Featured on PDR in the collection August Strindberg’s Celestographs (1893–4)

In the village of Dornach in Austria, during the winter of 1893-4, the Swedish playwright August Strindberg laid out a series of photographic plates on the ground. Removing the "middle-man" of a camera (and even lens), using the light-sensitive plates directly, he was attempting to capture images of the night sky above. He named the technique "celestography", literally to record or write (-graph) the stars or sky (celesto-). At first glance, the images appear to have been successful: galaxies take shape, speckled with clouds and other astronomical and meteorological phenomena. As the plates developed, one can imagine Strindberg gazing upon them in wonder, wondering if he had truly managed to reveal something previously invisible to the naked eye or even the most up-to-date telescope: a…