Large-scale Photographs Research Articles

Geoinformation monitoring of the condition of rice fields in Giang Province (Vietnam) according to multispectral ERS data and field spectroradiometering

The spatial distribution of areas of territory used for agricultural work is of great importance for the development of measures for managing territories and planning the rational use of land and water resources. As a result of the high development of land and its use for agricultural production, timely assessment of both the condition of soils and the growing season of crops in the fields plays an important role. Since in the conditions of the study area it is possible to choose the timing of sowing, growing and harvesting, spatial data on the location of fields for growing rice can be used to estimate the volume of water consumed for its cultivation and develop a crop rotation model for different volumes of available water based on the level of water reserves of the main crop. source. Geoinformation classification of Earth remote sensing data and the use of spectral indices can be used to monitor the dynamics of rice crop formation under existing conditions. Refinement of the results of geoinformation processing of satellite images is carried out using field standardization methods, including photo standardization, showing the real value of reflected energy during large-scale photography, and spectroradiometry, which makes it possible to determine the characteristics of the reflected energy by these objects in various spectral ranges. The results obtained made it possible to obtain statistical data on the values of the area of plots based on 4844 measurements; the average values of the area of plots were established – 0.447, standard deviation – 0.309, maximum area – 5.84 hectares, minimum 0.02 hectares. The obtained statistical results make it possible to determine on average the estimated number of plots in the territory of An Giang province, which is 442 thousand fields. Thus, when deciphering images of rice fields on satellite images, local geoinformation cartographic layers of such fields are developed, taking into account the actual characteristics and stage of plant vegetation, as well as the stage of harvesting and the stage of tillage.

Appearance and Social Inequalities: Physical Attractiveness as a Part of Occupation-Congruent Appearance

Appearance-based inequalities are gaining increasing interest in sociology. This article is the first to systematically examine the extent to which attractiveness is linked to culturally shared ideas of representatives of different occupations. We conceptualise these cultural expectations as ‘occupation-congruent appearance’. To understand the gendered dynamics between attractiveness and looking ‘congruent’, we analyse large-scale photograph data representing a heterogeneous group of different occupations ( n = 1411), including population-level ratings on those photographs ( n = 3456). We find that for both men and women, attractiveness is generally associated with an increase in perceived occupation-congruent appearance. However, this association is gendered, so the differences between occupational categories are greater for men than for women. Therefore, we argue that attractiveness can magnify appearance-based status differences, particularly among men. The research opens new perspectives to examine appearance and inequalities, not only from the perspective of looking attractive, but also through looking congruent.

Ki te kapu o takau ringa - In the Hollow of my Hand: Wānanga based Photographic Approaches to Place Representation

Ka matakitaki iho au ki te riu o Waikato 
 Ano nei hei kapo kau ake maaku; 
 Ki te kapu o taku ringa, 
 
 “I look down on the valley of Waikato, 
 As though to hold it 
 In the hollow of my hand.” 
 
 The words above are from Māori King Tawhiao’s maioha (song poem), a representation of his love for his homelands of the Waikato and the region known today as the King Country. Now imagine a large-scale photograph: a close-up of cupped hands, holding an object carefully. The phrase above informs Professor Tom Roa and Dr. Rodrigo Hill’s current research project titled ‘Te Nehenehenui - The Ancient Enduring Beauty in the Great Forest of the King Country’. With this project still in its early stages the research team will present early and ongoing creative practice developments, discussions and ideas about photography practice, wānanga, and place representation. The project promotes the use of wānanga (forums and meetings of focus groups through which knowledge - mātauranga - is discussed and passed on) and other reflective practices, engaging with and led by mana whenua (guardians of the land) providing a thread which will guide the construction of the photographic images. The research fuses wānanga, that is Mātauranga Māori (Māori Knowledge), and photography practice in novel ways, aiming to move away and challenge core photographic conventions and Eurocentric modes of place representation. Roa and Hill understand wānanga as a fluid practice of engagement which can be with mana whenua or with the taiao - the environment - either by itself or with the mana whenua. This is the essence of Kaupapa Māori Research. 

The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947–1985

The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947–1985

The Illusionist

The Illusionist

Sharing Seeing

In 2007, artist Sharon Lockhart made a large-scale photograph of two young girls reading braille, based on a specific photograph by August Sander from the 1930s made in an institute for blind children. Turning to the widespread iconography of blindness in the history of photography, this essay considers the importance of such images for a larger theory of photographic spectatorship. Lockhart's image of blind children relates to Sander's photograph, but does not duplicate it in all respects; her alteration of the historical image opens onto the larger non-coincidence of vision that photographic seeing instantiates. Ultimately, Lockhart's relational practice of photography-connecting each photograph she makes to prior images, while never fully duplicating or replicating them-provides a model for understanding the relational dynamics of photographic spectatorship. The essay also discusses Paul Strand, Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, Kaja Silverman's World Spectators, “straight photography,” and Michael Fried.

The City Itself

The City Itself Maud Casey (bio) The city is, in many ways, like other cities. Like other cities, it was built alongside a river and has a series of low rambling buildings, at the center of which is the domed chapel of a cruciform church. In the chapel, Chapelle Saint-Louis, the great doctor will one day lie in state. We will be invited to pass through, to look upon his dead face; those of us who can’t walk will be brought on stretchers. From a stretcher, it will be harder to look upon his dead face, but they will tell us that to see his face is not the point, though we will have had enough of the point by then because we have had enough of the point already. Still, who wouldn’t look? We will look the way he looked, seeking out the disease. Did you leave this world gently, our mother’s and father’s wish until it wasn’t because they could not find gentleness in the world and so why would leaving be any different? Anyway, who leaves this world gently? We will look the way we all look when studying a face that has studied us. Who are you who am I where are we going what is this feeling inside of me why why why what does it all mean, etc. His last words? I am feeling a little better. How about now? ________ As in other cities, there are alleys with pollarded plane trees, which, if you know the way, will take you the back route to the market, the bakery, the laundry, the vegetable gardens, the school where we learn grammar, history, geography, and sums, the gymnasium where we learn to bend and not to break, the library where those of us who are able to read borrow books about other cities, the post office where those of us who are able to write consider posting the letters we might someday write; until then, we write in our head or trace them in the dark on each other’s backs. We take a back-alley route to the cemetery where sometimes we go to visit ourselves. In other words, as in other cities, there are places to live and places to die. In the city, we are dimly aware of the other cities, the villages, the farms, where we were born or found, or we found ourselves, places we left behind as this city wrapped itself around us like time. Until it became the only city. The places from the before fade, grow fainter, farther away, until it is too far to travel even in our minds. For example, the city that contains our city? The one outside the wrought-iron gates, which open onto, where else, Boulevard d’Hôpital? We can’t be sure we didn’t make it up altogether. The city is, in other ways, unlike other cities. In the courtyard, sometimes [End Page 37] there are masked balls where famous scientists and artists and doctors dress as robed monks, musketeers, knights in armor. On those nights, the great pavilion is strung with fairy lamps, colored lanterns, flowers, and streamers, and we dance as though we are Jane Avril at the Moulin Rouge and then, look, there is Jane Avril. No, really. There she is, a citizen of the city, too, for a brief while. The luxurious pain of a body in the throes of its symptoms has been likened to a dance and when she, a dancer, was a body in pain, it was something to behold. Unlike other cities, there is a photography annex with platforms that fill an entire studio, platforms along whose length we walk because the way we walk is worth capturing and inscribing on plates of glass. There are headrests for close range, large-scale photographs of our head or parts of our face—our eyes, our mouth, our nose, our ears. Longer exposure requires immobility, and so, iron gallows to suspend those of us who can’t walk or hold ourselves upright, those of us who will eventually be carried on stretchers, those of us who...

The Big Picture: The Materiality of Size in Ansel Adams’s Large-Scale Works

The prominence of the large-format photograph in contemporary art since the 1970s is often attributed to the desire to explore new pictorial and spatial avenues by moving beyond the documentary approaches that had dominated since the 1930s. While not an inaccurate characterisation, the focus upon the artistic impulses associated with large-scale photography comes at the expense of the material issues that enabled it. This article addresses the gap by examining two largely overlooked forms produced by Ansel Adams between 1930 and 1960 – the photomural and the folding photo-screen – in order to demonstrate the high level of direct engagement that existed between photographer and materiality, which resulted in large-scale works that addressed many of the same issues dealt with in contemporary large-format photography, but that also stood in stark contrast to the ephemeral, mass-produced, large-scale work prevalent at the time. By considering historical examples, from an era when materials and processes were very different, the article demonstrates the active, physical effects of photographic enlargement, revealing print size to be not simply a changeable option but an inherently material condition, honing our understanding of why a photograph is big by demonstrating how it got that way.

Using stereo aerial photography and satellite InSAR to help assess slope hazards for a hydropower project in mountainous southern Albania

The use of small-scale and large-scale aerial photograph interpretation (API) in the assessment of reservoir slope stability at a proposed hydropower scheme in Albania is described. Large-scale photography yielded greater ground detail and aided site-specific interpretation while the small-scale photography provided important overview. Ground deformation monitoring using satellite InSAR analysis largely vindicated the findings of the API. Combined, API and InSAR analysis yield a potentially extremely powerful tool for geohazard assessment for civil engineering purposes.

Northern Conifer Forest Species Classification Using Multispectral Data Acquired from an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Object-based image analysis and machine learning classification procedures, after field calibration and photogrammetric processing of consumer-grade unmanned aerial vehicle (<small>UAV</small>) digital camera data, were implemented to classify tree species in a conifer forest in the Great Lakes/St Lawrence Lowlands Ecoregion, Ontario, Canada. A red-green-blue (<small>RGB</small>) digital camera yielded approximately 72 percent classification accuracy for three commercial tree species and one conifer shrub. Accuracy improved approximately 15 percent, to 87 percent overall, with higher radiometric quality data acquired separately using a digital camera that included near infrared observations (at a lower spatial resolution). Interpretation of the point cloud, spectral, texture and object (tree crown) classification Variable Importance (<small>VI</small>) selected by a machine learning algorithm suggested a good correspondence with the traditional aerial photointerpretation cues used in the development of well-established large-scale photography northern conifer elimination keys, which use three-dimensional crown shape, spectral response (tone), texture derivatives to quantify branching characteristics, and crown size, development and outline features. These results suggest that commonly available consumer-grade <small>UAV</small>-based digital cameras can be used with object-based image analysis to obtain acceptable conifer species classification accuracy to support operational forest inventory applications.

On the Experience of Viewing Thomas Demand’s Photographs

Using a phenomenological approach, the article describes the experience of viewing a recent exhibition of Thomas Demand’s photographs. The focus is on both the visual experience itself, and the extent to which the events of the weekend inextricably intertwine with the way the photographs make meaning. Demand’s large-scale photographs are found to be more than just surfaces intended for aesthetic appreciation through visual inspection. His construction process, from source-image, to model, to photograph, supplemented with an information-laden press release, creates visual connection-points inextricably interwoven in the experience of being itself. Demand’s work, it is argued, through conspicuous refusal to easily connect indexically to the original scene, makes visible ways in which photography may be understood through ways of knowing described by existential phenomenology.

52nd Society for Photographic Education National Conference

Research Article| May 01 2015 52nd Society for Photographic Education National Conference Karen vanMeenen Karen vanMeenen KAREN vanMeenen is editor of Afterimage. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (2015) 42 (6): 6–7. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2015.42.6.6 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Karen vanMeenen; 52nd Society for Photographic Education National Conference. Afterimage 1 May 2015; 42 (6): 6–7. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2015.42.6.6 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAfterimage Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2015 Afterimage/Visual Studies Workshop, unless otherwise noted. Reprints require written permission and acknowledgement of previous publication in Afterimage.2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Drawing Complaint

Matthew Barney’s 2006 solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art showcased large-scale sculptures, drawings, and photographs relating to his film Drawing Restraint 9 featuring the artist and his partner Björk on a whaling ship in Japan. This essay examines Barney’s neo-Orientalist project in light of cultural appropriation and discusses the author’s participation in Drawing Complaint: Memoirs of Björk-Geisha, a guerrilla art scheme to interrupt the exhibition opening. The successes and failures of this intervention are considered alongside other artistic practices that deploy disidentification and hyperracial drag to interrogate the consumption of exotic and erotic spectacles only to encounter further exotification or cooptation. This essay also reflects on the instability of disidentificatory interventionist tactics as well as the psychic and personal toll of embodying toxic representations especially for queer artists of color who deliberately perform their own racial and sexual abjection as a mode of critique.

“Enlightenment, Advertising, Education, Etc.”: Herbert Bayer the Museum of Modern Art's Road to Victory

“In the beginning was virgin land and America was promises.”2 So began the text panel located in the opening panorama of the photo exhibition Road to Victory: A Procession of Photographs of the Nation at War that the Museum of Modern Art organized in 1942 and circulated between 1943 and 1945. Years before Edward Steichen became curator of photography at MoMA and organized the global blockbuster exhibition The Family of Man, he combed government, press, and corporate archives to select the photographs for Road to Victory, his first curatorial project at the museum. Encircling the opening text were large photographic panels of picturesque landscapes, stern Native Americans, and a few buffalo. The largest panel—of pristine mountain valleys—was sixteen by twelve feet, making the viewer about the same height as the three portraits of Native Americans. Exhibition designer Herbert Bayer, recent Austrian émigré and former Bauhaus master, removed the walls from the second floor of the museum, using the large-scale photographs to structure the exhibition architecturally. Arranged in a semicircle, these opening panels welcomed the viewer and urged him to follow the curve into the exhibition.

Mapping Collected Memory: An Exploration of Memory-Based Navigation in Amman, Jordan

The purpose of this research is to explore navigational and image-making methods in a context where maps and formal address systems have been minimally consulted in recent years. This investigation is approached by way of a research-based art project on subjective cartography, which was carried out from 2009 to 2010 during a Fulbright fellowship to Amman, Jordan. The project examines the mutability of a specific location as well as its relationship between obsolescence in cartographic resources and the photographic medium. By reaching out to Ammani residents for informal tours of the city, selected guides were asked to narrate their experiences of navigating the city by memory and then directed to point out key landmarks during this process. Later, these tours were re-memorized and landmarks were photographed as a representation of the afterimage to capture high-quality still images through the use of a large-format photographic device. These afterimages are not intended to serve as documents or memorials of Amman but rather as ruminations on the faculties of memory in an ever-changing environment. This subjective experience, or the observation of a city’s minutiae amid wayfinding, poses a series of inquiries, vis-à-vis memory-based navigation and the role of still images, as an alternative to the panoptic view of a map. The result is a meditative project considering the plasticity of an urban entity, presented as a composition of written material and large-scale photographs, fragments of the city that when viewed as a series come together as a constellation of a subjective whole.

A method for monitoring shallow seagrass meadows ( Zostera spp.) using terrestrial oblique large-scale photography

Different monitoring methodologies are available to quantify the spatial distribution of seagrass beds, but repeated coverage over short time intervals is usually expensive or impossible. Sampling resolution is also a limiting factor, due to costs and manpower. We propose a low-cost alternative that allows for the free definition of sampling frequency and resolution. Since January 2006, a shallow seagrass meadow ( Zostera spp.) (Sado estuary, Portugal), has been monitored using true color large-scale oblique terrestrial photographs taken monthly during low-water spring tides, from a fixed elevated point. To rectify the images and create an orthogonal view, a set of ground control points (GCPs) were taken in and around the meadow, each coupled with a photograph. The photo-coordinates of each GCP were matched to its geographic coordinates, and a 2nd degree polynomial adjustment was used, to rectify every subsequent monthly photograph (RMS error of 0.7 m and final resolution of 0.5 m). An unsupervised classification was performed on the rectified images to map and quantify the meadow area. The meadow showed a seasonal cycle typical of temperate areas, in response to the annual cycle of solar radiation, with maximum coverage (∼1 ha) in late summer/early fall, and minimum areas (∼0.5 ha) in late winter/early spring. A marked shift in the meadow distribution was also found, with ∼25% average annual change (Index of relative change) and ∼43% change over the 4-year period studied. These results suggest that the method performed consistently, over time and over a range of varying environmental conditions, its main limitation being the need for an elevated point overlooking the area of interest. Whenever elevated viewpoints exist overlooking seagrass meadows or other intertidal or shallow subtidal coastal habitats, this methodology, may constitute a viable and economically advantageous alternative to other more costly approaches, e.g. aerial photography.

Michael Fried's Modernist Theory of Photography

This essay critically analyses Michael Fried's book Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before. It examines the relevance of Fried's categories of absorption and theatricality to contemporary photography and his assumption that photography is an inherently modernist art. In his book Fried explains the shift to large-scale colour photographs in the 1980s as signalling a return to problems of beholding, which dominated painting since the 1750s and 1760s. In contrast, this essay argues that this shift reveals the importance of the legacy of conceptualism and minimalism to recent photography and, in particular, the role of the conceptual ‘document’ within contemporary artistic practices.

Paper Truth

An article dedicated to the German artist Thomas Demand opens by describing a German Disneyworld employee working in the Bavarian beer garden at Epcot. When questioned about working in a replica of her homeland, the employee replied that her hometown had been completely demolished in World War II and was reconstructed afterward. Thus, what is perceived as an authentic place of origin is often an imitation of its former existence, and conceptually, isn't too far removed from Disney's amusement parks.(1) The relation between this anecdote and Demand's artwork reveals something of the manner in which critics tend to interpret his work. Demand, who began his career in the 1990s, reconstructs interiors and other locations according to documentary photographs and objects; he builds these life-size reconstructions strictly out of colored paper. Demand then photographs the fabricated locations, which he eventually destroys. His exhibitions present large-scale photographs of paper reconstructions that, when first perceived, look like documentations of real objects and places. At first glance, his works tend to deceive the viewer. Only after a closer look, when encountering the disturbing effect of the works, does doubt arise regarding the nature of the images. Interpretations of Demand's work posit two very different views concerning its truth. On the one hand, the works can be understood as dealing with the production of visual images that reflect one another, devoid of any substantial core. On the other hand, some of his critics stress the referential aspect of his works--the indication of specific, concrete locations. Yet, despite their differences, all interpretations agree upon another prominent aspect of Demand's work: the extraordinary skill it exhibits. Using Demand's work as a lens, this essay elucidates the unique way works of art bare truth--truth that is not the opposite of falsehood and that has nothing in common with historical fact. This truth is derived from the artist's know-how--a know-how excluded by the discourse of art. ART VS. HISTORY, FACT VS. FICTION According to Aristotle, the difference between the historian and the poet is that the former relays what has happened, while the latter deals with the possibility of what might happen. (2) This distinction did not, of course, prevent the emergence of works of art such as historical novels or paintings. Theorists have claimed that what gives historical painting its privileged status in art history is part of another Aristotelian argument: the claim that exquisite painting should represent significant human actions. (3) Thus, for example, although it seems that in the painting The Death of Marat (1793) Jacques-Louis David did not save any efforts in supplying his viewer with historical information such as the crime scene or the murder weapon, the praise lavished upon this painting actually points toward the subject matter and its painterly characteristics rather than its reliable depiction of a particular historical event. Generally speaking, the failure of works of art in mirroring true information, a standard derived from Aristotle, seems obvious and inevitable. As is well known, the supremacy of historical paintings did not last long. Yet, the art world of the late twentieth century was stimulated from an opposite direction by questions related to the referential aspect of works of art--this time concerning questions of representation in relation to reality. In an essay dedicated to the American artist Cindy Sherman, Rosalind Krauss analyzes Sherman's Untitled Film Stills (1977-80), a series of black-and-white photographs in which the artist assumes the look of a Hollywood starlet and photographs herself in various costumes and locations (4) She begins by stressing the fact that although Sherman's works appear to recall a specific film, they do not in fact contain any singular cinematic reference. …

Some Musings on Galaxy Morphology, Galactic Colors, and the Environments of Galaxies

Careful inspection of large-scale photographs of Shapley-Ames galaxies seems to show a smooth transition between the morphological characteristics of galaxies located on the narrow red and on the broad blue sequences in the galaxian color-magnitude diagram. In other words, there does not appear to be a dichotomy between blue and red galaxies. Both the colors and the morphologies of galaxies are found to correlate strongly with their environments. Red and early-type Shapley-Ames galaxies are dominant in clusters, whereas blue late-type star-forming objects dominate the general field. Interestingly, the colors and morphologies of galaxies in small groups resemble the field and differ from those in clusters. As noted by Baade, the presence of dust and star formation are very closely correlated, except in a few galaxies that probably had unusual evolutionary histories. Over the entire range from S0 to Sc there is no significant difference between the integrated colors of normal and barred objects, suggesting that the formation of a bar does not significantly affect the stellar evolutionary history of a galaxy.

An Unmanned Aerial Vehicle for Rangeland Photography

Abstract Because of its perceived impracticality and expense, aerial photography from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) remains virtually unused as a rangeland management tool. This underuse suggested 2 objectives. The first was to develop a UAV from off-the-shelf components that could acquire low-altitude large-scale photography for rangeland documentation. The second was to assess the UAV flight characteristics. A remotely controlled UAV suitable for 35-mm photography was built in 56 hours at a cost of $1 480. In a 2-year test period, the UAV successfully completed 100+ sorties at elevations ranging from 10 m to 1 000 m above ground. The average distance required for takeoff is 18.2 m whereas landing requires an average of 22.5 m. Average UAV airspeed at takeoff is about 11.4 m·s −1 . Typical cruise speed during photograph acquisition is 13.8 m·s −1 , resulting in 6.9 mm of blur from forward-image motion. The UAV is an inexpensive tool for monitoring rangeland condition from an aerial perspective. It is currently being used to map squarrose knapweed ( Centaurea virgata Lam. ssp. squarrosa Gugl.) density at several rangeland sites in Utah.