DARKROOM TO DATA
New Methods for Exploring the Material History of Photography
Symposium
Yale University
August 12, 2024
DARKROOM TO DATA was a symposium held on August 12, 2024 and hosted by the Lens Media Lab that featured the lab's research into the material history of black and white photography and provided a forum for our principal collaborations, including contributions from colleagues at the Center for Creative Photography, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The theme of this work was "seeing at scale" through the creation and interpretation of datasets that surface patterns latent in photograph collections. These patterns inform our thinking of preservation, artistic intention, regional practices, and the influence of materials and methods shared by photographers across time. The symposium attracted over 175 attendess, among them artists, art historians, conservators, conservation scientists, collectors, curators, dealers and others interested in data science and data visualization applied to the study of cultural material.
Read the Symposium abstract.
Program
Titles link to presentations, speaker names link to bios. The full symposium recording is here.
Session 1: Paperbase
Moderator: Monica Bravo, Assistant Professor of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University
Session 3: Partner Research
Moderator: Sylvie Pénichon, Director of Paper, Photography and Media Conservation, Art Institute of Chicago
Moderator: Lee Ann Daffner, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Conservator of Photographs, Museum of Modern Art
Support
The Lens Media Lab is funded through a gift from the John Pritzker Family
Fund.
DARKROOM TO DATA and our work with the Center for Creative Photography is supported by Google's Artists + Machine Intelligence Research Awards.
The Lens Media Lab is part of the Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage, one of seven research institutes on Yale's West Campus.
We are grateful.
