Hackers and coders versus viewers

ǂthe ǂstakes of photography in an era of image massification

Abstract

The book Photography Off the Scale: Technologies and Theories of the Mass Image is, first of all, about quantities. Those with memories of pre-smartphone years may suspect that the images of this world have increased in number. Perhaps fewer, however, are aware of just how much. Among the first things we learn in this book is that, in 2018, over 30 million images were uploaded to Twitter, 52 million to Instagram, and 350 million to Facebook — daily (25). For someone who makes a handful of uploads a week, this was news. Who could possibly be looking at them? It turns out, no one. Even if everyone on Earth spent eight hours scrolling through images, they would not all get seen (25). The quantities are just too large. This book claims that the now unconscionable scale at which images circulate and are produced is because they are actually no longer tailored to the human. Interrogating an optics of “ec- centric metrics” (Dvořák), the book tackles one of the liveliest issues in image studies, media studies, and art history today — machine vision, or the vision of the human eye as it is extended by technical apparatuses. It is this seeing “by other means” that the book alleges has thrown the number of images “off the scale.”

Keywords

history of photography;digital humanities;art history;

Data

Language:	English
Year of publishing:	2021
Typology:	1.19 - Review, Book Review, Critique
Organization:	UNG - University of Nova Gorica
UDC:	7
COBISS:	109741571
ISSN:	0862-397X
Views:	645
Downloads:	0
Average score:	0 (0 votes)
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