“The photographers were militarized, even if they weren’t paid members of the military. They were taught at the School of Military Engineering at Chatham and sent with military assistants who recorded the transit with military timing, preparation, exposure, storage and later development of the plate.”
I found this aside interesting in the context early photography. In the context of what I know about early photography, (which granted is only what we were taught in Photographing America–an excellent course here at CMU), photography in the early United States was used to solidify state power through various projects. Examples include those like those we discussed in class–typologies creating a scientific concept of race (in order to justify slavery and racism), survey photography moving westward to catalog the new territory of the United States and convince people to move westward (manifest destiny), or notably Edward Curtis’ The North American Indian-a body of work supposedly undertaken to catalog the “Vanishing Race” (also a title of one of the works in the series)… but which was marred by the facts that Native Americans were not “vanishing” by experiencing a mass genocide (which Curtis’ work did not address) and that he did not in fact catalog traditional dress/rituals but rather asked Native Americans to pose for him in clothing he chose… regardless of what culture it was from or what significance it held.
The article mainly focused on where photography was lacking in terms of a scientific tool. For example, how unreliable measurements are even taken from a carefully captured photograph–in the case of early astronomical photography unusable, in survey photography labor intensive, or how in botany it highlighted a specific specimen as opposed to scientific illustrations which were designed to show a general/average. But beyond the scope of the article and these problems is that of what isn’t photographed at all. What can we understand from the information scientists and others choose not to (or are unable to) record?