This series of images forms part of the ongoing project Soft Ground, Hard Light, which speculates on a multiscalar spatial ontology of photography emanating from the Arditurri silver mine complex in the Basque Country. Evoking the mountainous massif around Arditurri where silver ore and galena have been extracted since Roman presence in the area, the depicted topographies are, in fact, data transcriptions from atomic force microscopy (AFM) probing the analogue film stock of an early 1930s experiment in 3D cinema, Cine (...) en Relieve, by the Basque cinematographer Teófilo Mingueza. In contrast to optical or electron microscopy, AFM uses a scanning probe to physically touch the specimen, recording its surface undulations at the atomic scale of a nanometre, or a billionth of a metre. As a haptic operation based on direct contact between instrument and sample, between apparatus and referent, AFM is literally a contact print, a ‘blind’ scan that senses not the visual content of the recorded image but ‘feels’ its underlying material substrate of silver nanoparticles within the 35 mm film emulsion. The resulting image assemblies visualize a topography resulting from the intra-action between the silver nanoparticles and the scanning probe as much as its transcription through the particular parameters afforded by the AFM analysis software. Hard Light, Soft Ground was initiated during an artist’s residency at Tabakalera Centre for Contemporary Culture, Donostia-San Sebastián, and is currently in production as part of the wider research project Esper Syndrome: Archaeotopologies of the Image at the Royal College of Art, funded by the AHRC through the London Arts & Humanities Partnership. With additional thanks to the Basque Film Archive and Gustavo Ariel Schwartz at the Materials Physics Centre, Donostia-San Sebastián. (shrink)

This article discusses the 2019 Event Horizon Telescope image of a black hole as an ontological question for photography, contrasting its spatially distributed operations as a planetary apparatus against its temporal inscriptions of successive histories of scientific realisms following Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison. The 'becoming photographic' of this image, this text argues, hinges on the distance it traverses from its scientific milieu to its vernacular reception, making visible the cultural calibrations that produce a consensually legible image.

This roundtable discussion is based on an online symposium – The Promise of Photography: Scale, Measure and Proportion in a Conflicted Visual Milieu – which took place on 17 September 2021. Since its inception, photography has promised to set things to scale, to grant them measure and proportion, a series of promises that have also entailed moments of irrationality or conflict that persist in and continue to shape the era of global networked digital imaging technologies. The symposium started out from (...) the diagnosis that, whilst photography continues to promise an ordered, proportionate and measured world in which things can be set to their proper scale, it also acts in many ways as an agent of dismeasure, disproportion and the unscalable. In light of this, the roundtable discussion presented here examines a range of different meanings that scale, measure and proportion have accrued in the photographic context and sets out to explore conceptual frameworks and research methodologies through which the current situation might be understood. (shrink)

As a process distinct from its poured cousin, sprayed concrete involves using compressed air to propel cement with various chemical admixtures at a surface. Used in tunnelling for rock surface stabilization, and above ground for securing slopes and fabricating fake rockeries, its chimeric character ranges from the polished landscapes of skateparks and swimming pools to mimicking cast concrete in structural repair work. The origins of this industrial process lie with taxidermist Carl E. Akeley (1864–1926), who invented it during his pioneering (...) work in the proto-photographic field of natural habitat dioramas at the Chicago Field Museum in 1907. Further cementing André Bazin’s notion of photography as embalmment, Akeley also invented a unique 35mm cine camera during his time at the American Museum of Natural History, New York. The essay explores this historical intersection between photography, taxidermy and architecture, and its wider implications for thinking through photography’s material contingency. (shrink)