Research

Research

Photography Uncertain: Rethinking Photography through Information

In my doctoral dissertation, I contend that thinking about photography in terms of excess or “too much” positions photography as a problem to solve, rather than recognizing abundance as a condition of its existence. Photography is always already abundant. Drawing on information theory, I refigure photographic abundance through entropy, redundancy, and noise to demonstrate the material, temporal-spatial, and meaningful abundance of photography. I suggest we can look to photography as a pre-history of the Information Age insofar as the invention of photography and its subsequent rapid adoption produced a distinct epistemology because of how cameras produce, record, and store information. Thus, rethinking photography in informational terms provides an avenue to push back against claims that the plethora of images in modern life is inherently problematic. I argue that this abundance is symptomatic of modernity and not distinct to images, but rather the product of an increasingly informationalized modern subject.

Light Sensitive Materials: A History of Charged-Couple Device Sensors and The Dawn of Digital Photography

My postdoctoral project develops a media history of digital photography that focuses on the sensors that convert light into electrons. The purpose of this project is to conduct archival research and write a book-length manuscript that provides an account of digital photography that foregrounds the sensors that make digital imaging possible. As described by the Nobel Prize in Physics 2009 press release: “The CCD is the digital camera’s electronic eye. It revolutionized photography, as light could [now] be captured electronically instead of on film.” Foundational to the development of digital photography, charged-couple device sensors convert light into electrons, read the accumulated charge, and converts this to binary form that can then be read by a processor as a digital image. This project will answer the following questions: What do we learn by reorienting the history of digital photography around the first sensors to turn light into electricity? How can an elemental approach to media enhance our current conceptions of digital photography and its ubiquity? If we begin by looking at the constitutive elements that are required to produce a digital image, can that tell us something about what digital photographs are? This postdoctoral project builds on my doctoral research in demonstrating that how the digital camera works is significant to understanding the distinct ontological and epistemological consequences of digital photography within the larger history of photography’s informational significance.

Technically Copies: The Digital Production of Art, Heritage and Culture

This is part of an ongoing collaboration with Sarah EK Smith. In this project, we develop three major strands. First, the history of Google Arts and Culture. Through interviews and textual analysis, we address the history of Google Arts and Culture, its connection to other Google initiatives and the legacy of the idea of “making art accessible” that exists beyond and before Google in other cultural institutions like the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Council of Museums (ICOM). The second strand is a typology of the platform Google Arts and Culture. Using the walkthrough method categorize what the site contains, how it works, what it allows for (such as a customizable experience of art; widespread access) and what both traditional and non-traditional modes of engagement with fine art. Finally, how Google Arts and Culture contributes to cultural preservation of both historical artifacts and both historic and contemporary artworks. We look at the selection criteria for what museums are included in partnership, and how objects are selected to be included in Google Arts and Culture’s online repository. We also examine how these objects are preserved, focusing on Google Arts and Culture’s innovation in photographing objects at a size and scale to allow for surface detail to be observed through their Art Camera, their Tabletop scanners for smaller artworks, and their 360-degree options to engage with landmark museum spaces.

Through this project we draw historical connections to other global organizations, like UNESCO, that have decided what “counts” as art, and what art gets preserved under these initiatives. This work challenges narratives and conservation practices that center Western ideas of art and cultural preservation. This project is an extension of work Dr. Smith and I have done on the idea of the copy in historical examples of art and cultural exchange. Digital production allows for endless reproduction, raising the issue of ubiquity and excess. The copy is seen as problematic given the possibility of endless reproduction. Exploring the issues raised by the copy, we push back on dominant understandings that position technological reproduction as “less than.” Instead, we draw on critical scholarship about copies to suggest the political work and potential of reproductions.

Producing Visual Culture: From Emoji to Mars

As a visual culture researcher, my focus is how visual culture is produced, highlighting the technical modes that create visual materials but also the ways in which these materials are taken up and form common ideas and understandings.

While much of my focus has been on how photography specifically has been used in the production of visual cultures this strand of my research also includes other forms of visual culture such as emoji and technical images. Previous work has included a project on the technical history and political economy of emoji and how decisions are made about what emoji get made. Work from this project has been published with First Monday here. Current projects look at the visual imaginary of Mars produced through visual simile, and the connections between the first images of Mars and the first images of black holes.