Offering a new interdisciplinary perspective to the scale and quantity of images in contemporary visual culture.
The writing brought together in this volume, by renowned and emerging scholars of media, art, and photography, addresses the epistemological, aesthetic as well as political implications of various forms of scaling in both scholarly and artistic work. From the mass image in vernacular culture to transformations of photography in contexts of big data and artificial intelligence, these essays and conversations address the massification of photography, proposing a shift into a fundamental re-evaluation of our theoretical coordinates so as to understand the underpinning media and culture of this change.
Taken together, these essays call for a reconsideration of both scholarly and artistic approaches and concepts in the face of our contemporary image excess.
TomáS Dvorák is Assistant Professor in the Department of Photography, FAMU in Prague.
Jussi Parikka is Visiting Professor in the Department of Photography, FAMU in Prague and Professor of Technological Culture and Aesthetics at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton.

TomáS Dvorák is Assistant Professor in the Department of Photography at FAMU in Prague. He studied philosophy, art history, media studies and sociology at Charles University in Prague and The Graduate Center, City University of New York. His research focuses on philosophy and history of media and philosophy and history of science, and the interrelations between these fields, especially media archaeology of science and knowledge. He has authored or co-authored a number of books in Czech: Epistemology of (New) Media(NAMU 2018), Photography, Sculpture, Object(NAMU 2017), Temporality of (New) Media (NAMU 2016), Contemporary Approaches in Historical Epistemology (Filosofia 2013), Chapters from the History and Theory of Media (AVU 2010), and Waste Management: Texts, Images and Sounds of Recent History (Filosofia 2009).

Jussi Parikka is Professor of Technological Culture and Aesthetics at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton and Visiting Professor at the Academy of Performing Arts, Prague. He is the author of Digital Contagions (2007, 2nd. Edition 2016), Insect Media (2010, also the winner of the SCMS Anne Friedberg book award for innovative scholarship), What is Media Archaeology (2012) and A Geology of Media (2015). He is the co-editor of books such as Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications (2010, with Erkki Huhtamo) and Writing and Unwriting (Media) Art History: Erkki Kurenniemi in 2048 (2015, with Joasia Krysa) among many others. In addition, he was a co-editor of the book Across and Beyond: a transmediale Reader on Postdigital Practices, Concepts, and Institutions (2016). Parikka is the research director for the project Operative Images (2019-2023), funded by Czech Science Academy.

Introduction: On the Scale, Quantity and Measure of Images
Jussi Parikka & TomáS Dvorák

Part I: Scale, Measure, Experience

1. The Mass Image, the Anthropocene Image, the Image Commons
Sean Cubitt

2. Beyond Human Measure: Eccentric Metrics in Visual Culture
TomáS Dvorák

3. Living with the Excessive Scale of Contemporary Photography
Andrew Fisher

4. Feeling Photos: Photography, Picture Language and Mood Capture
Michelle Henning

5. Online Weak and Poor Images: On Contemporary Feminist Visual Politics
Tereza Stejskalová

Part II: Metapictures and Remediations

6. Photography's Mise en Abyme: Metapictures of Scale in Repurposed Slide Libraries
Annebella Pollen

7. The Failed Photographs of Photography: On the Analogue and Slow Photography Movement
Michal simunek

8. Strangely Unique: Pictorial Aesthetics in the Age of Image Abundance
Josef Ledvina

Part III: Models, Scans and AI

9. On Seeing Where There's Nothing to See: Practices of Light Beyond Photography
Jussi Parikka

10. Planetary Diagrams: Towards an Autographic Theory of Climate Emergency
LukáS Likavcan & Paul Heinicker

11. Undigital Photography: Image-Making Beyond Computation and AI
Joanna Zylinska

12. Coda: Photography in the Age of Massification
Joan Fontcuberta & Geoffrey Batchen