Philosophy of Photography - Current Issue

This editorial introduces the Special Double Issue of Philosophy of Photography (15.1&2), which focuses on the impact of novel technologies on photography and through this on our understanding of the contemporary world. It sketches the contents of the featured articles and articulates some of the technical developments, concerns and questions that inform and link them.

Many recent visual and technological changes in photography are related to the fact that it is increasingly connected to space through computerization and digitization. Photographs no longer appear as framed 2D images, but rather resemble a cloud whose viewing and operating mode necessarily involve navigation. My purpose in this article is to think about photography’s ontological and epistemological status through its contemporary spatial uses. Using two projects by Forensic Architecture, I examine two methodologies of spatial photography – photogrammetric point clouds and the Image-Data Complex – and claim that, whereas with the emergence of the internet, digital photography has primarily been perceived as a networked image, today we should think of it in terms of clouds. Both projects rely on a posthuman multiplication of perspectives and a vertical conceptualization of photography as navigable space. Both also represent and demonstrate the medium’s contemporary political potential for documenting, creating evidence and organizing data. Finally, both challenge traditional definitions of photography and outline new alternatives for interrogating human rights violations.

Arising out of the heightened sensory perceptions of extended lockdown, this creative investigation began with contemplation of flowering street-trees. Through 262 days of lock down, residents of Melbourne retreated to the hyper-local, often reinforced by a 5-km travel bubble and a one-hour daily time limit outdoors. The sublime ephemeral springtime flowers of street-trees were amplified by the extreme sensory and social constraints of social distancing. Drawing us into a suspended moment of slow encounter, we attuned to the contained glowing pulse of plants. The works were created using photogrammetry, a technique for generating 3D models from a large set of photographs taken from all angles of the botanical specimen. Whilst the point-cloud models remain the central artefact of vegetal/digital, it has been presented in a range of formats throughout 2022–23, including multichannel video loops, augmented reality, webXR, gestural interactive works and still prints. This work invites an embodied experience of attuning to both the vegetal and the digital. This is consistent with my alignment with queer and autistic politics, of siding with the object. Increasingly, queer cultural practices are employing new materialism and posthumanism to interrogate the agency of things and the culturally constituted hierarchies of objects and subjects. The reconfiguration of embodied relations is necessary in order to reconceive a viable future.

This article looks at the emerging technology of the neural radiance field (NeRF) and suggests that this means of digital image production, when used by a creative practitioner, produces an emergent aesthetic – a result of the affordances inherent in the digital materiality of the NeRF and its processes. The use of this machine-learning technology as a material for creating images can lead to an entirely new way of creating photographic representations that provide us with a way of seeing and recording how we phenomenologically experience seeing. The processes and the emergent aesthetic are explored with examples drawn from the author’s own practice.

This encyclopaedia entry defines ‘analog(ue) photography’ as a construct of the digital age. After first situating the concept’s history in relation to that of the larger field of ‘the analog’, thereby exposing its connection to the American field of cybernetics, the entry describes how analog photography’s identity as a synonym for film was initially constructed and has subsequently evolved. Then it elaborates on the category’s formulation as a site of resistance to emerging technologies. Analog photography’s ongoing usage, the entry suggests, is a testament to the way that information-age epistemologies have organized the shape and scope of the photographic field.

Dall-E2 and Stable Diffusion promote their text-to-image models based on their level of (photo)realism. The use of photographic language is not superficial or accidental but indicative of a broader tendency in computer science and data practice. To nuance the general application of photorealism, I position the term alongside photographic realism and computational photorealism. To contextualize important nuances between these three terms, contemporary examples from astrophotography are analysed and reconstructed using text-to-image models. From the comparative analysis, computational photorealism emerges as a modified term that recognizes the relationship between photography and text-to-image models without conflating their ontological and epistemological differences.

With the advent of AI-generated photorealistic images in easily accessible online resources, synthetic imaging suddenly is widely discussed, obscuring the quiet revolution that has transformed image-making in the digital realm over the last decades. ‘The decisive moment’ has been taken out of the photographer’s hands a long time ago and the numerous automatic mechanisms integrated into the apparatus and the editing pipeline question the idea of sole authorship. This reassessment and re-evaluation of photographic images demands for a precise, differentiated description for images that are not produced by optical means. Therefore, the term synthography determines the essence and origin of the photorealistic, artificially created image.

Review of: Operational Images: From the Visual to the Invisual, Jussi Patikka (2023)

Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 276 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-51791-211-6, p/bk, e-book, $29.00