For the official version of record, see here:

McQuire, S., Pfefferkorn, J., Sunde, E. K., Lury, C., & Palmer, D. (2024). Seeing Photographically. Media Theory, 8(1), 01–18. Retrieved from https://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/1066

Seeing Photographically

SCOTT MCQUIRE

University of Melbourne, AUSTRALIA

JASMIN PFEFFERKORN

University of Melbourne,
AUSTRALIA

EMILIE K. SUNDE

University of Melbourne,
AUSTRALIA

CELIA LURY

University of Warwick, UK

DANIEL PALMER

RMIT University, AUSTRALIA

Abstract

This Introduction to the ‘Seeing photographically’ special issue begins with four vignettes drawn from (nearly) two centuries of photographic history. These examples are leveraged to pose critical questions about photography’s transformation since the 19th century, and especially in the first decades of the 21st century, as trajectories associated with digitization, networked distribution, the widespread integration of cameras into mobile devices and the growing application of machine-learning to image-making have all taken hold. Photography has never been more widespread, but its boundaries and specificity seem to have become less and less certain. Beginning from the premise that ‘technological change’ is never simply technological, this issue challenged authors to respond to the theme of ‘seeing photographically’. Their responses clustered around a set of intersecting problematics: the impact of ‘generative AI’ on the photographic field; the way that photography has consistently challenged the (often unconscious) human-centrism of most accounts of perception and seeing; and the challenges associated with theorizing photography as media in the present.

Keywords

Photography, technological change, machine learning, generative AI, other-than-human sensing

In 1826 or 1827 — the exact date has been disputed — French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce used his camera obscura to project light reflected from the scene outside his window onto a pewter plate thinly coated with a type of naturally occurring asphalt. The resulting image, known as View from the Window at Le Gras (Fig. 1),is today widely regarded as the oldest surviving photograph.

Niépce had been experimenting with his ‘heliographic’ process for some years using different emulsions (helios being the ancient Greek word for sun). View from the Window at Le Gras has since been estimated to have required an exposure time of several days. For a long time, Niépce’s image was thought to be lost, along with his other early experiments. However, in 1952, it was tracked down and bought by photography historians Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, who took it to the Kodak Research Lab to have a copy made. This proved extremely difficult. Helmut Gernsheim later ‘retouched’ one of the copied images to render the scene clearer (Fig. 2). This is the version of View from the Window at Le Gras that has since circulated most widely. Gernsheim refused to allow reproduction of the original plate for some decades.

Niépce entered a partnership with the French panorama painter Louis Daguerre in 1829, but died in 1833 before the process of durably fixing a camera image onto a material surface had been fully resolved. Six years later, when Daguerre later made his Daguerreotype publicly available in return for a lifetime pension from the French government, Niépce’s family received a (smaller) pension.

In his 1839 announcement to the French Academy of Sciences, Daguerre famously characterized his invention as a novel form of automatism — one in which agency seemingly belongs to neither human operator nor the apparatus but to ‘nature’:

The DAGUERREOTYPE is not merely an instrument which serves to draw nature; on the contrary it is a chemical and physical process which gives her the power to reproduce itself (Daguerre, 1839 in Gernsheim, 1968: 81).

* * * *

A century later, in 1939, American novelist Christopher Isherwood published his Goodbye to Berlin stories which famously begin with the bold declaration, “I am a camera”. Isherwood frames ‘being a camera’ as a model for human detachment: being able to observe without being involved in the action. The stance, perhaps inevitably, proves impossible for his narrator-self to sustain. Nevertheless, Isherwood’s statement registers the consolidation of a new link in the long chain of claims made about the nature of photography. By 1939, photography was no longer a matter of nature reproducing itself; nor was it a matter of ‘art’ in the pseudo-painterly form which the Pictorialists had imagined in the 1890s. Instead, the camera is recognized as a distinctively modern mode of seeing; a technological seeing implicated in the transformation of models of human perception — and perhaps of ‘humanness’ itself. Seeing photographically has come to name a distinctive transnational aesthetic linking the ‘New Vision’ (Neue Optik) advocated by those such as László Moholy-Nagy and Sigfried Giedion to the ‘kino-eye’ constructivism of Dziga Vertov (Fig. 3, 4), Alexander Rodchenko and Osip Brik in the Soviet Union and the more prosaically named ‘straight photography’ championed by Paul Strand, Edward Weston and others in the United States. This was the lens through which Beaumont Newhall celebrated the first hundred years of the medium in a 1937 exhibition and catalogue at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, an event which established the basic canon for future art histories of photography.

* * * *

In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) revealed what was widely celebrated as the first ‘photograph’ of a black hole.^[i] If capturing a photograph of a black hole seems counterintuitive — given that one of the defining features of a black hole is the inability of light to escape its gravitational pull — describing the resulting image as a photograph also stretched the bounds of the medium in new ways (Sunde, forthcoming 2024). The M87 image (Fig. 5) was constructed from multiple electromagnetic signals obtained across five days by an international team of more than 200 astronomers using eight sophisticated radio telescopes spread across the globe. This data was then knitted together using computer algorithms to make a continuous picture by filling in gaps and details probabilistically. On their website, the team justified the procedure by stating that “not all images are created equal”, and went on to explain that, from all the different renderings that were generated using machine learning, they chose “the image (or set of images) that looks most reasonable” (Event Horizon Telescope, n.d.).

Fig. 5: The first image of a black hole, obtained using Event Horizon Telescope observations of the centre of the galaxy M87. Image credit: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration.

* * * *

In April 2022, the public release of Open AI’s text-to-image model DALL-E 2 sparked widespread interest with its capacity to generate images that looked like photographs. Open AI’s website proclaimed that 88.8% of “evaluators” preferred DALL-E 2 over the previous year’s release DALL-E 1 “for photorealism” (Open AI). Google’s proprietary Imagen software also appeared in a beta test phase in 2022 promoted under the tagline “unprecedented photorealism × deep level of language understanding” (Saharia et al., n.d.). The same year saw the public release of other text-to-image models such as Midjourney (July) and Stable Diffusion (August). By 2023, generated images of the Pope wearing a white puffer jacket and of Donald Trump being arrested went viral. Alongside the earlier ripples made by ‘deepfakes’, photography found itself surfing a new wave of ‘AI’ turbulence — one that not only raised complex questions about the boundary between photographs and other visual images, but threw the ever-unsettled relation between words and images into new relief. If a picture is worth a thousand words, how might we value a prompt?

Fig. 6: Image generated by Jasmin Pfefferkorn using Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion SDXL Turbo model, with the prompt “View from the window at Le Gras by Niépce, heliographic image, oldest surviving camera photo, black and white”. 9 May 2024.

* * * *

What can we make of these four moments ranging across the nearly 200-year history of photographs, if not of photography? It should go without saying that it would be easy to choose numerous other moments — it seems almost irresistible to call them ‘snapshots’ — that would also be relevant and illuminating. However, accepting that origins and exemplars are always complex and contested, this set provides as good a point of departure as any. In this vein, let’s begin by acknowledging that the practices, cultures, social relations, economies and formations of knowledge that have been generated by and around ‘photography’ have always been subject to technological change, which — like all technological change — has never simply been technological.

What is immediately striking in the history of photographic discourse is how it has continually signalled the extent to which technological change is entangled with different understandings of what it is to be ‘human’. If all technologies pose the question of what it is to be human in a certain way, photography sharpens this question by turning ‘technology’ into something that promises to directly mediate our perception of the world. Remote seeing — seeing at a distance across space or through time, and often both at once — is the decisive cut that photography makes into the ‘human condition’. The ambiguity of this intervention — registered in our awkward and contradictory phrasing of ‘directly mediate’ — has continually challenged the way we comprehend human senses and sense-making. In the same gesture, photography’s novel mediation brings the relation of the human to the non-human into play, whether this non-human is thought of in terms of ‘other animals’, other entities or both.

While photography historian Geoffrey Batchen (1997) has long argued that photography fundamentally complicated the distinction between nature and culture, the potential for photography to provide insight into human–technology relations has played a lesser role in photographic discourse. Although photography is well recognized as a medium subject to ongoing technological change, Derrick Price and Liz Wells (Wells, 1996: 46) pondered in the 1990s whether the history of photography had been reduced to a history of changing techniques. Recent developments offer the opportunity for a fundamental reconsideration of photography: what it once was and what it might be becoming, and how these changes might impact our understanding not only of visual culture but of (human) perception, human–technology relations and the relation between visual images and knowledge practices into the future.

In 2012, Kodak — the company synonymous with photography for much of the 20^th century — entered into bankruptcy. Kodak, which famously industrialized amateur photography in the 1880s, had lodged the first patents for digital cameras in 1975, but proved unable to ride the waves of change that digital photography initiated. The technologies behind ‘digital photography’ — or, more precisely, the process of storing samples of reflected light as an electrical charge rather than via chemical transformation of an emulsion — were critically underpinned by the US space program. During the 1970s, in the lead up to the launch of the Large Space Telescope (now more commonly known as the Hubble Telescope), scientists were grappling with the logistics of retrieving photographs from space, as well as the immense difficulty of inserting fresh film into cameras on an ‘unmanned’ space craft. Converting light into electrical values stored in charge-coupled devices (CCDs) opened the possibility for remote transmission of images.^[1] By the time the Hubble Telescope was finally launched in 1990, following years of delay, the first consumer digital cameras were already on sale in the US market. Digital cameras, accompanied by new file formats and the development of imaging software like Photoshop, set in train a process that has completely reworked photography.

The transition to the digital storage of visual information raised immediate concerns about photography’s evidential value: the rising use of Photoshop by media organizations and artists, in particular, led to a spike in ‘death of photography’ discourses in the 1990s. But this concern about photographic reference was ultimately overtaken by the major transformations in photographic practice and image economies associated with the growing capacity to transmit photographs over digital networks (first internet, then cellular), the widespread integration of cameras into mobile phones (especially following the release of the iPhone in 2007) and the growing role of computational processing in the digital milieu. Barely had ‘Photoshopped’ been established as a recognized verb when proprietary automated image filters emerged as a key factor in the massive popular uptake of mobile photo-sharing platforms such as Instagram (2010) and Snapchat (2013).

Platform photography immediately displayed different dynamics to earlier modes of popular photography. For the first time, photographs made by large numbers of non-professional photographers could achieve wide circulation. Lev Manovich and colleagues (2017) argued, contra Pierre Bourdieu (1965), that this was the moment when photography genuinely became a form of ‘everyday art’. However, what they precociously dubbed ‘Instagrammism’, naming an ‘aesthetic’ shaped by new techno-cultural conditions of photographic capture, circulation and display, soon found itself outflanked by the formalization of ‘influencers’ and the widespread colonization of platforms by brands and commerce. Photographic practice had been radically democratized, but tightly orchestrated and meticulously curated ‘posts’ became the dominant currency of platform photography.

Before there was any sense that the new image economy emerging around mobile networked photography had been stabilized, let alone comprehended, rapid growth of computer vision capabilities in the 2020s has pulled yet more ground away from the traditional pillars of photography. Photography could seemingly cope with losing film as a storage format. It could — arguably — cope with being assembled from data such as electromagnetic radiation that is invisible to the (human) eye. But can it adjust to living among a burgeoning array of images, some of which ‘look like’ photographs, but are produced in very different ways? If, as Benjamin famously observed, photography confused the traditional relation of original and copy, the emergence of Generative AI introduces a similar confusion of photography and other kinds of visual images.

* * * *

What, then, do we make of photography as it nears its bicentenary? Photographs have never been more common, but this ubiquity is belied by growing uncertainty about what constitutes a photograph. Is a screenshot a photograph? What about all the forms of computation that are now built into cameras and editing software to automate certain operations, from the elimination of red eye to the capture and synthesis of multiple images to make a single visible ‘photograph’? What about the M87 image? Or images produced by Generative AI systems such as DALL-E, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney? If we prefer to call the outputs of text-to-image models ‘images’ rather than ‘photographs’, what is the border that we are enforcing? And what is the idea of ‘photography’ that is continually smuggled back across that border to infiltrate these images — not simply in terms of the common appeal to ‘photorealism’ as the pseudo-scientific standard to which they aspire, but in recognition of their reliance on the entire history of photography to provide their algorithmic models with ‘training data’? Does it matter that ‘seeing photographically’ has become the taken-for-granted principle for training machines to ‘see’? How does this threshold shape what is (there to be) seen?

This is the complex and multilayered context that prompted this special issue of Media Theory. What does it mean to ‘see photographically’? How has this ‘seeing’ been understood historically? How has it changed over time and how is it continuing to change in the present? Has photographic seeing lost its credibility? What can ‘seeing photographically’ tell us about media theory, about technological change and about human–technology relations?

‘Seeing photographically’ has regularly assumed both human and more-than-human dimensions. From Eadweard Muybridge’s famed serial images of animals in motion to spirit photography, from the inscription of identity in various institutional archives to the role of the camera in colonial conquest, from everyday photography to professional cultures of evidence and reportage, photography has played a key role in connecting human sensory experience to changing modes and models of technological media. Yet the position of photography in mainstream media theory has often been fraught. What can contemporary photographic practices tell us about how we understand ‘media’ and processes of ‘mediatization’ in the 21^st century?

In the opening article, Scott McQuire is animated by the new conditions of photography, but sets this in the context of debates about media history. He asks: what does the historical transformation of photography tell us about how we understand ‘media’ in the present? He begins by considering theorists such as Vilém Flusser, Friedrich Kittler and Bernard Stiegler, who all posit photography as a threshold event in the history of media, marking the moment when cultures of writing and the book begin to cede ground to cultures of the ‘technological image’. While he finds their ‘big picture’ approach instructive, he remains dissatisfied with the way it can lose sight of the specific social-technical arrangements that characterize photography in the present. This becomes the basis for seeking a media theory more capable of acknowledging the dispersed space of any medium.

Other contributions to this special issue are clustered around some common issues, exploring not only the persistence of seeing photographically but also how that persistence is subsumed and transformed in other ‘ways of seeing’. First and foremost among these shared concerns is the disruptive innovation of the new image generators, which has directly inspired a number of contributions and is present in some shape or form across all. Paul Frosh understands ‘seeing photographically’ in an era of AI-generated images, screenshots and the like as primarily an act of ‘cultural memory’. He argues that a specific cultural memory of photography is now implicated in the construction and maintenance of an ideology that informs photography’s continuing existence as a set of cultural practices. Drawing on a case study concerning the digital ‘rescue’ of found film photography, Frosh traces the way that the social values and moral obligations associated with photography in the past are re-animated in the present, producing both new visibilities and new anxieties.

The articles that follow acknowledge the force of this memory and query whether the institutions and practices sustaining that memory are sufficient to understand what it means to see photographically today. Daniel Palmer and Katrina Sluis explore the return of photographic style in Generative AI models. While outmoded in art history, they argue that style has assumed a new importance in photography as Generative AI enables the emulation of the ‘look’ of photographs from any period or photographer. This results in a ‘style market’ that is abstracted from history and context, where photographs are reduced to patterns of visual information which are nonetheless in competition with the photographers who produce the styles that the models depend on.

This kind of photographic short-circuit is also of concern to Nicolas Malevé, who ponders the vexed question of ownership in this domain. As numerous artists, photographers and others have pointed out, recent developments in computer vision have depended upon large-scale unauthorized extraction of images from the internet. Sometimes this has involved taking millions of images to compile databases for object recognition training (e.g. ImageNet) while other seizures have focused more directly on face recognition (e.g. Clearview AI, which now claims a database of 40 billion images).^[2] Contemporary Generative AI applications have a similar dependence on extracting large numbers of images in order to train their models. Malevé focuses on the legal action initiated by major stock photography and image agency Getty Images against Stability AI in 2023, when Getty accused Stability AI of illegally appropriating Getty-copyrighted photographs for the purpose of training its models. He also considers the implications of Getty’s attempts to provide ‘contractual certainty’ for its own customers by developing an image generator trained on its ‘own’ image collection (where it has contracted license rights). This is an area of ongoing uncertainty. The fact that it cuts across a number of different cultural domains can be registered by the protracted Hollywood strike in 2023 as actors sought to renegotiate rights agreements. If this was partly driven by new distribution models such as streaming, it was also about negotiating compensation for the use of an actor’s image in future training of AI models and generating ‘digital replicas’.^[3]

Geoff Cox and Amanda Wasielewski both consider the limitations of Generative AI imaging systems. Wasielewski argues that AI-generated images remain limited by their ‘flatness’, which is a function of their dependence on 2D photographs as their training data. She contrasts human vision, where visual information received through the eye is also informed by embodied spatial experience, to machine vision which is necessarily lacking any such ‘experience’. She suggests that this lack shows up in the difficulties — the errors and non-sequiturs — that AI applications consistently make when attempting to generate complex images such as a horse galloping. Drawing on analysis of AI-generated images, as well as Muybridge’s famous series, Wasielewski argues that flaws in AI-generated images help to reveal the illusionistic core of all photography.

Geoff Cox approaches the limits of Generative AI in a different way. He argues that the new capacity to generate images which ‘mimic’ photographs is undermining photography’s historic role in producing what Walter Benjamin called ‘dialectical images’. In place of images capable of cathecting reservoirs of unmet social desire and thereby contributing to a political project, the synthetic photorealism of Generative AI results in “fake images that render fake history”. For Cox, this threatens to bring image dialectics to a “standstill”, with significant implications for political and cultural change. Joanna Zylinska is also concerned with the narrowness of current developments in Generative AI. However, by adopting a perspective tracing the transformation of the relationship between seeing and understanding in humans and machines, she asks if the current conjunction can also offer some emancipatory possibilities. Zylinska’s essay includes images she has generated to enact her argument, based on a “desire to visualise anew” the future rather than mourn the past.

While other contributors are less directly engaged with Generative AI, computational processes and logics are an evident concern. Ina Blom and Matt Fuller explore ‘filters’, understood both in the specific sense of technical applications particular to photography, but also in the wider sense of a cultural logic of selection and organization. Drawing on the photographic series Travel Pictures (2006–2008) by the artist Walead Beshty, they propose filtering as a new way of theorizing photography. They argue that a ‘filter theory’ has the advantage of encompassing both material and computational filters, conjoining the sifting of things, people and data to the non-optical processes at work in machine learning applications. This relocates our understanding of ‘photography’ to a wider set of environmental conditions and allows us to situate the photographic image as a distribution across a field of perception that spans different forms of technical sensing and configuration.

Jasmin Pfefferkorn explores the role of algorithmic models in curating (filtering) our own photographs. Through a case study of ‘For You’ album slideshows in the iPhone’s ‘Memories’ feature, she explores both the technical operations and emotive resonances of algorithmically curated photo albums. By paying close attention to the specific ‘logics’ determining how images are selected and arranged, Pfefferkorn brings into focus the detailed operations that underpin new entanglements of human perception and machine operations in contemporary culture. Her investigation raises wider questions around the affective impacts of ‘personalization’ in relation to visual culture and machine vision.

Michelle Henning returns to the history of chemical photography to challenge the idea of photography as a purely visual medium. She explores the “passive agency” of photographic materials such as emulsions and the way they illustrate cultural and environmental sensitivities by registering much more than visible light or even radiation. Her account of how photographic materials have been impacted by various forms of ‘noise’, including the atmospheric pollution that their production has contributed to, leads her to propose the inclusion of photographic materials factories as participants in “technological sensory training”. As Henning argues, such training — materialized in diverse entities including chemistry, production systems and ‘how-to’ manuals — has helped to determine what is perceived in and through ‘photography’.

Like Zylinska and Henning, Yanai Toister’s contribution is also focused on how photography unsettles assumptions about (human) vision. Toister scrutinizes traditional paradigms for understanding photographic seeing from the perspective of non-human sensory processes, notably the echolocation practices of bats and dolphins. Arguing that these practices introduce a paradigm of “active sensing”, he suggests that such engaged, participatory frameworks can provide new relational models for understanding image creation and viewing. This enables them to provide insights into contemporary developments such as the distributed sensing networks being developed and deployed for new purposes such as the operation of autonomous transportation.

Ana Peraica is also concerned with the limits of photographic practice, but in a different way. Beginning with a historical survey exhibitioncalled The Unphotographable (2013) held at the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, she analyses a series of abstract images from the series Scotoma (2014–2018) made by the contemporary Slovenian artist DK. Scotoma is a medical term for ‘blind spot’, while scotomization has been adopted in psychoanalytic theory to describe the defensive avoidance of distressing perceptions. For Peraica, unphotographable images — a term that links failed, impossible and experimental photographs — remain photography’s blind spot and reveal that ‘seeing photographically’ always exists in a dynamic relationship to what is unphotographable.

Finally, in an evocative and idiosyncratic series of reflections, Séan Cubitt reconsiders his concept of the ‘mass image’ (Cubitt, 2020), inspired by a brief note from American documentary photographer Walker Evans in which he described the principles of his practice. From Walker Evans’ injunction that great photographers need to ‘love’ their subjects, Cubitt distils the beginnings of an ecological orientation to images and image making that might inform photography at a time of its profound transformation. As Cubitt suggests, perhaps it is the intransigence of unrequited love that will sustain, renew and transform what it means to see photographically.

* * * *

There’s a long tradition associated with photographers such as Edward Weston and Ansel Adams in which ‘seeing photographically’ has been understood as a mode of envisioning the world as a series of photographs: it is the practical skill of imagining what a scene would look like if it was photographed.^[4] Despite its attractive air of common sense, such an account has always raised more questions than it answered. While no collection could hope to address the full and complex resonances of ‘seeing photographically’ — replete with its ambiguous promise of sensory and cognitive training in the company of ever-shifting machinic-cultural assemblages — we hope this issue offers an expanded frame for understanding what it means in the contemporary conjuncture. The historical trajectories of photography continue to permeate our collective cultural memory in the present. Tracing these contested lineages and lines of force moves us beyond the traditional human limits of visual perception into other realms of sensing — sonic, chemical, machinic, environmental — and asks us to consider what it is to inhabit a milieu that both augments and decentres human sensory perception in radically new ways.

Acknowledgement
The editors would like to thank all the contributors and all the reviewers who offered generous feedback on the articles in this special issue. We would also like to acknowledge the support of the Australia Research Council through DP200102781 Digital photography: mediation, memory and visual communication, and the input of Séan Cubitt and Nikos Papastergiadis who are part of that project along with the editorial team. Our sincere thanks go to Kathryn Shanks for her careful copy-editing, to Jane Birkin for the issue design and to Simon Dawes for embracing this idea.

References

Batchen, G. (1997) Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Bourdieu, P. et al. (1990) Photography: A Middle-Brow Art (trans. S Whiteside). Cambridge: Polity.

Cubitt, S. (2020) ‘The Mass Image’ in Anecdotal Evidence: Ecocritique from Hollywood to the Mass Image. New York: Oxford. University Press, pp.223-268.

Event Horizon Telescope (n.d.) ‘Imaging a Black Hole’. Available at: https://‌eventhorizontelescope.org/science (Accessed: 13 May 2024).

Gernsheim, H. and A. (1968) L.J.M. Daguerre: The History of the Diorama and Daguerreotype. London: Dover Publications.

Manovich, L. (2017) Instagram and Contemporary Image. Available at: http://manovich.net/index.php/projects/instagram-and-contemporary-image (Accessed: 26 February 2024).

Open AI. ‘DALLE-2’, openai. Available at: https://openai.com/index/dall-e-2/ (Accessed: 9 May 2024).

Saharia, C. et al. (n.d.) ‘Imagen’, imagen.research.google. Available at: https://‌imagen.‌research.google/ (Accessed: 9 May 2024).

Smith, R. W. and J. N. Tatarewicz (1985) ‘Replacing a Technology: The Large Space Telescope and CCDs’, Proceedings of the IEEE 73(7): 1221-1235. doi: 10.1109/PROC.1985.13268.

Sunde, E. K. (2024, forthcoming) ‘From Outer Space to Latent Space’, Philosophy of Photography (Special issue: Expanded Visualities: Photography and Emerging Technologies).

Wells, L. (ed.) (1996) Photography: A Critical Introduction. New York: Routledge.

Weston, E. (1980 [1943]) ‘Seeing Photographically’ in A.Trachtenberg (ed.) Classic Essays on Photography. Connecticut: Leete’s Island Books, pp.169-175.

Notes

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[1] The Charge-Coupled Device (CCD) — the first successful imaging technology using a digital sensor — was invented in 1969 by Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith using the photoelectric effect theorized by Albert Einstein, for which he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in 1921. Boyle and Smith would complete the circuit by winning the Nobel Prize for their invention in 2009. In their detailed history of the development of the CCD, Smith and Tatarewicz (1985: 1233) note: “We have seen that the CCDs developed rapidly, and as usual for astronomical detectors, there was the added factor of potentially lucrative commercial and military markets to keep the manufacturers interested, as well as the funding provided by NASA, thereby giving rise to a mix of ‘market pull’ and ‘invention push’.”

[2] See https://www.clearview.ai/clearview-2-0. Accessed: 14 May 2024.

[3] The strike lasted from 14 July to 9 November 2023, and involved members of two unions (Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) who took action against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). The new agreement came into effect towards the end of 2023.

[4] See for example Weston, 1980 [1943].

Scott McQuire is Professor of Media and Communication at the University of Melbourne. He has written or edited nine books, including Visions of Modernity: Representation, Memory, Time and Space in the Age of the Camera (1998), The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space (2008), and Geomedia: Networked Cities and the Future of Public Space (2016).

Email: mcquire@unimelb.edu.au

Jasmin Pfefferkorn is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the School of Culture and Communication at The University of Melbourne. Her research spans museum studies, digital and computational humanities, and visual culture. She is the co-director of the research group CODED AESTHETICS and is on the steering committee of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Ethics’ Art, AI and Digital Ethics research collective.

Email: jasmin.pfefferkorn@unimelb.edu.au

Emilie K. Sunde is a Ph.D. candidate on the Australian Research Council Discovery Project Digital Photography: Mediation, Memory, and Visual Communication at the University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on computational visual culture and the changing ontology of the photographic image. She is the co-director and co-founder of CODED AESTHETICS and part of the Centre for AI and Digital Ethics’s research collective Art, AI, and Digital Ethics.

Email: sundee@unimelb.edu.au

Celia Lury is a Professor in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick. Recent publications include Problem Spaces: How and Why Methodology Matters, Polity, 2020 and Figure: Concept and Method, co-edited with Will Viney and Scott Wark, Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. Her book Prosthetic Culture: Photography, Memory and Identity, Routledge 1997, addressed what it might mean to see photographically before the dawn of the digital. 

Email: c.lury@warwick.ac.uk

Daniel Palmer is a Professor in the School of Art at RMIT University. His books include Installation View: Photography Exhibitions in Australia 1848–2020 (Perimeter Editions, 2021) with Martyn Jolly; Photography and Collaboration: From Conceptual Art to Crowdsourcing (Bloomsbury, 2017); Digital Light (Open Humanities Press, 2015), edited with Séan Cubitt and Nathaniel Tkacz; The Culture of Photography in Public Space (Intellect, 2015), edited with Anne Marsh and Melissa Miles; Twelve Australian Photo Artists (Piper Press, 2009), co-authored with Blair French; and Photogenic (Centre for Contemporary Photography, 2005).

Email: daniel.palmer@rmit.edu.au