Photography of the Scale

Display Schedule

Subject guarantor

Tomáš DVOŘÁK

Name of lecturer(s)

Tomáš DVOŘÁK

Learning outcomes of the course unit

Students will take part in an academic conference – they will become acquainted with the formats of scholarly presentations and discussions and will be introduced to current issues in photography and media research.

Mode of study

Photography Off the Scale

FAMU in Prague, 9–10 November 2018

Smetanovo nábřeží 2, Praha 1, room U1

Friday, 9 November, 13:00–18:30

Tomáš Dvořák (FAMU in Prague)

Introduction

Michelle Henning (London School of Film, Media and Design, University of West London)

Feeling photos: photography, picture language and mood capture

Joshua Kurz (National University of Singapore)

Excessive images, incomprehensible archives: street photography and social media

Katarína Mašterová (Institute of Art History, Czech Academy of Sciences)

Volume of photographer’s archive: from quality to quantity (the Sudek’s case)

Annebella Pollen (University of Brighton)

The mirror in the archive: photography’s mise en abyme

Lisa McCarty (Duke University)

Photosites

Saturday, 10 November, 10:00–15:30

Joanna Zylinska (Goldsmith, University of London)

Undigital photography

John Hillman (Birmingham City University)

De-materialised desire

Qiao Chu Lin, Paul Heinicker, Daria Stupina, Lukáš Likavčan

alt'ai – designing machine-to-machine interfaces for automated landscapes

Rowan Lear (London School of Film, Media and Design, University of West London)

Force of habit: automation and sensory circuits in the photographing body

Andrew Fisher (Goldsmith, University of London)

On the excessive scale of contemporary photographic image

Jussi Parikka (Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton)

Closing remarks

Prerequisites and co-requisites

none

Course contents

The conference seeks to address the ever-growing number of cameras and images and the techniques and approaches, both artistic and scholarly, of coping with the large-scale, gigantic and incalculable in photography.

We have become accustomed to speaking of photography in terms of deluge, flow, overload, multiplicity, multitude or excess; using liquid metaphors, projections of exponential growth and various gargantuan measures that exceed not only singular images but also their series, archives or databases. The photographic gesture seems to be no longer one of pressing the shutter but rather the instantaneous uploading, searching, tagging, sharing, networking and filtering of masses of images. At the same time, the images don’t seem to represent or mediate anymore but rather operate, track, activate, oversee, control, detect and identify. Most contemporary accounts seem to suggest some kind of Hegelian phase transition – a becoming-other of photography, its breaking off and a leap from quantitative into qualitative alteration.

“Around sixty billion photographs are taken every year,” claimed Julian Stallabrass in 1996; Joan Fontcuberta updated the figures recently: “800 million images are uploaded to Snapchat every day, together with 350 million to Facebook and 80 million to Instagram.” “This year, people will take about a trillion photos, and for many of us, that means a digital photo gallery filled with images that we won’t actually look at,” claims Josh Lovejoy at the presentation of Google Clips, a hands-free AI-powered camera, which automatically recognizes and captures memorable moments without human intervention.

What kind of entity is “about a trillion photos”? What kind of perceiver does it presuppose? Do such vertiginous quantifications imply something about the changing nature of photography and, if so, in what sense? What happens to images when the displays are turned off? Are we producing streams of redundant images just to train machines to see?

Recommended or required reading

Joanna Zylinska, Nonhuman Photography. MIT Press 2017.

Michelle Henning. Photography: The Unfettered Image. Routledge 2018.

Assessment methods and criteria

attending both conference days and writing a 1-page critical review (must be sent to tomdvorak@famu.cz by November 19, 2018)

Note

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Further information

This course is an elective for all students of this school

Schedule for winter semester 2018/2019:

Schedule for summer semester 2018/2019:

The schedule has not yet been prepared

The subject is a part of the following study plans

• Photography CZ - Bachelor - 1819 (optional subject)
• Photography CZ - Master - 1819 (optional subject)
• Photography CZ - Master - 1819 (optional subject)
• Photography EN - Bachelor-1819 (optional subject)
• Photography EN - Master-1819 (optional subject)