Through the Keyhole: Photographic Desire and the Astronomical Imagination

Two women, a century apart, gaze at them intimately through the keyhole, reproducing them mechanically and with patience:2 Malena Szlam, a contemporary visual artist and filmmaker, and Annie Jump Cannon, an astronomer passionate about photography, who worked at the Harvard College Observatory in the early 1900s. In writing this essay, I too have looked through keyholes – peering into crevasses in the narratives of science and the arts, seeking counter-histories through archival findings, fragments of transcribed conversations, diary entries and personal reflections. I have attempted to shed light on unexpected interconnections between two female figures that provide very different narratives – polar opposites, perhaps. Yet their juxtaposition sheds light on a piece of photographic history that conjoins nocturnal landscapes and desire.3 Together, their fasci- nation with the architecture of nightly skies gestures towards an “astronomical imagination” fuelled by movements between northern and southern axes, by displacements and migrations, by wonder and despair, and by imperial geographies reaching – beyond the earth’s exploitation – towards the mastery of the sky. By tracing the etymology of desire (“sidus”) in their respective work, this text bears witness to the vast entanglements that form moments of “dis-aster”.