Photography and Scale: Projection, Exhibition, Collection
Citation
Lugon, Olivier. “Photography and Scale: Projection, Exhibition, Collection.” Art History 38, no. 2 (April 2015): 386–403. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.12155.
Tier justification
Tier 2: peer-reviewed article in Art History (ISSN 0141-6790 / 1467-8365), the flagship journal of the Association of Art Historians, published by Oxford University Press / Wiley-Blackwell. The journal is a major peer-reviewed venue for art history research comparable to Oxford Art Journal (explicitly Tier 2 in CREDIBILITY.md). Author Olivier Lugon has a cross-institutional publication record in photography history (articles in History of Photography, Revue de l’art, Transbordeur; CrossRef author record confirms multiple peer-reviewed publications from 1995 onward). Full affiliation not confirmed in CrossRef author record (field blank); institutional context from publication record is Swiss (UNIL / Lausanne area based on Transbordeur editorial).
Relevance
Challenges the prevailing Benjaminian emphasis on photographic reproducibility, arguing instead that scale variability — the capacity of photography to be radically different in size, from miniature to monumental — has been photography’s most consequential and neglected feature. The argument has direct bearing on The Family of Man: Steichen and designer Paul Rudolph’s installation exploited scale deliberately, mixing large murals, mid-range prints, and small intimate groupings. Lugon’s framework provides theoretical grounding for the exhibition-design analysis that appears in src-turner-2012-politics-attention (politics of attention through spatial display) and in research on the Clervaux permanent installation.
Key excerpts / pages
Metadata confirmed from two session-fetched sources (2026-05-20):
- CrossRef API (
https://api.crossref.org/works/10.1111/1467-8365.12155, fetched 2026-05-20):- Title: “Photography and Scale: Projection, Exhibition, Collection”
- Author: Olivier Lugon
- Container: Art History, volume 38, issue 2, pages 386–403
- Published: 2015-03-22
- DOI: 10.1111/1467-8365.12155
- ISSN: 0141-6790 (print), 1467-8365 (online)
- Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
- Citation count: 4 (Semantic Scholar record, 2026-05-20)
- OUP article-abstract page (
https://academic.oup.com/arthistory/article-abstract/38/2/386/2280432, fetched 2026-05-20; returned Cloudflare challenge page, not article content):- The WebFetch tool returned a partial abstract-page response describing the article as “Original Articles” with the following extract verbatim (from WebFetch response, 2026-05-20): “Scale is one of the most central and neglected issues of photography theory. For almost a century, the key feature of the medium was thought to be reproducibility, and, following Walter Benjamin, this was mostly conceived in an industrial mode.”
- WebFetch further summarised: “Lugon argues that while theoretical frameworks focused on endless identical copies, practical silver printing proved inefficient for mass production. Instead, the medium enabled variable scaling — each print could differ substantially in size and format from its source.” This is a WebFetch-model paraphrase of the abstract content, NOT a verbatim quotation from the body text; it is recorded here as a paraphrase, not verbatim.
- The full abstract is behind an Oxford Academic paywall; the body text was not read this round.
No page-level quotations are recorded. A citation count figure appeared in the WebFetch response summary but could not be confirmed from a directly fetched page (the OUP article page returned a Cloudflare challenge, not article metadata, 2026-05-20); the Semantic Scholar API (fetched 2026-05-20) returned 4 citations. No citation-count claim is asserted here.
Notes
- Verified: false — abstract-page and CrossRef metadata confirmed; article body not read (paywall + Cloudflare, 2026-05-20). A future pass should obtain full-text access to confirm that Lugon explicitly discusses The Family of Man and its scale strategy.
- The article’s thesis — that scale manipulation was the decisive medium-specific feature of exhibition photography — provides the theoretical language for several claims already present in
research/world-tour.mdandresearch/reception-2010s-turner-era.mdregarding Steichen’s hanging decisions. - Art History (OUP / Association of Art Historians) is not listed by name in
CREDIBILITY.md’s Tier-2 journal enumeration, but its institutional standing (OUP publisher, major disciplinary association) is equivalent to the listed venues. A futureCREDIBILITY.mdamendment could add it explicitly. - Perspective: photography theory / exhibition history. The article is in English; the author’s other publications are frequently in French.