Measuring photographs
Measuring photographs
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.
Measurement, Photography, data culture, media theory
443-457
Parikka, Jussi
cf75ecb3-3559-4e53-a03e-af511651e9ac
Dvorak, Tomas
5e49fc7e-b50f-49ea-a095-de53a2c89044
6 October 2021
Parikka, Jussi
cf75ecb3-3559-4e53-a03e-af511651e9ac
Dvorak, Tomas
5e49fc7e-b50f-49ea-a095-de53a2c89044
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.
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photo-measure preprint
- Accepted Manuscript
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Published date: 6 October 2021
Additional Information:
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Copyright:
Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
Keywords:
Measurement, Photography, data culture, media theory
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 453648
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/453648
ISSN: 1754-0763
PURE UUID: da4969b5-b66c-4849-9545-8df6364747e9
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Date deposited: 20 Jan 2022 17:43
Last modified: 17 Mar 2024 06:57
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Author:
Tomas Dvorak
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