VISUAL ECONOMIES OF SCALE
Thu 13 Feb
|READING GROUP
Reading Group led by Lauren Pankin (Université Paris Cité, France)
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13 Feb 2025, 18:30 – 20:00 WET
READING GROUP
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The Archivo Reading Group Series invites participants to explore seminal texts in visual culture, with a particular focus on lens-based media and the archive. Led by scholars, researchers, and artists, these sessions foster engaging discussions and critical analysis. Participation is exclusive to Archivo Network members in good standing. To join the Network, visit our website or contact us at info@archivoplatform.com.
ARCHIVO READING GROUP
Visual Economies of Scale
Lauren Pankin
Université Paris Cité, France
The scale of digital images available to view, to share, to modify and to buy is virtually unquantifiable. In the arts, responses to this constant deluge of visual information have embraced two main approaches: a reckoning with scale by materializing the digital images and a commentary on the dialectic between discrete image and mass of images, typically by making random images once again individual. Similarly, the historian must grapple with the scale of digital images, available in myriad forms, including traditional archives, Flickr pages, news reporting, auction websites, Google Arts and Culture, eBay, etc. This (over)abundance of images, especially historical images put up for sale on platforms like eBay and Delcampe, forms a shadow archive, paradoxically open and accessible as well as privatized and transient.
This reading group will ask what historians can learn from artists, and what artists can learn from historians, in terms of the theories and methodologies used in making sense of this unprecedented mass of visual information.
Reading Materials are available at the Archivo Network member's page.
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Lauren Pankin is a third-year doctoral candidate at the University of Paris Cité. Her thesis, ‘The Salt of the Earth’: regards photographiques croisés sur la ferme lors de la seconde révolution industrielle (France, Grande-Bretagne et Etats-Unis) is co-directed by Quentin Deluermoz et Daniel Foliard.
Cover picture © Erik Kessels, 24 Hrs in Photos