Imaging the Universe: a History of Astronomy and Photography with Professor Charlotte Bigg

The Huntington Library “Brown Bag Talk” Seaver Classrooms 1 & 2 

April 10, 2025, at 12pm

Event Description: A special relationship links astronomy to photography. The conception of photography as a device suited for the exact and authentic recording of reality was put to an especially hard test in astronomy, and often failed to live up to expectations. Rather, the heavens constituted for photography a field of experimentation and a source of technical innovation from the mid-nineteenth century onwards and into the age of digital imaging. The development and refinement of photographic methods resulting from this research transformed astronomy and often found uses in other areas. This history seeks to make sense of technical developments by framing them within broader contexts, thereby bringing together the history of photography and visual cultures with the history of astronomy and its instrumentation. Attention is paid to the people, the settings, the possibilities and desires that shaped the making of new astronomical visualizations and their meanings for a range of audiences to this day.

About Professor Bigg: Professor Charlotte Bigg of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales is the 2024–2025 Dornsife-EHESS Visiting Professor at USC, in residence April 2025 and hosted by the USC Dornsife Visual Studies Research Institute and the USC Dornsife Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life. Charlotte Bigg is a permanent research fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Centre Alexandre Koyré, Paris. After earning degrees in history and history and philosophy of science from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, she worked at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and at ETH Zurich. She has published widely on the social and cultural history of the chemical, physical, and astronomical sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in a transnational perspective. Her work focuses especially on the visual and material cultures of scientific practice and their circulation among a range of audiences. She is currently co-PI of two projects, one focussing on the history of graphic design in the humanities and social sciences in the second half of the twentieth century, and another on the history of French colonial photographic archives. She is also currently working on the history of exploring, curating, and exhibiting geological collections.

This event is co-hosted by the Huntington Library, the Levan Institute for the Humanities, the Visual Studies Research Institute, and the Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life.

About the USC Dornsife-EHESS Partnership: USC Dornsife has a multi-year scholarly cooperation agreement with the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS; School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences). The Dornsife-EHESS Partnership, housed in the Levan Institute for the Humanities, aims to build ties between scholars at the two institutions and to support collaborations in research and teaching. It involves a program for doctoral students and another for tenured faculty with primary appointments in Dornsife. The program director is Nathan Perl-Rosenthal (Professor of History, Spatial Sciences, and Law). Queries can be directed to him at ehesspartnership@usc.edu. For more information on the Dornsife-EHESS partnership, click here. 

Image: Craig Mackay. Undated. An early astronomical CCD photograph. Courtesy of Craig Mackay.