ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Eijkelboom's indexical aggregations predict a number of features that now characterize the social form of photographic experience. In 1992, the Dutch conceptual artist Hans Eijkelboom began to candidly photograph people on busy shopping streets as part of an extraordinary visual diary. Photo Notes, as he called the project, takes the form of grids of color portrait photographs, each of which has a common visual feature. A few years ago, Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson wrote of a "double indexicality" in photography's "peculiar pointing both outward to the world before the camera and inward to the photographer behind it. Ironically, the primary raw material for identification is what is known as "indexical data." Within the discourse of "big data," this is data that enables identification, including "unique identifiers. As pattern recognition algorithms become more sophisticated, metadata can also accrue to digital photographs automatically through software.
