Edward Tufte

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• October 2, 2001, on Formalizing Photographic Aesthetics:

  Dear Philip, I like your essay on formalizing photographic aesthetics. Imagine locating many different photographs in a multidimensional space, whose dimensions need to be figured out (character of the color, depth of field, composition, and 3 to 6 others). This space needs to characterize, gracefully and reasonably, a great variety of different photographic styles that we may seek at one time or another to emulate. The task of the automatic-aesthetic camera (AAC) is to sample that space so that a reasonable number of points (photographs) are available for post-shoot processing. One picture cannot capture all your want. So you need smart bracketing to replace what is now rather naive bracketing. Thus the AAC will provide a set of wildly different pictures as it systematically moves through the multidimensional space of possible photographic styles--all applied to the same scene. Now this is similar to what you are trying to do now with nouns (names of different photographer...