unthinking
photography

This strand on computer generated imagery explores the interrelations between photography and CGI technologies. We have invited the artist and designer Tobias Revell to curate the strand and commission essays around the effect of rendering and CGI on architecture and the build environment.

This strand develops from the ideas within ‘Fauxtography’, which examines how images become collective resources through which people perceive the world and its crises. 

‘Digital Colonialism’ considers the topographies of digital and networked images and how systems of power are mirrored within their structures and dissemination.

Images online are constantly claiming the attention of the viewers but whose truth do they speak of?

The theme of Fauxtography examines a world where images become collective resources that narrativise the world we live in and its crisis. First coined by webloggers during the 2006 Israel – Lebanon war to describe the blatant use of manipulated images in news articles, the term encapsulates how casual we have become in our relationship to such images.

Either by spreading the populist discourses of highly visualised conspiracy theories or by expressing the democratizing power of cameras today, networked images create a challenge of credibility not only of their content but also of their creator.

This theme draws from Data / Set / Match, a programme of commissions and research at The Photographers' Gallery that sought new ways to present, visualise and interrogate contemporary image datasets. The essays and artworks here draw attention to, and explore, the uses, influence and politics around image datasets and contemporary visual culture.

Machines are becoming intelligent agents that read, organise and valorise images while taking decisions and performing actions that mirror the human. In ‘Machine Vision’, we examine ways of seeing generated through the computational apparatus.

From the mechanical eyes of drones, GoPro cameras or the indexed options of search engines, the ways that we conceive the world today are commonly affected by a machine’s decisive moment. But what are the politics behind machine optics and what are the challenges for photographic culture under conditions of algorithmic governance?

How can we “unthink” photographic education? Can we learn photography theory from YouTube? In this strand, we explore the ways people define the photographic pedagogies of today and the factors that affect and challenge them. The permeation of online tutorials, the aesthetics of search engines and social media temporalities generate questions concerning the agency of the photographer and the value and currency of the image.