Category: Reading02

When thinking about photography as a scientific medium I have always been under the impression that photography enabled a sense of standardization and comparability in data collection. So upon reading that in the 1800s that “standardization was not one of photography’s strong points” (pg. 23) I was completely baffled. I was fascinated to learn how the different photographic plates make objectivity and reproducibility a bit more hazy than I would have envisioned for astronomical scientific photographs.

However, when doing a research internship at university of Washington I was charged with the job to locate defects within a crystal structure using photoluminescence. The data I was looking at were all raster scans of various areas of the nanosheets that contained bright and dark spots. However, the actual reading of these images was more or less guess work.  Even through our images could be classified as ‘objective’ the reading and interpretation of the images was quite subjective. This astounded me for we often viewed these  photographs as ‘truth’ when really it is the interpretation of the images that can cause confusion and debates.

Thinking back to pre-photographic scientific observation times, I can imagine that limited capture methods would make typologies less effective if the goal is to compare their slight variations. The reading states that looking away from the subject would be required in order to record sketches or notes, versus today where we can easily snap and capture something we wish to observe at a later time easily. If someone was to record manually how a bunny reacted to different vegetables, they would miss crucial moments in the experiment that would be absent in the documentation because of having to look away, or, the time it took to sketch the subject would draw attention away from the experiment as a whole. In addition, the entries might all vary in consistency, making comparison challenging if one is unsure if a variation is a human error, or actually existed at the moment of capture. The camera does indeed allow uninterrupted viewing and capture, but being able to see the variation in the product due to human error, can, in fact, be the machine for the typology. We saw this in Kim Dingle’s study of drawings of the United States; if she had asked the students to capture an image of their town with a camera, we would lose a significant element of the typology that only exists due to human error and lack of having a perfect understanding of what the United States looks like.

As far as contemporary captures being predictable, I think that’s kinda the point of typographies-to be predictable (at least on a basic level.) They challenge you to pay attention to what each entry has in common with its peers and spot the variation. In Aertryck & Danielson’s, Ten Meter Tower, the audience picks up on the pattern and predictability of what the next subject will do, but that’s also a part of the amusement. I wouldn’t say it’s scientifically reliable, as this capture is only of a small sample size that probably wasn’t chosen to reflect a large body of people.

In my mind, the scientific method depends on consistency and repeatability—if, given a set of variables made consistent, similar results occur. For example, given consistent emulsion in photography, one could predict the kind of image that would be produced from the same lighting, objects, etc. However, the inconsistent emulsion practices and the retouching of photographs in the late nineteenth century demonstrated that photography is easily and more likely to be inconsistent,”a malleable medium,” in the words of Kelly Wilder (director of the Photographic History Research Centre in the UK).  Then, photography, or any capture method, is only as scientifically reliable and predictable as the practices that surround it.

Scientific assessment of a capture medium such as photography belie the larger question of whether objectivity is attainable in the act of observation.  I argue that it is not, because the act of observing always comes from the perspective of an observer. In other words, a person must decide to photograph, to point the camera at a subject. Even further, a medium of capture prescribes a way of seeing; how one can know about the world and the possible things that can be observed. In this way, the relationship between observer and observed depends on the nature of that medium of capture. What can that medium of capture afford? What does it not afford? How we see determines how we relate to the object we’re seeing, and thus what how we can act towards that object.

With most photographs, there is assumed to be some amount of objectivity, an assumption that I think for the most part is appropriate. Yes, the photographer needed to choose the angle, and the exposure time, and many details like that, but the image that was captured still represents the actual light that was there at the time. With typologies, the assumption of objectivity is even stronger. Because the images captured are methodological, they beg to be compared and contrasted with each other, comparisons that can only be meaningfully made if we assume the images are accurate. But what they need even more than accuracy is consistency: each subject being captured with the same medium, from the same angle, in the same fashion. As the reading describes, this is often very difficult to achieve, but advances in technology make it increasingly more possible. Though no method of capture can be totally objective, careful procedural photography is still a powerful tool for observation, and a great medium for scientific and artistic typologies.

As the essay points out, the various functions of photography “are more than just the making of invisible things visible,” but they are “entirely new ways of observing” (43). Our ability to observe (medium of capture) and the system upon which we reason our observations (the way we measure and define typologies) mutually influence each other. For example, the curiosity for archeological objects and architectural structures facilitated the development of Raman spectroscopy and photogrammetry. The discoveries of x-rays and radiation reformulated our awareness of our own bodies.

In evaluating whether the medium of capture is ‘objective’ in contemporary culture, I want to first borrow some ideas from the theory of ‘post-truth,’ where objectivity relies upon a general consent to a system of truth that is external to what each individual perceives and believes. In the context of science, over the course of history, methods of photography respect a stable set of standards. And this allows for the notion of objectivity to stand in the context of scientific photography. However, in mass culture, it is questionable whether any type of general consent exists at the moment. Since the medium of capture now seems to be always accompanied by retouch, edit, filter, and many other types of maneuvering, I am not sure we are still attached to the notion that a photo should be objective. It is more about the reach for some type of ideal. Also, the essay mentions the assumption of complete passivity of photography, which is foundational to the idea of that it is an objective medium (19). The way we take photos in our daily life is nowhere near passive, so such objectivity breaks down. The idea of “mechanical objectivity” in general is on shakier ground nowadays, because we are increasingly suspicious of the assumption that machines are neutral with all the discourse around the biasses in technological systems.

How can the medium of capture influence a typology?

A typology is just as much about how it’s captured as what’s captured. The Venus typology in the chapter is a good example. The typology is a collection of photographs of Venus. It is about Venus and also about the way that Venus has been captured, because the way that it’s been captured is what allows us to see the representation of Venus. The medium of capture is necessarily a part of the typology.

It is also a part of the typology in the sense that the capture medium plays a role in what’s included in the typology. Placing people’s forearms under a camera reveals a typology of the visible exterior of forearms, while placing people’s forearms under an x ray reveals a typology of bones in the forearm. In this case the typology is dictated by the device doing the capturing and what it’s able to “sense.”

Is the medium objective? Objectivity is a separation of the interpretation and biases from the perception. It is pure perception, without any top-down influence. The capture method’s perception of something is objective in this sense, but what is being captured is not. The capture method has been designed to do something; to have a particular kind of perception. There’s nothing objective about this- it was designed. The capture itself, however, is perfectly objective; a transformation of information without interpretation. Yet it exists within a system that has been created to do something, biased in what it perceives.

Another way to think about this is with an aspect of human perception: seeing. There is seeing in the sense of the light hitting the cones and rods in the retina, and then what is seen after it has been processed in the brain with the many top-down influences that humans have. Seeing is the process of converting light to action potentials, while the experience of seeing is different and biased by other aspects of human cognition. I think we can separate the capture from the perception, the pure objective from the interpretative, even though they exist within the same system.