Black Light: Revealing the Hidden History of Photography and Cinema

A radical assessment of the racial motives underlying the conception of photography and cinemaConventional 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 photoimagi