Our Best Machines Are Made of Sunlight: Photography and Technologies of Light

With the demise of analog photography, the workings of light, which seemed an obvious and transparent modality in an earlier era, have acquired a new salience. Instead of a transparent medium that seamlessly links seeing and knowing, light is shown as having agency and a textured materiality, both of which inflect bodies and spaces.¹ This resurgence is indicated in the recent spate of scholarship on the social and material cultures of light, the infrastructures enabled by light, colonial practices of light (which is my own point of entry into the subject), anthropologies of luminosity, and geographies of darkness.² These interventions