Seeing Behind the Camera: Identifying the Authorship of a Photograph

We introduce the novel problem of identifying the photographer behind a photograph. To explore the feasibility of current computer vision techniques to address this problem, we created a new dataset of over 180,000 images taken by 41 well-known photographers. Using this dataset, we examined the effectiveness of a variety of features (low and high-level, including CNN features) at identifying the photographer. We also trained a new deep convolutional neural network for this task. Our results show that high-level features greatly outperform low-level features. We provide qualitative results using these learned models that give insight into our method's ability to distinguish between photographers, and allow us to draw interesting conclusions about what specific photographers shoot. We also demonstrate two applications of our method.Comment: Dataset downloadable at http://www.cs.pitt.edu/~chris/photographer To Appear in CVPR 201

Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990

‘Postmodernism’ was the final instalment of a 12-year series of V&A exhibitions exploring 20th-century design. It examined a diverse collection of creative practices in art, architecture, design, fashion, graphics, film, performance and pop music/video, which the curators, Pavitt and Adamson (V&A/RCA), identified under the common theme of ‘postmodernism’. The exhibition assessed the rise and decline of postmodern strategies in art and style cultures of the period, exploring their radical impact as well as their inextricable links with the economics and effects of late-capitalist culture. The exhibition comprised over 250 objects, including large-scale reconstructions and archive film/video footage, drawn from across Europe, Japan and the USA. It was the first exhibition to bring together this range of material and to foreground the significance of pop music and performance in the development of postmodernism. Pavitt originated and co-curated the exhibition with Adamson. They shared intellectual ownership of the project and equal responsibility for writing and editing the accompanying 320-page book (including a 40,000-word jointly written introduction), but divided research responsibilities according to geography and subject. The research was conducted over four years, with Pavitt leading on European and British material. This involved interviewing artists, designers and architects active in the period and working with collections and archives across Europe. The research led to the acquisition of c.80 objects for the V&A’s permanent collections, making it one of the most significant public collections of late-20th-century design in the world. The exhibition was critically reviewed worldwide. For the Independent, ‘bright ideas abound at the V&A’s lucid show’ (2011). It attracted 115,000 visitors at the V&A (15% over the Museum’s target) and travelled in 2012 to MART Rovereto, Italy (50,000 visitors) and Landesmuseum Zürich, Switzerland (70,000 visitors). Pavitt was invited to speak about the exhibition in the UK, USA, Poland, Portugal, Ireland and Italy (2010-12)