Measuring photographs

Abstract

This article investigates relationships between photography and measuring. It outlines main types of visual measurement within scientific photography (such as spectroscopy or photogrammetry) and proposes to broaden the analysis by understanding measuring as a visual cultural technique, which has a particular reach outside scientific institutions and uses. Here it connects arguments from media theory with questions of photography and argues that the centrality of measurement and metrics can be backtracked from current focus on questions of digital data to earlier techniques and discourses of visuality. It traces the conjunctions between the practices of imaging and measuring in the Renaissance, offering a genealogy that aligns photography with acts and processes of measuring, comparison, standardization and scaling as both their effect and cause. Making or looking at photographs always implies sighting, gauging, measuring and co-measuring, which as cultural techniques can be approached as recursive chains of operations.