The early history of photography in relation to three notions of “fixity”: chemistry, politics, and meaning

Abstract: The fragility and ongoing decay of the image was an undeniably essential element of the early photograph’s chemical nature, aesthetics, and cultural life. This talk offers a reworking of the early history of photography in relation to three notions of “fixity”: chemistry, politics, and meaning. It mobilizes the archive of faded, damaged, and illegible photographs from the medium’s early decades, the archive behind every early photographic exhibition, and explores its relation to preservation, reproduction, and representation. Despite powerful narratives on photographic history as a medium of fixity, photographs are always, profoundly, unfixed.