‘Retouching the Archive’ is a practice-based research project located between the archive, darkroom and studio that explores the role of women in early photography in Scotland between 1780 and 1847. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, women were at the centre of the scientific breakthroughs that would later become known as photography. This project focusses on the contributions of three women who lived and worked in Scotland: Elizabeth Fulhame, Mary Somerville and Elizabeth Johnston Hall. Through archival research and contemporary art practice, it examines their lives and works as they intersect with histories of photography. The project’s contribution lies in its retrieval of their work and its repair of the subsequent, canonical narrative which marginalised their vital contributions to an ‘invention’ of photography dated to 1839. More than this, its significance is in the creative methods of reenactment and retouching, demonstrating how a fine art practice can deepen our understanding of women’s contributions to early photography.

Following Lütticken’s theorisation of reenactment as activating ‘a potential waiting’ (Lütticken 2005), the project reenacts the published technical workings of women’s chemical and optical experiments undertaken before and after 1839. Its method of reenactment provides a haptic encounter with the materiality of historical photochemical processes, enabling me to experience, at a distance of over 200 years, these women’s still-thrilling pre-photographic moments of discovery. Reenactment also undertakes a reparative action that allows me to make the invisible labour of these women’s production visible once again. When the limits of the archival case files are breached (Hartman 2019b), I advance a feminist research method called retouching in which non-verbal, non-visible and non-dominant narratives are reactivated, and new knowledge produced. Ultimately, the art practice and archival research presented here attempts to create a space for women’s contributions to early photography to become known again so that a history of photography can be learned anew.