THE HUMAN TRIPOD: COMPUTATIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY, AUTOMATED PROCESSES, AND PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY

Abstract

How can professional photography continue to exist in an age of machine vision? As this article suggests, computational photography destabilizes the ideology of professional photographic distinctiveness, expertise, agency and creativity. In an era characterized by constant instability due to technological developments, changes to photographer’s professional habitus are expected. While these changes are connected to technical modifications in professional tools, they can deeply challenge the identities of practitioners, their perception of photography’s fluctuating affordances, their own roles in image-production, and even the distinctiveness of the medium itself. Professional photography is thus a powerful signifier of the photographic medium and a key arena for understanding the social meaning of the automation of vision across the entire photographic field. Drawing upon interviews with professional photographers who use Structure from Motion, this article propose a new emerging professional identity adapted to this situation: ‘the computational photographer’. For such a photographer the automation of photographic processes necessitates a shift in the site of identity-construction and expertise, away from image-production itself and towards the sphere of distribution on professionally oriented digital platforms. I argue that the advent of the 'computational photographer' indicates that automation processes and practices of technological embodiment influence the habitus of professional photographers.