Category: Reading-1

If I’m being totally honest, this reading was not the most exciting for me, and I have been struggling a lot to find a part of it I’m passionate enough to write a blog post about. However, I did find a strike of inspiration from an Instagram post I saw the other day about how the importance of photojournalism in preserving history is wildly under-appreciated.

When I think of photography, I mostly think of it as an artistic field. I often forget the importance of photography in other, perhaps more technical disciplines. The way this reading focused a lot on the use of early photography in scientific fields reminded me of that again. This makes photography much more interesting to me (I’m not that interested in it as a form of artistic expression).

Here is an incredible video where the owner of a pawn shop was given an album of photos from the Nanjing Massacre (TW: rape, murder), a historical event with only a handful of known photographic evidence, resulting in widespread denial of the event at all. Basically, this discovery is so massive that a lot of people are worried for this man’s safety! The power of photography is seen right here.

@pawn.man

PLEASE HELP ME #nankingmassacre #historicalphotos #worldwar2 #pawnman #museumtreasure

♬ original sound – Pawn Master Kail

I struggled to follow the emulsion, exposure methods, and chemicals mentioned in the first half of the reading. However, I like the comparison this reading made between Raman spectrograms and photogrammetry. Both of them use photography to measure. While the Raman images generate very specific information, photogrammetric images contain mathematical information and visuals. I also like the article’s mention of Documentation vs. Measurement: while most photogrammetric images are discarded once the mathematical information is harvested, the few images with accidental pictorial details are preserved.

I was also inspired by how this reading looks at the slow-down effects of photography: motion can be recombined as a moving image, but the trend was to see motions as a series of individual discrete moments strung together.

As for an artistic opportunity, I lately tried a Polaroid emulsion lift, and I was thrilled about the texture of possibilities of it. I want to explore the relationship between emulsions and images, though I am unsure if this is a methodological/scientific/scientistic approach to imaging. To be more specific, I am thinking about printing images that would be otherwise impossible to appear on Polaroid films (such as my drawing, a screenshot of my computer, an image of a scene created with Unity, etc.)— and then extracting the emulsion and transferring it onto surfaces other than films or papers. I appreciate the soft texture and the uncontrollable nature of emulsions: they blur the restriction of the rectangular frame and create unexpected patterns by overlapping themselves. I’m also excited about transferring the emulsions onto different surfaces: I wonder what it could possibly mean through transferring images with certain content onto wood, iron, cotton, or other special mediums.

I think it’s interesting how dubious the scientific community was of photographs early on. Especially astronomers considering there was little venue for the general public to observe what they were seeing without a camera. There’s such a high overlap between the lens tech used for cameras and telescopes that I would think astronomers would be the most enthusiastic about using photographs. In some ways, the modern astronomer is also a photographer.

The practice of applying honey and sticky substances, having special development recipes, to old school plates breathes some artistry back into the medium. I’m too used to the click of a phone camera. I liked the photos of Venus and other planetary observations from multiple artists each using their own development recipe and photographic style. In some ways it more an objective documentation of each photographer’s quirks than an accurate record of planet.

I’m most excited about the use of the camera to scale time. Sped up videos of crowds, slowed down videos of objects crushed in a hydraulic press. It lets me experience different dimensions to a given object or experience. I also wrangle with its ability to warp distance and space. Whenever I pull out my iphone and the FOV, focal length, etc. make the camera different from what I see with my eyes it’s aggravating. I like that surprise especially when I use focal zoom on a camera and comb over the details in a scene.

I have had more exposure to the history and process of photography than I realize. I was most interested in the photography process over the years. Through different chemical relationships and it evolves conceptual status with humans, my interest in creating an image through the photographic process is heightened for me. I am interested in this push and pull between the visible and invisible. The importance of photography and its role in documentation brings thoughts about truth and logic. I challenge the scientific method and consider the photograph a new source of fiction or bending the truth through illusion.

I think there is potential in deconstructing the scientific approach and falling into the process a bit more. I believe that the approach to observation and documentation brings up a factual quality. However, I think there is room to negotiate these ideas. There is potential to cause disruption and to tinker with systems to have new outcomes. To be specific, within a camera, maybe there are ways to develop new techniques or mechanical changes that can alter the output of an image. The scientific method is to get to an exact point or specificity, and maybe there is a new way to realize an image.

The reading explains different processes of generation photographic emulsions, which were new to me. It is interesting to see how multiple factors impact the generated photo. In order to obtain objective representations of a physical event as photographic images, careful crafting of different parameters is required, in which one’s photography skills impact the “objective” outcome.

It seems these methodological/scientific/scientistic approaches to imaging involve and require more rigorous criteria on the condition of the subject. In digital photography (which we use every day), the purpose is to capture what human eyes can see, so it doesn’t require the subject to be in a certain condition (if we disregard social and ethical norms). However, in scientific imaging, the goal is broader — to make the invisible visible. It extends beyond the human level of vision; for that, the state of the specimen (e.g., dry or wet) determines how it would appear in the captured image.

Before this reading, I personally associated older methods of photography with tintypes. I feel like this is because I associated tintypes with the stereotype that people usually hold toward photos – that they are efficient, objective, and develop as quick as the press of a button. What I never really considered before was how different methods of photography’s exposure times determine a photo’s ideal use and audience. I always grouped all photography into a category defined by modern digital photography’s traits, however reading about methods like dry collodion or Raman plates allowed me to see past this. These ways allowing photographers to capture multiple exposures in series or keep an image exposed for longer periods of time really demonstrated its effectiveness in scientific or military research as compared to more conventional street portraiture of the tintypes.

An opportunity I find interesting is how we can start to mimic older scientific photography methods (like Maria Sibylla Merian’s botanical drawings) which they state in the reading “rely on an entirely different understanding of truth”. These images capture specimens throughout time in different stages of their lives all within one composition. I am interested in how we can mimic these observational drawings with modern day photography thanks to the science behind capturing and layering multiple exposures together in one image. 

 

I find it interesting that early years of photography is so tightly related to scientific field. Before this reading, I’ve always assumed that the invention of photography is almost entirely artistically driven. I’m also surprised by how complex early photography can be. In particular, that “it was often the case in the nineteenth century that professional or amateur photographers were hired to work side by side with astronomers, microscopists and surveyors” (19.) In this current world where taking a photo is such an insignificant task, it seems hard to imagine a time when photography requires multiple people’s work to decipher.

An interesting artistic opportunity made possible by scientific imaging for me is biomedical art. Using the open resource of scanned biomedical models (like viruses, protein strains, etc.) or doing manual modeling, artists can create biomedical render art or animations. While these creations once were for educational use, now they are more and more diverse and artistic.

This article made me feel that hundreds of years ago before photography was developed, mankind exhausted all techniques and tried all means in order to see-observe. Whether it was the very macroscopic, the twinkling stars in the sky, or the very microscopic, an element; out of sight, invisible spectra and rays …… in order to see and be visible.
This reminds me as if our imagination of the world is not satisfied with the visible world in front of us, and the limitations imposed by the naked eye. We want to SEE in different ways, from different angles, layers, and dimensions, in order to shape our perception of the world. It is like a kind of excavation, trying to exhaust the surface and phenomena of the so-called objective world, and the “appearance（相）”, while we still pursue this “appearance”.

I wonder if there’s a method to film the image behind closed eyes?

I really enjoyed Reading 1, I was not super familiar with the particulars of historic photographical processes so learning about that and the motivation of scientific documentation was pretty fascinating. Although it makes perfectly good sense, I was really struck by how the reading mentioned “standardisation was not one of photography’s strong points” because I think I have always perceived the digital cameras that surround me as mass produced standard tools. I also find the dual “notion that photography was a malleable medium” while also being “indiscriminate” a really interesting pairing. This, I think, is a sentiment that still exists.

When it comes to imaging made possible through scientific means, the first thing I could think of was IBM Research’s atom-sized smallest animation, “A Boy and his Atom” (2013). Not only are people able to capture images small enough to see individual atoms, but they were also able to exercise control over individual atoms and manipulate them into sequential images that became a full out animation. I think the pairing of control with imaging is a super fascinating concept when it comes to capture.

I had not previously appreciated the notion that photography captures the “particular”, in contrast to previous kinds of scientific imaging, such as drawing, that depict an “ideal” specimen (p33, Wilder 2011). In this way, both modes of scientific depiction reveal different modes of subjectivity: in the first case in choices of what particular specimen to capture, and in the second case by choosing which aspects of a type are considered “ideal”. Both are helpful in different ways: drawings in bird books capture the ideal to permit identification regardless of lighting or surrounding habitat, whereas a photo of a bird in this context is more likely to be seen as “proof” that you actually saw this species of bird. 

In light of recent releases of AI based image generation algorithms such as GPT3 or Stable Diffusion, and controversy over an AI generated image winning a prize, after which its creator said “Art is dead, dude. It’s over. A.I. won. Humans lost.” (Roose, 2022).  As someone who studies AI and also as a Painter, I have recently had to explain to AI folks how silly this claim sounds to artists: one may as well claim “Paint won, humans lost”. AI is no more an Artist than “paint” is an Artist: AI is a medium, with which agentic humans interact to create art. The value is inherent in this agency: that is why sites have sprung up to sell expert-created prompts to coax out certain images from these AI models (ie, https://promptbase.com)  The same debates were had for photography – that photography would “kill” art –  but as the Wilder reading showed, photography is subjective in the same way as other artistic media, demonstrating the value of the photographer. But somehow we seem to credulously ascribe agency to “AI”, whereas with photography, the claim was that it would remove agency. 

 

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Wilder, Kelley. “Photography and Science.” University of Chicago Press, Jan. 2011.

Roose, Kevin. “An A.I.-Generated Picture Won an Art Prize. Artists Aren’t Happy.” The New York Times, 2 Sept. 2022. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/technology/ai-artificial-intelligence-artists.html.