Magnus Bremmer,
Stockholm University
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plate no 6 from Hugo
Hildebrandsson's "Sur la classification des nuages" (1879)
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Meteorology as a modern science was largely a product of novel ways of distributing information and organizing what John Ruskin once called a ”vast machine” of observers. In this paper, Magnus Bremmer delineates how photography came to play a key––albeit, not undisputed––role in the project of educating an international network of cloud observers.
Tracing the photographic engagement of the Swedish meteorologist Hugo Hildebrandsson, an influential figure in the making of the first photographic cloud atlases, Bremmer shows how photography initially was acknowledged as an indispensible aid to observation and classification of clouds. However, as the medium was further involved in the instructive pursuits of the international meteorological circles, the photographic image eventually turned into an object of observation, scrutinized under the meteorologists’ trained eye.
