Brooke Belisle

The “depth effect” feature of the “portrait” mode available on many smartphone cameras has been advertised as making it easier to take good photographs, helping the photographer to focus on what’s important and eliminate distractions from the scene. “Depth effect” features work by relying on the dual, or now often triple, apertures of contemporary cameraphones. The camera captures multiple exposures from its multiple apertures, and algorithms compare relationships between pixels across the different ‘takes’ to map multiple planes of depth. Object-recognition algorithms that have been taught to identify which pixels of an image are a person’s face, and which other pixels might be ‘part’ of that person, associate the ‘subject’ of the photograph with a particular plane of the image. Image correction algorithms then adjust the focus of the image to sharpen the plane of the subject and proportionally blur everything else. In practice this means people show up as what matters, unique individuals against a general backdrop, the world fading away around them.

In some ways, smartphone camera “depth effects” computationally reinvent 19th century stereoscopic photography, which, notably, was not especially used for portraiture. People most often show up in stereographs as figures in the distance (markers for scale) or as part of a theatrical tableau. When a person is the explicit subject of a view, they are less often “portrayed” than displayed as a specimen, labeled as an example of an ethnic type. The degree to which stereoscopic photography seemed fit or unfit for portraiture communicates about the formal and phenomenological conditions of the encounter it seemed to stage between the one looking, the one looked at, and the world they did or did not seem to share.

In this talk, I explore the relationship between portraiture and “depth effects” by comparing the practices and possible implications of stereoscopic processes from two very different periods of photography. On the one hand, the objectifying gaze associated with stereographic images seems to underwrite the algorithmic processes that rationalize subject-object relationships in computational photography. On the other hand, however, the way that stereographs stage a dynamic and embodied engagement in order to even “see the image” as such may point out dimensions of visibility that need to be reasserted within the shifted terms of algorithmic aesthetics.

Bob Tate

Many highly significant artworks were criminally destroyed after the notorious Degenerative Art exhibitions of 1937, staged by the Nazi Party in pre-war Germany, in a futile attempt to lampoon modern art.

Whilst monochrome photographs of some of the lost paintings exist, many sculptures were lost, with apparently little visual record remaining.

One such artist was Margaret Moll (1884-1977), whose work was so “exhibited” and thought to be subsequently lost. However, and during the excavation of a new underground station in Berlin in 2010, (which were buried when a block of flats containing them collapsed during a wartime bombing raid), and their subsequent restoration.

This paper explores the uses of stereoscopic photography as an enhanced mechanism of cultural record and will argue for the extension of its use as a non-invasive and highly economical adjunct to curation.

It will also investigate new archival evidence for the survival of a small number of stereophotographs of lost sculpture, taken at such an exhibition, which may ofer assistance in the future restoration of such works.

The paper also suggests possible innovations for stereoscopic photography to proactively record and reproduce sculpture for research and restoration.

Evguenii Kozlov

Agitational trains and steamboats, actively used during the civil war in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, usually appear in the light of military or propaganda history. This paper considers these trains and boats as complex media apparatus combining new technologies of radio, gramophone and cinematograph along with more “classical” visual media such as lanterna magica and panorama, — media apparatus that the new regime would use to communicate with mostly rural audiences; brightly and thoroughly painted as if following horror vacui aesthetics, interiors of these “enlightenment machines” would offer its public a kaleidoscope of immersive experiences, which are close to what has became known in the new film history as cinema of attractions. On the other hand, this early project, in its theory and practice, was infused with taylorism-inspired discourses of rationalisation and disenchantment of the world, which, in conjunction with all these “magic” media, made this dispositive so ambivalent. As we uncover its media-archeological layers and look for the antecedents, unexpected constellation of phenomena become relevant: world-fairs’ attractions with its sophisticated technological wonders, projection tours with lanterna magica in the context of educational campaigns in villages, royal trains, landscape painting, travelling cinema and cabinets of curiosities. While taking into account that this “residual” (media) culture resurfaces in this highly ideological period in history, one revisits these peculiar vehicles as a part of the 19th century. By reversing historical perspective, we’ll assert the agency of the media by studying its unforeseen side-effects, as evident in cases where a political message gets evacuated by power of an attraction to fascinate or re-enchant its observers. This paper argues that these cultural phenomena are best understood along with Soviet campaigns of eradication of illiteracy as media pedagogy, where observers do not necessarily consume political content, but rather adopt new ways of seeing.

Evguenii Kozlov has a Bachelor degree in Art History and Archaeology (Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, Paris, 2011). Master degree in Theory of culture (Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Russian State University for Humanities Moscow, 2016). He is currently preparing a PhD candidature with research project on media archeology of optical telegraph in Europe in the first half of the 19th century.