While digital photography employs the building blocks of data—zeroes and ones—to form its images, unlike film photography, which employs the alchemy of light and chemicals, the fields of data and photography share a long history that goes back to the dawn of the photographic medium.
According to Jessica D. Brier and Anna Mayer, curators of “Photography as Data: Augmentation, Extraction, and Objectification,” photography has always served as a technology for the augmentation of reality, allowing the human eye to overcome the limitations of vision, and for the extraction of information about people, places, and cultures that are rendered objects of study and consumption.
Using images drawn from the extensive photography collection at the Lehman Loeb Art Center, including early collotypes by Eadweard Muybridge, the exhibition explores the ways in which photography has been read, used, and manipulated as data—quantifiable, measurable “information” about the world. On view through September 15 at the Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie.
Ears, Athena Tacha, 40 chromogenic prints, trimmed, glued to rag board, 1970-1975. From “Photography as Data” at the Lehman Loeb Art Center, through September 15.
This article appears in June 2024.
