today we take X-rays for granted,
and here are a few of the earliest X-rays I could find,
these
photogravures are from one of the first series of X-rays ever produced, with
X-Rays in (1896), by Josef Maria Eder
(1855–1944), a director of an institute for graphic processes, and Eduard
Valenta (1857–1937), a photochemist, both from Austria,
the
portfolio, simply titled Versuche über Photographie mittelst derRöntgen’schen Strahlen (Experiments in Photography by means of X-Rays),
contains a total of fifteen images,
the book contains a
mixture of positives and negatives, including, in addition to the skeletal
forms of animals and human limbs, X-rays of carved cameos and an assortment of
various materials such as metal, wood, glass, and meat,
I have just featured a few here, if the images are striking today they must have been doubly
so when first published, only a few weeks after Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen made his
discovery of X-rays public with his groundbreaking paper “On a New Kind of Ray”, the impact of the invention was revolutionary, not just medically but
also aesthetically. As The Met comments: “The careful compositions and shocking
appearance of these ‘Experiments in Photography’ link them to the previous
century’s tradition of natural-history illustration and point toward the
experiments of New Vision photographers in the 1910s and 1920s.” more early X-ray images here in in Dr Ludovic O’Followell’s 1908 images of
corsets, X-rays in 1896, amazing!
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