JUSTINE VARGA SOMERVILLE SUITE

Justine Varga | Somerville Suite

Erin Pauwels

Photography emerged from centuries of scientific inquiry into optics, chemistry, and mechanics. Yet typically, the material components essential to this process—light, chemicals, film, paper—dissolve into invisibility, subsumed within the constructed pictures they produce.

Justine Varga's Somerville Suite (2023-25) reverses this disappearance by reclaiming photography’s experimental origins. Her prints lay bare an unfamiliar, elemental vision of the medium, gesturing not only outward towards representation of external realities but also inward, revealing layered practices shaped by human touch, skilled labour, and intimate dialogue with history. At first glance, the three prints dazzle with brightly coloured geometric forms in cyan, magenta, and yellow. Looking more closely reveals the artist’s mastery of craft and playful exploration of photography’s hidden processes.

Conventionally, film is exposed inside a camera, a brief and unseen chemical encounter with light. Varga's negatives, by contrast, are altered by hand through direct physical contact marked in ink, inscribed lines, vegetable juices, saliva. These interventions trace the artist’s bodily presence onto the film itself, producing negatives that are active sites of inscription rather than passive carriers of information.

The artist’s performative engagement with photographic materials continues in the darkroom. Each print carries variations in colour, along with fingerprints and material traces bearing witness to Varga's emphatically subjective process. During printing, the negative rests between sheets of glass in an enlarger. The dark line framing the negative's edge results from light seeping through gaps in this equipment. Rather than cropping the surrounding field, Varga includes this expansive space, enhancing it with coloured light to make the negative's edge and the enlarger’s shadow essential compositional elements. The result invites viewers to reconsider what a photograph might be—not merely mechanical reproduction or transparent window, but physical object painstakingly crafted through chemical and creative forces.

This approach—at once scientific and personal—takes inspiration and its title from Mary Somerville (1780-1872), a Scottish scientist and polymath whose 1834 publication, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, was among the best-selling science books of the nineteenth century. The text was groundbreaking not only as the work of a woman scientist, (in fact, one reviewer coined the term ‘scientist’ to describe her unique aptitudes) but also because it offered something rare: an approachable, poetically written account of scientific knowledge, explaining theories of astronomy, physics, chemistry, and electromagnetism in a style that blended technical and literary ability.

Varga's meditation on Somerville's legacy is rooted in extensive archival research among the scientist's collected papers and notebooks, preserved at the University of Oxford's Bodleian Libraries.

Algebra speaks directly to these archival origins. The photograph shows Varga's negative suspended in a honey-coloured field. While viewing Somerville's notebooks, Varga sketched marks onto the negative, approximating the arcs and quadrants of Somerville’s mathematical diagrams. For both artist and scientist, mark-making represents a process of thought made visible—less about being understood by others than honouring persistent curiosity. Here, it also expresses sympathetic kinship. The same energetic force Somerville observed in the cosmos—light's transformative power—animates Varga's photographic exposures. On a more terrestrial level, the looping lines of the artist's drawing echo the string closures of Somerville's notebooks. Opening these bound volumes in the archive requires untying and retying knots, a material ritual connecting maker and reader. In rehearsing these simple acts—untying string to access another's thoughts, tracing the line of an equation—Varga echoes gestures Somerville made nearly a century earlier, tracing a living thread of discourse between women separated in time.

Scribble tests the limits of mark-making, photographic legibility, and the transmission of human knowledge. Its central image is an energetic bundle of calligraphic lines bounded by a dark rectangle seared into the surrounding blue field. Evoking gestural abstraction, Varga’s lines are scratched into the film's surface, in some places with such force that they penetrate and remove the underlying emulsion. The frustrated effort evident in this expressive act emphasizes the handwritten quality of the lines even as they refuse to resolve into recognizable language.

Somerville’s final scientific journals, which record independent experiments she conducted in her early 90s, carry a similarly moving intellectual persistence. These pages of mathematical data are marred by the blots and scrawls of an ageing hand. Though virtually unreadable, they conjure the scientist’s undying drive to study, learn, and observe despite all obstacles, making these momentary slips into archival illegibility the passages where Somerville’s spirit, paradoxically, is most clearly felt.

In Varga’s work, the viewer’s search for textual clarity reveals indicators of photography's usually invisible processes: Kodak brand imprints, registration marks, notch codes—tactile clues that allow photographers to identify film type by touch in the darkroom. Emphasizing the blindness embedded in all aspects of photographic exposure, the work slips fluidly between knowing and feeling, between the desire to communicate meaning and the inevitable difficulty of being fully understood.

Whereas Algebra and Scribble grapple with written language, Geranium channels Somerville's experiments in natural science more directly. The vertical orientation of the Somerville Suite prints takes inspiration from the elongated paper strips the scientist used to test the colour chemistry of vegetable dyes. After painting these paper strips with pulverized flower petals and plant leaves, Somerville recorded her subjective experience of colour, intermingling scientific and sensory perception. In Somerville’s time, floral painting was one of the few branches of art deemed acceptable for women. It may have been with some delight then, that, this self-determined lady of letters ground up the petals of pretty plants to make chemical ingredients she deemed more useful in growing her ideas.

Varga’s negative for Geranium is similarly coated with juice from crushed flower petals—an experiment in light, chemical affect, and expanding photography’s boundaries. The flower named in the title is not represented pictorially but is vividly evoked in the wash of reddish orange surrounding the violet negative at the composition’s heart, contrasting colours drawn from opposing ends of the light spectrum Somerville studied.

As in other prints in the Somerville Suite, the dark halo demarcating the negative's edge does not chart the limit of what photography allows us to see but rather suggests a strategy for remapping its potential. Varga reveals that, where the medium resists conventional representation—where it appears to fail our expectations—is precisely where it offers its most profound insights, opening pathways towards deeper understanding of nature, science, and art.

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Erin Pauwels is an Associate Professor of Art History at Temple University in Philadelphia. Her most recent book is Napoleon Sarony's Living Pictures: The Celebrity Photograph in Gilded Age New York (2024).

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