As a child, I would sit on the balcony of our Dhaka apartment overlooking the pond and look through photo albums of our two families. After the 1971 Bangladesh liberation war, film was scarce and our cameras broke down. With no place to repair or buy film, we haven’t had a single more family photo in nearly a decade. No pictures of me until I was 8 years old.
The tiny, jewel-like black-and-white prints of my parents and brother are shards of my history that, as curator Glen Helfand put it, “captured a fraction of a second of activity and fueled those stories told for generations”. These images are ingrained in my soul, preserved as evidence of my family’s stories from before I was born, and now on my children’s iPhones.
On that balcony by the pond, I could clearly see what the photographs were. Then I would be taught the technical language for those images: the two-way registration of light on a cellulose negative, which is then printed on halide foil. However, 25 years later, sitting in my studio surrounded by thermal cameras, 3D printers, 3D printers, and AI software, I am no longer so sure.
Much of today’s photographic theory and criticism still actively debates the past, with little consideration of what is to come. For example, the 2017 exhibition of American artist Trevor Paglen “Research on invisible images“Surveyed “machine vision”—machine-generated images for use by other machines, such as facial recognition systems. Jerry Saltz, senior art critic for New York magazine, declaring the work to be “formalism of the concept of zombies“Based on “trousers lingo”, rather than taking seriously the implication of his work. When it comes to theory, a large part Photography theory, a 451-page book commonly used for teaching, focuses on the argument for uncertainty, the idea that photography leaves a physical trace of the subject being photographed. This is questionable in analog photography but not at all in digital photography, unless the information is considered a trace. Again, the book says nothing about new or emerging technologies and how it affects photography.
Evolving technologies affect every step of the photo production process, and photographers are using them to question the very definition of photography. Is a photograph a photograph when it only captures light? Is it when it’s printed out physically? Is it when the image is 2D? Is it when it’s not interactive? Is it object or information? Or is it something else?
Going digital
Photography — from the Greek are from Photograph and graphos, which means “painting with light”—started in the 19th century by capturing light from objects onto a chemically coated medium, such as paper or a polishing pad. This evolved with the use of negatives, allowing one person to create multiple prints. The capture, processing, and printing production steps involve starting and stopping chemical reactions on the printing paper and negatives.
With analog photography, chemistry directly captures physical reality in front of the camera. With digital photography, however, imaging involves counting the number of photons of light that hit each sensor pixel, using computers to process the information, and in the case of color sensors, performing calculations. Deeper math to determine color. Only the digitized bits of information are recorded — no surface leaves a physical trace. Because data is much easier to process and manipulate than chemicals, digital photography allows for a greater variety and flexibility of image manipulation. Film theorist Mary Ann Doane has said that digital represents “a vision (or nightmare) of a non-physical medium, of pure abstraction embodied in a sequence of numbers.” 0 and 1, code. Even light, the most important part of matter, is converted to digital form in digital cameras. “
Photography is growing
Analogue photography is taken “Active light”, a narrow segment of the electromagnetic spectrum that is visible to the naked eye and can cause photochemical reactions. Over time, photographers have extended this range beyond optics to create images from infrared, X-ray, and other parts of the spectrum, such as thermography.
Irish photographer Richard Mosse uses the camera to capture contours with heat rather than light. Traditionally used in military surveillance, this camera allows him to take pictures of what we can’t see — it can detect people at night or through tents, up to 18 miles away. In 2015, Mosse produced a research group on the refugee crisis called “Heat map,” Capturing what art critic Sean O’Hagan calls “the white anguish of the migrant crisis,” presents monochrome photographs with shimmering landscapes and ghostly figures. Unlike light, heat signals cannot distinguish facial features, so converting human figures into statistics without faces represents how immigrants are typically treated.
Any form of information can be collected for photography. The artists worked with other inputs such as audio signals, matter particles such as electrons, and other waveforms. American artist Robert Dash uses an electron microscope, which uses matter waves rather than light waves, to create very high magnification images of natural objects, such as pollen or The seed was found in the property where he lived. He then montages these images with life-size images of the same objects, creating a microscopic, surreal world. The first time I saw these pictures, my eyes are scanning for any signs in the landscape that could help locate the photo that may have been taken, but to no avail.
Image processing is evolving
Image processing, the traditional way performed during the printing process, is any type of manipulation to produce the final image, from darkening the sky in a landscape photo to using Instagram filters or retouching in Adobe Photoshop. Recent documentaries Black Hole | The edge of all we know show an enhanced version of digital image processing. The documentary explores the process of creating the first photograph of a black hole, which took 250 people about a decade to make.
The researchers built the image by combining calculations with radio frequency data collected over the years, using a new mathematical model, from many observatories around the world. The image shows a band of light around the supermassive black hole at the center of galaxy M87. It continues the tradition of photography that extends beyond human perception, revealing previously unseen dimensions of reality and encoding it into tangible knowledge, as Eadweard Muybridge did 150 years ago with his pioneering work using photography to study motion.
With the development of artificial intelligence, the image processing step can go further. For example, Paglen create portraits of people by generating facial recognition models of its collaborators, then using the second model to generate random images using polygons to fool the first model into thinking it was a portrait. Then, as Paglen explains, “these two programs iterate until an image ‘evolves’ that the facial recognition model identifies as representative of that particular person.” This process creates produces a haunting portrait of what the machine sees.
