Niharika Dinkar, ‘Our Best Machines Are Made of Sunlight’: Photography and Technologies of Light, in Lewis, J .W. and Parry, K (eds). 2021. Ubiquity: Photography’s Multitudes (Leuven University Press).
pp.104-105
What such a widespread use of lighting suggests is that the familiar narrative of the role of light in photography was by no means limited to the sun and natural light – in fact, photography sits amid these wider conversations on technologies of light.
p.105
My intention here is not to pit natural light against artificial light as two different sources, but to indicate the mutual imbrication of the two., to suggest that what was at stake here was an instrumentalization of light through a wide range of materials and devices.
It is also to undermine narratives of the autonomous agency of light and the inevitability of the traces, to indicate that light was in fact manipulated in terms of the materials used. Crucially, light’s manipulation was contingent upon economic and trade factors.
p.106
To consider the ubiquity of photography today is to engage with these developments in photography that employ technologies of light outside of the visual spectrum or the electromagnetic spectrum.
Playing Against The Camera 