Eliminating the photographer Photographing artwork is a
subjective business. The photographer has to make aesthetic
decisions on lighting and the angle from which the picture is
taken, based on his or her aesthetic instincts. But accurate
representations of paintings and sculptures are important for
scholars, collectors and other art lovers who view them in
books, museum archives and on websites. To get around the
problem of subjective photography, the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation has awarded a grant of $855,000 to the Rochester
Institute of Technology and the colour scientist Roy Berns. The
scientists will use maths to build a system that photographers
can use in situ to eliminate subjective decisions. The main part
of the project will be to build an instrument that can capture
information about an object's geometry and colour and measure
how these depend on lighting. This involves reducing the
painting or sculpture to its most basic optical blueprint, and
stripping it of any attributes that are down to subje