A group of visual activists, architects, software developers and archaeologists as well as a multicultural team composed of artists, investigative journalists and lawyers – an organic organization. Forensic Architecture ‘Investigative aesthetic’ is based on visual aggregation on data allowing viewers to enhance their perception-cognition of events by the integrated use of augmented photography. Their works have been presented in front of a court, but also exhibited at international shows all around the world. FA expanded use of photography, integrating in the urbanistic reconstruction of frames of any kind of multimedia information collected, consider it not simply as a medium, but as a proper tool for triggering critical reflections and political action. Forensic Architecture have mainly been investigating the area of conflicts with the aim to present counter- investigation on unclear circumstances, often underlining social constructs in the public forum. The particular role that FA plays, claiming social truth and assigning to photography the function to be a “civil act,” remarks its place in the history of war photography, and underlines the importance of also having a contra-culture in a post- industrial society, permeated by the presence of technology.

This article presents an overview of the history, principles, and current developments in the media technological field of photogrammetry. By chronicling the isomorphic shift taking place in image capturing, we seek to show that photogrammetry has led the way forward in seeing technical images not only as two dimensional projections, but as three-dimensional model-based images. In the mid-nineteenth century, photogrammetry was first used for the documentation of architectural objects and it later became a standard technique in aerial photography. Although its fields of application have become more extensive, photogrammetry’s basic principle hasn’t fundamentally changed: it is still defined as the three- dimensional geometric reconstruction of two-dimensional photographs through the measuring of reference points. With digital technological standards and advances in camera technology, photogrammetric imaging nowadays is intensively used for object recognition in machine vision and robotics. Beside this, photogrammetry is also opening new possibilities for documentation in the fields of investigative arts, this being explored with a discussion on the “Ground Truth” project from Forensic Architecture.