CAA Conference Presentation

Date: February 18–21, 2026

Location: CAA 114th Annual Conference, Hilton Chicago

Chair: Jennifer Marine
Adam Nadel: Who’s Afraid of Electrons? 
Alexander Betz, University of Arkansas: The Delayed Rays of a Star: An Ontological Expansion of Photography in Nuclear Detonations
Rachel Hutcheson, Rochester Institute of Technology: Rethinking Photography: Spectral Events and Mirror-Box Displays
Eszter Polonyi, University of Ljubljana; University of the Arts Linz: The Image Tactics of Black Holes: Moving Photographs Beyond Data

Recordings available at: https://caa.confex.com/caa/2026/meetingapp.cgi/Session/16575

In 2019 newspapers excitedly reported that astronomers had finally “photographed” the black hole M87*. This famous image does not fit our usual definitions of photography as it used complex computer algorithms to fashion an image from collected data. Why and how is this image described as a “photograph?” This panel looks to examine objects that are named, described, titled, situated, or conventionally understood as “photographs” despite not using a camera, not recording light waves, or using other mechanical or digital methods to produce an image. Rather than being a novel phenomenon or problem, artists and scientists have struggled to define and name photography since the inception of the medium. From nineteenth-century photomechanical processes and photo-sculptures to AI image-making and astronomical visualizations, such objects are often subsumed into the category of “photography.”

Investigating photography from this set of examples, this panel asks: What kind of objects/processes have been called a photograph? Which features and technologies are used to define the medium? How can they reimagine the medium’s history and future? Contributions might explore the reception of objects as “photographs,” the aestheticization or mediation of alternative “photographic” methods, the use of photographic processes in science, or the circulation and transmission of photographs through other media. This panel seeks to bring together papers across geographies and time periods and encourages presentations that engage with interdisciplinary perspectives including scholars working on the definitions, devices, and debates surrounding photographic methods from the nineteenth century to the contemporary.

Abstract: By most counts, the image published by the Event Horizon Telescope of a black hole is not a photograph. Part of what has made black holes undiscoverable, beyond their being at twenty-six thousand light years from Earth is that they are understood to swallow rather than emanate light, with patterns in light’s absence making them discoverable. What makes the black hole photograph an image at all might be an equally pressing question, given that the volume of data transmission their observation requires, currently assessed at sixty-four gigabits per second at speeds that exceed earlier interferometric systems ninety-thousand-fold. The black hole photo is not just of a theoretically hyperbolic object, it also is a supermassive entity itself—of data. Drawing on the so-called Beckenstein entropy bound on information, according to which the maximum amount of data that can be put in a volume is framed in terms of a black hole, this paper considers black holes as expanding the imaginary of data to off-world frontiers in response to a crisis in both the perceived sustainability of data and its intelligibility to human perception. It looks at work by artists seeking to subvert data-saturated systems by targeting their inner propensities toward forgetting, rot, and decay, such as Hito Steyerl’s notion of impoverished images, Linda Dounia Rebeiz’s synthesis of non-existent memories, and Mimi Ọnụọha’s filling of “blank [sic] holes” with missing data. Black holes are thus presented as both hyperbolic and tactical in image theory.