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Michelle Henning, "A Dirty History of Photography: Chemistry, Fog, and Empire" (U Chicago Press, 2026)
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Marshall Po
This time of year, everyone talks about.
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Professor Michelle Henning
Going dry, but at Athletic Brewing Co.
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Marshall Po
We're skipping that because we prefer going.
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Professor Michelle Henning
Athletic, which isn't dry at all. From crisp goldens to hoppy IPAs and.
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Marshall Po
Limited releases in between, you'll find something.
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Professor Michelle Henning
That fits your style. Every single non alcoholic brew is packed.
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Marshall Po
With flavor and the same craft experience you love.
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Professor Michelle Henning
So, yeah, you could call it dry.
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Marshall Po
But there's really nothing dry about it.
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Professor Michelle Henning
Find your new favorite near beer@athleticalbrewing.com Athletic Brewing Co. Fit for all times.
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Marshall Po
Hello, everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Professor Michelle Henning about her book titled A Dirty History of Chemistry, Fog and Empire, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2026. Examining a history of photography. Yes, absolutely. That is what's happening here. But bringing in some other things too, right? This is not just a history that goes on this year. This person invented this. And then a photograph was taken of X. Right. I'm sure that history exists. I'm sure there are benefits to it. This history, to be honest, is more interesting because we get to talk about how photography is linked to fossil fuels, to the industrial revolution, to capitalism, to other forms of Art to air pollution to extractive empire. I mean, there's so many things here that take us to a really interesting sort of places and times, many of which might seem to be a really long time ago. Right. We are going back, in some cases over 100 years, but actually a lot of these questions around air and what we see and how we see it, I think are still very relevant today. So clearly we have a lot to discuss. Michelle, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Professor Michelle Henning
Thanks very much for having me.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book? What sorts of questions are you asking in this project and how did you develop it?
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Professor Michelle Henning
Sure. I'm professor in Photography and Media at the University of Liverpool and I've been writing about photography since about the mid-1990s as well as other things. And I also work as an artist, so I have a kind of practical interest in photography as well. And my second book on photography is what this is. So my previous full book on the subject was Photography the Unfettered Image, which came out in 2018. And the reason I decided to do this book was it felt like there was very little research on this British company called Ilford Limited. Now, anyone who has worked in a dark darkroom, photography or worked with film will know Ilford because it's the major producer of black and white film in this country in the uk, and it also produces a lot of the darkroom chemicals and darkroom equipment that you would find in most schools and colleges that still have dark rooms. So Ilford Limited in its time was the major British company. It's not at all on the scale of, say, Kodak or agfa, the two major global photography firms. But I was kind of surprised that nobody had written about it in much depth. Certainly nobody had done in depth archival research in it. So I was already interested in questions around the materiality of photography. So what are photographs made of? What are these chemicals that we use in dark rooms and so on. So I was interested in the history of chemical photography and its materials, and I wanted to build on some of the ideas that had come up in that previous book. In particular, the kind of work I'd done around materials such as coal tar dyes. So there's one chapter which is actually predominantly on color in that book where I talk, but I start to talk about the dyes that were used in photography. And those dyes are not always to make film colour. They're used to adjust the sensitivity of black and White film. So I also, I think the other reason for doing it why look at chemical photography when we're in the era of digital now? So we've had digital photography for over 30 years and there's a growing. Well, I don't know if it's growing, but there's definitely a kind of nostalgia for analog and often it's quite misrepresents the analog era. So people tend to think of analogue as craft based. When you look at the history of photography, often they focus on the very early history, so the moments of its invention in the 1830s or even earlier. And there's a kind of assumption that it's a kind of handmade thing. Whereas actually these industries were massive and they had huge kind of global networks. So I was really interested in that. I also thought that one of the effects of our digital focus has been that we tend to think of the materiality of photographs being to do with print. Now that's problematic anyway for digital because digital images are still material, they're just made in different ways out of electronics and so on, but they still have a materiality. But there's a tendency to think of the materials of the photograph as print. And there's a well known photography theorist and historian called Geoffrey Batchen who wrote a book on the negative recently to try and correct this. But also it's not just the negative, it's all the chemicals, the emulsions, the kind of, you know, the surface of that print, the surface of those negatives are composed of certain kinds of substances. So that's all the stuff I was thinking about. And then you asked me about the questions I was asking. I got a fellowship from the ahrc, which is the Arts and Humanities Research council in the UK. So that allowed me, that was in sort of 2018, 2019, and that allowed me to, to research these archives of Ilford Limited And I thought I've got to narrow what I'm doing. So I knew I'd already said to the AHRC that I was going to ask questions about innovation and industry. But I decided to focus on the interwar period because that's the period that Ilford Limited was really expanding. It was taking over all the other British photographic manufacturers, not so much camera manufacturers, but the people who are manufacturing the sensitized materials and the papers and so on. And so that was what I looked at. And in the process, questions of empire. If you ever look, I think at a British company in the 1930s, this would come up. You know, the British Empire is everywhere over the Archives, so you couldn't kind of ignore it. And then the other thing that happened in that period was I went to visit the factory of the current manufacturers of, of Ilford Film. And that company is called Harman Technology. It's located just outside Manchester in the uk. And the factory itself was an original Ilford Limited factory, but now the company's called Harman Technology after the founder of Ilford Ltd. A guy called Harman. So it's a kind of. There's a convoluted history of corporate takeovers and so on that happened in the post war period. But the actual factory is one of the original ones. And I had a guided tour of the factory and it just really made me aware of photographic sensitivity of kind of how. Well, first, like how high tech the production of films is, but also how sensitive the materials are and the kind of way in which in particular, when they coat the emulsion onto the surface of the film or the paper, you can't enter the room that that's happening in because humans would contaminate the space. We have oil on our hands, we flake skin. You can't have any light in there, obviously, because light would fog the film. You can't have. The machines have to be made of certain metals because metals react to the films and so on. So you really get a sense of this stuff is really, really sensitive. And it's not just sensitive to light, it's sensitive to the atmosphere, it's sensitive to all these other substances. So I started to think, what would it be like to think about photography in terms of the dual meaning of atmosphere. So on the one hand, atmosphere in images, how images are kind of meaningful and give us feelings through atmospheric effects, but also atmosphere in the environmental sense. Both the Earth's atmosphere, but also localized atmosphere, weather, the air in a particular place. So that was kind of how the whole project started.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I love hearing about different investigations and different archives and you know, as you said, the tour of the thing and wait, that made me realize this. Right. Like the process of figuring things out is always so fascinating and does often sort of show up in certain ways in the final version of a book. So given that background, I'm not particularly surprised that you've done some interesting things with how you've structured this book, given what you figured out through all those methods. So can you tell us a little bit about how, how you decided kind of what to focus on and how to present this in the final version?
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Professor Michelle Henning
Sure. So the structure that you're talking about is that it's made of 36 short chapters, which is very unusual for an academic book, I don't think. So unusual if it was a novel or something. And these are about 2,000 words long. And I think of these as frames on a film or snapshots. So 36 is the number of exposures you have on a standard length film, 35 millimeter film. So it seemed like a kind of relevant number. And the reason I arrived at this structure was I'd been writing in full chapters in the kind of conventional way from about 2023. So I'd done the research back in. I'd kind of finished the archival research around 2019, but I hadn't had the opportunity to kind of write it all up. And when I started to do that, once I'd kind of grasped that I had this focus on atmosphere and so on, I couldn't keep the flow. I found that I was writing in small bits, and this was partly because I'd been writing catalogue essays for exhibitions and. And they tend to be about 2,000 words. And I really enjoyed it. I loved that kind of compressed style and the way you had to wrap up at the end. And I just liked the length. And also I'd been doing, from about 2017 or just before I got the AHRC grant, I'd been doing a blog on my website of about 800 word entries, because I don't really like blogs that just go on and on. But I wanted to kind of. I didn't want it just to be a sort of diary. I wanted these to be enjoyable to read. So what I did was some of these chapters, I think about eight or so of them actually are derived from that blog. So I went back to the blog and there were certain themes that had come up during the research and I pulled those out and then I realised that when you write to 2000 words, you can't really develop an argument very far within the 2,000 words. But you can build across chapters so you can do this kind of looping back. So you'll find that in one part of the book I mention something like coal tar dyes, for example, and briefly explain what they are. And then I'll have another whole chapter that goes into much more depth about them and their significance later on. So you can kind of allow the book to build, but you could also, if you want it as a reader, you could just drop in and read these small chapters individually. And the other thing I really like about the structure is you can have themes that run like threads through it, where something can subtly change its meaning across the chapters. So, for example, in the first chapter, I invoke a creature. So the first chapter is called the Creature. And I mention a creature. And it kind of implies, I think that. I'm not sure how implicit or how explicit it was whether you picked up on this, but that that creature could be a kind of Frankenstein's monster. It could be a dragon in a cave. So it's a metaphor for photography, but it could be quite a threatening thing, or could be a sympathetic character in some way. But there's a kind of invocation of Frankenstein there. And then in other chapters, I bring up Mary Shelley appears in a chapter, and then I return again and again to this idea of the. You know, if we think of this as sensitive, we're almost thinking in animist terms. Well, let's think about what happened to Frankenstein, you know, when he. The creature. Sorry, not Frankenstein himself. What happened to Frankenstein's creature when he realizes that nobody's going to love him, essentially, that he's kind of been cast out. So. So I liked the way you could be a bit more literary like that. And the other thing to mention is, you can see, I think I couldn't completely abandon this. You can see the remnants of the old chapter structure. So, for example, chapters six to ten are all about fog and how photography can represent it. But because I broke them up into smaller chapters, you end up with some chapters that don't even mention photography. But I quite like that. I don't know what you thought about that, but I didn't. I don't mind that. And then there's chapters 18 to 21 are all about war. And this is because the 1920s and 30s were bracketed by the world wars. So I looked at different takes on the interwar period, and the historian David Egerton makes the argument that this is not peacetime in Britain, this is the rise of what he calls the warfare state. So I'm looking at photography's role in the kind of rearming of Britain during this period. And then towards the end, you've got chapters 25 to 28, which are on the concept of latency, which kind of moves us into more abstract theoretical ideas about photography, but it can also bring in the idea of the latency of the climate crisis. Yeah, there is evidence of these older structures still there, but hopefully it kind of works, I think. Well.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
And as you said, there's so many threads to pull throughout, which is something I always enjoy in a book. And I think the structure definitely lends itself to kind of seeing them very clearly. Now. I don't know if we are going to be able to talk about all of them here, but certainly have a number of things to sort of see where we go with them. So moving, maybe vaguely chronologically, we'll see how we get on with following the threads. But before we get into the sort of interwar period in terms of warfare, I want to go back a bit further and talk about the Industrial Revolution and imperial expansion, which of course are happening at exactly the same time, and they're happening at the same time as the rise of photography. You discuss in a number of chapters in the book that like, this isn't an accident, right? We can in fact think of photography as a quote unquote, daughter of coal is linked to these two expansions, right?
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Professor Michelle Henning
Yeah, absolutely. So it's really interesting if you read kind of social histories of photography, which kind of started in the 1930s because photography was announced in 1839 to the public. And I always, when I'm trying to sell what I do, I always say, you know, can you imagine a world without it? Can you seriously imagine a world in which no one could take photographs? No one had pictures of their, of their ancestors or, you know, or even their parents or of themselves? You know, people didn't really. A lot of people, because of also mirrors were very expensive. A lot of people didn't even know what they looked like. So photography in 1830, its announcement in 1839, is a massive deal. And then obviously after that, we have all sorts of lens based media such as film and video emerging out of that. So 1930s was the time of the centenary and we are now heading towards the bicentenary. I'll come on to the bicentenary later. I don't mention it in the book. But 1930s, there was a flurry of publications about photography and one of the things that they kind of puzzled over was why was photography invented in Europe and America when it was given developments in China centuries before, Given that cameras had been around since the renaissance of, you know, cameras that couldn't preserve an image. But camera obscura as camera lucidas, these devices that could allow light in and form an image projected on the back of them. The lenses were already developed, there were chemicals were already available. So they had this kind of issue of like, why now? Why then? Why in the 1830s? And the tendency to the way that it's been answered, and this hasn't really been challenged in a lot of the literature, was that it was to do with capitalism, it was to do with the demand for portraits, the rise of the press, to do with secularization, to do with all those changes that happened as part of capitalism. And this is, you know, broadly, obviously broadly true. But what that misses is that it's also to do with empire and the Industrial revolution, those other two things that capitalism is tightly bound with. So you have to have, in order to have photography taking off as a kind of mass practice, you have to have an empire and a global trade. So the global trade in minerals, in animal products, in fine chemicals, make photography possible. And the reason I say daughter of coal is because what drives this is coal. So you have to have coal fired steam engines so that you can have steamships that can move this stuff across the world. So it's only, it's only really with the development of the British Empire and other European empires that you would get this kind of photography industry that you get. And there's several reasons I focus on coal actually. So the first one is that it drove empire. So the steamships, the coal depots. Also Britain was the source of the highest quality coals compared to somewhere like the us. So it gave coal was one of the reasons Britain had an empire at all, gave it a huge advantage. Coal tar is a substance that was a byproduct of coal exploitation. So if you're coking coal, it's called, if you're distilling coal, you can make all sorts of other substances. But this kind of waste product was called coal tar. And then in the 19th century they were looking for other uses for it. And in the 1850s discovered that you could make dyes out of it, artificial dyes. And this was a huge deal, not just for the British, it was discovered in Britain, but it was quickly taken up in Germany in particular, because other countries that didn't have empires of the same scale as the British were dependent for their colours and dyes on India, which was held by the British. So there were tariffs and high prices and so on. So the artificial dye industry gave Germany a big advantage. So you start to see these dyes being developed and they discover that they can be used to change the sensitivity of photographic film. So you can get certain dyes were photosensitive and they could actually be added to the emulsion and shift the spectrum, the spectrum of radiation that the emotion is sensitive to. So the emotion is that light sensitive stuff that is coated onto the glass plates and then later onto films. So those are some of the reasons. The other reason is that Ilford limited the company. One of the most interesting stories I came across about the Company was its struggle with the fog in London. So London was beset by these terrible fogs, and Ilford Limited's factory was in Ilford, which is now actually part of London, but at the time was a small town on the outskirts of London to the east, and it was situated there because there was clean air, but you had good train links to the city. However, the London fog starts to move. As the Clean Air Acts take place and the centre of the city is cleaned up, the fogs start to move to the suburbs because you get more and more gas works and so on being built. And the gasworks contribute also to the fog, but also you've got bigger population, more people burning, domestic fires, more factories and so on. So Ilford eventually becomes beset by these fogs, and in one day, at the very turn of the 20th century, at the end of the 19th century, they have a vast number of their glass plates that are completely destroyed by contamination from the fog. So that was another reason. And then finally, the final reason for focusing on coal is that I found it very interesting that coal burning and processing is still a massive contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and thus to climate change, but also to the contamination of the earth. So there's this book by two writers called Francois Garrige and Thomas Leroux called the Contamination of the Earth. And one of the things I learned from reading that and other sources was how many things were kind of chemically developed out of the exploitation of coal that are actually deeply damaging to both human bodies and the environment. So I thought that was quite counterintuitive because we tend, especially in Britain, we tend to think of coal as a thing of the past. So I thought it was quite a good idea to keep the focus on it.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, it is interesting to see, again, how all these things intertwine. Right. Because we start talking about the Industrial Revolution and capitalism and empire, then we're talking about coal, we're talking about London fog. Right. Like, these things might seem separate, but as you're explaining, they're really not. And London is a really important part of this, obviously, because of the fog that London is notorious for, for decades of the story you're telling us. But also, of course, as a city and as a city at the centre of Empire. Right. To go back to another one of those themes we've mentioned. So is there anything further we want to talk about in terms of how London is thought of within this history and development of photography?
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Professor Michelle Henning
Yes. So obviously there were Fogs in other British cities, particularly in the industrial north. But London becomes very much identified with the fog internationally. There are reasons for that. Obviously London is in a river basin, so it has naturally occurring fog. I don't use the term smog much in the book because it wasn't really used very much in the period I'm talking about. But essentially that is what we're talking about. So it's a combination of the naturally occurring mist and heavy moist air that you would associate with a natural fog with this man made, or we would now say anthropogenic pollution, mainly coal smoke. So London becomes identified with this and there's, there's a strange phenomenon where even though it's really unpleasant, you know, it makes it very difficult to breathe, it actually is toxic and causes thousands of deaths. And it's known very early on, it's known in the 1880s that the London fogs are killing people essentially and are extremely bad for people. Yet it still becomes associated with the kind of greatness of the city because fog starts to symbolize a kind of industriousness. And it is associated obviously with the Industrial revolution, with the dominance of the British Empire. So it becomes almost like a signifier of the greatness of the city as a kind of imperial centre in the 19th century. But I think also what you see in the period I was looking at and in photography is very interesting because in the 19th century it's very difficult to take photographs in fog. And that's because the type of film that they were using was. Or the emulsions, it's not film, it's glass plates and so on. The emulsions on those plates were very highly blue sensitive and very red, yellow, insensitive, which meant that the fog, because the London fogs were notoriously yellow, it meant that the fog would just appear even darker on the photographic plate. So for that reason and also for the reason that it's full of things like sulfur which react to photographic materials, for those reasons it was just very, very difficult. And in the 1920s and 30s it becomes easier with the invention of new kinds of sensitive emulsions. And by the 1930s, press photographers are routinely photographing the fog. So fogs come usually in the winter, November through kind of through to about February, I think. And they would take the opportunity to go out and photograph, let's say bobbies, the London police men at that time. They were men with their distinctive style, kind of bell shaped helmets which everybody would recognize, I think, but also white gloves for directing traff and Also the London double decker buses, the lights of Piccadilly and so on. So if you look at any kind of 1930s-50s pictures of the London fog, you see this iconography again and again. And also the other thing you see a lot is the architecture of the city of London, the financial centre. So arches and kind of classical architecture and people silhouetted within those arches and that kind of thing. The other thing that kind of relates to that, there's a kind of inverse of that is in other parts of the world which are not besieged by fog and don't even have the kind of atmospheric softness that the UK routinely has through there's a kind of bluish light in this country that kind of remains, even when there's not mist or fog, a kind of level of moisture in the atmosphere. So photographers would go to other places that had different kinds of climates and they would complain. And this I found really funny that this was in things like the letters pages of the photographic press. You'd see them complaining about how difficult it was to take photographs in those places and especially to develop them. So they would be building their own dark rooms, but there would be insects, the heat would be too much, so the chemicals would act too fast or there would be mold inside their cameras. So tropical conditions, very hot, wet conditions were they found really bad for photography. But also hot, dry conditions where you might get very sharp contrasts of light and dark didn't fit these British photographers either, who in the 1930s were still. These are the colonial photographers who've gone out to different parts of empire, but in their heads they are still, in their hearts, I should say, they're still very wedded to a kind of aesthetic that comes from foggy, misty UK and England especially. So they kind of imagine this kind of damp, foggy, misty climate as the perfect climate for photography, which is ironic. And they always judge other climates against this kind of criteria.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
This is so interesting to think about because of course there's the practical dimension of like, what is the fog doing to the chemicals. But then there's also the kind of what's happening in people's brains and minds and ideas of like, well, what is photography meant to do? What are we supposed to take photos of? Right, like these things are very much combining in these ideas of London. But there's another thread I want to make sure we pick up from what you were mentioning earlier, which is that so much of this history of photography is about the physical chemicals. Right? You've mentioned this a number of times. The sensitivity to light or Sulfur, but also of course, the chemicals used to be make all of this too. So can we talk about for example, some of the. I know we've mentioned waste products a few times, but that's not incidental to these conversations around empire or even discussions around race that are happening, right?
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Professor Michelle Henning
Yeah, yeah, so that's a really good question. So as I just said, these photographers, these colonial photographers, judgments about goods and bad climates for photography were very much to do with their materials, the materials not seeming to work and so on. But they were also linked very much to ideas about the different peoples of these places. So the talking about climate becomes also a kind of COVID means of talking about the populations, so the colonized peoples. So it's linked to ideas of compliant or non compliant photographic subjects. Unruly flora and fauna are linked to ideas of unruly native peoples and so on. So you see over and over again this conflation of difficult climates, difficult flora and fauna and difficult people. So there's a kind of racialized element to this. And there's another way of looking at it as well, which when you mentioned waste, one of the things I came to understand quite late in the research and with the help of books like Max Liberon's Pollutionist Colonialism or Michel Serra's book Malfeasance, these are both books on pollution. It made me understand that pollution is related to colonialism and empire because it's predicated on territorial claims. So when you build a factory and then poor without even thinking about it, allow all of its kind of effluent to just go into the local river or whatever, you're staking a claim to that environment. You're staking a claim to having a right to do that. And so there's a kind of mentality associated with kind of unthinking pollution. And it's the same, it's the kind of inverse of extraction. Extraction is similar. The idea that you can just go and take the resources from another country and exploit those. So obviously photography is not the only industry that does this in a way. Photography, Ilford Ltd. Certainly is not the biggest problem by any means, but it allows us to think about these things. So chemical photographic manufacture and photographic processing were at the start incredibly polluting. So Kodak, for example, lots of people have looked at Kodak's Rochester plant in New York State and you can see, it's very easy to see the huge environmental impact that had and the pollution that people in Rochester are still living with as a consequence. Ilford was on the banks of a river called the River Roding, which is in the. Which runs through the suburb of Ilford and then joins the Thames. The Kodak Limited plant, which was Kodak's British branch, was further upriver on the west side of London, but it still had a canal, I think, or a river that then goes into the Thames. And the people have talked about the way in which, by the 1970s, the Thames river was dead. And one of the arguments is that it was killed. All the fish and life in the river were killed by pollution, including pollution from all the film studios, the photographic factories and so on. And actually, after the end of chemical photography, or rather the end the kind of takeover of digital and the reduction in size, you see the river coming back to life. But if you look across the whole chain, if you take photography as one way of looking across a whole chain of manufacture, you'll see highly polluting processes all along, from things like paper manufacture and dye manufacture, but also used fixer chemicals. And one of the things. So if you work in a darkroom, you have three main chemicals. You have the developer, the stop bath, which can even be just water, and then the fixer. And the fixer takes up the residue, silver, some of the silver that comes off the print or the film that you're developing, and then that fixer is dumped. And it's usually often considered harmless, but it's become recognised that actually silver in this form actually is causing pollution of kind of microscopic organisms and embryonic aquatic life and so on. But that's still even sort of handbooks for waste recovery and so on, still ignore that cumulative effect. So one of the things that Libourne talks about is how legislation treats each substance separately and doesn't look at the cumulative effect when they're mixed together. So that's a big thing. But one of the. The things that changed it wasn't a deliberate environmental. Or reduced the amount of silver pollution, not from fixer necessarily, but just reduced the amount of silver pollution in general was not a kind of environmental decision, but actually to do with color photography. So I don't really talk much about color photography in the book, but it's worth mentioning that color photography comes in. In the 1930s, not in print form. People, normal people, you could. You could do. If you had money and you were doing something commercial, you might get. Or you're an artist, you might get color prints, but generally it was color transparency film that was available to amateurs, but that's right at the end of the 30s and so, or second half of the 30s. So, but what happens with that is you start to. They start to realize that the bleaching process used in colour strips off the silver and that could be reused. So they start to introduce silver recovery plants. So that has the kind of positive environmental effect, but it's actually for economic reasons. Yeah. So I guess just to kind of sum up on your question, that there are these quite complex ways in which ideas in which waste and pollution relate to imperialism and colonialism, which is a lot to do with a kind of attitude to territory or an attitude to land.
- [38:31]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah. No, again, the combination of the physical, practical things and the thinking behind them very much intertwined throughout this. Speaking though, of the bringing in of colour photography, I want to talk a little bit more about the sort of interwar period and the high tech ness of it. Right. This is something you mentioned right at the beginning of our conversation, that that's maybe an aspect of this kind of photograph that's lost now, given where we're at with the medium. So can we talk a bit more about other sort of cutting edge technological things that companies like Ilford Limited are doing at this point and the kinds of ways that these changes are influencing who is using photography and for what?
- [39:10]
Professor Michelle Henning
Sure, yeah. So a lot happens in the 20s and 30s in terms of developments in photography, technical developments, and often most of them are not talked about because it's the classic thing. When we talk about technological change, we tend to focus on moments of very vivid innovation or the introduction of new products that seem kind of game changing. So the obvious one is color photography. So Kodak brings out its first commercial color film in 1935. But all throughout the period there's experiments with different forms of colour movie film and different forms of colour photographic materials. But putting aside color for now, there are these other things which are a bit more subtle. So Ilford was particularly advanced in infrared and panchromatic emulsions. Now, both of these were developed earlier and were linked to the First World War. So infrared. Infrared plates at one point were outstripping anything produced by Kodak. It was what they were kind of known for. But of course the reason for developing it and putting so much effort into it in the first place was that this infrared photography was being used for aerial photography in particular. And similarly panchromatic emulsions, that's also used for aerial photography initially. So I need to explain what panchromatic emotion is. So if you went to a shop and bought a film today, as you still can, if you buy an Ilford film, you'll notice that they are called HP and that stands for hyperpanchromatic, I think is the H hyper, I can't remember, but the P is panchromatic. And then also you'll see some other films, some Kodak films have the word word pan in them. And the other way you'll see this word is in pan sticks. For when you see. Talk about Max Factor's makeup for film, people used to use pan makeup. I always thought that was a reference to sort of metal pans that the makeup was held in. But it's not. It's to do with panchromatic emotions. So makeup that was made specially to deal with panchromatic film. So panchromatic is black and white emulsion. So it's an emulsion for black and white films or plates or papers. And it is sensitive to a much wider spectrum than older films. So it loses that kind of over blue sensitivity that you find in very early films. So if you look at, if you have any old photographs from sort of the early part of the 20th century or late 19th century, any family photographs, you will see that if someone's wearing something blue, it will appear as say a pale blue would appear as a white. You can see this sometimes. I've got a picture from the early 1920s which shows a garden and the garden is full of white plants. And I think it's because these are the kind of bluish, more bluish leaved plants. So it was the same thing I was talking about with the fog that was over sensitive to the blues and then the reds and yellows. It was very insensitive. So on a positive that would appear as a black. So panchromatic corrects that. It makes for images that look much more close to the kind of tonal range with which our eyes see the world. So it corresponds better to human vision. But this had all sorts of knock on consequences. So for example, if you increase the red sensitivity, you can't use a red safety light in the developing of the film. So if you've ever developed a film, you'll know that you use a light proof developing tank. And then when the film is developed, you can then print in a dark room under a red safety light. But so that's because the films are panchromatic, because they're sensitive to the red light, which wasn't the case before. So suddenly in the factories manufacturing these products, the workers had to work in complete darkness. So there were kind of consequences. Ilford had this very. One of Ilford's managers does this rather sexist account where he talks about an outbreak of hysteria among the women workers in the film packing rooms because suddenly they have to work in in the pitch dark. And it also led to the company exploring using blind employees. And I think actually Kodak did this and did employ blind and partially sighted employees, but the experiment didn't work out for Ilford. So. Yeah, so those are some of the things. But panchromatic has huge consequences. So one of the arguments that people made at the time, and I think is a good case, is that it's panchromatic film that leads to the rise of snapshot photography, because with this film you can start to take photographs much more easily and in all different light conditions. So it really changes the game for photography.
- [44:45]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I mean, that makes it so much more possible to take photos in many more places than were possible before, given the sensitivities that you've helped us remember were a huge part of the process until some of these developments came along. So that's definitely an interesting part of the kind of intertwinings, especially with capitalism. But I want to make sure we don't lose one of the threads that you mentioned towards the beginning of our conversation, which is, of course, the chapters that look at the links between photography and war, especially if we're talking about the sort of interwar sort of period. Could we maybe also combine that with some of the chemical aspects we were discussing earlier? Because, of course, when one thinks of World War I and especially images of World War I, gas masks are kind of right at the forefront there.
- [45:30]
Professor Michelle Henning
Right.
- [45:30]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Poison gas, chemicals too. So are there kind of some direct links between poison gas and photography beyond just. That's what some of the images are that we have?
- [45:40]
Professor Michelle Henning
Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. So both poison gas and photography are derived. The poison gas that we're kind of thinking about are derived from the dye stuff industries that came out of the exploitation of coal tar. So companies like agfa, for example, we know that as a photographic brand, but that began as a dye company and it became, as well as producing photography or photographic materials, it became a manufacturer of poison gas. So Ilford Limited, the company that I focus on most, was not involved in poison gas production, but I focus on it in a couple of chapters because poison gas shows how implicated the photographic and the film industries were in war chemistry in general. So the First World War was often described as the chemists war. It's a real change in the way that warfare is conducted and chemists play a big role in that. And the major chemists in the UK were also the same people would be working for the photographic industry. So these things are very tightly linked, but there's also some kind of less literal ways in which they're connected. So one of the reasons I also wanted to talk about it is I've always puzzled over. There's a. A very canonical, very important text that pretty much every student of art history or photography comes across at some point. And that's Volta, Benjamin's Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which is from the period I'm talking about. It was written in 1935-36. And it's one of those things that you can keep reading and every time you read it, you'll find something different. And what I remembered of it was obviously the famous bits. So he ends with discussing how film and photography can be used in the service of fascism or they can be used against it. And I hadn't really thought, because Benjamin was a Jew who was in exile from Nazi Germany, and he's quoting an Italian fascist, the futurist poet Marinetti. But it hadn't occurred to me that he says Marinetti is commenting on a specific imperial war, which is the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. And I hadn't really clocked that or gone back and looked at what was happening when Marinetti invaded Ethiopia. So I did that. And of course, this is the first time that poison gas is used on a mass scale, on a scale that exceeded far, far exceeded what happened in the First World War. So Mussolini made extensive. I mean, Benjamin wouldn't have known this at the time, but it's almost kind of. He anticipates it because he talks about poison gas in his essay. But Mussolini makes extensive use of gas warfare, pouring mustard gas over Ethiopia again and again from planes in flyovers, killing thousands or actually tens of thousands of people. So I became interested in this idea that Benjamin was talking about poison gas and photography in the same breath. So even though he didn't know about that war, he sees Marinetti talking about it as the exemplification of what happens when we aestheticize warfare. And he says photography and film can be used to. To aestheticize warfare, or they can be used to serve fascist ends, or they can be used to challenge it. So it's a bit complicated. And those two chapters are probably the most difficult in the book, and they're probably the ones aimed most at the people who had to read that essay as part of their education. But I wanted to keep in mind that there's two ways of looking at photography's involvement in the material involvement in war. One is the very kind of, if you like, empirical work we can do around what these factories were producing alongside their photographic chemicals, or what other companies they were collaborating with, who they were providing their materials to. It's Ilford, one of Ilford's biggest. Well, Ilford's biggest customers were the military, outside of the snapshot photographers and the studio photographers. So there's that kind of literal, empirical thing you can do. But there's also a kind of a more, if you like, theoretical issue around what poison Gusts does to atmosphere and what photography does to our relationship with the world. So those are the kinds of things that Benjamin touches on. And that's what I also wanted to talk about.
- [50:41]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, this is really interesting because, of course you go, oh, well, this period of warfare. Yeah, that is when we start to have photographs of war. Oh, that's going to have all sorts of effects. And we, you know, think about the Vietnam War and television. But there's like some really literal connections here, as you've mentioned, with, like the actual chemistry going on.
- [50:58]
Professor Michelle Henning
Right.
- [50:58]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That I think we probably don't necessarily think about. And yet the intertwining that you've done here of those components helps us see literally, sometimes those connections and all of those sorts of questions around kind of what about war is aestheticised and how remain incredibly relevant, I think now. So, in fact, that might be a good place then to sort of end our discussion about the book, obviously leaving loads of unanswered questions on the table. But of course, that's what's interesting to kind of keep thinking about and have people take away with them. So I'm curious then, what you are still thinking about, whether you've moved on to other subjects or your next project is sort of related to this one. What's on your desk at the minute?
- [51:39]
Professor Michelle Henning
It. Well, I've applied for a big grant, which so a lot hangs on, whether I get that or not. But in any case, I think what I'd like to do next is a project, this sounds like a big jump, a project around mobile phone photography and how that's changing right now. So I'm interested in how the phone companies are encouraging people to use their cameras, their phone cameras, and how that can be subtly changing or trying to change quite long established ideas about snapshot photography. So just to go back to the book a second, in the book I talk about how for the companies and also the shops, like Boots. I haven't mentioned Boots, but I made a lot of use of the Boots, the chemists archives. Boots is A British pharmacist chain. Pharmacy chain. And yeah, so I, I was interested in how these companies were and the shops were pushing certain kinds of practices because they want to increase consumption. So they encourage people with the new panchromatic films to go out and photograph at night, for example. So you start to get these very particular kinds of images of nighttime. So similar thing is happening now with the advertising and the promotion for the latest mobile phones, which say, for example, Google's used their Gemini AI system, so they're promoting the camera as a kind of extension of that AI system. So they're encouraging, they're actually redefining photography in many ways, or snapshot photography, saying quite unusual things about why you might want to take photographs, that kind of thing. So I'm interested in researching that and then kind of comparing it, maybe doing some historical research as well, and looking at how big a change is this by contrasting what's happening with both the design and the promotion of mobile phone cameras with the kind of advice given to photographers and the handbooks and the advertising and so on from earlier periods. But that's as far as I've got. Oh, actually, and just to say, as well, I think I want to continue to, to think this through in relation to questions of colonialism and environment, because those were big things that came out of the book. So I kind of, when I got to the end of the book, the thing that really stuck in my mind was this chemical contamination of the earth, this sense of the kind of massive legacy, not just of photography, but of coal. And so I want to think about current practices in relation to the kind of legacy it's going to leave as well.
- [54:28]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that certainly sounds very intriguing and does have a lot of links to what we've been talking about. Even if the sort of way in which photographs are being taken might be different, I can see those threads continuing. So for any listeners who want to learn more, they can of course, read the book we've been discussing titled A Dirty History of Chemistry, Fog and Empire, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2026. Michelle, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [54:54]
Professor Michelle Henning
Thank you very much. It's been lovely to talk to you.