Book Launch: “A Dirty History of Photography: Chemistry, Fog and Empire”

Join Michelle Henning and Sarah James to discuss questions about the relationship between the ways in which photography pictures the world, the materials from which it is made, and its relationship to polluting and extractive industries.

Focussing on chemical photography in the interwar period, Michelle Hennings’s book “A Dirty History of Photography: Chemistry, Fog and Empire” addresses how photographic practice was linked to British imperial ideas about weather, climate and racial superiority; photography’s dependence on coal; how the polluted atmosphere (fog) came to represent particular ideas about imperial London, and how at the same time, photographic materials had a sensitivity to atmospheric change and contamination that went beyond the sensitivities assigned to them by the industry. How does thinking about photographs and photography allow us to understand our wider relationship with the world, and dependence on the “nonhuman”?

Michelle Henning says,

“This book is the culmination of research done over the last 8 or 9 years, drawing on the archives of Ilford Limited, the most well-known British photographic manufacturers. I have tried to write in a way that is accessible and evocative, but also conceptually rigorous. I ended up constructing the book out of 36 “snapshots” or short chapters, which allow me to move back and forth in time, change style and shift from close readings of images to accounts of the wartime chemical industries, of devastating fogs and gas attacks, to unusual weather events and air conditioning systems!”

Michelle Henning is Chair in Photography and Media at the University of Liverpool. She is the author of numerous essays and chapters on photography including Photography: The Unfettered Image (Routledge 2018). Her new book, ‘A Dirty History of Photography: Chemistry, Fog and Empire’, is published with the University of Chicago. She also works as an artist/designer.

Sarah James is Professor of Visual Culture at Manchester School of Art (MMU). She is the author of ‘Common Ground: German Photographic Cultures Across the Iron Curtain' (Yale University Press, 2013), and 'Paper Revolutions: An Invisible Avant-Garde' (The MIT Press, 2022). Her new book ‘Art and Ends of Capitalism’ is forthcoming with Manchester University Press. She regularly writes for the international art press.

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