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This paper analyzes the relationship between photography and machine vision by examining its prehistory, as embodied in the art-historical photo archive. It characterizes the introduction of machine vision to the world of libraries, archives, and museums as a renewed (rather than wholly new) effort to mechanize or systematize art and its history. Assumptions and attitudes about photography embedded in the photo archive are therefore easily and often inconspicuously reproduced in efforts to study art computationally. Noting this repetition, this paper reframes the debate about art-historical applications of computer vision to emphasize the issues this technology raises about what constitutes art-historical work. The question is not whether we should use computer vision or computers for art-historical inquiry, but rather, what kinds of activities we ask computers to perform. Understanding machine vision in the context of its prehistory is critical for explicating its relationship to photography, and the role of photography and digital images in the study of visual culture more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The text is a summary of the 3rd international conference on photography held at the University of Texas at San Antonio's School of Art. The conference focused on the theme of boundaries and borders and how photography has addressed, informed, or undone them. The papers and visual works presented at the conference were organized into six thematic sessions, including Borders and Boundaries, Transcending Boundaries, Curatorial Perspectives, Borders in Flux, Critical Memory, and Transient Ecologies. The conference aimed to explore the role of photography in shaping and challenging boundaries and borders, both geographically and socially. The text also discusses the specific context of the conference, being located near the U.S.-Mexico border, and the historical and political implications of border rule in that region. The conference sought to uncover the imperial workings of borders while also exploring photography's potential to cross divisions and create alternative forms of belonging and knowledge production. [Extracted from the article]

This document is an editorial from the journal "Photographies" announcing a special double issue on the theme of Borders and Boundaries. The issue is based on papers presented at a conference held at the University of Texas San Antonio in September 2022. The aim of the conference and the journal issue is to bring together thinkers and photographers from various local and international contexts to discuss the theme of borders and boundaries in relation to contemporary photography. The editorial also announces the addition of Julia Peck as a co-editor of the journal starting in 2024. [Extracted from the article]

By experimenting with a practice called Joint Spectatorship several questions from the heart of the philosophy of photography are brought to consideration: the relation between the medium of photography and the idea of looking; the difference between seeing art and making sense of the art seen; the political aspects of collective spectatorship in public spaces; and the consequences that alternative pedagogies have on the divide between the university and the museum as the loci of art history. Joint Spectatorship is thus investigated through various conceptualizations of looking at photographs, from Henry William Fox Talbot's and Walter Benjamin's to later literary theory of "close reading" and the critique of institutions of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]