USC-LACMA History of Photography Seminar

BROOKE BELISLE
Associate Professor, Stony Brook University

Moving between contemporary art, media archaeology, and popular visual culture, Depth Effects uses the problem of dimensionality to propose a revised history and theory of media aesthetics. AI-enabled techniques of object recognition, depthmapping, and photogrammetry are now used in the most everyday images - like mapping apps and smartphone camera photos. These techniques break from long-established photographic norms, but have curious precedents in early photography. Nineteenth-century stereographs, the first photographic portraits, and attempts to adapt cameras for land surveying all emphasized spatial relationships within and between images in their efforts to convey the voluminous shape of things, portray a subject’s hidden depths, or chart the topography of global terrain. The potentials and problems that structured these practices when lens-based conventions were forming recirculate now in the emergence of computation’s visual norms.