Through the Picture Plane: On Looking into Photographs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although I have concentrated on writing about Surrealism and documentary, I have also continued to write more generally about the relationship between the making of photographs and their exhibition and publication (a key relationship that also informs my work with Surrealism). \n \nMy essay on Tony Ray-Jones’s photograph 'Beachy Head Tripper Boat 1967' (Source, 40, 2004, pp. 16-21) was based on a close analysis of his original contact sheets in the National Museum of Photography, Bradford, while the text on John Kippin’s work Cold War Pastoral (in Ruth Charity ed., Reviews: Artists and Public Space, Black Dog, 2005, pp. 47-51) began with the experience of seeing it exhibited in the place where the images had been made - Greenham Common. Reviews of the work of Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus, and Benjamin Stone have also contributed to my exploration of these themes. \n \nThe essay 'Through the Picture Plane: On Looking into Photographs' was a broader exploration of these themes, commissioned by the Canadian curator and historian Martha Langford for the book Image and Imagination, published in English and French to coincide with the 2005 Mois de la Photo in Montreal. The essay was the first text in the book which otherwise featured essays by Geoffrey Batchen and Martyn Jolly and images by Michael Snow, Martin Parr and Tracey Moffatt, among many others. \n \nAs Langford commented in her introduction, 'Walker draws out the importance of lived experience and first contact with a photographic work of art. His vivid memories are brought freshly to the page, animated by a researcher’s distrust of simulacra and a traveller’s affection for the souvenirs of exhibitions seen. Perception, memory and imagination intertwine as Walker ruminates, testing his mental images against photographic objects, putting the thoughts of other scholars to the same test' (Image and Imagination, p.10).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.004 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".