Photography Off the Scale

Reviews / Votes

The breadth of the research is extraordinary. The contributors to the book scrutinise the mundane and the exceptional, the terrestrial and the vernacular, the obsolete and the futuristic. Photography Off the Scale made me revisit everything I thought I knew about big data, digital culture, automated systems, data visualisation and new forms of creativity. * We Make Money Not Art * Among the many fundamental changes taking place in contemporary photography and media culture, probably the most important are changes in scale. The new magnitude of image production, the instant global dissemination of billions of new images, and the adoption of AI that turns these images into big data are only some examples of how the visual has been 'scaled up' in the 21st century. Now we finally have a first book that rethinks the history and theory of photography through the lens of scale - and connects this concept to a range of others including measure, politics, gender, subjectivity and aesthetics. -- Lev Manovich, City University of New York This book's refreshing and much needed take on photography cuts through the infoglut and explores the apparatus, infrastructure, and operations of contemporary pictures. Addressing everything from snapshots to machine vision, Photography Off the Scale unfurls a vital field of technology, politics and aesthetics reshaping the world. -- Lisa Parks, University of California-Santa Barbara Someone takes a picture somewhere in the world. Such a trivial action is multiplied by a trillion. Or much more, since the majority of pictures today are produced by machines for machines. This collection of essays brilliantly explores the unheard-of effects of scale on the ontology of photography and it touches upon the sublime of the infinity of digital images. -- Peter Szendy, Brown University