Bodies in Relation. Theater Photography and the Distant Viewing of Performance

Theater photography created a massive visual archive of 20th century performing arts, largely neglected due to the medium’s precarious status and archive size. This paper argues deep learning for computer vision can tackle both challenges, enabling distant viewing approaches from Digital Literary Studies and Art History applied to Theater Studies. Focusing on scene shots, it discusses why scale makes these materials interesting and what questions emerge. It addresses disciplinary objections, suggesting the approach’s benefit lies in challenging prevailing paradigms. The paper reviews image composition, theatrical gaze, and technologies like pose estimation, mesh recognition, and sentiment analysis. It explores using biased industrial technologies as scientific instruments, arguing that scale provokes empirical outlook, shifting from aesthetic performance discussion to collective meanings through social mediation centered on the body.