Photography Off the Scale

Tomáš Dvořák is Assistant Professor in the Department of Photography at FAMU in Prague. He studied philosophy, art history, media studies and sociology at Charles University in Prague and The Graduate Center, City University of New York. His research focuses on philosophy and history of media and philosophy and history of science, and the interrelations between these fields, especially media archaeology of science and knowledge. He has authored or co-authored a number of books in Czech: Epistemology of (New) Media(NAMU 2018), Photography, Sculpture, Object(NAMU 2017), Temporality of (New) Media (NAMU 2016), Contemporary Approaches in Historical Epistemology (Filosofia 2013), Chapters from the History and Theory of Media (AVU 2010), and Waste Management: Texts, Images and Sounds of Recent History (Filosofia 2009). Jussi Parikka is Professor in Digital Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University. He is also Visiting Professor at FAMU at the Academy of Performing Arts, Prague where he leads the project Operational Images and Visual Culture. He is the series co-editor with Ryan Bishop for Technicities (Edinburgh University Press). His co-edited volume Photography off the Scale (2021) was also published by Edinburgh University Press. Parikka is the research director for the project Operative Images (2019-2023), funded by Czech Science Academy.

• Introduction: On the Scale, Quantity and Measure of ImagesJussi Parikka & Tomáš DvořákPart I: Scale, Measure, Experience1. The Mass Image, the Anthropocene Image, the Image CommonsSean Cubitt2. Beyond Human Measure: Eccentric Metrics in Visual CultureTomáš Dvořák3. Living with the Excessive Scale of Contemporary PhotographyAndrew Fisher4. Feeling Photos: Photography, Picture Language and Mood CaptureMichelle Henning5. Online Weak and Poor Images: On Contemporary Feminist Visual PoliticsTereza StejskalováPart II: Metapictures and Remediations6. Photography’s Mise en Abyme: Metapictures of Scale in Repurposed Slide LibrariesAnnebella Pollen7. The Failed Photographs of Photography: On the Analogue and Slow Photography MovementMichal Šimůnek8. Strangely Unique: Pictorial Aesthetics in the Age of Image AbundanceJosef LedvinaPart III: Models, Scans and AI9. On Seeing Where There’s Nothing to See: Practices of Light Beyond PhotographyJussi Parikka10. Planetary Diagrams: Towards an Autographic Theory of Climate EmergencyLukáš Likavčan & Paul Heinicker11. Undigital Photography: Image-Making Beyond Computation and AIJoanna Zylinska12. Coda: Photography in the Age of MassificationJoan Fontcuberta & Geoffrey Batchen

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.