Drawing was a terribly important part of science until the mid-19th century. Without photography, scientists, particularly in the life sciences, had to document what they saw with painstaking illustrations.

The clarity and "realness" of photographs eventually relegated scientific drawing to a hobby, but it didn’t happen overnight. Photographers working at the microscopic scale had to devise new emulsion chemistries and types of equipment to capture clear images of tiny things.

Leading the charge was Auguste-Adolphe Bertsch, who worked to overcome any challenge that scientists threw at him. Unfortunately, he died during leftist social unrest in France in 1871. As a result, his pioneering work languished in the archives of the French photography society, Société française de photographie, until Corey Keller dug them up for her new exhibit about early scientific photography, Brought to Light Photography and the Invisible, at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art.

"Photographers would deposit their pictures with this organization sort of as a way of staking their claim to achievements," Keller told Wired.com. "So these pictures went there directly from the man who made them and have been there ever since."

In this five-part series, we’re walking through the Brought to Light

exhibit with

Keller, who spent five years scouring dusty archives, primarily in Europe, to dig up dozens of haunting photographs from the period. Many of the images have never been seen, except by their creators. This installment brings you the story of pioneering microphotographers like Bertsch and their struggle to bring technological advancement to traditional scientific practices.

Even as they solved technical challenges, the photographers faced social resistance. The idea of representing a specific living thing instead of a generalized abstraction of an organism forced scientists to let go of long-held notions about their discipline.

"Prior to the 19th century, the scientific illustrations tend to represent a type, an ideal. So if you were going to do a picture of a flower, for example, the illustrator would look at 20 flowers and then take the common features and make an ideal flower," said Keller. "So, if that particular one happens to have a defective petal or something peculiar to it, you never really know: Does that photograph substitute then for that type of flower in general, or does it only represent that one specimen?"

While it may have posed a challenge for scientists of the 19th century, it’s the unique nature of each photograph taken during this early period that wows us, even now.

Credits: Photos from the Brought to Light show in the video include: Auguste-Adolphe Bertsch, Male itch mite, ca. 1853–57; San Francisco Museum of Art; William Henry Fox Talbot, Photomicrograph of moth wings, ca. 1840; Calotype negative, Arthur E. Durham, Photomicrograph of a fly, ca.1865; Arthur E. Durham, Photomicrograph of a flea, 1863 or 1864. Other images, like the scientific drawings and microscopic photography setup from Manufacturer and Builder courtesy of the Library of Congress’ American Memory collection.

See Also:

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter , Google Reader feed, and webpage; Wired Science on Facebook.