could not provide objective information about how the world ‘really is,’ it

could serve as the basis for standardizing the act of looking, thus providing some

common ground for the subjective interpretive process. When his colleagues Carl

Fraenkel and Richard Pfeiffer claimed that their photographic plates showed “mit

unbeugsamer Objectivität die Dinge wieder, wie sie wirklich sind”21 they did so with the

full awareness that absolute objectivity relied upon their frame of reference: the

photographic eye. They understood that the objectivity of visual representation is

largely a matter of fixing the act of viewing. A loose analogy may be drawn with the

admittedly complex case of linear perspective, as laid down in Leon Battista Alberti’s

De Pictura (1435). As Joel Snyder explains, “[l]inear perspective, by definition, requires

the painter to ‘fix’ his eye in a determined and unvarying relation to the picture surface

in order to recreate within the picture the rational structure of perceptual judgements.”

He adds that this account of vision “provides a basis for explaining how we are able to

make ‘certified’ judgements about the sensible things of the world. It is not an account

of momentary glances or ‘impressions’, nor is it, strictly speaking, an account of

‘appearances.’ A completed perceptual judgement, that is, a unified one in which we

correctly identify objects, their attributes, and their interrelations, can be made only

20 Daston and Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” 371-72. 21 Quoted in Breidbach, “Representation of the Microcosm,” 238.

Photomicrography 53


under specified observation conditions through time, by means of discrimination,

comparison and integration.”22 What this shows is that we can make certified

judgements about objects if we set the conditions of our looking. As with Alberti’s

linear perspective, Koch and his colleagues used the development of photomicrography

in part to standardize the act of looking such that judgement had a common (though

not metaphysically objective) basis. Neither linear perspective nor the photographic eye

provides objective facts about things in themselves, but they allow us to share a

consistent vantage point for observation.

This view of scientific objectivity accords with more recent theories of

knowledge-as-practice. For example, Karin Knorr-Cetina has claimed that knowledge is

produced by “epistemic communities” whose values and practices are deeply

entrenched and socially contextual.23 This view may be associated with Daston and

Galison’s social constructivism since it similarly undercuts the stable subject/object

relationship posited by scientific realism. However, it is not clear whether the social

basis of epistemic practices invalidates their claim to objectivity. Michael Lynch offers a

more balanced view in his assessment of visualization studies. He describes the

complex process of forensic science, by which a blood sample taken from a crime

scene is transmitted and subjected to various examinations to ensure its validity as a

piece of evidence. As he observes, “[r]eferential truth is not an essence that is

transported concretely from beginning to end; rather, it is a contingent, certified

assessment of a sequentially ordered and routinely organized production.”24 This is to

say that the validity of forensics is the product of a procedure which can be

standardized, questioned, and held accountable to another observer. With this in mind,

it is only when scientific photography is asked to do the impossible—to transmit

referential truth from an object to a subject—that it may be characterized as failing to

attain objectivity.

22 Snyder, "Picturing Vision," 516. 23 This perspective has been taken up in a recent study on the epistemic functions of visualization in scientific practice. See Evagorou et al. “The Role of Visual Representations in Scientific Practices: From Conceptual Understanding and Knowledge Generation to ‘Seeing’ How Science Works,” 2015. 24 Michael Lynch, “The Production of Scientific Images: Vision and Re-Vision in the History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Science,” Visual Cultures of Science Rethinking Representational Practices in Knowledge Building and Science Communication, ed. Luc Pauwels (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Press, 2006), 37.



***

I have argued that the notion of mechanical objectivity was a natural response to the

demands of empirical science that emerged in the seventeenth century. The

draughtsman or engraver could never reproduce the object of observation without

introducing the residue of his preconceptions and visual vocabulary. Photography

offered a potential solution to the problem of subjective representation by ostensibly

removing the artist from science altogether. Once representation was mechanized by

the camera, objects were supposedly allowed to speak for themselves. Yet even in its

infancy, mechanical objectivity was recognized to be deeply problematic. Despite the

mechanical nature of photography, it still required the expertise of a trained

professional in order to produce a reliable representation.

In the field of bacteriology, photomicrography was rarely used to communicate

information in scientific publications. It was not until after 1880, when procedural

standards of the practice had become codified and regulated, that photomicrographs

gained wide currency in scientific illustrations. This suggests that photography’s claim

to scientific objectivity depended in part upon its capacity to document procedural

integrity rather than on a heightened claim to metaphysical truth. Social constructivists

such as Daston and Galison have seized on this feature of scientific photography to

stress the sociological basis for the construction of knowledge, thereby undermining

the traditional project of scientific realism and the tidy subject/object relationship that

it posits. Whether the admittedly sociological basis of our epistemic standards precludes

scientific objectivity is an ongoing debate and cannot be answered here.

I believe that Robert Koch and his colleagues had a stronger awareness of these

issues than the social constructivists credit them with. If scientific photography is

expected to capture the innate properties of objects ‘as they really are,’ free of

interpretation, then it certainly fails in its objective. But if it is seen, as I claim it was by

Koch, to provide the basis for objective evaluation of visual data by standardizing and

conditioning the process of viewing, then scientific photography may be understood to

increase our knowledge of reality. The case of nineteenth-century photomicrography

thus supports a position somewhere between the opposing poles of social

constructivism and scientific realism. We may agree with the social constructivist in

this, at least: whether photomicrography succeeds or fails depends entirely on what we

ask it to achieve.

Karl-Magnus Gustav Brose

Photomicrography 55


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PHOTOMICROGRAPHY and the PROBLEM