JOURNAL OF

18.2
VISUAL CULTURE
Thermal vision
Nicole Starosielski
Abstract. This article describes thermal vision, the ways of seeing invisible
thermal emissions and exchanges. While most studies of thermal vision
have focused on the deployment of infrared imaging in military and
police operations, the author articulates thermal vision as a perceptual
mode that both extends beyond the infrared camera to a broader set of
practices of seeing heat as well as beyond the militarized view to scientific,
commercial, and cultural landscapes. Weaving through these practices
and landscapes, she outlines four overlapping ways that thermal vision is
oriented and in turn organizes the world: through thermal effects, hue,
objects, and zones. Focusing on the latter form, and taking cases from
early infrared photography in the 1930s and the expansion of building
thermography in the 1970s, she argues that the thermal imagery used for
visual surveillance, often as a means of objectification and targeting, is
intimately connected to regimes of environmental monitoring and the
creation and management of normative zones. A close attention to these
cases draws out one of thermal vision’s critical affordances and cultural
uses, regardless of technological platform or orientation: entangled with
practices of temperature control and synesthetic processing, it has been
enlisted to alter architectures, environments, and bodily movements
through them. Observing these uses expands visual culture studies’
understanding of the sensory possibilities of the visible and helps scholars
to track the affective and intimate dimensions of climate change.

Keywords. heat • infrared • photography • temperature • thermal imaging

Addressing the British Photographic Society in 1910, Robert Williams Wood

asked his audience to consider ‘how the world would appear to us if our eyes
were sensitive to some region of the spectrum other than the one for which
they have become adapted’ (p. 329). In his lecture, Wood presented a series
of infrared photographs, including images of trees whose leaves were as
bright ‘as if colored by freshly fallen snow’ and sheets of white paper that
appeared dark, even set against a blue sky in full sunlight (p. 330) (Figure 1).
These images opened the infrared spectrum and its ‘invisible rays’ to visual
perception and, he argued, revealed ‘the fact that we do not see things as
they are’ (p. 336). At this early moment in the history of infrared imaging,
the photograph exposed human eyes to a new form of radiation, extending
human vision to new landscapes while simultaneously calling into question
its capacity to fully perceive the environment.

journal of visual culture [journals.sagepub.com/home/vcu]

SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC and Melbourne)
Copyright © The Author(s), 2019. Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions
Vol 18(2): 147­– 168https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412919841019
DOI 10.1177/1470412919841019
148 journal of visual culture 18.2

Figure 1.  ‘A Landscape by Infra-Red Light’, Robert Williams Wood (1910).

Today, infrared images index a much broader swath of the spectrum and
document radiation than Wood’s camera was unable to capture. While Wood’s
images of trees and skies visualized short-wavelength infrared (just below
the range of visible light), contemporary handheld infrared cameras, weapon
scopes and military-grade thermal imagers capture thermal emissions
emitted at much longer wavelengths. These technologies are sensitive to the
heat emitted by all matter, whether the leaves of a tree, the human body, or
an electronic screen. Today’s infrared cameras enhance the view of Wood’s
camera: they reveal an expanded thermal landscape, an environment fully
populated by radiant emissions. One of the leading companies of commercial
thermal imagers, FLIR, argues that its cameras provide ‘superpower vision’
of an ‘infrared world’ – a world that ‘visible light doesn’t affect’ (FLIR, 2018).
Echoing claims of the early 20th century, infrared cameras are promised
to provide access to an inaccessible environment, one that typically exists
beyond the limits of human vision.

Infrared technologies, past and present, have infrequently been an object of

visual culture studies. More broadly, forms of thermal emission and reception,
whether radiant energy or the processes of heat exchange through conduction
or convection, are rarely considered in media studies, perhaps due to their
apparent invisibility. The sensation of heat and cold, termed ‘thermoception’,
has received some critical attention in other fields, including architecture,
anthropology, energy studies, and studies of affect and the senses (Allen-
Collison and Owton, 2015; Classen, 1993; Lara, 2015; Potter, 2008; Royston,
2014; Vannini and Taggart, 2014). As scholars in these areas have described,
 Starosielski. Thermal vision 149

thermoception is not a process in which we record a set of phenomena in

a world outside of us, but rather reflects ‘the energy balance between our
bodies and our environment’ (Ong, 2013: 3). Sensing temperature is always a
sensation of relationality between different thermal zones, and it is a critical
means by which we locate ourselves in the world.

This article begins with the assumption that sensing heat and cold, and
the sense of thermoception, is not merely a biological process that occurs
through our skin. It is shaped by other senses, including vision. I argue that
thermal vision, the ways of seeing and modes of visualizing invisible thermal
emissions and exchanges, is an integral part of how we conceptualize, and feel,
temperature – it is part of our thermoceptive apparatus. In other words, I trace
here how visual cultures and practices of understanding images shape the
sensation and manipulation of temperature. Thermal vision extends beyond
the infrared image to encompass a range of strategies that visual media,
especially film and photography, have developed to attune viewers to heat and
cold. Many of these strategies reveal thermal emissions through their effects:
we are able to see heat and cold based on material relationships between
the subjects, objects, and environments that are imaged. For example, such
images might show how furnaces heat the people near them, how wind causes
the cooling of bodies, or how skin reacts to temperature change. Another
technique of thermal vision has been the use of color, especially red and blue,
to stimulate thermal perception. The first section of this article describes
these two means of depicting temperature: on one hand, a thermal vision
oriented to relations, which makes heat and cold perceptible through their
material effects on visible entities, and on the other hand, a thermal vision
oriented toward hue, evoking a sense of heat through color’s synesthetic
potential. These approaches are often connected, as color is frequently used
to indicate thermal change in an environment.

Compared to these historical forms of thermal vision, contemporary

technologies of infrared imaging seem to constitute a different way of
seeing heat, one that breaks from such effects-oriented and hue-oriented
modalities. Today’s infrared imagery captures many of the invisible thermal
emissions emitted by bodies (all bodies greater than zero degrees Kelvin
give off thermal radiation) and which, in turn, permeate all environments. In
the infrared image, heat, while still perceptible in its effects and symbolized
through representation, becomes a visible property of all objects, subjects,
and environments. The thermal vision of today’s infrared imaging projects the
world as a landscape of ever-present thermal gradients. Critical commentaries
and artworks have drawn attention to the way that infrared imaging functions
as part of military surveillance and policing. Here, authors show, thermal vision
becomes a means of targeting people. Taken up as part of cultural projects to
identify specific bodies as threats, the infrared image is an object-oriented
one that locates entities to be eliminated.
150 journal of visual culture 18.2

After describing ways of seeing heat through its effects, through color, and
as a property of rogue objects, this article draws attention to another mode
of thermal vision, one that emerges with early infrared imagery and which
functions not (or not solely) to define targets, but as a means of segmenting
the thermal landscape into a set of zones. To illustrate this capacity of thermal
vision, the latter half of the article focuses on two moments in the commercial
expansion of infrared photography, in the 1930s and in the 1970s. While the
first expansion, made possible in part by the release of Eastman infrared-
sensitive plates, established the contours of what I describe as the zonal image,
especially in medical research, the expansion of thermography in the 1970s as
a means of assessing building insulation catalyzed developments in the field of
thermal imaging, as well as the formation of a company, FLIR, which remains
one of the most significant players in the infrared camera market. In this
genealogy, thermal vision is not primarily object-oriented (although there are
many similarities with object-oriented images), but zonal – it recasts the world
as a series of differentiated areas: healthy and unhealthy, normal and abnormal,
and critically in the latter period, as sites marked for thermal manipulation.
While the object-oriented image sets its sights on an object-target to be
eliminated, the zonal image is often deployed to accelerate the feedback loop
between modes of temperature manipulation and thermoemissive entities,
often to incorporate them into the normative thermal background.

Tracing these divergent cultures of image production, this article expands

our conception of thermal vision beyond a militarized ‘Predator-vision’ in two
directions, linking infrared images to a broader set of practices of seeing heat
and to a range of commercial uses of infrared imagery. In doing so, I argue
that there is not a single mode of thermal vision, but many forms of thermal
visuality that surface across different historical and cultural contexts, four of
which I describe here: temperature communicated through relation, through
hue, through objectification, and through normative zones. These are not
mutually exclusive, but rather are overlapping categories that materialize
through cultural contexts of production and use. What might be a zonal
image for one community or field of practice, at one scale (for example, an
infrared image of an entire building leaking heat) might be deployed as part
of a process of targeting at another scale (for example, when a contractor
closes the specific window that is causing the problem). Likewise, the means
of seeing heat through color inflects the ways that weather maps, infrared
images, and climate change visualizations are all sensed by viewers.

The cases described here are intended to broaden our understanding of

the relationship between the infrared spectrum, heat, and visual culture in
a number of ways, and to prompt new lines of inquiry for those invested in
infrared imaging. First, these cases reveal that the thermal imagery underlying
so much contemporary targeting and visual surveillance is intimately
connected to modes of environmental monitoring and management,
 Starosielski. Thermal vision 151

technologically, industrially, and epistemologically. The images of buildings

and fields in recent infrared images are not as aestheticized as Wood’s early
tree-captures, but they represent an ongoing and enduring orientation to
the thermal landscape, and reveal a structuring normativity that is deeply
connected to object-oriented thermal vision. Second, these cases illustrate
how thermal vision often carries an assumption that bodily and environmental
temperature can be either visually managed or affected through sight,
whether through the color of ambient lighting or through the ‘radiographic
episteme’ (the transformation of ‘imperceptible radiation into data that can be
made productive within an information economy’) (Parks, 2017: 143). Entangled
with technologies of temperature control, the thermal image is not only a
means of targeting, but a key technique for altering architectures, practices,
and movements through the world. The analytic concepts proposed here
are intended not as fixed categories, but as the beginning of a language to
describe the specificity of such entanglements.

Finally, looking at thermal vision adds to visual culture studies’ documentation of

sensory possibilities of the visible and the entanglement between the visual and
other sensory registers, since as Mieke Bal (2003: 9, emphasis in original) writes,
‘vision is itself inherently synaesthetic’. Doing so offers an alternate genealogy of
the image: one that thinks through the image as a technology, not of light, but of
heat. Developing a better understanding of thermal vision’s synesthetic effects,
embodied registers, and thermostatic uses has implications, not only for our
analysis of images of temperature, but also for how we feel heat. Thermoception
is becoming a critical sense in an era of climate change, as it is the means by
which many people will perceive the increased and accelerated transitions
between thermal states. It is one way that people will be able to intimately sense
their own positionality in a threatening thermal world. Understanding the visual
and cultural dimensions of how thermal perception occurs, how people feel hot
or cold, and the ways in which climate is perceived can help scholars to track
these material, affective, and intimate dimensions of climate change.

Seeing heat
Before thermal imaging and without thermometers, we have been able to see
heat – or perhaps more precisely, to see its effects on visible entities. We see
the effects of heat on bodies, human and non-human (in goose bumps, sweat)
or in the environment around us (the falling of leaves, the crystallization of ice).
Condensation on a window might signify that it is warmer inside than outside.
Towering cumulous clouds caused by convection – the movement of hot air
upwards and cool air downwards – sit on the horizon. We may not know we
are witnessing a thermal shift, but intuitively, we somehow sense a cold front
is coming. These visual perceptions reveal something that a thermometer
does not – thermo-relationality: we, our bodies, our surroundings are hot or
cold, moving from warm to cool, losing heat or gaining heat.
152 journal of visual culture 18.2

Visual media has long mobilized these sorts of images to generate an

understanding of temperature in the absence of actual thermomanipulation.
Steamy car windows tell us there is heat inside, of bodies moving against one
another. Characters shiver, wring their hands, huddle together to make sure
their heat does not get lost in the air, but is transmitted to other bodies. Shots
of a bright sun tell us that it’s going to be a warm day, as do images of hands
wiping sweat off foreheads. The temporality of film and video can also reinforce
our perception of climate: long, slow shots with little movement used to amplify
the stillness of a cold landscape; rapid movement to intensify the affects of heat.
In his analysis of the ‘aesthetics of cold’, Luis Antunes (2016: 3) argues that while
‘temperature forms part of the sensory context of any film’s world’, some films
mobilize thermoceptive cues to communicate an experience of heat and cold
through representations of the changing states of matter, facial expressions,
and character movement, among others. These are all forms of thermal vision,
and almost all depict temperature by visualizing the material effects of heat and
cold on objects, on characters, and on the environment.

One way that extreme heat is often signified in visual media is through the
representation of heat haze: a blurred vision of the world distorted by hot air. In
Bill Viola’s 1979 Chott el-Djerid (A Portrait in Light and Heat), heat haze appears to
rise from the Tunisian desert; it obscures figures, the horizon, and distinctions
between figure and ground. Reflecting on the project, Viola writes, ‘the intense
desert heat manipulates, bends and distorts the light rays to such an extent
that you actually see things which are not there’ (Viola, 2018). Juxtaposed with
the cold prairies of Illinois and Saskatchewan, which also create a sense of
environmental ambiguity, Viola argues that the piece is not about mirages, but
about the limits of the image. This project and other visual media that feature
heat haze (or an icy lens) reveal temperature through its effects, not on bodies
or the environment, but on our vision itself. Such relational forms of thermal
vision are grounded in a form of synesthesia: in order to make sense, they call
upon embodied memory and the thermal histories layered into the viewer’s
skin. Moreover, as Viola’s video calls attention to, our vision itself is shaped by
the conditions of the thermal landscape, and visual media that deploy such
imagery attune us to the entanglement of heat and sight.

One of the most long-standing modes of representing temperature has been

through the use of color, through the reds and blues that produce a sense of
climate in fictional worlds. While this history is expansive, and temperature is
linked to hue even in ancient color theory, it has continued to be influential in
areas of practice (and their associated fields of research) from interior design
to psychology. For decades, psychologists have been testing the ‘heat-hue
hypothesis’, which posits that the color of an object or environment affects
the human perception of temperature. Studies have placed test subjects in
rooms illuminated with differently colored light, given them goggles with
different hues, and altered the color of virtual objects in head-mounted
displays, and then observed subjects’ perception of temperature (Balcer et al.,
 Starosielski. Thermal vision 153

2014; Bennett and Rey, 1972; Mogensen and English, 1926). Researchers find
that we believe we are warmer in red rooms, we feel our drinks are colder in
blue cups, and color functions as a widespread thermoceptive cue (Guéguen
and Jacob, 2014; Ziat et al., 2016).1

In recent years, this correlation has taken on a new significance in light of the
impact of climate change, especially in industrial design. In their themed issue,
‘Counting the Costs of Comfort’, Sue Roaf, Luisa Brotas, and Fergus Nicol (2015)
argue that, in an era of climate change, the costs of thermal comfort must
be calculated in social and environmental, and not just economic, terms. In a
description resonant with an earlier era of hue-heat research of the 1960s and
70s, they call upon building designers to think about comfort more expansively
and to find solutions that are not as power-intensive. Alongside this call, they
reflect on the continuing controversy in thermal comfort studies over the
‘mismatch between the accepted definition of thermal comfort as “the state
of mind which expresses satisfaction with the thermal environment” and the
methods used to investigate comfort which use physics and physiology but
spend little time on the way individuals actually perceive comfort’ (p. 272).
In other words, they call for the deployment of techniques that change the
perception of temperature without actually lowering or raising the temperature.

With this imperative, hue-oriented thermal vision has been re-activated with
social and political potential. And a wealth of research, industrial design,
and company practices have sought to manipulate inhabitants’ and potential
customers’ actual perception of temperature through the use of color, if not
to lessen the dependence on fossil fuel-based thermal manipulation like air-
conditioning, at the very least to reduce their own energy costs. As one example,
scientists at the German Aerospace Center published a study on the effect of
colored light – blue, yellow, green and violet – on the perception of temperature.
They solicited almost 200 participants to sit inside a mock aircraft cabin,
interspersed with ‘thermo-dummies’ (which measured the actual temperature),
and then altered both the actual temperature and the color of LED lights. What
they found validated the heat-hue hypothesis: subjects felt warmer and more
satisfied with the yellow lights. They recommend to the airline industry that
yellow ‘contributes, directly or indirectly by means of a kind of “psychological”
warming-up, to the overall satisfaction with the climate’ (Albers et al., 2015:
492). Their findings ran counter to current cabin lighting, which has used blues
and violets to instill a sense of calm and soothe passengers (a key concern of
aircraft design). Based on these results, the researchers suggested that, even at
a low level, deploying color to alter perceived temperature could help airlines
save energy and, by extension, money.

The aircraft lighting example is just one of many investigations into the link
between hue and heat in contemporary design. Regardless of the specific
claims, collectively this research indicates a renewed investment in leveraging
thermal vision not simply to produce a sense of a fictional world, but as a means
154 journal of visual culture 18.2

of affecting one’s sense of thermoception toward ecological and economic

ends. Like the long-standing forms of relational thermal vision, hue-oriented
thermal vision is often imagined as a synesthetic mode of vision: it not only
draws upon embodied sense memory, but holds the potential to alter bodily
senses beyond sight – a relationship documented by visual culture studies
scholars in relation to other senses, including taste (Higgins, 2007; Ndalianis,
2015). It is this connection that enables thermal vision to be infused with the
potential to alter the environment.

Relational thermal vision and hue-oriented thermal vision are not mutually
exclusive ways of seeing heat. In many media representations, they are paired
and complementary strategies. Take for example, Spike Lee’s Do the Right
Thing (1989), which stages an unfolding of racial tensions in a sweltering
hot summer. Describing his initial discussions with cinematographer Ernest
Dickerson about how to communicate the heat, Lee (1989: 51) writes:

He’s already thinking about how to visualize the heat. He wants to see
people in the theaters sweating as they watch the film. We should have
closeups of people’s faces, I mean extreme closeups, with beads of
perspiration dropping off. Every character must comment on the heat.
Those outside should look up at the sky, the sun.

At the same time as the film uses camerawork, dialogue, and movement to
signify characters’ relationships to their surroundings, it also uses red and
warm hues to intensify the ambient sense of heat through mise-en-scène,
lighting, and costume design. These two forms are the most common and
well-documented means of seeing heat, and they permeate the histories of
visual media.

Infrared
In contrast to the relationally-oriented and hue-oriented forms of thermal
vision, the thermal infrared image recasts the world as a field not just of
bodies and environments that relate and react to heat, or as an evocative,
sensory landscape, but as an array of radiators. Thermal infrared cameras and
light-sensing cameras both use a sensitive medium (film or digital sensors, for
example) to index radiation. ‘Light-based’ film typically captures light after it
bounces off of objects in the world. Only when it is pointed at an extraordinarily
hot object – fire or the sun or molten lava – does it index objects as emitters
of thermal radiation. Passive thermal imaging, on the other hand, captures
the emissions far below this thermal threshold and beyond perceptible levels
– it offers a view of the thermal world not simply through heat’s effects, but
in terms of the heat generated by bodies and objects. It does so by gauging
the infrared radiation emitted in the long-wavelength spectrum, which is
directly related to temperature.2 In this case, no visible light is needed to
 Starosielski. Thermal vision 155

illuminate a scene. The scene itself is the illumination (at least in the case
of passive thermography; in active thermography, an energy source is used
to ‘illuminate’ the subject). And while today’s thermal infrared cameras are
inextricable from the digitized systems that process their images, there is a
long history of analog infrared sensing, from the late 19th century bolometer
through Kodak’s commercialization of infrared film.

There have been a number of critical analyses of thermal imaging, especially

its uses by militaries and in surveillance operations. In her description of the
thermal infrared cameras used in counterterrorism, Lisa Parks (2017: 145)
describes how, in the drone’s ‘hunt for heat’, visual surveillance practices
extend ‘beyond epidermalization’, producing what she terms ‘spectral suspects
– visualizations of temperature data that take on the biophysical contours
of a human body’ (emphasis in original). Spectral subjects surface not only
on the screens of militarized operations, but in the artistic and photographic
projects that use thermal infrared cameras, such as Richard Mosse’s Incoming
(2017), which uses a military grade weapons system to document the refugee
crisis. The infrared camera dehumanizes and projects the body as bare life,
Mosse claims: ‘the camera is colour-blind – registering only the contours of
relative heat difference.’ Thermoemissive bodies, registered from above or
afar, communicate the distinct feature of aliveness – this is a thermal vision
attuned to the particular emissions of biomatter. Extending this analysis, and
tracking infrared imagery across visual media from films such as Predator
(1987) to installation and new media art, Carolyn Kane (2014) argues that such
images are not only imbricated with the history of military technology, but
emerge as part of a post-optic, algorithmic lifeworld. And, as a result, as Hanna
Rose Shell (2012) notes, camouflage changes dramatically in a world of thermal
surveillance. Collectively, studies of thermal imagery articulate its emergence
as a military technology, its connection to war and weaponry, and its reduction
of the human subject to digitized temperature data. The way of seeing that
emerges from these images is an object-oriented thermal vision. Whether
it depicts human bodies, architectural installations, or military vehicles, the
significant difference is between a discrete figure, often distinguished as a
target, and the ground, portrayed as a neutral thermal backdrop.

But infrared cameras are not limited to military use, and infrared photography
has permeated a variety of scientific, commercial, and cultural spheres since
the early 20th century. It has become a standard tool in fields as different as
veterinary medicine and the automotive industry (see Figure 2). Some of these
uses enact an object-oriented thermal vision, working to separate figures
from a background and redefine them as thermal objects to be manipulated or
eliminated. Infrared cameras in wildlife tracking allow ‘one to discern infrared
emissions from target animals against background vegetation or habitat’
(Blackwell et al., 2006: 467). Conservation biologists describe the usefulness
of infrared cameras in a variety of situations – from detecting polar bear dens,
156 journal of visual culture 18.2

Figure 2.  Thermal analysis of brake disks and tires (InfraTec, 2018). In these close-up images of
brake disks and tires, the color red signifies elevated temperature. Color and temperature, mediated
through this thermal image, are used to help diagnose problems and correct them.

to counting bighorn sheep, to tracking and hunting feral goats on islands

(Amstrup et al., 2004; Bernatas and Nelson, 2004; Campbell and Donlan,
2005). In deer management programs, infrared images help to register the
number of deer in an area, and subsequently, to help define and then justify
parameters for sharpshooters to kill them.

The popularization of thermal imaging today is indebted in part to a set

of commercial practices in the technology’s analog history as much as the
military development of infrared technology. Infrared images, sometimes also
called thermograms, have been produced since the early 20th century at a
range of industrial and institutional sites, especially following the release of
infrared-sensitive plates by Eastman Kodak in the early 1930s. This technical
transition spurred the first major expansion of infrared photography.
Astronomers used the plates to detect nebulae and clusters. Scientists used
infrared plates to detect plant diseases, especially in potato crops (Bawden,
1933) (Figure 3). Anthropologists looked at infrared photographs of black,
Japanese, and white men, and tried to parse what these images revealed
about racial types (Seligman, 1934). And infrared photography spread across
the medical field, used in the detection of circulatory problems and the
diagnosis of tumors (Epstein, 1939; Jones, 1935; Ronchese, 1937) (Figure 4). In
1932, Popular Mechanics reported that, thanks to the Eastman plates, ‘Infra-
red photography is now possible to the amateur’ (p. 276).
 Starosielski. Thermal vision 157

Figure 3. An infrared image of a
potato leaf reveals lesions. Reprinted
by permission from Springer Nature:
Nature (‘A new potato epidemic in
Great Britain’, Redcliffe N. Salaman,
Cecilia O’Connor) copyright (1934).
Figure 4.  An infrared image reveals the increased size of
veins below a boy’s skin. Reprinted from American Heart
Journal, 8(3), Bernard S. Epstein, ‘Infrared photographic
demonstration of the superficial venous pattern in
congenital heart disease with cyanosis’, 282–289.
Copyright (1939), with permission from Elsevier.

The capture of infrared radiation remained significant in these areas for

decades, even though it was not widely taken up by such amateurs. Many of
these imaging practices, which permeated medical thermography, formed
the basic contours of the zonal heat image. For example, in Epstein’s early
study of patients with congenital heart disease, the physician’s infrared
image transformed the body into a set of zones: a zone of larger than typical
veins, which appear to radiate light, and the darker skin of the patient’s
chest and arms (Figure 4). In Jones’s study, the veins form a dark spider-
web, a set of contoured indications of a hidden circulatory system, visible
only in its distention (Figure 5). Images of the nonhuman world also adopted
this zonal orientation. In the image of the potato leaf in Figure 4, the leaf
is similarly separated into light and dark regions, with the dark regions
indicating lesions of potato blight. These images, which permeated a
number of research fields over the following decades, were often imbricated
in diagnostic practices developed in tandem with scientific and medical
technologies, which as Lisa Cartwright, José van Dijck and others have
traced, formed a disciplinary and managerial gaze that governed the body
(Cartwright, 1995; Van Dijck, 2005). What became visible, whether blight
158 journal of visual culture 18.2

Figure 5. An infrared image reveals enlarged veins below a

patient’s skin. The image reveals neither the patient’s head nor
identity. This framing both intensifies the depersonalization of
the image and reduces the patient to a landscape of abnormal
circulation (Jones, 1935).

or the circulatory system, was visible because it was abnormal. To image

thermally was to not only reveal the invisible, but to assert a set of norms
and deviations, coded in light and dark, and to imply a set of corrective
procedures.

By the 1950s and 60s, thermography was regularly used in many professional
fields. Zoologists captured thermographs of animals ranging from woodchucks
to seals (Bailey and Davis, 1965; Irving and Hart, 1957). Infrared images were
used to locate breast cancer, to reveal hidden layers of paintings, and to
assist in the aerial detection of natural resources. It was even harnessed
in emergent ecological studies of this period. Thermographs imaged the
‘thermal pollution’ produced by electric-power plants’ cooling apparati
as waste heat leaked into rivers and lakes (Clark, 1969). The technology of
infrared imaging had changed significantly since the early forms of infrared
photography: as one study observed, ‘modern infrared detection and image
display systems bear little relationship to what in the past has been known as
infrared photography.’ Although, they argue, the average doctor might think
 Starosielski. Thermal vision 159

about ‘infrared’ in relation to surface veins, ‘the term infrared photography

is a misnomer’ since the earlier forms were only capturing the edge of visible
wavelengths, and bore ‘no direct relationship to the temperature of the
object, and any heat recorded on them is the result of reflected infrared
radiation, in contrast to directly radiated energy’ (Lawson et al., 1961: 1129).
These new forms of infrared imaging were able to index wider sections
of the spectrum, capturing longer and longer wavelengths (a transition in
scope), as well as a transition in kind (they offered a new visual practice that
could directly ‘capture’ temperature).

In the 1970s, this form of infrared imaging, like so many other technologies
and forms of media of the time, was infused with a new imperative in light of
the energy crisis. In 1970, the United States’ oil fields reached their peak of
production – 9.6 million barrels per day. In October 1973, the Arab producers
of OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) placed an
embargo on oil exports to the United States. In addition, they threatened
to cut back production by 25 percent. The price of oil, and of home heating,
dramatically increased. As Meg Jacobs (2016) describes in her history of
this period, in addition to increases in production, this prompted a range
of policies and debates about energy conservation. In turn, these also
generated an array of new social and technical approaches to conservation.
One of these was the energy audit – a detailed accounting of the energy
consumption of individual elements in a building and buildings within a
community. Although this mode of accounting first gained traction in the
mid 1970s, it became an indispensible tool after the National Energy Act of
1977, which included the National Energy Conservation Policy Act. There,
the energy audit and varied forms of building insulation were described as
important techniques of energy conservation.

In this context, infrared thermal imaging was imagined and seized as

a critical technology for the detection of heat loss. As one report of that
period argues, many buildings had been constructed ‘in an era of cheap
and abundant fuel, when insulation and thermal integrity were not primary
considerations’ (Marshall, 1977: iv). Thermography, especially the recent
infrared scanners that made emissions instantly viewable on a black and
white screen, was deployed to visualize buildings and detect waste heat.
Thermal aerial surveys were conducted, beginning with NASA’s offices and
extending across the United States, from South Dakota and Nebraska, to
schools in Illinois, to the small city of Garland, Texas. In the analysis of these
images, drawing perhaps more on the history of medical imaging, those
conducting an audit cast the field of buildings into normal and abnormal
areas. Anomalous ‘warm areas’ might include smokestacks, skylights or roof
vents. Such features created what were termed ‘natural’ warm points. But, on
the other hand, there could be sites of ‘thermal expression’ that were oddly
shaped or excessively large – these would be marked on the thermogram
160 journal of visual culture 18.2

Figure 6.  A thermograph reveals hot air ‘escaping’ from a chimney

and windows of a home (Shuldiner, 1975).

and slated for potential on-site investigation. Much of this was conducted
using then new digital processing techniques.

These images visualized heat in the tradition of medical and agricultural

research imaging, and were explicitly articulated in relation to these fields. In
one Popular Science article, the author writes:

Technology has a new tool specifically designed to pinpoint such weak

points in your home’s insulation. It’s done with thermography, the infrared
imaging system that’s been employed to spot cancer and other defects in
the human body, and faults in machinery. (Shuldiner 1975: 83)

The images that were produced, such as the one shown in Figure 6 (which
shows a home from which hot air, signified by bright white, is ‘escaping’), were
circulated more broadly than prior thermograms in hospitals or scientific
literature. The high contrast indicates thermal difference and the abnormality
of unconstrained heat recalls the unconstrained veins, disease, and pollution
of earlier images. Such ‘irregular’ thermal expressions directly motivated and
justified the re-insulation of built structures. These thermal images were a
visual topography of dwindling resources, literally a map of their diffusion.
In the history of infrared photography, this is a key moment where the heat
image is enlisted in a broad digital feedback loop of environmental and thermal
manipulation.
 Starosielski. Thermal vision 161

Figure 7.  AGA Thermovision Model 680 (AGA Museum, 2018). In this advertisement for the AGA
Thermovision Model 680, the infrared camera is pointed at a workman, who is in turn pointing at
a feature of the building. In the frame, a radiator is also featured. This setting reveals the intended
audience of the ad and consumer of the camera: building contractors and heating specialists.

In 1977, Stephen Marshall, of the Army Corps of Engineers, pointed out

that such techniques were still not widespread in part due to the high cost
of instrumentation. Only a few companies offered commercial thermal
cameras, including AGA, based in Sweden (where building thermography
had been taken up much more rapidly than in the United States). AGA
had developed a thermal camera in 1963, and their models 680 and 750
had been widely used for medical thermography before being used on
buildings (Figures 7 and 8).3 But each of these scanners cost $36,000
(Shuldiner, 1975). In the late 1970s, a movement had begun to expand the
use and lessen the cost of thermal scanning as part of the ‘war on fuel
waste’ (Shuldiner, 1978). In February 1977, Barnes Engineering Co. released
the ThermAtrace, which was easier to operate, did not require liquid
nitrogen cooling, and was significantly less expensive (only $6,000) than
162 journal of visual culture 18.2

Figure 8. AGA Thermovision Model 750 (AGA Museum, 2018). This advertisement of the AGA
Thermovision Model 750 shows a man, holding an the infrared camera, with an image viewer strapped
around his body. In the margin, a man carries the infrared viewer like a suitcase. The staging of the camera
in these images signifies its mobility and potential for workers that might use the system in the field.

the AGA model. And the following year, FLIR Systems was founded as a
provider of thermal imagers for energy audits.

These energy audits and the forms of infrared photography they spurred
in the United States catalyzed an expansion in infrared imaging, bringing
it into people’s homes, into new professions, and linking it to modes
of ecological conservation. At this moment, the commercialization of
thermal vision also expanded in a way that paralleled Eastman Kodak’s
release of infrared plates. FLIR Systems, in particular, became one of the
leading developers of commercialized thermal cameras, and remains so
today. AGA eventually segmented its infrared division as a subsidiary,
AGEMA, which was acquired by FLIR in 1998. The Boston-based company,
Inframetrics, which had developed the first TV-compatible infrared
system in 1975, was acquired by FLIR in the late 1990s. Today FLIR’s cameras
are critical tools not only for building contractors, but for a wide range
of professional practices that involve managing the thermal landscape:
firefighting, ecological management, and farming, among others. Many
of the uses of these cameras capitalize on the potential of the thermal
image, not just as a technique of identification or means of location,
but as an integral step in loops of thermal control – particularly ones
that are governed by economic efficiency and masked as environmental
 Starosielski. Thermal vision 163

Figure 9.  Human target in Predator (1987). One of the canonical images of thermal vision is a view,
from the Predator, of its human target in Predator. In this image, the human is reduced to multicolored
blob – red in the center and blue at the periphery – against a black background. Outside of the context
of the film’s narrative, it could be difficult to identify this as a person at all, given the indeterminate
shape and vague outline.

conservation. Beyond the range of industrial uses of thermal imagery,

FLIR has helped to popularize the thermal camera for everyday uses and
users: offering a relatively affordable version that can be attached to an
iPhone, fostering the development of new applications, and encouraging
experimental uses of the ‘new’ technology.

Conclusion: On thermal vision

The canonical reference for thermal imaging is the vision of the Predator: a
human body becomes a ‘spectral subject’, a bright spot cast against a dark
background, a target as a function of machine-vision (Figure 9). Present in
the thermal imagery that guides today’s drone strikes, Predator-vision is
object-oriented: it not only separates discrete bodies from a background,
but is an integral part of a process by which people are reduced to objects
to be managed or eliminated. Alongside this military history, there is a
genealogy of another kind, of a thermal landscape, where the environment
is cast into regular and irregular zones, structured by thermal normativity,
and thoroughly shaped by social and cultural values. These images have
been critical in medical practice where heat often indicates disease, in
environmental management where it often indicates pollution, and in the
restructuring of the 1970s home, where it indicates leakage and waste. In
the zonal image, what becomes visible is always already abnormal: to vary in
temperature is to invite environmental manipulation and modulation, often
through strategies of insulation and containment.
164 journal of visual culture 18.2

Looking at the history of these images, and to other forms of non-military

infrared photography – even those that are not ‘thermal’ imaging per
se, such as Robert Williams Wood’s trees – is an illuminating context for
contemporary object-oriented images. It reveals that object-oriented
images often carry with them assumptions about normativity, inflected
by the longer history of commercial infrared photography. The thermal
target is not simply a spectral subject, a thermal trace of bare life but,
given the broader context of the use and circulation of infrared images, it
is often abnormal in its mere visibility. The calibration of the camera, which
renders the subject in high contrast from the background, and the hue-
oriented thermal vision that codes heat as red, mark bodies themselves
as always already too hot, a visual correlate to the disease, the cancer,
and escaped heat. To read the military image as a zonal image or a hue-
oriented image makes clear that the practices of infrared, even as they
bring their viewers into a world where they ‘do not see things as they are’,
anchor these apparently objective and nonhuman landscapes in normative
stratifications.

Second, many of the users of the thermal image, from police to anti-
poaching forces, do not use military thermal cameras. The industry of
infrared imaging exceeds the military – and has done so, as this article
shows, since at least the early 20th century. Take, for example, the fact
that agriculture is the largest commercial market for drones and one of
the more significant deployments of non-military infrared imagers. These
industries, alongside architecture, construction, medicine, and others,
capitalize on the zonal image. These commercial uses of infrared cameras,
which are often paired with the manipulation of a thermal landscape, are a
substantial source of income for camera manufacturers, including FLIR. In
other words, the historical and contemporary capacity of thermal infrared
in everyday environments underwrites the affordability of infrared
cameras for policing, and strengthens their use as a tool of targeting more
broadly.

The history of thermal vision is not solely the history of a targeting technology,
but of a practice of coding the landscape into a radiographic episteme, which
has then justified and underwritten numerous forms of manipulation. Seeing
by heat, especially in the zonal image, is interwoven with changing climate.
Yet this is also true for thermal visions attuned to relationships or color which
are intended to stimulate affects or thermal perceptions in their viewers. If
thermoception is not simply limited to one’s skin, but can synesthetically be
enacted through vision, then the way that climate can be managed opens up
to a much broader set of manipulative practices – as the case of the cabin
lighting above shows. In addition, it means that the images of climate change
are significant not simply in the concepts or ideas that they convey, but in
their felt, tactile, and embodied effects.
 Starosielski. Thermal vision 165

These images both shift the ways that we think of, see, and feel heat, but they also
alter our understanding of cinema, photography, and visual imaging. Thermal
vision challenges the assumption that light is the condition of all photographic
and cinematic visuality: William Henry Fox Talbot named the photographic
medium ‘words of light’. In his book Words of Light (1997: xcii), Eduardo Cadava
writes, ‘Photography is nothing other than the writing of light, a script of light.’ As
Sean Cubitt (2014: 1) observes, ‘Light is the condition of all vision.’ Or, at the very
least, human vision. For Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1995), cinema, like photography,
is a light-based medium. He writes, ‘The new media of the nineteenth century
– the panorama, the diorama, the magic lantern, “dissolving views” and, finally,
film – were pure aesthetic, technical creations born of the spirit of light’ (p. xvii).
Even as scholars have more recently articulated a critical history of darkness
(Elcott, 2016) and a transition to a post-optic regime (Kane, 2014), the linking of
light to imagery continues to ground theories of photography, film, and visual
media. Thermal vision offers another genealogy of visual media’s formation and
effects, one in which the visual field is populated by promiscuous emitters, the
camera is a mechanism of heat capture, and the body is the place where vision
has its most profound environmental effects.

Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Shannon Mattern and Annie Tressler for their support
in the development of this article.

Notes
1. Aside from their demonstration of the synesthetic possibilities of thermoception,
these investigations serve an ideological purpose as well. A better knowledge of
how to visually activate thermal associations and sensations benefits companies
interested in selling products, not only via heating and air-conditioning, but
through the use of imagery.
2. This is not always a clear-cut relationship. Different forms of matter also vary in
something called emissivity, a material’s ability to emit radiation. Polished metals, for
example, are at the low end of the spectrum, which ranges from 0 to 1: smooth polished
aluminum has an emissivity of 0.04, polished lead 0.05, and polished iron 0.06. On the
other hand, ice is 0.97, glass 0.95, and red rough brick, 0.9 (Brewster, 1992: 56). For
this reason, in gauging accurate temperatures, some encourage painting the surface
of an object black – thus giving a more ‘true’ temperature. Low emissivity surfaces
and substances, such as polished metals, are a kind of ‘thermal mirror’ – they emit less
radiation, and a thermal sensor that is calibrated to a high emissivity substance, such
as ice or brick, will record these as colder than they actually are. Rougher surfaces
tend to reflect less infrared radiation than smooth ones. Black objects will emit more
than white ones. On some thermal imaging cameras, the image must be calibrated so
that the norm is either matte or glossy, thus offering always a skewed temperature
of non-matte or non-glossy objects. Thermal images are therefore never simply a
recording of temperature, but an interaction between objects, surfaces, materialities
in particular conditions, calibrated to particular norms.
3. Other models included Barnes Model T – lOl (InSb), Barnes Model T – lOl (PbSnTe),
Barnes ~~X – 8, Bendix M S, ERIM Mi, Inframetrics Model 510, Texas Instruments 8
– 310, AN/AAS – l8 (Marshall, 1977)
166 journal of visual culture 18.2

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Nicole Starosielski is Associate Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and

Communication at New York University. Her research focuses on the relationships
between media, infrastructures, and their environments. Her first book, The Undersea
Network (2015), charted the development of the cable systems that carry almost all
transoceanic internet traffic. She is also co-editor of Signal Traffic: Critical Studies
of Media Infrastructure (2015), Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and
Environment (2016), and the ‘Elements’ book series at Duke University Press.
Address: New York University, 239 Greene St, 8th Floor, New York, NY 10003, USA.
[nicole.starosielski@nyu.edu]