For this task, find an example of a photographic image NOT made by a human, then share and discuss that image with your peers: is a human truly not involved?
Dr. Julius Neubronner’s Miniature Pigeon Camera
I struggle to find even one photographic image which had no human intervention what so ever. These are a few of the images that were captured in 1902 by German inventor Dr. Neubronner. Using a miniature, time-released camera, and an aluminum harness, Dr. Neubronner began experimenting with a novel way to capture aerial photographs: deploying a squad of pigeon photographers. One could have argued at the time that these images may have been taken by a balloonist however the wings visible on the periphery of the snapshot, gave up the true identity of the photographers. The idea of course is non human when it comes to capturing the image however there has indeed been a lot of human intervention with regards to the entire concept,someone clearly strapped the cameras to these birds and of course managed the entire process.
Today, in the age of CCTV, drones, medical scans and satelite images, photography is increasingly decoupled from human agency and human vision. In Nonhuman Photography, Joanna Zylinska offers a new philosophy of photography, going beyond the human-centric view to consider imaging practices from which the human is absent.
James Balog and his team created the Emmy-winning and Oscar nominated documentary Chasing Ice (2012) Blog and his team customized Nikon DSLR cameras with micro computers which were encased in high-resistance cases and attached to mountains in the harshest of weather conditions, the plan was to record a multi year chronicle of the planets rapidly melting glaciers. The cameras were placed in Iceland, Alaska and the Arctic and recorded for three years the transformation of the Geo and Hydrosphere. Balog edited the images into a time-lapse video. Watching the instalation of the cameras along with watching the finished film, you could definitely argue this was actualy far from nonhuman photography given the tremendous amount of involvement from Balog and his team.
https://youtu.be/eIZTMVNBjc4