The Photographic Image in Digital Culture: Susan Murray.

Source: Murray, L. (ed.) (2013) The Photographic Image in Digital Culture: Susan Murray. Abingdon: Routledge. (Pp165-82)

Revisiting Flickr

• Flickr images organised in groups and batches (technological features) and fetishization, classification, collection, memory, flow, taste, signification, identification (functions).
• Members page – “decentralised network of similar pages” contributing “to the construction of a community [through keywords tags, comments and contact lists] and larger collection of photographs.” Lister: 2013:165)
• “Collaborative experience: a shared display of memory, taste, history, daily life and judgement through which amateur and professional photographers collectively articulate a novel, digitized (and decentralised) aesthetic of the everyday.” (Lister: 2013:165)
• Digital camera is necessary to document daily life, resulting in a temporal shift with our association of everyday images and narratives about ourselves and our relationship with the world.
• Online photo-sharing with Facebook makes it accessible for anyone to upload whole album in one go to share with family and friends.  Other sites focus on on-line storage with personalised memorabilia such as mugs, I Phone cases.
• Flickr and Facebook differ in sharing with the community which has enabled the two to remain in the digital world.
• Flickr influences the development of photographic technique – e.g. filters, calls members artists and concentrates on aesthetic practice rather than online social identities and offline lives.
• Flickr – slow photography “goal is the experience of studying some object carefully and exercising creative choice.” (Wu as cited by Lister, 2013:168) “Another redefinition in digital practice.” (Lister, 2013:168)
• Flickr blog - techniques, teaching, sharing – different from other social networking sites.

Brief history of amateur and domestic photography

Zimmerman – Kodak cameras – leisure / consumer activity. “organised social and artistic practice that was valued for its spontaneity, authenticity, naturalness and emotialism (particularly in the widespread use and reference to pictorialism).” (Lister, 2013:169) Two types of amateurs – fun or special events recording and “serious amateurs” who engaged in art and middle to upper class leisure. Professionals worked in studios. Pictorialism was inescapable; people wanted to replicate nature and so modern urban life and subjects which populate social networking sites was considered unacceptable. Zimmerman argued that this “deflected cameras, at least on the discursive level, from insertion into the day to day world of industrial capitalism.” (Lister, 2013:169)

Manovich in 1995 wrote “The logic of the digital photograph is one of historical continuity and discontinuity. The digital image tears apart the net of semiotic codes, modes and of display, and patterns of spectreship in modern visual culture – and at the same time, weaves this net even stronger. The digital image annihilates photography while solidifying, glorifying and immortalising the photograph. In short, this logic is that of photography after photography.” (Lister, 2013:170)

Theorists have now moved past the issue of indexicality and representation to study the materiality, universal presence and ephemeralness of digital photographs and question whether the value and meaning of the images is diminished. Cohen studied photobloggers and noticed that they appeared to post banal images to stress that their images are not traditional snapshot images but life as they experience it.

Transience, collection and the everyday image

Photography linked to history, memory, absence and loss by several writers including Barthes and Benjamin. Pollen argues that Flickr and digital photography websites is more transient than loss. Flickr moves the old photos to the back when new ones are uploaded, providing an autobiographical account of the photographer.

“Mobile imagining as autobiographical practice proceeds according to a logic of catalogue or database...Such a logic privileges techniques of selection and (re)combination, which do not operate according to cause-effect relations.” (Heidi Rae Cooley as cited by Lister, 2013:174)

Some categories on Flickr have very strict rules on what can be included but although the images are all a specific type, they are all unique. E.g doors and windows in decay.

Line is blurred on Flickr between serious amateurs and professionals but clues are present such as comments and followers. New category emerging called “ephemera” because photographs are not as precious as they once were. Disposable – images on memory cards are deleted. Visible straight away and the owner can decide if they keep the image. Taken as everyday moments. Group photo pools have larger albums – shared interests and fetishes.

“Digitisation allows for reinvigoration or remediation of what is essentially a form of album making, which can co-exist with other forms of memory making.” (Hand as cited by Lister, 2013:176)

“While digital photography has become a social tool for “identity, formation, communication and experience” it also remains – like the forms of photography before it – a tool of memory.” (Jose Van Dijk as cited by Lister, 2013:176)

“Digital personal photography gives rise to the new social practices in which pictures are considered visual resources in the microcultures of everyday life. In these microcultures, memory does not so much disappear from the spectrum of social use as it takes on a different meaning.” (Jose Van Dijk as cited by Lister, 2013:176)

Photo sharing and communal aesthetics

Pollen compares Flickr to Bourdieau’s Camera Club studies in that they have similar aspirations and practices although Flickr is much larger with its various communities. Flickr in partnership with Getty images so if some images are chosen, members are paid. Pollen argues that the lines between what is an acceptable image and what is not is blurred, as well as amateurs and professionals being indistinguishable. Whereas old photographs may be scratched or grainy, people seek to do this by decreasing the resolution or compression or adding filters on Instagram or Snapseed; what Manovich calls manipulation.

“While digital photography itself has not revolutionised photography or led to the loss of authenticity of an image as predicted early on, it has significantly altered our relationship to the practice of photography (when coupled with social networking software) as well as to our expectations for and interactions with the image and everyday aesthetic.” (Lister, 2013:180)