This is one those entries where we get to dig a little bit into other faces of photography, those we don’t usually think of, even if we get to work as professional photographers, teachers, art directors, etc.
We will be discussing the essay “Photographic scale” written by the english researcher Andrew Fisher. So yes!.. We will be talking about philosophy applied to photography, so let’s get started.
Andrew Fisher is one of the founding editors of the journal Philosophy of Photography also a teacher at Goldsmiths, University of London · Department of Visual Cultures, he has written different publications and has published several books, all of them taking on the idea of “scale” and what it means in and for photography.
As a researcher he focuses on photography, networked digital imaging and its political and philosophical discourses, along with many other topics, he holds a PhD on Fine Art/Art Theory from UCL.
His work can be described as a very structured series of publications that work together to convey the philosophical theories he has been working on for quite some time. A philosophy schequeme that can be applied to photography and the understanding of its geo-political, material, and spatiotemporal relations.
About “Photographic scale”
I first came across Andrew’s work as recommendation from one of my friends, the idea of philosophy applied to the photography, not as a meaning of inspiration (even though I have use it this way myself) but as a medium to understand how we perceive a photograph, and what we take out of the ever increasing number of images being created and seen through all mediums, has always fascinated me.
In this essay Andrew is not referring to scale as a “tool” for photographers or photography itself but for thinkers to understand what happen when someone stands up in front a photograph and how it is more than the visual experience we usually attach to it. He talks about different “scales” acting up dynamically in a not hierarchical way, this “scales” add up when looking at an image and might be responsible for the different reactions from different people to the same picture.
He opens up the essay with the idea that scaling “has an ontological significances for photography”, in other words, it is part of the very essences of photography and it cannot be separated from it, it appears when creating an image, when looking at it, and when thinking of it, he also theorized that this phenomenon is “ubiquitous, variegated and compound”, meaning that it exists in all photographs, in different forms, and it is composed of different “parts” or “scales”.
The main idea of this essay is to present “scaling” as a way to understand the different ways a person reacts to an images, as they “scale” the images not only based on the size of the physical print or the size of the elements within the image, which Andrew calls “inherently scaled”, but also based on aspects like value, life, history, geography, date, personal attachments, etc. Also to interpret how photography reacts to the word as the image itself “scale” the word that created it, this by exploring the relation of the “value-form” between the different mediums in which an image can be showend, and how they affect the play photography has had with economical and social structures such as capitalism until now.
Something that calls my attention is the eye for detail Andrew has when it comes to thinking about the consequences this idea might have, so he takes into account the possible fit of “scaling” along the rest of ontological structures photography already possess, and what “scaling’s” meaning is in relation to photography.
The idea that Andrew provides for this is that as “scaling” can be done in different ways, by different people, and applied to different images, “it is its very diversity wich give clue to what scale means for photography”. In other words that photography scale does not replace any other ontological structure, rather, is the diverse play of possibilities these categories and particularities take on their form and force.
He also theorized that a person might have a question or “scale” that stands out as predominant, for example “scaling” and image based on “its purpose” or “what technique was used to make it?” however this does not mean the rest of “scales” get dismissed as they still working on the background. The essay talks about 3 aspects that are believed to be predominant, and uses them to build a case and explore what can be called as the most weightly face of photographic scale.
Andrew’s work is a very intrige way of looking at the phenomenon of photography and how it interacts with people, to me it is very important to understand this part of photography, as it will definitely be useful when try to predict or even understand human behavior towards images in general.
If you want to know more about this concept, here is the link to Andrew’s conference about the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLqFi_8VSaE
Feel free to contact if you have any questions or comments abouts this post!… I have been working on a project that has a lot to do with the questions and observations Andrew made in his essay, you can check it out here.
Also feel free to check any other of my posts here!
Until next time…Stay curious!.
