This article sets out to substantiate an understanding of the photographic image as a constellation of scaled relations, with a focus on the significance of historically neglected questions of scale in and for the present. It explores two recurrent themes in Walter Benjamin’s writings: his celebrated methodological-epistemological concept of constellation and his less often remarked fascination for relationships of scale, processes of scaling and the scale effects these produce. These are investigated in light of the mutable and composite character of (...) the contemporary photographic image and its unprecedented scale as a mass form. Key phenomena and prevalent conceptions of photography are approached as already structured by intercalated facts, operations and experiences of scale, scaling and scalability. On this basis, a constellation of three historical essays that examine questions of scale in photography is constructed. The guiding aim of this construction is that such a constellation might stand as a pre-history of scale and its significance in and for photography today. (shrink)

Review of: Photography from the Turin Shroud to the Turing Machine, Yanai Toister Bristol and Chicago, IL: Intellect, p/bk, 215 pp., ISBN 978-1-78938-156-6, p/bk, £37.

Review of: Theory of the Image, Thomas Nail New York: Oxford University, 432 pp., ISBN 978-0-19005-008-5, p/bk, £19.99.

Photography has an important place in picturing and documenting environmental changes, especially when they occur in distant areas, or are inaccessible from ground level and/or imperceptible to the naked eye due to their scale. As the invention of photographic technology was officially registered only 55 years after the invention of the steam engine, most subsequent transformations of the environment have been well documented. One needs to distinguish the time of human changes to the environment, the Anthropocene, from images of the (...) era this term names, which are the way humans learn of their own environmental deeds. Such images may be dependent, yet they are also distinct insofar as they influence the perception as well as the production of the Anthropocene itself, framed by limits of the static, fractioned, subjectivized and perspectival medium of photography. In this vein, the article risks proposing yet another in a long series of neologisms that aim to define the unstable or extreme times we live in: the Photographocene. The Photographocene marks various phases of the human relationship to the environment in which photographs have documented, directly communicated and announced impending environmental processes directly caused by human actions. Yet, this is also an era marked by photographic images of the environment that report but also pollute our relationship to the environment by forming an alternate reality. Thus, this concept enables one to articulate the role that images have in our understanding of the past–present–future human impact on the environment. (shrink)

This article suggests that when the engagement with photography is limited to questions of recognition and resemblance, such approach stifles our experience of the world and directs us towards monotonous homogeneity in which everything can be represented in a photograph, and a photograph is always a representation of something or other. And yet, a photograph has the potential to move our gaze beyond representation of events and situations in a way that allows us to penetrate the appearance of things and (...) to sense their inner reality, rather than act as a mere illustration. (shrink)

Photographs and optical images, whatever their contents, are imprints of the electromagnetic waves in the visible range of wavelengths, we refer to as light. Furthermore, they are designed to portray different parts of the visible light in terms of different colours, in analogy with the human eyes, however imperfectly. The world outside our eyes and cameras, however, is permeated by electromagnetic waves with much wider spectrum of wavelengths than those in the visible range. Importantly also, colour is a construct of (...) our eye–brains: the Universe itself has no colour, independently of us. I ask how does the knowledge of these facts change the way we perceive the colour in optical images and photographs, whatever their relationship to the world in a representational sense may be? By employing three images, with very different origins and vistas – one a direct photograph, the other two synthetically constructed images using real cosmological observations – I demonstrate the extent to which colour in such images can hide the underlying phenomena of which they claim to visually speak, both due to its nature as a coarse-grained visual index, and by being restricted to the visible range. The aim is not to belittle the important role that our vision together with our perception of colour have played in the evolution of our species, and still play in the way we relate to the world informationally, aesthetically and emotionally. But rather to show that recognizing the limitations of our vision and complementing it with the knowledge of the phenomena underlying optical images and photographs can allow us to perceive them anew and provide additional tools to imagine and envision such images outside the bounds of the visible range and colour. (shrink)

Review of: Documents of Doubt: The Photographic Conditions of Conceptual Art, Heather Diack Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 296 pp., ISBN 978-1-51790-757-0, p/bk, $30.00.

This article examines the belated reception and occlusion of the photographic work of Roy DeCarava by evaluating two recent publications: The Sound I Saw: Improvisations on a Jazz Theme and Light Break. In the article, I attend to the ways in which DeCarava’s closely cropped photographs delve into the sensual, private textures of everyday life but also track as well the collective anguish and social discontent that still burns on today.

In this essay I want to take some metaphors seriously. I want to push at their limits and ask whether this exercise can help us think differently about photographs and their relationship to what they depict. (Should it be ‘what they depict’ or ‘what they are seen as depicting’? The choice of phrasing depends on theoretical position: is depiction inherent in the image, or is it seen by the viewer?). The moel of citationality based on Cadava’s work is developed by (...) exploring in more detail the variety of bibliographic ciataions. (shrink)