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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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Notes
1. See e.g. Ernst, Chronopoetics.
2. See Daston and Galison, Objectivity.
3. Maynard, “Photo Mensura,” 47.
4. See e.g. Canales, A Tenth of a Second.
5. Wilder, Photography and Science, 34.
6. Ibid., 41.
7. See Albertz, “140 years of ‘Photogrammetry’”; and Laussedat, Recherches sur les instruments.
8. Cubitt, The Practice of Light, 108.
9. Macho, quoted in Siegert, Cultural Techniques, 11.
10. Vismann, “Cultural Techniques and Sovereignty,” 84.
11. See Young, List Cultures.
12. See e.g. Beer, Metric Power; Lupton, Quantified Self; and Mau, Metric Society.
13. Carnap, Philosophical Foundations of Physics, 51–121.
14. Berka, Measurement, 2.
15. Gal and Chen-Morris, “Empiricism without the Senses.”
16. Maynard, “Photo Mensura,” 41.
17. Cusanus, “The Layman on Experiments,” 606.
18. Ibid., 608.
19. Ibid., 624.
20. See Flusser, From Subject to Project.
21. On the Cusanus—Alberti relationship see also Harries, “On the Power and Poverty of Perspective”; and Carman, Leon Battista Alberti and Nicholas Cusanus.
22. Alberti, On Painting, 38.
23. Snyder, “Picturing Vision,” 241.
24. Baxandall, Painting and Experience, 87–8.
25. Crosby, Measure of Reality, 196.
26. Wise, Values of Precision, 8–9.
27. See e.g. Snyder, “Picturing Vision.”
28. Kuhn, “Measured Appearances,” 117.
29. Ibid., 116.
30. Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 223.
31. Sekula, “The Traffic in Photographs,” 23. For a thorough treatment of the subject see Henning, Photography, 105–26.
32. Dvořák, “Beyond Human Measure.”
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Tomáš Dvořák
Tomáš Dvořák is Assistant Professor in the Department of Photography at FAMU in Prague. His research focuses on theory and history of photography, media and visual culture. He recently co-edited, with Jussi Parikka, Photography Off the Scale: Technologies and Theories of the Mass Image (Edinburgh University Press, 2021).
Jussi Parikka
Jussi Parikka is Visiting Professor in the Department of Photography at FAMU in Prague as well as Professor of Technological Culture and Aesthetics at University of Southampton, UK. In addition to the just published co-edited volume Photography Off the Scale: Technologies and Theories of the Mass Image (Edinburgh University Press, 2021 with Tomáš Dvořák), his forthcoming books include The Lab Book (University of Minnesota Press, co-authored with Lori Emerson and Darren Wershler). He is currently writing a new book on Operational Images.