Chemical affinities: photography, extraction, and industrial heritage in nineteenth-century northern England

ABSTRACT

“Chemical Affinities” explores how chemistry and visual culture were entwined in the long nineteenth century, focusing here on the role of photography as both a material cause of pollution and the aesthetic means to visualize the pollution that it caused. Chemical layering was a common dimension of all nineteenth-century photography and photographic printing, making photography a by-product of the chemical revolution of the nineteenth century, no less than fertilizer and paper. Drawing on hundreds of visual representations (drawings, engravings, photographs, and graphs), most of them located in local, scientific, and business archives in northern England, my research approaches photography as a material, economic, and social process: an extractive resource that raises questions about the global future alongside recording the tangible present and arrested moments of the past. Here, I examine the nineteenth-century industry in Widnes, Cheshire, as a particularly representative and vexed site of photography’s chemical effects on land and people, as well as its instrumentation in documenting and recording – and in so doing promising to expose and moderate – those effects. The article concludes with some reflections on the value of photographic archives and critical industrial heritage studies for historical understanding of nineteenth-century chemical industry and its legacies.

KEYWORDS:

• Chemistry
• industrialization
• photography
• environment
• labor
• public health
• visual culture
• environmental law

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Jessica Straley and Leslee Thorne-Murphy for their constructive criticism of the manuscript, and Nadja Durbach and the members of the organizing committee that hosted the 2022 INCS conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, for a dynamic and generative gathering.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jennifer Tucker

Jennifer Tucker is a historian who specializes in the study of industrialization, photography and visual culture, and law in the long nineteenth-century. She has published numerous books, scholarly articles, and edited journals including Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005) and A Right to Bear Arms? The Contested Role of History in Contemporary Debates on the Second Amendment (Smithsonian Institution Press, 2019). She is currently writing an environmental history of chemical photographic processes in the long nineteenth century and serves as the founding faculty director of a new research Center for the Study of Guns and Society at Wesleyan University (Connecticut).