August Strindberg’s Celestographs
A strangely fascinating set, Strindberg’s celestographs are photographs of the sky taken without the aid of cameras and lenses.
A playwright by profession, August Strindberg distrusted camera lenses because he perceived them to “[give] a distorted rendering of reality,” according to the National Library of Sweden. Nevertheless, this didn’t stop him from dabbling in photography and, instead, made use of an alternative method. Strindberg took what he had calledcelestographs: photographs of the sky taken without the use of cameras or lenses, attempts at “[producing] a more objective view of stars and planets.”
On how the images were produced and the name came to be, the Library further explained, “The plates were directly exposed to the night sky for some time and then developed… August Strindberg thought that he had captured the stars so he called the photographs for (sic) celestographs.”
Below are some of Strindberg’s celestographs from the Library’s archive. These were taken during the winter of 1893–1894 in Dornach, Austria, where he and his wife Frida Uhl were staying at that time.
To see the rest of the collection and to find out more about these photos, you may visitthis album on the Library’s Flickr account. Aside from the celestographs, the album also includes scanned images of the backs of the photographs on which Strindberg wrote relevant details of the images.
Information in this article was sourced from National Library of Sweden on Flickr: The Commons.
This article was written Julien Matabuena and was originally published at www.lomography.com.
