Black Light: Revealing the Hidden History of Photography and Cinema

Name: Black Light: Revealing the Hidden History of Photography and Cinema
Brand: University of Minnesota Press
SKU: 9781517917760
Price: 3613.0 INR
Availability: InStock

by Christophe Wall-Romana

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ISBN13: 9781517917760
Binding: Paperback
Subject: N/A
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Publisher Imprint: University of Minnesota Press
Publication Date: February 10, 2026
Pages: 328
Original Price: USD 30.0
Language: English
Edition: N/A
Item Weight: 658 grams
BISAC Subject(s): History

About The Book

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 Europeans were reckoning with "multiple worlds" and natural philosophy was giving way to "mechanical objectivity." Wall-Romana shows how engagement with the nature of light was always entangled with racist discourses on Blackness--especially after the 1801 discovery of the invisible spectrum and its paradox of "black light." Deprovincializing media archaeology, this book presents a groundbreaking historical framework with which to reenvision our dominant modes of seeing and understanding the world.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

About The Author

Christophe Wall-Romana is professor of French in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Minnesota. He is author of Cinepoetry: Imaginary Cinemas in French Poetry and Jean Epstein: Corporeal Cinema and Film Philosophy and translator of Jean Epstein's The Intelligence of a Machine as well as Gilbert Simondon's Imagination and Invention, both published by the University of Minnesota Press.

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