| This dissertation historicizes the conception of photography as part of an epistemological shift in which new objects and methods of knowledge were constituted after the collapse of natural philosophy as a viable framework for the study of nature. Through an analysis of the philosophical, scientific, and photographic works of Henri Fox Talbot and John Herschel, I show how their conception of photography was discursively inseparable from the efforts to secure the scientific validity of the inductive method and of empiricism, in reaction to the challenges of skepticism in Hume's work, and the introduction of Kant's transcendental philosophy to England. My project thus conceptualizes the conception of photography in relation to a broad and intellectually significant set of concerns unlike canonical accounts that conceptualize photography as the end product, medium or system of representation of an inevitable technological progress toward visual verisimilitude, Accordingly, I argue for the historical specificity of early photography in the 1840s, and contend that it was discursively different from the concept of photography emerging in the 1850s with its accelerated industrialization, as well as from the modern conception of it.;Chapter one analyzes the evocation of the inductive method in Talbot's discovery accounts. I show how his conception of photography was discursively inseparable from the philosophical premises of the empiricist legacy England and from the Romantic reaction to it. Chapter two analyzes Herschel's conception of photography as a function of new analytical and mathematical methods for the study of light, and of the professionalization of scientific practice in England. Chapter three shows how in the 1840s the photographic image was not conceived to be an emblem of either mechanical copying or of visual verisimilitude as the camera obscura image was believed to be. Chapter four examines the early failed attempts to apply photography to science either in the form of botanic illustration or as part of observation. It analyzes Talbot's comments in The Pencil of Nature on the evidentiary status of the photographic image as grounded within nineteenth-century Romantic historicism. |
