Love Under Mercury

A 16mm film, Love Under Mercury is about science, transformation, and tragedy. Louis Daguerre invented the Daguerrotype when some drops of mercury, accidentally spilled from a broken thermometer in a cupboard, developed his iodised photographic plates, and thus revolutionised photography. But some years later the early Daguerrotypists developed symptoms of mercury poisoning – irritability, insomnia, and ‘childish over-emotionalism’. Just the very symptoms of love melancholy. Like Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter they had been poisoned by the mercury vapour.