Professor Ramesh Raskar, head of the Camera Culture group, received the 2024 Royal Photographic Society Award for Imaging Science. This award recognizes the sustained excellence or a notable contribution to the advancement or application of imaging science.  The award for Imaging Science carries a one year membership to the Society. 

Award winners are determined by a panel of experts from across photography and the Royal Photographic Society. Dating back to 1853, it is the world’s oldest photographic society, with a mission to bring inspiration, creativity and connection, through photography, to people of all ages and backgrounds.

Here are a couple excerpts from Professor Raskar's interview with Rachel Segal Hamilton in the RPS Journal:

The Camera Culture group you direct at MIT focuses on ‘making the invisible visible’. What does ‘visibility’ mean in our hyper technologised, image-saturated age? 

Like many kids, until the age of about 11 or 12, I had this feeling that the only part of the world that existed was what I could see and everything else was unreal. ‘Making the invisible visible’ is about saying, “there are things that exist that we can’t see with the naked eye but can we take a picture of them?” Whether that’s faraway astronomical objects or an X-ray showing the inside of the body, imaging science is about moving past the constraints of the camera.

Since you started out in the early 2000s, what has been the biggest imaging shift? 

The fact we have taken what was once a massive camera and shrunk it down to this [holds up smartphone]. It’s not even one camera, it’s four cameras if you count the lenses. That fourth camera is actually a LiDAR [Light Detection and Ranging, a remote sensing technology that employs laser pulses to measure distances from which it creates 3D models], the same thing you have spinning on top of cars and my main area of research. It’s an amazing journey to see how things have changed in terms of hardware becoming simpler, more compact, lower cost. But also, the software behind that, the computer vision, the machine learning.

What are your predictions for the future for photography? 

On the one hand we will have incredible cameras that can render the invisible visible. On the other we will have what I call the ‘non camera’, a camera that has no lens, no sensor, only a shutter. You’ll stand in front of the Eiffel Tower and hit the button and this device will know where you are, what direction you’re looking in, the timestamp. It will download the millions of pictures people have already taken of the Eiffel Tower and images of your family, and will use these to compose an amazing picture. It’s important to think about photography in an extremely broad spectrum, instead of keeping it to the original notion of a camera.