The Persistence of Photography

Abstract

This book wants to view photography as part of the expanded field of image technologies, operating at a planetary scale where data and the algorithm play an increasingly infrastructural hand. The book proposes that the exponential increase in the quantity of photographic images, uploaded, shared, stored in databases, and operationalized in automated computational systems requires a radically new way of thinking about contemporary photography and visual culture. In setting out to address this situation, the editors suggest that the question of scale and the related concepts of measure and quantity are pivotal in reaching new understandings of what images do. The book aims to ground scale in terms of political agency to bring aesthetic discourse into closer dialogue with developments in media and cultural theory. As such, the book is a welcome and timely contribution to current debates across art, media, and cultural studies in considering not only the fate of photography in computational culture but also new methods of framing the image in social, political, and aesthetic terms, The essays have been organized in three sections to consider, broadly, the politics of scale, the aesthetics of scale, and the technical media of scale. For the authors, scale becomes a new register for photography because of the exponential expansion of images in circulation socially, as well as the increasing deployment of computer vision algorithms in information systems. The image is now inseparable from big data, in which the image at scale becomes calculable and statistical. But for Tomáš Dvořák and Jussi Parikka, organizing B o o k R e v i e w