Cloud Album: Selected Topics

The Cloud Album exhibition brings together photographs created by a wide variety of producers from around the world: artists, pilots, amateur and professional photographers, photojournalists, astronomers and meteorologists. The participation of amateurs, linked to the circumstantial and unpredictable nature of atmospheric events and data, has always been a characteristic of meteorological science.

Also reflected in the exhibition is a wide range of photographic processes and formats, from salt paper prints to silver gelatin processes, albumen prints, photomechanical processes and non-silver ones such as cyanotypes. And of course the full range of cloud formations: cirrus, stratus, cumulus, nimbus, altocumulus, lenticular altocumulus, etc. The viewer will also see that photography has brought to the fore new clouds linked to society’s industrialization, its conflicts and economies: explosion clouds, smoke clouds, contrail clouds, atomic and other weaponized clouds, artificial and chemical clouds.

Clouds were once thrones for the gods. Viewers of Cloud Album will step into the wondrously diverse, astonishing world of our constantly changing skies.

Cloud Album

The title Cloud Album refers to a stunning scientific album initiated by the Belgian meteorologist Jean Vincent (1851–1932), who studied cloud classification and practiced photography for more than twenty years, becoming the first director of the Institut Royal Météorologique when it was established in Brussels in 1913.

Vincent compiled these pictures to supplement the 1896 International Cloud Atlas, which was in circulation at the time, and later went on to produce a new cloud atlas in 1907. The album, included in the exhibition, is a kind of photographic archive of research carried out on clouds by several key players in the international scientific community. In the history of cloud science, few original photographs have been preserved, as most were ephemeral records used for publications or documentation.

The study of clouds and meteorology are sciences of networks and sharing. This album of clouds brings together photographs of many authors who worked in different parts of the world and who often knew each other due to conferences, publications, and at times through exhibitions of cloud photographs. These cloud enthusiasts were also photography devotees or hobbyists, some of whom dedicated years to cloud photography.

A Cloud Week

One hundred years ago, in 1923, a week devoted to cloud photography was organized under the auspices of the International Commission for the Study of Clouds.

This Commission was created in 1891 to prepare the publication of the first International Cloud Atlas and the organization of the Cloud Year in 1896 – a year dedicated to the measurements of clouds. The organizers of “Cloud Week” aimed to construct an overall perspective of the sky that was “continuous in space and time” by gathering photographs taken simultaneously by volunteers from different geographic areas.

Two hundred and fifty contributors, positioned throughout France, produced approximately 3,000 photographic prints. This project would go on to give shape to a much larger undertaking, the International Cloud Week held September 24-30 in 1923.

John Constable (1776 - 1837)

Between 1821 and 1822, on Hampstead Heath, English painter John Constable produced spectacular, vibrant oil sketches of the sky and its changing cloudscapes. Painted en plein air, directly outdoors, most of his images include notes of the date and time, with detailed descriptions of the weather including the wind and its direction, the characteristics of clouds, and the prevailing light or humidity. While his first studies include trees or treetops, during the year of 1822 the paintings progressively become pure skyscapes in which clouds are the singular focus.

Constable owned an edition of Thomas Forster’s Researches About Atmospheric Phaenomena (1815). His comments on the pages reflect his interest in amateur meteorologist Luke Howard, who first named the clouds with Latin terms: cirrus, cumulus, etc. Constable felt that “painting is a science and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature,” and that the presence of the sky in landscape paintings was considered to be the “key note, the standard of scale, and the chief organ of sentiment.”

Half a century after Constable’s death, the Impressionists recognized Constable’s sketches as “faithful and brilliant.” In the late 1930s these studies were revered as “harbingers of abstraction,” and the wording “pre- photographic” is now associated with them. As observed by historian Peter Galassi, their “modern pictorial syntax of immediate, synoptic perceptions and discontinuous, unexpected forms” is that of “an art devoted to the singular and contingent rather than the universal and stable. It is also the syntax of photography.”

Next page: Above: Thomas Forster, Researches About Atmospheric Phaenomena, London, United Kingdom, 1815, book. Below: John Constable, Sept 10, 1821, Noon. Gentle wind at west / Very sultry. After a heavy shower with thunder. Accumulated thunder clouds pafsing [sic] slowly away / To the south east. Very bright & hot. All the foliage sparkling and wet. England, 10 September 1821, oil on paper.

“If the sky is to be depicted, then the landscape remains black and indistinct; if the landscape is to be rendered, the sassy action of light completely burns away the shape of the clouds in a blaze of white.”

Impossible Clouds

Published in 1854, this statement by critic Lady Elisabeth Eastlake summarizes a technical issue the first photographers faced: the low sensitivity of the first photographic emulsions forced them to choose between the sky or land. Most photographers chose the land. This is exemplified in British photographer Roger Fenton’s work, who documented the Crimean War in 1856, the first such use of photography. His skies are often shapeless, sometimes blurred when the exposure time is too long. Trained in the studio of Paul Delaroche at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Fenton was a founding member of the Royal Photographic Society.

The International Cloud Atlas

“The pencil of a draftsman is a thousand times better when he knows how to see with the eyes of intelligence and not with those of the lens, which reproduces blindly, pell-mell, everything he sees from a confused and unintelligible manner.”This defect in photography, as observed by the meteorologist André Poey in the late 1880s, has been noticed by others who consider how photographs rarely show discrete shapes, even if they wonderfully capture the atmospheric conditions of the moment. The lack of colour – particularly blue – is felt. For others, however, it is the drawings that are imprecise compared to the photographs.

The different editions of the International Cloud Atlas reflect these contradictions. The photographs were retouched and coloured in the 1896 edition, and later printed in white and blue with annotations on the images. In 1932, they were published alongside schematic drawings, meant to simplify and clarify the photographed forms. Recent editions of the Atlas favour colour photography. The last edition of the International Cloud Atlas, published by the World Meteorological Organization, appeared at the end of the 20th century and is now accessible online.

The Names of Clouds

Attempts to understand cloud formation have a long history, as evidenced by Aristotle’s Meteorology (350 BCE), a treatise that begins with a study of cloud formation and duration. However, it wasn’t until the dawn of the 19th century that naturalists would invent a common nomenclature.

It was Luke Howard, an English pharmacist and and an amateur meteorologist with broad interests in science, who devised the Latin system of naming clouds, such as cirrus and cumulus, still in use today. His lasting contribution to science was this nomenclature system, which he proposed in an 1802 presentation to the Askesian Society and which was later published as “On the modification of clouds, and on the principles of their production, suspension and destruction” (Philosophical Magazine, 1803).

Above: Book display in the exhibition Cloud Album featuring (centre): Luke Howard, Climate of London Deduced from Meteorological Observations Made in the Metropolis and at Various Places Around It, Vol. 1, 1833.

Cloud Postcards

Postcard correspondents could send each other a piece of the sky, an atmospheric effect, or even a bit of the Milky Way. The taste for cloud postcards prefigures, in some forms, the popularity of sky and cloud hashtags on image-sharing platforms like Instagram.

Above left: Albert Rintsch, Explosion, Germany, 1916, silver gelatin print. Above right: Organization for the Defense Against Aircrafts, Paris, Verdier Device Beginning To Release Smoke (1 Minute After Opening The Taps), Paris, France, 1914-1918, vinyl mural. Below: Department of Defense, USA, Atom Bomb Test, Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands, 1946, colour tinted silver gelatin print.

The Movement of Clouds

In the mid-1920s, Japanese physicist and meteorologist Masanao Abe built an observatory with a view of Mount Fuji. From there, and for more than fifteen years, he recorded the clouds around the mountain using multiple techniques, including a motion picture and still photography, as well as with drawings and stereoscopy.

While Abe’s images echoed artistic traditions, his aim was scientific and experimental as he searched to visualize the air currents by means of film and photography. Through his work Abe proposed numerous technical improvements in the field of cinema. The observatory’s archive is preserved at the University Museum, University of Tokyo in Japan.

Clockwise from top left: Jean Vincent, cover of Albums de Nuages, Belgium, 1894-1940; Arthur W. Clayden, Cloud Studies, London, United Kingdom, 1905; Weather Service Department for the Air Force Commanding General, Wolken im Luftmeer (Clouds in the Sea of Air), Germany, 1917; William A. Quayle, A Book of Clouds, United States, 1925. Next page: TV Times Press Archive, View of a Large Storm System from Apollo 9, 1209 Miles North of Hawaii, United States, 1969, silver gelatin print.