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tags: Photography Social Media
NOTE
Photography is the dominant form of different social networks. Instagram is dominated by the photo. Dating sites are now dominated by the photo.
The lion’s share of text in these spaces is not read.
Photography has arrived as a new technology like a kind of magic, allowing you to document the world in new ways and to share these frozen bits of lived experience with people who weren’t present for them.
If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its function, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally.
- Charles Baudelaire
Tech and nostalgia have become co-dependent; new technology and advanced marketing stimulate ersatz nostalgia - for the things you never thought you had lost - the anticipatory click of nostalgia - for that present that flees with the speed of a click
- Svetlana Boym Foreverism by Grafton Tanner
the early rise of social photography, so defined by an aesthetic saturated with nostalgia?
The low quality of early digital cameras perhaps, but why vintage? The text says multiple reasons. First the proliferation of digital media often brings rise to physical media - mp3 sales grow with interest in analog sources like vinyl records. There is authenticity to the physical object, their weight, smell and tactility that cannot be achieved digitally.
Sharing faux-vintage photos, when they first populated social media streams was like situating oneself in a Brooklyn neighborhood rich and venerable brownstones.
They are self aware simulations…
Baudrillard notion of photos in their faux-vintage form and more vintage than vintage, by exaggerating their qualities.
The dichotomies of amateur vs pro and digital vs analog matter less for the social photo than the relations between power, identity and reality.
Not sure here:
Susan Sontag states everyday snapshot photography doesn’t lend itself to the same type of textual analyses that artistic work typically receives. This is true for the social photo, which is rarely created explicitly as an art object.
Selfies: nonverbal, visual communication that implies one’s thoughts, intentions, emotions, desires and aesthetics captured by facial expressions, body language, and visual art elements.
Young people take less interest in sharing photographs as objects, than as sharing them as experiences.
Yes:
As easy as it is to appreciate special moments, it is equally easy to underestimate the seemingly banal moments in between.
Text: to speak with a photo is to make something more expressive than it seems. You might apply a filter to something that feels cold, which is a manipulation of reality. What is happening here is an augmentation of what the eye perceives (it attempts to capture the subjective truth, desires and essences.)
The social camera is also based on software that does something with those photographic objects.
Sontag:
Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed, just by virtue of being photographed are touched with pathos… All photographs are momento mori.
NOTE
Echoes Camera Lucida, Reflections on Photography - Barthes on photograph as death. I’m unfamiliar with this spelling (momento) and it seems like Neologistic Error Words with the fitting blending of the moment (this could be the clever intent, the more I think about it)
This could just be a trait of all things. But I certainly do feel, like when I pick of a camera or sort through old family photos, like I am given a chance to live briefly and it is the last time I will see this. I have to capture it, and I have to see everything because everything is being lost and I only have this time in this moment for certain because tomorrow it may be gone, including me.
This has also taken on a terrible trait, where there is a sadness and loss to each photo. I can take a photo of family members and be struck with the imagination of it on a display at a wake.
I also had this situation occur, where someone on social media would post a large amount of text and multiple photos where they extolled a family member. My immediate reaction is “this person has died” which can be wrong, and shocking.
Also, algorithmic memories. These cloud photo storages services will provide memories “see what happened 10 years ago” which can bring pain and sadness. Perhaps this is a method of algorithmic torture.
This is part of the appeal of social photography: documentation of a personal experience is reified and made shareable - what you do and who you are is given an audience, made part of social participation in new ways.
NOTE
I could see how for some this will make them feel real. Their moments take life precisely when they are seen.
Nobody really cares to hear you sleep dreams, because they are not part of a shared reality. Were they to tangibly affect their world, they’d take interest. This life, feel like a shared dream were we are tangled in our dreams.
I understand this to an extent. I enjoy the solitude and power of keeping a moment to myself or a limited audience. But I’ve definitely been out at times and said to myself, “what is the point?“. If I were to simply copy some photos from someone, a relay an experience I heard as a complete fabrication it wouldn’t matter. Basically there is no verification check, to my experience unless it is shared. Others will corroborate your existence in the social space (should you want that). I have gradeschool friends who I can think of, and would talk to, but I have no contact with and they are offline.
I think, mainly of people I am connected with.
Still, excluding that social element, there is power in being present in the purely asocial, inner space.
Scrolling a feed, or watching a live event through a phone screen camera view:
Hans Buddemeier - “why did the exact repetition of reality excite people more than the reality itself”
Camera eye - the habit of seeing the world in terms of the logic of the camera mechanism even when you are not looking through the viewfinder.
The was a time long ago when most people didn’t make images are part of their every day life. One could go weeks without taking a photo…
Tourist photos are often criticized for their predictability, the banality of each imitating to each other as if millions fill cameras with the same images. Corinne Vionnet’s 2011 project “Photo Opportunities” in which tourist photos are layered on each other, highlight the homogeneity of the traveler’s gaze
Sontag describes these: photographer trophies. Barthes: certificates of presence
Text goes onto brief discussion of “Claude Glass” which was a pocketable mirror, popular with tourists which was tinted and thus reduced the color/tonal range of scenes.
(I did look further into this Claude Glass, and purchased one.)
The person using it ought always to turn his back to the object that he views. It should be suspended by the upper part of the case … holding it a little to the right or the left (as the position of the parts to be viewed require) and the face screened from the sun.
Nothing seems more miserable and more dead than the stabilized thing, nothing is more desirable that that which will soon disappear.
- Georges Bataille
Platforms like Snapchat or Instagram Stories where uploads are available for a limited amount of time, and then locked away.
Similarity with postcards:
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. Like postcards, camera phone pictures are meant to be discarded after they are received.
The faux-vintage filter helped evoke the look of scarcity, but social photography came to embrace more ephemerality and thus a real kind of rarity, one of attrition, pruning the archive pre-emptively. Furthermore, when it may not be seen again, an image’s temporariness can imbue it with a heightened aura of meaningfulness, inspiring memory by welcoming the possibility of forgetting.
A self destructing image especially demands a sharpened focus and urgency of vision, a challenge to exhaust the meaning from the image in the moment. Given only a peek, you look hard.
The self — the feeling that you are you and not someone else — is a story you tell yourself to connect to the person you once were to who you are now to who you will become. Photography plays an integral role in linking the self over time. We see ourselves in old photos, but we also picture ourselves in the future reminiscing over that which was captured today.
Selfie vs Self Portrait
The self produced by a selfie and a traditional self portrait are not the same. The connection of the hand to to the cell phone at the moment of recording makes the selfie a sort of externalized inward look, and the point of view of the selfie is not necessarily the external gaze of the painter’s eye as he steps out of his body to see and render his own form, but that of a hand that has been extended the power of sight. Thus, in a strange way, the so-called amateur’s look of the selfie also becomes an index of the real - the point of view of the selfie seems authentic because it is the human body looking at itself. On Hands
One worry is that as documentary vision expands, more and more of the world comes to be seen through the logic of what can be digitally captured and shared. The questions shifts from what to document, to what not to document, a proposition which can be difficult to answer leading each photo not taken to feel like a loss, a waste of possible records, memories attention and likes.
Vivian Maier - died with hundreds of rolls of undeveloped film, and reels of video of everyday life sitting next to suffocating stacks of newspapers, themselves mixed with audio cassettes of her every thought.
Erich Fromm’s critique of tourist gaze
The tourist with his camera is an outstanding symbol of an alienated relationship to the world. Being constantly occupied with taking pictures, he does not see anything at all, except through the intermediary of the camera. The camera sees for him, the out come of his pleasure trip is a collection of snap shots which are a substitute for an experience which he could have, but did not have.
All writing all documentation is to approach life from the outside. Bataille - “writing, thinking are never the opposite of work. To live without acting is unthinkable” (to live only in the moment without a meta-awareness is akin to death. Living in the moment is an idea of perfect passivity. One does not participate, or create or manipulate the moment but becomes enveloped in it. To be truly in the moment is to achieve the state of an insect.)
Bataille - knowledge and unknowledge (what is unknown).
Nonknowledge is everywhere
Every time you learn something new, you also learn more about what you don’t know. Discovery is never a matter of gaining truth but also revealing new mysteries. Any breakthrough prompts new questions which were no conceivable before.
For Bataille, the way of knowledge always produced non-knowledge spurred a kind of epistemic despair, the sense of impossibility of knowing absolute knowledge of anything.
Compared to Video:
Stillness is more informative, more explicitly documentary and invites more attention to detail. Video by contrast has limitations that stem from more closely mimicking how experience unfolds. In this way, the photo suggests knowing; the video, observing.
ITV News short on Santorini Tourism, overridden.
Getting a holiday snap isn’t just something you do when abroad, the photo is the thing. The whole reason for making the trip.