PhotoTech raises an array of questions for the future of art history and information science, including:

• How can existing methods of collection processing and digitization be improved to accommodate larger, more diverse image collections?
• How might technologies like data visualization, computer vision, or linked data offer new ways to analyze image collections?
• What types of inquiries can be supported by image searches with limited descriptive metadata?
• How can existing metadata be used to train neural networks and automate metadata generation?

PhotoTech applies Getty's expertise in semantic technologies, the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), digitization, digital art history, metadata, and software development to open photographic archives to broader audiences and foster interdisciplinary innovation in the field of art history.

This project includes the digitization of 80,000 items from the GRI's Photo Archive, which contains over 2,000,000 photographs depicting works of Western art, architecture, and decorative arts from antiquity to the modern era. Annotations on the images supply details about attributions, provenance, and the art market. This information, currently available only in physical form, will be made digitally discoverable for scholars and linkable to other datasets such as the Getty Provenance Index™, thereby enhancing the growing network of art historical data.

Photography Unbound is a subproject of PhotoTech in which art historians and computer scientists collaboratively explore the potential of computational methods to inform a global study of 19th-century photography. Connecting photo albums, photo archives, and image datasets, this research employs computer vision and data analysis to examine photographic collections and their histories as objects and tools of art historical study.

Co-Leads
Andra Darlington
David Newbury
Lily Pregill
Emily Pugh

Archival and Special Collections Staff
Tracey Schuster
Ann Harrison
Daniel Powazek
Bryce Dwyer
Matt Moore

Research Team
Tracy Stuber
David Ogawa, Union College
Alexander Supartono, Edinburgh Napier University

Former Team Members
Ruth Cuadra
Melissa Gill
Linta Kunnathuparambil
Rob Sanderson

PhotoTech leverages the GRI's role as a founding member of Pharos, an international association of photo archives that began as a consortium of fourteen art research institutes in North America and Europe offering digital access to their respective photographic archives.