"Painting with Fire" shows how experiments with chemicals known to change visibly over the course of time transformed British pictorial arts of the long eighteenth century – and how they can alter our conceptions of photography today. As early as the...

In late seventeenth-century London, the most provocative images were produced not by artists, but by scientists. Magnified fly-eyes drawn with the aid of microscopes, apparitions cast on laboratory walls by projection machines, cut-paper figures reve...