Abstract
In 1844, in the first photographically illustrated book, The Pencil of Nature, Fox Talbot includes a perplexing chapter, “A Scene in a Library,” which couples a photograph of a bookshelf with a seemingly unrelated passage of text. Here, Talbot speculates about a fantastical voyeuristic scenario involving a proto-night vision device and its literary possibilities. In this chapter, it is shown that the vexing nature of “A Scene in a Library,” particularly Talbot’s pairing of invisible light with books, stems from the challenge that light beyond the visible range of the spectrum, such as ultraviolet and infrared, posed to the dominant epistemology of the time. His recourse to a literary form of invisibility was an attempt to reconcile the incommensurability of invisible light with the prevailing episteme structured around tropes of visible light and the eye.
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Laskin, A. (2019). Literary Device: Invisible Light and a Photo of Photography. In: Grønstad, A., Vågnes, Ø. (eds) Invisibility in Visual and Material Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16291-7_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16291-7_3
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