Images at work: Digitisation and the archival cultures of photography
When:
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Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
No booking required
The digitised research cultures of today are deeply dependent on technologies that count photography among their immediate ancestors. Whether consulting a digitally scanned image of a book page through the Google Books facility, or examining a digitised photograph of a material object in an online museum collection, professional and amateur researchers alike encounter an overwhelming share of their sources in the form of digital surrogates, which are either derived from pre-existing photographic records or created through lens-based imaging technologies that trace their lineage back to photography.
This work-in-progress presentation took the view that photography and its archival cultures may be seen as active agents rather than passive objects of digitisation. Engaging the work of Steve Edwards (2006) and Mercedes Bunz (2013), it particularly explored how the notion of skill and knowledge as contested territories within capitalist production is equally applicable to recent and ongoing practices of digitisation, as to earlier practices of industrialisation.
Contact name:
Patrizia Di Bello