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19th century experiments in color micrography by Fernand Monpillard with Nicole Liao
My project is interested in the use of new synthetic dyes in the life sciences and how this would have shaped color and photo media in the 19th century. I will be looking at the earliest experiments in color micrography by little known French photographer Fernand Monpillard, who seized upon synthetic color’s chemical and visual properties to visualize biological structures and microscopic organisms. While there was no shortage of atlases featuring micrography in the wake of photography’s invention, Monpillard and zoologist Étienne Rabaud’s Atlas d'histologie normale: Principaux tissus et organes (1900) appears to be the first scientific atlas of its kind to print its photographed specimens in color. I explore how this incorporation of color forces us to reconsider assumptions around “mechanical objectivity” and the active role corporeal relations between viewer and image, between specimen and technology, play in the relay of information. Monpillard’s other unpublished monochrome, bichrome and trichrome prints of parasites, insects, embryos and minerals will also be analyzed in relation to his written articles on the technical art of micrography. Thinking through the material and technical execution of Monpillard’s process, I ask how his visualization of “living” tissues and organisms might have intersected with what Jacques Loeb referred to as “Technology of Living Substance” in the lab wherein man can manipulate living nature to his will.
Biography:
Nicole Liao is currently a PhD student in the Department of Art History at the University of Toronto. Her interests lie at the intersection of the history of photography and film, science and technology studies, and aesthetics. Her dissertation will foreground the importance of colour in theories of evolution and biology as scientist sought to reveal, magnify and animate life processes in the latter half of the 19th century. Prior to pursuing a doctorate, Nicole worked as an artist and designer in the architectural field.
 
Bibliography:
Allen, Grant. The Colour-Sense in Insects: Its Development and Reaction. London s.n., 1879.
Breidbach, Olaf. “Representation of the Microcosm: The Claim for Objectivity in 19th Century Scientific Microphotography.” Journal of the History of Biology 35, no. 2 (2002): 221–5
Canguilhem, Georges. “The Living and Its Milieu.” Translated by John Savage. Grey Room 3, no. 3 (2001): 7–6.
Donné, Alfred. Cours de microscopie complémentaire des études médicales: anatomie microscopique et physiologie des fluides de l’économie. J.-B. Baillière, 1844. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/nbp87rbk/items?canvas=35
Kennedy, Meegan. “‘Throes and Struggles … Witnessed with Painful Distinctness’: The Oxy-Hydrogen Microscope, Performing Science, and the Projection of the Moving Image.” Victorian Studies 62, no. 1 (2019): 85–118.
Monpillard, Fernand. Appareil de photomicrographie. Paris: Impr. nationale, 1903.
———. Écrans et plaques orthochromatiques. Paris: Impr. nationale, 1907. http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k34120132.
———. Note sur la photographie indirecte des couleurs appliquée à la microphotographie. Paris: Impr. nationale, 1900.
Rabaud, Etienne, and Fernand Monpillard. Atlas d’histologie normale : principaux tissus et organes. Paris: Georges Carré et C. Naud, 1900. http://archive.org/details/atlasdhistologie00raba.