Philosophy of Photography - Volume 7, Issue 1-2, 2016

Photography’s initial claim to represent has been derived from a privileging of the visible world, which, it might be argued, is reinforced by the limited visibility of the camera. The proliferations of utilitarian photographies, therefore, are necessarily also the elimination of the non-visible. Such a notion of visibility, when contested, might provide the starting point for a reconception of the photographic in which the apparently indexical medium is filtered through alternative relationships to representation, transparency and, ultimately, even the discourse of realism. This article proposes that an alternative conception of realism might sceptically underline the limitation of the photographic apparatus in relating to but also limiting the world.

The kilogram prototype is an object manufactured in late nineteenth century to serve as the standard unit of mass worldwide. Since then, the kilogram definition has been determined by this unique object, making it a peculiar case in metrological studies. However, after realizing that the prototype’s mass was unexpectedly changing, scientists are seeking a new way to define the kilogram in pure mathematical terms.

As a process distinct from its poured cousin, sprayed concrete involves using compressed air to propel cement with various chemical admixtures at a surface. Used in tunnelling for rock surface stabilization, and above ground for securing slopes and fabricating fake rockeries, its chimeric character ranges from the polished landscapes of skateparks and swimming pools to mimicking cast concrete in structural repair work. The origins of this industrial process lie with taxidermist Carl E. Akeley (1864–1926), who invented it during his pioneering work in the proto-photographic field of natural habitat dioramas at the Chicago Field Museum in 1907. Further cementing André Bazin’s notion of photography as embalmment, Akeley also invented a unique 35mm cine camera during his time at the American Museum of Natural History, New York. The essay explores this historical intersection between photography, taxidermy and architecture, and its wider implications for thinking through photography’s material contingency.

In this interview with curator Cécile Bourne Farrell, artist Jananne Al-Ani discusses her aerial films Shadow Sites I (2010) and Shadow Sites II (2011) and the representation of landscape, from the Middle East to the American south-west, in relation to Kitty Hauser’s book Shadow Sites: Photography, Archaeology, & the British Landscape 1927–1955 (2007) a study on the emergence of aerial archaeology and the role of the sun’s movement in materializing latent histories embedded in the landscape. A French translation of the interview first appeared in issue 59 of the journal Multitudes.

This artists’ text examines the relationship between photographic images and Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) environments. We note that such scripted image worlds necessitate a fundamental reconsideration of the capacities of image, its formation, reproduction, storage and circulation. As an archaeologist would document an excavation, extending conventional methods through 3D visualization technology to work in new ways with the archaeological record, we chose to document a world built and razed digitally by a now dormant group of anonymous gamers called the Yung Cum Bois (YCBs). We turn to some definitions of griefer as a subcultural phenomenon within online culture to attempt to contextualize our involvement some more, thinking through the forms of image-gathering that grief play has generated, such as scripted object attacks where image-objects spawn and self-replicate, continually spurting out copies of themselves, lagging the region, slowing down frame rates, consuming land resources. Here we witness images blockading network logistics. This was active fieldwork. We got involved. We applied visualization technology learnt from archaeological computing research to the avatars, temporary structures and abandoned ruins of an online world, Second Life (SL). We patched together a kind of virtual photogrammetry, enabling the monumentalization of avatars, objects and scenarios, recompiling these into new configurations and uploading them freely to be reused, detourned and weaponized by our virtual friends. We situate this endeavour within a cobbled history of imaging technology, the networked self and its pathologies, riffling through our own image dump. Here.

In this article I discuss the attribution of photographic indexicality to synthetic photorealistically rendered images. For some traditionalists the idea of photographic indexicality being associated with a synthetically produced digital image is heresy, while others who are more comfortable with the attribution will look to the underlying computational methods that lie behind this insight. An examination of the underpinnings of the software algorithms that produce these synthetic images points to a class of statistical methods based on Monte Carlo simulation, which employs nondeterministic randomness as a strategy to overcome the overwhelming complexity of the simulations. Expanding on a practice that uses the instrumental nature of these probabilistic algorithms as a means to examine the aesthetic qualities of simulated light, I suggest that these mathematically incomplete simulations capture a referential linkage between subject and image – equivalent to a form of indexicality.

This article examines the role of photography in the scientific discovery of cosmic radiation and antimatter, showing how a visual medium designed to react to photons was successfully coopted to detect invisible particles and antiparticles through traces left by their collision, so-called annihilation events. The continuous presence of cosmic radiation means that every photograph is always already a double image, carrying both a visible surface formed by photons and a latent image carrying traces of cosmic rays, the latter ‘image’ continuing in its perpetual state of ‘development’. It is the physical irregularity of the photograph exposed to the continuous and uniform shower of cosmic radiation that leads Doser to speculate on image formation not through an external referent but through the internal manipulation of the material substrate.

In the twentieth-century photography was the de-facto face of representation, as the visual arm of an industrial society that thought to reproduce the world as commodity for the consumption by individuals. However, in the twenty-first century this logic of mechanical reproduction is augmented by the (fuzzy) logic of algorithmic processing, which does not require individuals and commodities for its operation, but converts both to packets of data. The task of photography today is not to represent the world as an image, but to explore the conditions that make something like an ‘image’ possible.

AND – PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE END, FRANCO ‘BIFO’ BERARDI (2015) Semiotext(e), South Pasadena, 355 pp., ISBN-13, p/bk, 9781584351702, £12.47

PHOTOGRAPHY AND ITS VIOLATIONS, JOHN ROBERTS (2014) New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 232, ISBN: 9780231168182, h/bk, £20.67

ON PHOTOGRAPHY, WALTER BENJAMIN AND ESTHER LESLIE (ED. AND TRANS.) (2015) London: Reaktion Books, 160 pp., 31 Illustrations, ISBN: 9781780235257, p/bk, £14.95