Photography and Digital Cultures

Visual SociologyWeek 102013-14

Introduction

• Introduction: How this lecture fits into this term’s work

• Has the move to digital media and platforms transformed photography?

• Transformation of photographic practices reflects and contributes to new/expanded ways of relating to each other

• Conclusions

Introduction

• Sociologists have to reflect on their methods of investigation: sociologists and anthropologists problematised first language and now visual representations J.Clifford and G Marcus (1986) Writing Culture: The Politics and Poetics of Ethnography

This term: politics and practices of looking at and through photographs

Two meanings of looking in relation to photographs: R.Chalfen (2002) ‘Snapshots “r” us: The evidentiary problematic of home media’ Visual Studies 17 (2)

• ‘how we look’ (in that picture)• ‘how we look (ed)’ at the world, at ourselvesThe relation between these two, intertwined aspect of

photography as a method for understanding the social run through our module.

Has digital photography fundamentally changed either of these? We need to add a third question:

• How we relate to each other, through digital media, including photography. Studies now focus on photographs as a ‘relational objects… occupying the spaces between people and people, and people and things’ (E. Edwards (2005:27) in N. Van House (2011)’Personal photography, digital technologies and the uses of the visual’, Visual Studies, 26,:, 125-134

Why might we expect dramatic revolutionary change?

• ‘…media which previously existed in discrete analogue forms (e.g. the newspaper, the film, the radio transmission) now converge into the unifying form of digital data’. (Lister at al 2003).

• One-way linearity between production, circulation and use has broken down, replaced by recursive, manipulation of images and text.

• Transferable from one platform to another• Speed of transmission and access to information and images• Use of media is more interactive, mobile, privatised• Technology more powerful in terms of how far we can see,

and from where.

What are the implications for visual sociology? For photography? Dramatic ‘death of photography’, replacement by new media? (Fred

Ritchin, After Photography? W.W.Norton, 2009)? Or continuity, revival of photography (Lister 2004)?

‘Death of photography’ ? Now in ‘post-photographic age’ which has fundamentally altered the way we receive information.

1. Limitations and restrictions of photography - e.g. fixed viewing position, limitations of manipulation replaced by enhanced power of visual

2. Democratisation of culture and visualisation because we so easily make and send our own images (e.g. phone pictures taken by ordinary people during London bombings)

3. Photographic ‘Truth’ imperilled and replaced by other criteria of judgment

What are the implications for visual sociology? For photography? Dramatic ‘death of photography’, replacement by new media? (Fred

Ritchin, After Photography? W.W.Norton, 2009)? Or continuity, revival of photography (Lister 2004)?

‘Death of photography’ ? Now in ‘post-photographic age’ which has fundamentally altered the way we receive information.

1. Limitations and restrictions of photography - e.g. fixed viewing position, limitations of manipulation replaced by enhanced power of visual

2. Democratisation of culture and visualisation because we so easily make and send our own images (e.g. phone pictures taken by ordinary people during London bombings)

3. Photographic ‘Truth’ imperilled and replaced by other criteria of judgment

Or stress continuities:1. Photography now revived

rather than dead or transcended, e.g through digital camera, cheapness, speed.

2. Production and use still embedded in longstanding power relations.

3. Photographic objectivity long- challenged, nothing new in faking

Life in a Day (Kevin McDonald, 2011)http://www.youtube.com/movie/life-in-a-day

• 90 minute film, entirely crowd-sourced, received 44,000 amateur video sections uploaded onto youtube.com

• Went on to do Britain in a Day, BBC

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00kqz5p

Usual assumption: this is entirely novel, made possible by digital video, internet communications

• More innovative, participative and democratic production and circulation of images by ‘prosumers’ replacing passive mass consumption?Charles Leadbeater (2008) We-Think: Mass Innovation, not Mass Production London: ProfileClay Shirky (2009) Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Together London: Penguin

• But do digital media mimic older media?

Annebella Pollen: Here Comes Everybody: Mass Participation Photography Photographers’ Gallery, 11 Nov 2011

Mass participation in this format is very old, goes back at least to the Mass Observation scheme that started before the second world war, and include reports of the day of King George VI’s coronation. See also photography book One Day for Life (1987) London: Transword Publishers.

• Dong-Hoo Lee (2005) ‘Women’s Creation of Camera Phone Culture’ The Fibreculture Journal

http://six.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-038-womens-creation-of-camera-phone-culture/

Do young women take control of their own image or reproduce the male gaze?

How we represent ourselves is only part of the story, We also enact ourselves. The ‘selfie’ or Facebook profile shots are performative, create our identities and not just capture them.

Cottingley fairies

Digitisation involves losses, including the loss of aura/ special emotional

quality of image, feeling of authenticity

• When archives scanned into a website, there is usually a loss of contextual information, including --the place of the image in linear series, for instance an album--its materiality as an object

--images are homogenised, all reduced to the same form (Sassoon 2004)

Is a change, but change for the worse?

Transformation of photographic practices

• Motivation for taking pictures may be switching from capturing memories to communication (Gillian Rose, Doing Family Photography, 2010). This blurs or recalibrates the relation between (rather than eliminates the division between) private and public visual cultures are more closely entangled, including the construction of an ‘intimate public sphere’.

• Taking pictures now is taking part in the world, rather than representing it. Gap between photography and life is closing, although not collapsing

Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska (2012) Life After New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Conclusions

• C. Graham, et al (2011) ‘New visual technologies: shifting boundaries, shared moments’ Visual Studies 26, 2: 87-91

• Development of photography as a form of (relational) communication rather than mere representation

• Photographs are less durable, less private• Involved in the creation of new collectivities and

intimacies• Productive of new freedoms and new forms of

surveillance and regulation