Table of Contents
Title page
Copyright page
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Capturing the End of the World
1 Nonhuman Vision
2 The Creative Power of Nonhuman Photography
3 Photography after the Human
4 Photography and Extinction
5 Ecomedia between Extinction and Obsolescence
6 We Have Always Been Digital
Conclusion: Postphotography?
Bibliography
Index
List of Illustrations
Figure 0.1 Four screengrabs by Joanna Zylinska from the Earth Vision Institute’s time-lapse video of the receding Columbia Glacier in Alaska, 2007–2014, http://earthvisioninstitute.org/share-this/columbia-glacier-alaska/.
Figure 1.1 Bird’s-eye view from Dr. Julius Neubronner’s miniature pigeon camera, with the pigeon’s wing tips visible on the edges of the top image, ca. 1908. Public domain.
Figure 1.2 Enhanced version of Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s
View from the Window at Le Gras
, 1826 or 1827. Public domain.
Figure 1.3 Joanna Zylinska,
Park Road
, London, 2011 (developed as part of the “Excavating Utopia” exhibition for the Look2011 Liverpool International Photography Festival). Park Road is the most common street name in the United Kingdom. There are over a dozen Park Roads in London alone: from the leafy and wealthy thoroughfare bordering Regent’s Park in NW1 through to the urban and suburban byways of E10 and SE25. Using Google Street View, I have “visited” these different Park Road locations in order to create a multilayered portrait of the mediated city, always under surveillance. The close-up photographs zoom in on the intimate moments of life as it unfolds on “Park Road, London.”
Figure 1.4 Still from Richard Whitlock,
The Street
, HD video, 2012. Courtesy of the artist.
Figure 1.5 Bonamy Devas, from
Photographic Tai Chi
, 2015. Courtesy of the artist.
Figure 1.6 Fibonacci,
Kanizsa Triangle
. Such “kanizsa figures,” named after researcher Gaetano Kanizsa, trigger “the percept of an illusory contour by aligning Pac-Man-shaped inducers in the visual field, such that the edges form a shape” (“Illusory Contours,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_contours), 2007, license: CC BY-SA 3.0.
Figure 1.7 Joanna Zylinska, from
Active Perceptual Systems
, 2014–2016.
Figure 2.1 Joanna Zylinska, stills from
iEarth
, 2014. For the gif version, see Joanna Zylinska, “iEarth,”
ADA: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology
5 (May 2014), http://adanewmedia.org/2014/07/issue5-zylinska/.
Figure 2.2
Earthrise
(rotated), taken during the Apollo 8 mission, 1968, courtesy of NASA. Public domain.
Figure 2.3
The Blue Marble
, taken during the Apollo 17 mission, 1972, courtesy of NASA. Public domain.
Figure 2.4
The Pale Blue Dot
, taken by the Voyager 1 space probe at the request of astronomer Carl Sagan, 1990, courtesy of NASA, annotated by Joanna Zylinska. Public domain.
Figure 2.5 Véronique Ducharme,
Encounters
, 2012–2013. Courtesy of the artist.
Figure 2.6 Juliet Ferguson,
Stolen Images
, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.
Figure 2.7 Lindsay Seers,
Optogram (mouth camera)
, 2010. Courtesy of the artist.
Figure 3.1 Shane Gorski,
Wasteland
, from the Detroit Public Schools Book Depository set, 2008, Flickr, License: CC BY-ND 2.0.
Figure 3.2 “Ruin Lust,” Tate Britain, March 4 to May 18, 2014, screengrab of Tate website by Joanna Zylinska, 2014.
Figure 3.3 Tong Lam,
An outdated and abandoned theme park in Chengdu, Sichuan Province
, 2013. Reproduced with permission.
Figure 3.4 Dennis Skley,
Time isn`t passing … [Urban Explorer]
, 2012. Flickr, License: CC BY-ND 2.0.
Figure 4.1 Joanna Zylinska, still from
Exit Man
, 2017.
Figure 4.2 Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre,
Shells and Fossils
, 1839. Public domain.
Figure 4.3 Website of Palais de Tokyo promoting Sugimoto’s exhibition, screengrab by Joanna Zylinska, 2015.
Figure 4.4 Alexa Horochowski, from
Club Disminución
, 2014. Image courtesy of the artist.
Figure 4.5 Penelope Umbrico,
Suns (From Sunsets) from Flickr
, 2006–ongoing. Screengrab by Joanna Zylinska, 2015.
Figure 4.6 Joanna Zylinska, still from
Exit Man
, 2017.
Figure 5.1 Pieter Hugo,
Yakubu Al Hasan, Agbogbloshie Market, Accra, Ghana 2009
, C-print. © Pieter Hugo. Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg, and Yossi Milo, New York.
Figure 5.2 Pieter Hugo,
Al Hasan Abukari, Agbogbloshie Market, Accra
, Ghana 2009, C-print. © Pieter Hugo. Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg, and Yossi Milo, New York.
Figure 5.3 Self-portrait in the Small Object Store of the National Media Museum in Bradford, 2016. Photo by Joanna Zylinska.
Figure 5.4 The “Capturing Light” wall in the National Media Museum, Bradford. Photo by Joanna Zylinska.
Figure 5.5 Close-up of the “Capturing Light” wall: a portable reflex camera obscura c. 1800. Photo by Joanna Zylinska.
Figure 5.6 Early cameras on display in the National Media Museum. Photo by Joanna Zylinska.
Figure 5.7 Close-up of a diorama at the National Media Museum, incorporating glass reflections. Photo by Joanna Zylinska.
Figures 5.8 and 5.9 Ominous-looking signs (“Adapt or Die” and “Closed”) in the Kodak Gallery at the National Media Museum, featuring various iterations of the Kodak Brownie. Photos by Joanna Zylinska.
Figure 5.10 Large Object Store, National Media Museum. Photo by Joanna Zylinska.
Figure 5.11 Small Object Store, National Media Museum. Photo by Joanna Zylinska.
Figure 5.12 The exterior of the National Media Museum. Photo by Joanna Zylinska.
Figure 5.13 Joanna Zylinska,
The Vanishing Object of Technology II
, 2012.
Figure 6.1 Joanna Zylinska,
We Have Always Been Digital
, 2009.
Figure 6.2 William Henry Fox Talbot,
Lace
, from
The Pencil of Nature
, 1845. Public domain.
Figure 6.3 William Henry Fox Talbot,
Window in the South Gallery of Lacock Abbey
, made from the oldest photographic negative in existence, 1835. Public domain.
Figure 6.4 Joanna Zylinska,
We Have Always Been Digital II
, 2016.
Figure 6.5 Joanna Zylinska,
We Have Always Been Digital II
, 2016.
Figure 6.6 Turning a page online in
Photomediations: An Open Book
: www.photomediationsopenbook.net. Image featured on the page: Bill Domonkos,
George
, 2014. (Domonkos combined footage from the Prelinger Archive with a photograph from The Library of Congress.) Source: Public Domain Review / The Library of Congress. License: CC BY-SA.
Figure 6.7 Cover of
Photomediations: A Reader
, available as an open access pdf and a printed book, http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/photomediations/.
Figure 6.8 The Ostrich,
Fractal Landscape
, 2002. A fractal landscape randomly generated with a custom-programmed algorithm and rendered using Terragen, Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY 3.0.
Figure 6.9 mikrosopht [deleted],
Glitch 127
, 2007. Glitch image of the body, created by utilizing a temporary browser image caching error, Flickr. License: CC BY 2.0.
Figure 7.1 Unexplained, geometric linear patterns associated with major temples across northwest Cambodia. Imagery consists of airborne laser scanning-derived bare-earth models, overlain by a semitransparent hillshade model, CC BY 4.0. (Evans, “Airborne Laser Scanning.”)
Figure 7.2 Joanna Zylinska, close-up of the installation of Roberto Huarcaya’s
Amazograms—90 meters of Bahuaja Sonene
in the Peruvian pavilion during the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2016.
Figure 7.3 Joanna Zylinska, close-up of the installation of Roberto Huarcaya’s
Amazograms—90 meters of Bahuaja Sonene
in the Peruvian pavilion during the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2016.
Guide
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