Sources on Digital Photography Culture

Round-up of writing on Digital Photography to tie in with Sources on Instant Photography in contextualizing On Instagram

Women's Creation of Camera Phone Culture

 * Lee, Dong-Hoo 2005. "Women's Creation of Camera Phone Culture" Fibreculture Journal, Issue 6.

Content

 * Basically an ethnographic engagement with Korean women and their camera phone actions. I am just going to take a few thoughts put forward on camera phones.


 * "The appeal of mobile phones is their transcendence of temporal and spatial boundaries. Mobile phones enable us to be connected at any times and in any place, even when on the move. With telephones we can interact with someone not physically near to us, but mobile phones let us communicate when we ourselves are spatially mobile" (2)


 * "When the mobile phone is equipped with a digital camera, it contributes to the mass production and circulation of digital photography. Since the digital photograph is a form of calculable digital data, it can be more than the record of an event. It can be easily duplicated and manipulated, and thus transforms the cultural meanings of the analogue photograph." (3)


 * "Users can easily edit and distort the photographed images for personal pleasure, and enjoy being the active producers and distributors of those images. On the other hand, users can record the moments of a person's everyday life and the scenes they witness on the move, making the world in private and public spaces more visible and transparent" (3)

Digital Photography: Communication, Identity, Memory

 * van Dijck, Jose 2008. "Digital Photography: Communication, Identity, Memory" Visual Communication, Vol 7, pp 57-76

Content

 * "In the analogue age, personal photography was first and foremost a means for autobiographical remembering, and photographs usually ended up as keepsakes in someone’s (family) album or shoebox." (2)


 * "The so-called cameraphone permits entirely new performative rituals, such as shooting a picture at a live concert and instantly mailing these images to a friend. But we also see this change reflected in terms of software.3 In the past three years, photoblogs have become popular as an internet-based technology—a type of blog that adds photographs to text and hyperlinks in the telling of stories. A photoblog, rather than being a digital album, elicits entirely different presentational uses: college students use it to keep their distant loved ones updated about their daily life, but individuals may also use a photoblog to start their own online photo gallery. Photobloggers prefer to profile themselves in images rather than words" (6) -> CAMERAPHONE + PHOTOBLOG


 * "Phone-photography gives rise to a cultural form reminiscent of the old-fashioned postcard: snapshots with a few words attached that are mostly valued as ritual signs of (re)connection (Lehtonen, Koskinen, and Kurvinen, 2002). Like postcards, cameraphone pictures are meant to throw away after they are received." (6) -> Snap-shots & disposability


 * "Not coincidentally, the cameraphone merges oral and visual modalities—the latter seemingly adapting to the former. Pictures become more like spoken language as photographs are turning into the new currency for social interaction." (6)


 * "When pictures become a visual language channeled by a communication medium, the value of individual pictures decreases, while the general significance of visual communication augments. A thousand pictures sent over the phone may now be worth a single word: see!" (7) -> Communication medium


 * "The digital evolution that has shaped personal photography is anything but an exclusive technological transformation. Rather, the shift in use and function of the camera seems to suit a more general cultural condition that may be characterized by terms like manipulability, individuality, communicability, versatility, and distributedness." (15) -> a general cultural condition


 * LONG QUOTE on the shift from MEMORY to PUBLIC ID PRODUCTION: "he function of personal photography as an act of memory, as we have seen, is increasingly giving way to its formative, communicative and experiential uses. Pictures taken by a cameraphone, meant as expendable enunciations to be shared with co-workers, have a distinctly different discursive power than our framed black-and-white ancestor photographs on the wall. We may now take pictures and send them around to a number of known and anonymous recipients. Networked systems define new presentational contexts of personal pictures, as sharing pictures becomes the default mode of this cultural practice. In many ways, digital tools and connective systems expand control over an individual’s image exposure, granting her more power to present and shape herself in public." (17)

Flickr: A first look at user behavior

 * Cox, Clough, and Marlow 2008. "Flickr: A first look at user behavior in the context of photography as serious leisure" Information Research, Vol 13, No. 1.

Content

 * "Because it is based on individuals uploading their own content, Flickr reflects the move from consumption to mass participation, a supposed feature of Web 2.0."


 * "Given the spread of ownership of cameras throughout society, photography may be viewed as one of the few mass media that has democratic possibilities." -> But this is often critiqued (by Sontag et al) as a false awareness that is still a) superficial and b) consumer oriented "


 * In general, article serves more as a model of ethnographic engagement with this community than a site to take quotes from


 * Part of At Cambridge
 * Related to On Instagram