This book wants to view photography as part of the expanded field of image technologies, operating at a planetary scale where data and the algorithm play an increasingly infrastructural hand. The book proposes that the exponential increase in the quantity of photographic images, uploaded, shared, stored in databases, and operationalized in automated computational systems requires a radically new way of thinking about contemporary photography and visual culture. In setting out to address this situation, the editors suggest that the question of scale and the related concepts of measure and quantity are pivotal in reaching new understandings of what images do. The book aims to ground scale in terms of political agency to bring aesthetic discourse into closer dialogue with developments in media and cultural theory. As such, the book is a welcome and timely contribution to current debates across art, media, and cultural studies in considering not only the fate...
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November 1, 2021
Book Review|
November 01 2021
The Persistence of Photography
Photography off the Scale: Technologies and Theories of the Mass Image
, edited by Dvorák, Tomáš and Parikka, Jussi, Edinburgh
: Edinburgh University Press
, 2021
, 288
pages, £88.93 (hardback), ISBN 10-1474478816, £18.54 (paperback), ISBN 13-978-1474478823.Cultural Politics (2021) 17 (3): 362–364.
Citation
Andrew Dewdney; The Persistence of Photography. Cultural Politics 1 November 2021; 17 (3): 362–364. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-9305433
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