‘I am the Prophet of the Light, Dumb When the Sun is Dark’: Solar Agency, Temporality and Early Photochemical Images

In his essay ‘On a Sun-Dial’, published in the New Monthly Magazine in October 1827, William Hazlitt announces the ancient ‘mode of counting time’ as ‘perhaps the most apposite and striking, if not the most convenient or comprehensive’. Hazlitt prefers a ‘stationary’ sun-dial, over an elaborate ‘repeating watch’ or a rudimentary ‘hour-glass’, for its ‘silent, imperceptible’ marking of the passage of time. Although he was writing during a period of intense experimentation with solar agency upon light sensitive substances, Hazlitt’s preference might seem remote from such early photo-chemical experiments. Yet, his singling out of the ancient timepiece of a sun-dial in curious ways gestures towards Roland Barthes’s much later and well-known reference in Camera Lucida to ‘cameras’ as ‘clocks for seeing’. While Hazlitt’s sun-dial is a clock seen and decidedly not heard—‘seen’ that is as it ‘points’ a ‘finger’ of shadow to the hour—it, too, like an early camera, becomes redundant when the sun is absent. Beginning with such proto-photographic qualities of a sun-dial, my essay will newly explore relationships between physical marking of the passage of the sun and examples of solar-generated images on paper. Early practitioners generated solar images of vibrant if ephemeral colours, and my interest lies with the fugitive and abstract nature of such photographic marks in the period prior to assumptions of a secure mimetic correspondence between objects in the world and photographic images of them. Hazlitt encountered ‘his’ sun-dial close to Venice while travelling, and my analysis will extend to travellers of the 1840s who began to take early cameras with them. By examining material and conceptual aspects of travellers’ attempts to secure salted paper prints from paper negatives taken in the field, my aim is to re-assess the serendipitous relationship of the salted paper support to temporal facets of the solar agency that marked its surface.