Full album here.
Today, you don’t need to look far to encounter photography of any kind. From when you cheekily check Facebook on your phone before you even get out of bed, in print, on billboards, on the news, a phone camera hovering tentatively above a piece of avocado toast. There’s no denying that photography has made itself a loving home in the 21st century, and this is none more true than when you look toward the digital realm.
Photography is a part of the digital language, of which kids growing up today are “native speakers.” (Murray) Yet, just a short time ago, photography in the way we knew it today was still developing – just as it, like any medium is constantly developing and will continue to do so. André Bazin once called photography an ‘embalmer of time’. In the 19th century, photographs were commonly taken post-mortem, partly because it’s quite easy to get a dead person to sit still for the length of time that was required by cameras of the time, and also as a way to preserve the memory of the person that was lot. This practice, the one of preserving memories – not so much the dead people part – continued into the 20th century, especially with Kodak creating a mass market for amateur photographers to arrange their lives into nostalgic snapshots. (West)
In the digital age, however, photography has become less about rare, ‘special’ personal moments and more about the mundane – like the aforementioned avocado toast, and what Britney Spears wore yesterday. Murray explains that this development has signalled a “definitive shift in our temporal relationship with the everyday image, and (has) helped alter the way that we construct narratives about ourselves and the world around us.” The landscape has changed even more since her reflection on online photosharing platforms in 2008, however – she notes Flickr as one of the largest communities, but social media platforms like Instagram have emerged with an even greater focus on sharing photographs with other users.
It is this integration of photography with the digital landscape, and by extension, our lives, that I explored in my media artifacts. I took a series of photos of my own social media pages, accessed on different devices, and removed all the images from the pages, to demonstrate how alien these sites look without the images that we are now all so used to. I also took a photo of another common scene that is very much linked to the image-sharing culture: people taking photos of the mundane, their lunch, and removed the cameras, in this case mobile phones, from the photo. There is no doubt that photography is crucial to digital culture.
Works cited:
- Murray, Susan. (2008, August 1) ‘Digital Images, Photosharing, and Our Shifting Notions of Everyday Aesthetics.’ Journal of Visual Culture, Vol 7, Issue 2.
- O’Hagan, Sean (2016, July 3). ‘The digital age reshapes our notion of photography. Not everyone is happy…’ The Observer.
- Prensky, Marc (2001),”Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants Part 1″, On the Horizon, Vol. 9 Iss 5 pp. 1 – 6
- Van House, Nancy A. (2011, June 9.) ‘Personal photography, digital technologies and the uses of the visual.’ Visual Studies, 26:2, 125-134.
- West, Nancy Martha (2000) ‘Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia.’ The University Press of Virginia, USA.
