Category: Reading-1

Photography was initially seen as a mechanical and objective tool for scientific observation, fulfilling the need for accurate documentation. However, subjective choices like lighting, composition, and exposure reveal photography’s artistic potential. I believe this interplay between subjectivity and objectivity provides the possibility for photography to become an art form, as photographers construct images through their own aesthetic and philosophical frameworks, thereby creating a secondary interpretation of reality. This process also reflects the distinction between “artistic recording” and “artistic creation,” demonstrating how photographers balance objective documentation with subjective expression. An example is electron microscopy, designed for objective scientific recording, but often resulting in visually stunning images of microscopic structures with fascinating textures and symmetry. These choices, such as magnifying specific parts and adding color, not only serve scientific purposes but also elevate the images into artistic expression.

The article highlights how William de Wiveleslie Abney’s efforts in 1874 to capture the transit of Venus faced significant challenges despite meticulous planning. Abney used various emulsions, like collodion and albumen, each with different sensitivities and results. Even with military precision in timing and preparation, the photographic data was inconsistent, and the results were deemed failures by astronomers. This struggle between achieving objective records and dealing with practical limitations offers a compelling artistic opportunity: exploring how the limitations and imperfections in early photographic methods can reveal deeper insights about the nature of objectivity and the role of human error in capturing reality.

Artistic opportunity:

Inherent and observational biases (although inherent bias would be more interesting for me). The creation of a single photography over a length of time, potentially capturing the transformation of an environment of object (there is a piece in the Carnegie Museum of Art, in which the artist showed several cloths pieces that were stained by a slowly corroding ecosystem (Lucy Raven I think)). Patterns, finding the line inside a bunch of random dots.

Comments:

I’ve always found the idea of complete passivity very strange because it only gets as far as to being an imitation of the human vision and understanding of the world. Such passive observation is only objective to the extent that it is universal to the human senses—in a perfect world. In our world, what is “universal” to human senses is simply defined by a dominating group of people that has say in the matter.

In a similar sense, the camera cannot really see. It collects data and visualizes such data in a way optimized to human vision (or hearing). Nowadays, with common-day photography being almost completely electronic, the physicality of photogrammetry in the late 1800s is a reminder of how arbitrary it can be. The discussion on astronomy reminded me of earlier times: with Brahe and Kepler (16th and 17th century) there was also a huge reliance on their measuring apparatuses. In their case it was the accuracy of huge system of whatever giant rulers they used to measure the position of stars. Here, rather than directly measuring the doom, the sky is transitioned, either pictorially or unconventionally, onto another medium and then measured, bringing new risks.

It doesn’t seem to me that we really moved from ideal/reasoned representations to specific/particular ones. The chase to formulate and perfect overarching truths led to the transformation of apparatus and method, which in turn allowed the discovery of more particulars and “random” cases (and then comes the problem of particulars to universal, the problem of induction in science and so on). Seeing the collections of photos from page 44 onwards felt like reading statistical graphs. In my very shallow impression of scientific methods, the goal of collecting specific cases seemed to always be to create a better version of the ideal.

I think the reading illuminates an interesting relationship between photography as a scientific tool and an artistic tool. The reading refers to some of the examples we’ve discussed in class relating to typologies, in which photography is used as a means for answering a question. Then, in the reading’s discussion of Photogrammetry, Wilder discusses instances where the technology take certain kinds of measurements ‘by accident’ – generating data that’s not necessarily useful to answer the original, scientific, question. This begins to become interesting for the (contemporary) artist, for whom capturing ‘by accident’, organically, or unpredictably is very appealing. That’s not to say that capture in order to answer a question is not relevant in art, but rather that art and science often try to answer different kinds of questions, which warrant different approaches to capture.

I think other than introducing a new way of looking at the world, one of the most interesting affordances of scientific approaches to imaging is the idea of collection and collection of images as evidence for scientific hypotheses. Ignoring the fact that the task of collection is an upcoming deliverable, the influence of scientific approaches (I feel) heavily influenced artists to imaging larger and larger volumes of specimen to exploit patterns found in real life in art. Take for example, Francis Galton’s Specimens of Composite Portraiture. The use of alternative imaging resulting in this incredibly not-fact-based-in-todays-standards-but-at-the-time-very-good collection of portraits. In some ways, it exposed the flaws of our initial understanding of scientific reasoning. In present context, I think having the opportunity to do large volumes of imaging is incredibly relevant (considering how other forms of data are being used). Who knows what patterns you can extract from a collection of images – how do details of one picture fade in the context of a million other images?

I find C.V. Raman’s observation and measurement of diffraction, known as Raman spectroscopy, really interesting. This technique shows how light interacts with materials at a molecular level by picking up small changes in the light’s wavelength as it scatters off a surface. While I was doing research on the method, I found that it’s mainly used in science to study molecular composition. However, like the “bar code” it creates (as shown in the article), I believe it has many ways to be used creatively in artistic applications. The method is especially fascinating because it’s not measuring the direct reflection but the diffraction and the scattering of the lights. By capturing the unique “color shifts” or diffraction patterns that different materials show, we could turn these small changes into visual art, revealing a new way to see the physical properties of different materials.