Microphotographs and scientific photography

This year we have come across a wide variety of photographic applications in which there is an interesting relationship between the form and the image.  We have really enjoyed the research into the pictural and historical relationship between both.

We have found very strange objects.  Photos which have become genuine objects.  Yet, the image remains very important.  The peculiar form adds an extra dimension to the image.

The reproduction of an issue of The Times of 1859 is an interesting example.  When the reproduction of the newspaper issue measures only a couple of millimeters it becomes something completely different.  In this case, we’re talking about “A Photographic Curiosity” (John C. Stovin).  You need a good microscope to be able to read the newspaper. 

We’re in the middle of the 19th Century.  The century of rationalism.  Photography is new and the microscope becomes a part of the bourgeois living room.  Combine the interest in microscopic slides and photography and you have microphotographs.  Very small images, no larger than a microscope slide.  Sometimes they made reproductions of Daguerreotypes on these microscopic slides.