Representation of the microcosm: the claim for objectivity in 19th century scientific microphotography

Microphotography was one of the earliest applications of photography in science. The first monograph on tissue organization illustrated with microphotographs was published in 1845. In the 1860s, a large number of introductions to scientific microphotography was published by anatomists. They argued that microphotography was a means of documenting the results of microscopic analysis, uncontaminated by subjectivity of the observer. In the early decades of the 19th century, before the general acceptance of cell theory, such a technique was of special importance, so no criteria were available to distinguish between important and superficial characters in the description of tissue microstructures. Microphotography was praised as the method of choice for documenting the scientific observations of microscopic material. Some of the microphotographic practices described in these early manuals, however, did not conform with the idea of a purely mechanical process of documentation. The authors of these manuals saw photography not as a technique which produced artifacts, but as a complete and reliable substitute for the original preparations. Thus, according to these authors, the artificial world of photography was seen as the actual representation of the microworld. Consequently, they tried to understand the microcosm by analyzing photographs instead of the microscopic preparation themselves. Such attitudes discredited the use of microphotography in the sciences. Consequently, the definitive breakthrough of scientific microphotography was delayed until the 1880s and was largely due to the efforts of Robert Koch, who made microphotography a central tool of bacteriology.