Brooke Belisle is an ACLS New Faculty Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor at Stony Brook University in the department of Cultural Analysis and Theory. She researches and teaches the history and theory of digital media, cinema, and photography, with a special focus on emergent technologies, experimental formats, and expanded views.
Authors | Brooke Belisle
Articles on Amodern by Brooke Belisle
PICTURING NETWORKS
Railroads and Photographs
Today we tend to visualize networks through metaphors and aesthetics offered by digital media. In the Post-Civil War United States, however, different ideas of spatiotemporal connection emerged in relationship with the new medium of photography and the construction of transcontinental railroads. Nineteenth-century sets of railroad photographs, which follow train lines through ordered sequences of images, coordinated multiple aspects into the conceit of a continuous view. A “network archeology” of railroad photographs discloses how specific contexts and implications attend any, of many, ways we might imagine and picture connection.