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‘Objectivity Shock’ – Prologue (‘Objectivity’ Daston/Galison)

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OS offers up the initial example of British physicist Arthur Worthington’s systemic visual classification of fluid dynamics (1877), its eventual disillusionment, and the emergence of the photograph (as a scientific record…) as the ideal analogy for the birth of the ‘Objective view’. The seismic shift in the science of seeing that followed this realisation highlighted the role and fallibility of the ‘Human Historian’ within a process bent on capturing a world set to a backdrop of perfect symmetry and regularity. OS begins this journey, and within the image history of objectivity, brings to the fore the complete reconfiguration of how we acquire knowledge.

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Mechanical records that were once regarding as the visual basis of scientific fact were shattered by the emergence of the photograph. Succeeding the eye, photography as a tool, offered a new ‘Objective view’ simultaneously highlighting the fallibility of the human observer and the universal imperfection that surrounds us.

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Blind sight, as a new way of seeing.