Seeing Photographically

Abstract

This Introduction to the ‘Seeing photographically’ special issue begins with four vignettes drawn from (nearly) two centuries of photographic history. These examples are leveraged to pose critical questions about photography’s transformation since the 19th century, and especially in the first decades of the 21st century, as trajectories associated with digitization, networked distribution, the widespread integration of cameras into mobile devices and the growing application of machine-learning to image-making have all taken hold. Photography has never been more widespread, but its boundaries and specificity seem to have become less and less certain. Beginning from the premise that ‘technological change’ is never simply technological, this issue challenged authors to respond to the theme of ‘seeing photographically’. Their responses clustered around a set of intersecting problematics: the impact of ‘generative AI’ on the photographic field; the way that photography has consistently challenged the (often unconscious) human-centrism of most accounts of perception and seeing; and the challenges associated with theorizing photography as media in the present.

Keywords

• Photography
• technological change
• machine learning
• generative AI
• other-than-human sensing