The book addresses quantity and scale in contemporary visual culture and photography. It takes the problem of quantity as a theoretical issue that changes the premises of visual analysis. It focuses on the logic and rhetoric behind the arguments by numbers, growth, and tipping points, while recognising that photography has been characterized in quantitative terms since its invention and concerns regarding information overload accompanied the discourse around many earlier technological innovations. Investigating historical trajectories and different modes of reasoning provides a critical framew ... More

The book addresses quantity and scale in contemporary visual culture and photography. It takes the problem of quantity as a theoretical issue that changes the premises of visual analysis. It focuses on the logic and rhetoric behind the arguments by numbers, growth, and tipping points, while recognising that photography has been characterized in quantitative terms since its invention and concerns regarding information overload accompanied the discourse around many earlier technological innovations. Investigating historical trajectories and different modes of reasoning provides a critical framework for contemporary discourses from accelerationism to technological singularity to big data analysis in cultural analytics. The chapters in this edited collection address core areas in photographic theory and its overlap with media and digital culture studies, and as such work across an interdisciplinary area. The texts stem from different theoretical directions with the shared brief to address the question how do we conceptualise photography in the age of the mass image, and how does the quantity of images present a qualitative problem for academic analysis of visual culture.