ABSTRACT
In this chapter I revisit the claims of an earlier paper, “What is Abstraction in Photography?,” in which I argue that there is no prima facie difficulty understanding the possibility of abstract photography given a sufficiently generous conception of photography (Costello, D. (2018b) “What is Abstraction in Photography?” British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 58, 4, pp. 384–400). That is not a claim I wish to question here. What I question here is the completeness of the taxonomy I then went on to offer. Though presented as non-exhaustive, this taxonomy was nonetheless meant to broadly capture the domain. But I have since come to question whether a taxonomy based exclusively on artistic uses of photography or, implicitly, the assumption that when we talk about “abstract photography,” we must have aesthetic uses of the medium in mind could be complete or, indeed, well founded. What happens once that model is opened to non-artistic uses of abstraction, such as various forms of photography used in pursuit of the epistemic rather than aesthetic goals of science? I address this question by comparing several abstract works by the artist Wolfgang Tillmans with a remarkable set of photographs produced using a bubble chamber in the course of doing fundamental research in particle physics.
