BLACK LIGHT

A radical assessment of the racial motives underlying the conception of photography and cinema Conventional histories have long traced the origins of photography and cinema to the goal of reproducing the visible world Black Light offers a radical counter to this understanding Investigating the optical cosmological and racial thought that surrounded their conception Christophe Wall Romana argues that these media developed out of a desire to visualize what cannot be seen Taking as its starting point the concurrent invention of the telescope and industrialization of the transatlantic slave trade Black Light shows how photography and cinema are entangled with two key preoccupations of the Enlightenment visualizing the mysteries of the cosmos and managing Blackness Wall Romana uses literary and technological sources to demonstrate how racial and astronomical thinking interwove throughout the long development of our modern visual media Retracing the impulses behind nonmimetic photoimaging and dynamic modeling he exposes the racial underpinnings of research on photosensitive compounds such as silver nitrate and the racist lenses applied in post Copernican cosmology Black Light charts the pivotal period from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century when Europ