Bibliographic record
Abstract
Photography has matured as a visual art medium to such an extent that exhibitions of contemporary photography have become a staple of the exhibition programs of museums and galleries. Over the last decade, institutions as diverse in their remits and collections as the Metropolitan Museum and the Tate Gallery mounted their first shows of work by living photographers, and for the first time in their histories, many museums and galleries have appointed dedicated curators of photography. These episodes reflect larger cultural trends: no longer confined to specialist galleries, distribution networks, theoretical discourses, or educational programs, photography has won mainstream institutional recognition. But why should such cultural shifts interest philosophers, even philosophers of art? Two events in particular occasion this volume on the philosophy of photography. Gradually, though marked by some standout moments, recent decades have seen a blurring of the boundaries that some philosophers took to demarcate photographic technology and photographic practices on the one hand from other representational and artistic technologies and practices on the other hand. The task of demarcation has been part of the history of photography since its early days: for example, Barbara Savedoff's discussion of photography's “struggle to define itself against painting” takes up issues that can be found in the writings of pioneering photographers like Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, Louis‐Jacques‐Mandé Daguerre, and Henry Fox Talbot.1 The struggle to define photography against painting culminated in a photographic version of the medium‐specificity doctrine, which directed that each art be defined in terms of those features that are both “unique and irreducible” to it.2 The bellwether question was: what is special about photography? Perhaps the most developed response from within the photographic artworld was John Szarkowski's list of five “characteristics and problems … inherent in the medium” in his introduction to the catalogue for the 1966 exhibition The Photographer's Eye at MoMA, where he was Director of Photography.3 Theorists and historians of photography have tended instead to take as their starting point a small cluster of theoretical concepts and categories, including C. S. Peirce's notion of indexical signs, Walter Benjamin's “aura,” and Roland Barthes's “punctum” and “studium.”4
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".