Solo exhibition of Andreas Gursky, held in Tokyo in 2013, attracted attention by its well-designed installation of extremely large-format photographs. It is known that the German contemporary photographers including Gursky, which emerged in 1990s, brought in the era of “big picture.” They often use face mounting methods like “Diasec” mount for their works. This paper deals with some problems which face museums in the process of installation as well as preservation of big picture works, such as Diasec mount photographs.

As Photohistorian Geoffrey Batchen insists, we need to pay attention to vernacular photographies, not just the masterpieces of art photography. The democratization of photography made it possible to share possession of the picture’s content. This essay discusses the pluramonity of vernacular photography using Tazuko Masuyama’s work as an example.

For the retention of digital data, familiar devices such as SD cards, used in digital cameras, as well as hard disks and Flash memory, used in personal computers, are often employed. Moreover, massive amounts of data are also retained in network cloud storage in recent years. However, within each storage device lurks the risk of data loss, whether due to physical failure or human error. Herein we define “data recovery”, the restoration of lost data, examine the structure of a typical hard disk and Flash memory, and introduce some actual recovery cases.

Striking dependence of work functions of noble metals on their environments were experimentally demonstrated and analyzed in the article, for which the present author, H. Iino, T. Uchida, and J. Hanna were awarded. In addition to the origin and development of this article, further analysis of this phenomenon is directed in this paper to seek for its significance in organic and plasmonic devices.

In the era of wet plate photography of 1860, Sir Herschel, who was a scientist of universal and a mogul of photographic chemistry, proposed the concept of “Instantaneous Photography” that is to leave the video to offspring by recording the moving events in the world. He described that the thechnologies required to instantaneous photography were high sensitivity one to enable the snap-shot of 1/10 second exposure and that of plate replacement within 1/2 to 1/3 seconds. Proposal of a pipe dream had been embodied in the wake of the report of the gelatin emulsion by Maddox in 1871 and the launch of the photographic film by Eastman in 1889. And concept of Herschel led to the popularization of photography as represented by film with lens as “Quick-Snap” and the creation of the cinema industry as the popularization of movies. Today digital photography era, the integration of both still-photo and movie-photo is progressing by both functions are housed in a single camera.