Photography as protogeometry

The article investigates relationships between measuring and imagemaking, focusing on the common historical context for the universalization of measurement standards and the emergence of photography. It discusses several artworks that directly tackle the problem of measurement and standardization (Marcel Duchamp’s 3 stoppages-étalon; John Baldessari’s Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts); and Sasha Litvintseva’s and Beny Wagner’s Constant) to demonstrate the tension between the particular and the universal, the material and the ideal, and to claim that both metrological standards and technical images always exist as multiple variants of idealized entities.