ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Hercule Florence’s photographic images in Brazil, 1833: history and materiality

• In Event: Making and Circulating Images, Their Impact and Influences on Different Fields of Science 2

English Abstract

Born in Nice, Hercule Florence (1804-1879) arrived in Brazil in 1824 and participated in the Langsdorff Expedition (1825-1829) as a draftsman, recording people, fauna, flora and landscapes along more than 10,000 km throughout the country. After the trip, he settled in Campinas (SP), combining readings and practices to develop techniques for multiplying images and recording animal sounds, light, and movement. The humanistic background allowed him to move between art, technology, and science, blending typography, engraving, chemistry, and optics to obtain images printed by sunlight.
His 1833 manuscript, which recounts his first photographic experiments, precedes by six years the announcement of the discovery of the daguerreotype in Paris. Hercule Florence was the first to create the word “photographie” and also the first to use gold salts as a photosensitive substance. His photographic images, visible to this day, are the oldest in the Americas and attest to the utilitarian purposes for which they were created: the multiplication, circulation, and commercial use of copies. They were submitted to material characterization techniques at the Physics Institute at the University of São Paulo (Brazil) in 2016 and at the Hercules Laboratory at the University of Évora (Portugal) in 2022. This communication aims to present the results of the scientific investigations, relating them to the European theoretical references used by Hercules Florence to create his photographic images and to the availability of optical and chemical materials in Brazil in the 1830s.

Author

• Francis Melvin Lee