The Aromatics are part of an open-ended photography series that springs from a large-scale imaging device of my own design. The process demands long exposure times, so images must be captured at night, and in near total darkness. These solitary and somewhat absurd labors in my basement studio recall the efforts of the Natural Philosophers, whose protoscientific explorations were not yet freighted by the established fields of study we know today.
This transitional period between amateur observation and professional articulation is full of evocative stories and abstract leaps. For example: how did we come to know what a molecule actually looks like? One could begin Rene-Just Haüy, who mishandled and broke a friend’s crystal specimen in 1781. As he picked up the pieces, he took note of how the fractures propagated along a plane, and intuited that this must be due to an invisible, internal structure.
In 1858, August Kekule claimed to arrive at the ring-like formation of benzene during a dream about a snake biting its own tail. Even modern tools like X-ray diffraction require the viewer to employ a strong dose of interpretation, as the process cannot capture direct images of atoms. A father and son team solved this problem in 1913 with Bragg’s law, when the younger Bragg was only 22.
Imagine working at the bleeding edge of an idea about an invisible universe, and having to design and build completely novel tools, to see something both omnipresent and unknown. Here artists and scientists are united, as they search for new ways to understand the complexity of our shared experience. The visual arts take this a step further by attempting to capture human subjectivities as well, though is this any different from Natural Philosophy? Perhaps the arts stand on a precipice, just as protoscience did, before technology allows us to attain definitive answers to abstract questions that once seemed unknowable.