Category: Reading-1

 

Processes that centred on measurement did not always have to dispense with the pictorial…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Press_the_Button,_We_Do_the_Rest

Sarah Lewis explores the relationship between racism and the camera.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/lens/sarah-lewis-racial-bias-photography.html

What I found to be most enlightening  about the reading is the strenuous correlation between anthropometry and scientific racism and the impact these ideas had on the history of photography. This reading helped me reconsider antiquated and “newer” technologies ability  to measure and classify the world around us. The author allows us to re-examine photography’s complicated relationship with truth and objectivity. It’s been eye-opening to recontextualize  my relationship with the image through an evidence based practice. I’m excited to continue to explore a methodology that is adaptive and considers the boundaries of the device/mechanism.

 

Artworks that came to mind while reading:

Lisa Reihana is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice spans film, sculpture, costume and body adornment, text and photography.

 

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The photographs listed below help me reflect on the limitations of our tools as well as our complex history and relationship with the outside world.

 

Fig. 10: Visual Perspective: The Young Painter’s Maulstick – James Malton (1800)

Estudio experimental de las leyes de la reflexión de la luz.

Jean Antoine Nollet: Leçons de Physique expérimentale, 1764, vol. 5

Camera Obscura, Catalogue, William Y. McAllister, New York, c. 1890

 

http://paleo-camera.com

 

 

I have studied the history of photography a bit, but had never come across photography’s involvement with the School of Military Engineering at Chatham and Abney. Learning about the extensive specialization and attention to details that many photographers would have to go through with various other kinds of scientists helps me wrap my head around the idea of photography as measurement tool rather than photography as expression. Both in the US and internationally, militaries have been some of the most influential and leading entities when it comes to researching an inventing new tech, it does not surprise me that the British military put so much effort into photography as recording tools for expeditions like recording the transit of Venus.

I am interested in the artistic potential available through the use of population and statistical data with visuals created or processed in Touchdesigner. I have experience in storytelling through worldbuilding and imagining futures for the contemporary world, but I am more interested to see if I can build a framework or tool that gives information to predict and contextualize changes in human life. I am still figuring out what different types of capture I can engage in .

I’ve heard about how photography has been used in the past to capture the split seconds of moment using various mechanisms that are like the ancestors to the modern day camera before, but many of my understandings come from the perspective of film, projection, and illusion. It was interesting to me to see how photography as an individual snapshot can offer so much more than I thought as the starting point of information embodiment. In specific from the reading, I found how photogrammetric images have been used in crime scene analysis very interesting since photogrammetry to me has always been a method that stitches a ton of 2D images into a 3D model.

Even though it is obvious that photogrammetry uses grid and mathematical equations to determine the dimensions of the subject in a snapshot to gain spatial information, I haven’t really thought about how much information one photo with an additional photographer’s knowledge of where it was taken at what angle can offer. One lesson I definitely learned through this reading is that I don’t need millions of data to construct or learn about a subject – even a single image or two can potentially be enough to give me the wanted insights. I see so much artistic opportunities in analyzing a single image with computer vision and/or photogrammetry, which I hope to explore more this semester.

  As a person who has taken photography as an artistic expression for a long time, I now find out photography originated from the scientific observation of the surrounding world. It originated from scientific documentation(which I somehow always ignored) to a more sensational art expression. Also, It is very exciting for me to explore the limitation of photography actually. It started from how people differentiated on their own biases, background, and perspectives. Photography is limited because “it only captures a specific object at a specific time in a specific place.”(17.) It is fascinating to know because people would have endless perspectives to observe this specific object. Other than photography, photogrammetry is a more analytical form of representation. By using mathematical, econometric, or other scientific knowledge with the combination of playful shooting skills, we can observe images that the human eye cannot perceive: for example astronomy or anatomy area.

  I see the artistic opportunity in quantifying everything happening around us with scientific methods. From my perspective, the information in the world is overloaded, and photography is a way to extract, organize, and re-represent the information I obtained. This re-representing process would give out images that people would ignore. Using the scientific method, I can organize the information by time or projectile and then juxtapose them together and build a connection between them. In the future study process, I would explore more using scientific techniques to extract more organized information, and explore more photogrammetry.

This essay definitely took me more than 25 minutes to read, but it was a reading that was well worth it, packed with curiosities.

In this class, I think I am one of the people less familiar with capture. I don’t have much knowledge of photography or film and I found this reading really insightful because it sent me on a deep dive that made me try to understand what it means to capture something. Or more concretely, how technology advanced  to answer our questions. I appreciate the scientific context that we got from astronomy, specifically, because it characterized the iterative photographic process for more accuracy. I found it very interesting how at the start of the essay, we distinguish photography as passive. This passivity implies inaction, lack of intention and a certain reproducibility.  And I think that the entire process of learning how to photograph was very intentional and active, the tools we have now came from very specific needs. I found this very interesting.

I think the section in the essay that spoke about photogrammetry was very interesting to me. Because I thought photogrammetry was a relatively new process, the essay alludes to modern forms of photogrammetry using software and 3D models. But photogrammetry as a concept has existed truly since the 19th century. I think I would like to learn more about traditional methods of photogrammetry and the immense labor that it takes.

 

 

“The photographers were militarized, even if they weren’t paid members of the military. They were taught at the School of Military Engineering at Chatham and sent with military assistants who recorded the transit with military timing, preparation, exposure, storage and later development of the plate.”

I found this aside interesting in the context early photography. In the context of what I know about early photography, (which granted is only what we were taught in Photographing America–an excellent course here at CMU), photography in the early United States was used to solidify state power through various projects. Examples include those like those we discussed in class–typologies creating a scientific concept of race (in order to justify slavery and racism), survey photography moving westward to catalog the new territory of the United States and convince people to move westward (manifest destiny), or notably Edward Curtis’ The North American Indian-a body of work supposedly undertaken to catalog the “Vanishing Race” (also a title of one of the works in the series)… but which was marred by the facts that Native Americans were not “vanishing” by experiencing a mass genocide (which Curtis’ work did not address) and that he did not in fact catalog traditional dress/rituals but rather asked Native Americans to pose for him in clothing he chose… regardless of what culture it was from or what significance it held.

The article mainly focused on where photography was lacking in terms of a scientific tool. For example, how unreliable measurements are even taken from a carefully captured photograph–in the case of early astronomical photography unusable, in survey photography labor intensive, or how in botany it highlighted a specific specimen as opposed to scientific illustrations which were designed to show a general/average. But beyond the scope of the article and these problems is that of what isn’t photographed at all. What can we understand from the information scientists and others choose not to (or are unable to) record?

To be honest, I am not familiar with photographic techniques at all, so the discussion about the dry vs. wet collodion, variations in emulsions, kinds of plates, were all very new to me. I think these are all very cool processes to read about, but I think I would benefit to a video of some sort which explains this process with more imagery. One thing that I found particularly interesting, was the fact that you could expose a plate multiple times (might be silly but I really had no idea!).

I personally think there’s an artistic opportunity to be had in X-Ray technology. I personally like how macabre skeletons look under an X-Ray and I see some potential for humor, especially considering it has mainly medical connotations. I also like the idea of scientific representations of creatures being used with an artistic purpose. There’s also this underlying expectation to illustration and imaging in medicine and biology that whatever you are portraying is supposed to depict something from real life. I think playing around with that expectation, maybe by creating some fictional monsters that are X-rayed, or plants that do not and could never exist, but positing them as real, is very interesting.

 

The idea that at some point photography’s place in society was still up in the air is kind of funny to me. In 2022, photographs emerge as a byproduct of living. Digital cameras are ubiquitous to the point where we often take photographs and record videos on an impulse because we simply can. So to read a section where photography is discussed as a diverse set of physical and chemical processes for scientific application speaks to an understanding of the practice that just feels alien to me. It’s one where the technology is diverse but the medium’s language isn’t, and the agency of the photographer is closer to the agency of an MRI technician.

In some sense, I found all of the techniques mentioned in the reading interesting because the applications of scientific imaging approaches seem novel to me, and I’d probably enjoy exploring ways to process/warp the physical materials involved. But in another sense, none of them interest me, because I’m not too interested in physical media that’s not easily accessible.

This article is quite eye-opening to me. Typically, photography for science is not covered as a part of the early history of photography. In fact, I just went back and flipped through the first few chapter of A World History of Photography and did not find any mentions of scientific photography — the age of daguerreotype is just a boring collection of portraits. I found it fascinating that they were able to take wet plate collodion on transatlantic expeditions as it is a painfully finicky process. I was in fact shocked that they were able to capture images of remote, dim celestial objects (even modern cameras require something like ISO 3200 and motorized star tracker gimbals, and wet plates’ ISO is usually below 10.) Seeing the power (and limitations) of early photographic technology and their applications, it really made me rethink the connection between art and science in the early ages of photography.

To me, the extreme scales at which modern imaging technology is capable of present many artistic opportunities. On the large side, satellites, drones, street views, etc. provides us with an unprecedented amount of data that can be utilized in art. Especially we the help of big-data processing tools (such as efficient object recognition,) it is possible to create a typological study without ever going to the place in person (e.g. using algorithms to sift through massive street view databases to find the object of interest.) On the small scale, high-definition optical microscopes and SEMs gave us many new opportunities to find interesting visuals at a completely different scale. Bio art, for example, is an interesting field that can potentially benefit from the ability to see tiny structures.