RARE early scientific photographs are to go on display for the first time alongside significant works they inspired by some of the 20th century’s pre-eminent art photographers in a major exhibition at the National Media Museum in Bradford.

Opening in November and running through to February, Revelations explores the untold history of the enormous influence of early scientific photography on photography in modern and contemporary art.

The pioneers of photography harnessed a tool to view and present phenomena indiscernible to the naked eye in striking new ways. This exhibition examines how subsequent generations of photographers have recognised, developed and celebrated the results from those early experiments.

The exhibition begins by showcasing the pioneering scientific photography produced during the 19th and early 20th century and the ways it helped expand the visual field. From here, it plots a course through 20th century art, examining the ways in which iconographies and methods drawn from earlier science helped to shape the face of modernism. The exhibition concludes by looking at the work of contemporary artists, questioning what their interest in earlier scientific photography suggests about our current visual landscape.

Co-curated by Greg Hobson, curator of Photographs at the National Media Museum, and Dr Ben Burbridge of the University of Sussex, the exhibition explores the fertile photographic ground where art and science meet.

Dr Burbridge said: “Early scientific photographs both exposed and surpassed the limits of human vision. In doing so, they revealed important formal possibilities, and spoke in clear and articulate terms about man’s changing relationship to science and technology. These qualities lie at the core of the photographs’ appeal for twentieth-century artists; and they have found currency again among artists working in the context of our own ‘digital age’.”

Taking ground-breaking work by figures such as William Henry Fox Talbot, Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey as its starting point, the exhibition explores the impact of both the technical and aesthetic insights of early scientific photography on photographic art.

From the 1840s, scientists were using photography to record things too large, too small or too fast for the human eye to see. WilliamHenry Fox Talbot’s experiments with photomicrography, some of the earliest scientific photographs ever made, will be on show alongside striking works by contemporary artists including Trevor Paglen, Idris Khan and Clare Strand.

Iconic works on display include examples of the high speed photography produced by Berenice Abbott and Harold Edgerton at MIT, Carl Strüwe, Laure Albin-Guillot and Joris Jansen’s differing uses of photomicrography, the varied visual treatments of electrical force by Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton, Man Ray and Hiroshi Sugimoto, and camera-less photography created by László Moholy-Nagy, György Kepes and Walead Beshty.

Revelations, Experiments in Photography runs at the National Media Museum, Bradford, from November 19 to February 7, 2016.

Visit nationalmediamuseum.org.uk for opening times.