https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1327-6404
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Abstract
How can professional photography continue to exist in an age of machine vision? As this article suggests, computational photography destabilizes the ideology of professional photographic distinctiveness, expertise, agency and creativity. In an era characterized by constant instability due to technological developments, changes to photographer’s professional habitus are expected. While these changes are connected to technical modifications in professional tools, they can deeply challenge the identities of practitioners, their perception of photography’s fluctuating affordances, their own roles in image-production, and even the distinctiveness of the medium itself. Professional photography is thus a powerful signifier of the photographic medium and a key arena for understanding the social meaning of the automation of vision across the entire photographic field. Drawing upon interviews with professional photographers who use Structure from Motion, this article propose a new emerging professional identity adapted to this situation: ‘the computational photographer’. For such a photographer the automation of photographic processes necessitates a shift in the site of identity-construction and expertise, away from image-production itself and towards the sphere of distribution on professionally oriented digital platforms. I argue that the advent of the 'computational photographer' indicates that automation processes and practices of technological embodiment influence the habitus of professional photographers.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Ethics approval
All interviews were conducted under the guidance of the Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Approval number 620,119
Notes
1. Manovich, “The Automation of Sight.”
2. Taffel, “Google’s Lens: Computational Photography.”
3. Frosh, The Image Factory.
4. Bourdieu, Outline of a theory.
5. Lindsey, “A Culture of Texts”; Gillies, “Mobile Photography”; Tifentale and Manovich, “Competitive Photography”; and Henning, “IMAGE FLOW.”
6. This is with the significant exception of photojournalism (Hadland, Lambert, and Campbell, “The Future of Professional Photojournalism”; Lehmuskallio, Häkkinen, and Seppänen, “Photorealistic Computer-Generated Images”; Mäenpää and Seppänen, “Imaginary Darkroom: Digital Photo”; and Solaroli, “Toward a new visual”) and, to a far lesser degree, stock photography (Frosh, The Image Factory).
7. There is a third category located in between the amateur and professional photographer, the photographic hobbyist, who also uses professional equipment. Photographic hobbyists are, however, differentiated from professional photographers through their lack of economic dependence (for the hobbyist, photography is not the main source of income) and, at times, of formal training.
8. Frosh, “Photography as a Cultural”; Borges-Rey, “News Images on Instagram”; and Veer, “Everyone’s a Photographer.”
9. Taffel, “Google’s Lens: Computational Photography,” 3.
10. Lien, “Buying an Instrument,” 133.
11. Gómez Cruz and Meyer, “Creation and Control.”
12. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations.
13. Gómez Cruz and Lehmuskallio, Digital Photography and Everyday; and Palmer, “Redundant Photographs: Cameras, Software.”
14. Frosh, “Photography as a Cultural Industry.”
15. Ibid., 266.
16. Ibid.
17. Ribak and Leshnick, “A Powerful, Spiritual.”
18. Lister, The Photographic Image.
19. Taffel, “Google’s Lens: Computational Photography,” 10.
20. Uricchio, “The Algorithmic Turn,” 26.
21. Lehmuskallio, “The Camera as a Meeting,” 24.
22. Lehmuskallio was clearly referring to algorithms as computational systems.
23. Ibid.
24. Uricchio, “The Algorithmic Turn.”
25. Rubinstein and Sluis, “The Digital Image.”
26. Ibid., 24.
27. Lister, The Photographic Image, 12.
28. Ansel Adams, The Print.
29. Toister, Photography From the Turin, 185.
30. Bate, “The Digital Condition,” 81.
31. Uricchio, “The Algorithmic Turn”; Rubinstein and Sluis, “The Digital Image”; and Palmer, “The Rhetoric of.”
32. Osborne, “Infinite Exchange: The Social.”
33. Zhang, “Algorithmic Photography: A Case”; and Hristova, “Traces: Photographic Negatives.”
34. McKim, “Oscillons and Cathode Rays.”
35. Ibid., 473.
36. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, 35.
37. Taffel, “Google’s Lens: Computational Photography,” 16.
38. Ibid.
39. Manovich, The Language of New.
40. Toister, Photography From the Turin, 145.
41. Solaroli, “Toward a new visual,” 522.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid., 519.
44. Palmer, “The Rhetoric of the.”
45. Adobe digital negative files.
46. Ibid., 155.
47. Rubinstein, “Digital Image.”
48. Bolter and Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media.
49. According to Adobe, the DNG format is ‘an archive format that meets the criteria for long-term file preservation that will enable future generations to access and read the DNG raw data’ (Evening 2016). The company’s long-term commitment not to abandon the DNG format derives from the industry’s practical concern regarding the lifespan of digital file formats. In contrast to the material permanence of analog film and prints, digital media depend on constant maintenance by the commercial companies that created them. The commitment of the DNG format to become archival is based on the two-step process, much like the analog negative which enables the file to be ‘developed’ in the future in an alternative way.
50. Albertz, “Albrecht Meydenbauer-Pioneer of.”
51. Schonberger and Frahm, ‘Structure-From-Motion Revisited.”
52. Veer, “Everyone’s a Photographer”; Borges-Rey, “News Images on Instagram”; Frosh, The Image Factory; Rosenblum, Photographers at Work.
53. Taffel, “Google’s Lens: Computational Photography,” 8.
54. Andrejevic, Automated Media. 10.
55. Altaratz and Frosh, “Sentient Photography: Image-Production.”
57. Rushkoff, Team Human, 37.
58. Bourdieu, “Distinction: A Social Critique.”
59. Rushkoff, Team Human.
60. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, 32.
61. Taffel, “Google’s Lens: Computational Photography,” 9.
62. Eastwood et al., “Autonomous Close-Range Photogrammetry.”
63. Altaratz and Frosh, “Sentient photography: image-production.”
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Doron Altaratz
Doron Altaratz is an academic researcher with a diverse practical background in the creative industries. His research interests include media critique and human-computer interaction, specifically concerning the automation of creative processes in computational photography. Doron holds a PhD in communications studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an M.P.S. in interactive telecommunications from New York University.