Something interesting or new: I hear about photography from people who do it as an art medium, but really the main argument I hear for photography there is that “the art is in finding the right shot”. Ex. finding the right moment, right view-angle, & composition. I know I’ve seen people assemble collections of photos, to have treated kind of like a dataset, but I’ve never known anyone who was in photography without wanting the photo/aesthetics of it to be a part of the final work. I think it’s interesting the writing gives “images made to be measured, like earthquake tremors or spectrograms” as types of photography. I wonder what also technically counts as photography— especially that I might’ve seen before & neither me nor the person introducing me to it recognized it as photography.
An artistic opportunity, made possible: I think it’s interesting comparing Raman spectroscopy where the photos are discarded, and visual data-sets where the photos are kept. Like, the difference being the level of abstraction from the human eye, and one being unreadable until it’s converted. I’ve seen a lot of art that exists in it’s documentation (was just looking at Gordon Matta-Clark, who’s building pieces are torn down after). I’m trying to think if there’s a type of photography/adjacent that somehow isn’t documentation. It was interesting to hear about the attempts at standardizing photos of Venus in 1874, in how the photographers had to be militarized in performing the documentation.
(Could not tell if these were 2 different prompts in the phrasing!)