Observance: A Record of Experiments

Thesis writing on the work of Olivia Mosley, Bachelor of Fine Arts candidate in Printmaking at Washington University in St. Louis. Engaging with a diverse history of photography and observation through the theoretical writings of Barthes, Berger, Didi-Huberman and others, Mosley conducts a series of visual experiments as part of her art practice in an attempt to expand her visual knowledge. Exploring the concepts of visualization, observation and the role technology plays in both of the aforementioned activities, Mosley’s work is discussed alongside the visual contributions of scientists, artists and hobbyists experimenting with the photographic medium throughout history, including, Wilhelm Kühne, Nicéphore Niépce, Wilhelm Ro ̈ntgen and others as a way of engaging with the possibilities of the medium. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it was a commonly held notion that the eye captured the image last seen before death, permanently affixing the picture to the retina. While fictionalized accounts of this theory served as conceptual fodder for detective stories and crime novels, scientists concurrently were seeking a method to actually retrieve images from the eye. In 1876, scientist Francis Boll discovered rhodopsin, or visual purple, a light-sensitive pigment in the retina (Evans). Two years later, Wilhelm Kühne’s experiments revealed that images on the retina could indeed be captured, fixing the rhodopsin, photosensitive component of the eye of a rabbit, essentially using the animal’s eye as a camera to crate a photographic negative (Fig. 1). Since the advent of photography, scientists, artists, and hobbyists have been seeking to expand our visual knowledge through experiments with the limits of the medium. The discovery of photography has defined our reality and shaped our perceptions of the world around us, while simultaneously suggesting the possibility that further knowledge can still be sought. My work engages with this history of observation, by creating visual experiments that seek to expand my own visual knowledge of the world around me.