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.