Gezicht op de Maan

This is an image of the moon made by Lewis M. Rutherford. It appears within a book opened to a spread. The image is in a frame that sits in the middle of a larger page, with text appearing on the facing page. Photography during the nineteenth century was caught up in a tension between art and science, and this image embodies that struggle. The photographic medium allowed images to be captured with a previously unimaginable level of objective accuracy. As scientific knowledge expanded rapidly, it became increasingly urgent to document the world in great detail. But there was also resistance to photography, which was seen as a merely mechanical process. To understand this image, one could consult a number of archives related to the history of science and the history of photography. Only by understanding the image in its social and institutional context can we grasp its meaning for the nineteenth century.