I am currently writing a history of celluloid film, the substance that made cinema possible. Long seen as immaterial, motion pictures were in fact made of a combustible combination of cotton, cow hide, and silver. Most of the world’s supply was produced by its inventor, Eastman Kodak, in Rochester, New York. The project follows Kodak’s nitrate film across time and space, from cinema’s origins in the late 19th century until the cessation of its manufacture in the middle of the 20th century. Working to stabilize a flammable material and standardize the images it produced, Kodak prized purity and control; chasing the constant future growth it promised investors, Kodak sought mass production methods for film that could be scaled without limit. The drive to control film’s volatility, within Kodak and without, helped at once to define Kodak and to constitute cinema itself.
A second strand of my research concerns the development and origins of the commodity category of the byproduct—industrial waste repurposed as new marketable entity. The history of the byproduct, understudied by historians of chemistry and of capitalism alike, troubles the neat conceptions of industrialization as a historical process driven solely by accumulation, generating waste in need of dumping. Instead of serving to reduce waste, the emergence of byproducts in the 19th and 20th centuries frequently helped drive new kinds of despoilment and new forms of exploitation.
Seeing Through Silver: How Chemists and Capital Made Images Move, book manuscript in preparation
“‘The Fatal Blemish’: Purity, Consistency, and Chemical Engineers at the Origin of a New Visual Order, 1890–1930,” Enterprise & Society, 2024: 10.1017/eso.2024.39