Every Storm

The problem of the flash

Lightning lasts for a fraction of a second. The electrical discharge through the atmosphere exists for less than a millisecond. By any measure, it is one of the most difficult subjects in nature to photograph. In 1880, when William Nicholson Jennings first attempted it, the emulsions available to photographers were not sensitive enough. The light was extraordinary but it was gone before the chemistry could respond.

Jennings was in his early twenties, recently arrived in Philadelphia from England, working as a private secretary with access to the Pennsylvania rail network and a growing obsession with the sky. He had a camera. He had access to storms. What he lacked was an emulsion fast enough to catch the flash.

For two years he carried his camera to the roof during every storm, opened the shutter, and waited. Every attempt failed. The images came back blank or formless. He was not deterred.

What changed

In 1882, Jennings had access to the new gelatin dry plate emulsions, significantly more sensitive than the wet collodion plates that had defined photography’s first decades. He set his camera on a rooftop in Philadelphia, pointed it at the sky, opened the shutter, and let the storm expose the plate.

On 2 September 1882, it worked.

The image showed something nobody had seen before. Not because lightning was invisible to the eye, but because the eye had never been fast enough, precise enough, or honest enough to record what lightning actually looked like. What the photograph showed was branching. Forking. A complex structure of electrical discharge that split and split again as it moved through the atmosphere. Intricate, asymmetric, alive.

It showed nothing like a zigzag.

What the photograph corrected

For as long as lightning had been depicted, in paintings, engravings, illustrations, on pottery, in mythology, it had been drawn as a simple zigzag. A crude bolt, angular and direct. This was not a scientific hypothesis. It was simply assumed, repeated, and eventually accepted as visual fact.

Jennings’ photograph made that assumption impossible to sustain. The camera had settled something that no argument, no observation with the naked eye, and no artistic tradition had been able to resolve. It did not just add information. It replaced a long-standing error with a verified truth.

This is what photography can do that words and drawings cannot. It does not argue. It shows. And what it shows cannot be dismissed as interpretation.

Wilson Bentley had understood the same thing in his Vermont snowfield: that there are phenomena in nature which only become visible, only become known, through the lens. Jennings reached the same conclusion from a rooftop in a thunderstorm. Both men spent their careers in pursuit of a single subject. Both built their scientific cases not through argument but through accumulation. Over his lifetime Jennings made approximately 400 lightning exposures in various parts of the world, no two alike.

Why this is a Point Zero

The Zero Baseline entry for Jennings’ first photograph of lightning marks a Point Zero in atmospheric photography: the first verified image of an electrical discharge in the natural environment, captured through a photographic process under documented conditions on a confirmed date. The verification parameters hold without difficulty. The image is authentic, photographic in technique, scientifically and culturally significant, and genuinely inaugural.

What makes this entry more than a technical first is what it demonstrates about photography’s role in the production of knowledge. The gelatin dry plate technology that made it possible also made high-speed photography possible: the systematic capture of phenomena at speeds beyond human perception. From lightning, the line runs forward to bullets in flight, to splashing droplets, to every domain of science and engineering where seeing faster than the eye can manage became a research tool.

The images also did something else. They captivated. The branching complexity that science needed to study was also, simply, beautiful. Jennings’ photographs circulated beyond laboratories and journals into the public imagination, into art, into the shared sense of what a natural force looked like. Empirical research and aesthetic spectacle arrived in the same frame. The photograph held both without choosing between them.

Every storm

Formal recognition from The Franklin Institute came in 1930, with the award of the Wetherill Medal for his pioneer photography of lightning. Jennings spent decades continuing what he had started that September night, carrying his camera into storms and building an archive of something that science had previously only imagined.

There is something in that persistence that goes beyond ambition. For Jennings, as for Bentley, the subject was not chosen because it was useful or prestigious or professionally strategic. It was chosen because it was there, and because the question of what it really looked like had never been answered. The camera was the only instrument precise enough to ask it.

When I look at the 1882 image, I see a photograph that corrected a myth. The branching structure filling the frame is not what anyone drew before that night. It is what was always there, waiting to be seen.

That is what this collection exists to hold: the moment the assumption ended and the evidence began.

RESOURCES:

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Image credit: William Nicholson Jennings, First Verified Photograph of Lightning, 2 September 1882. Glass plate gelatin transparency. George Eastman Museum / The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

© 2026 Patricia von Ah — Zero Baseline of Photography, SEETHINK Lab. All rights reserved.