The Popular Cultures of Digital Photography: Practices, Aesthetics, Institutions

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Digital photography constitutes an increasingly central site for the dialectic of popular culture. Integrated into smartphones and tablets, cameras have become, for many Western individuals, an essential part of their daily equipment, and photography a significant cultural activity that extends beyond the chiefly domestic and tourist contexts of earlier snapshot photography. At the same time those very same devices enable new forms of institutional monitoring, appropriation and intervention. Such centrality makes it all the more urgent to examine both representational and non-representational dimensions of digital photography in light of their popular appeals, and the entrenchment of the ‘popular’ within the ‘institutional’.

This panel undertakes such a task. Focusing on three interlinked environments - commercial, news and social media - it explores the relationship between personal, amateur and vernacular photography with the industrial, economic and professional structures underlying photographic imagery and technologies. Steering away from a mere critique of the ‘commodification’ of the popular in the service of institutional interests, the papers in this panel foreground their generative interdependence, addressing one or more of the following interlinked questions:

1) How do popular practices and aesthetics become integral to the production and/or consumption of digital photography?

2) How are the visible, aesthetic aspects of photographic imagery across popular and professional genres connected to more opaque discursive, institutional and technological forces?

3) How and when is the ‘popular’ autonomous of the ‘institutional’?

Engaging with these questions, Zeynep Devrim Gürsel takes us inside news organizations to expose the intersections between war photography and popular commercial genres. Giorgia Aiello focuses on the collaboration between Getty Images and the Lean In Foundation to explore tensions between popular aesthetics, public discourses of empowerment and commercial imperatives. Paul Frosh asks whether the selfies created and sold by commercial stock photography might be more than just malign corporate appropriations of vernacular practices. Theresa M. Senft examines the ‘political economies of fun’ in memes containing other people’s appropriated personal photographs, and Asko Lehmuskallio foregrounds the complex relations between popular uses of digital photography and the interests of developers of mobile and wearable camera technologies.

Taken together, these papers extend existing debates on digital photography by addressing some of the key tensions between ‘popular’ and ‘institutional’ outlooks across technological and aesthetic realms. In doing so, they offer insights on the semiotic/discursive and social/material implications of everyday genres and practices such as stock photography, news photography, selfies, Internet memes, and photo-sharing.

Sub Unit

• Popular Communication

Cosponsor

• Visual Communication Studies

Chair

• Giorgia Aiello, U of Leeds

Individual Presentations

• The Incredibly Expensive Business of War Coverage - Zeynep Devrim Gürsel, Macalester College

• “You Can’t Be What You Can’t See”: Popular Appeals of Empowerment and Authenticity in Getty Images’ Lean in Collection - Giorgia Aiello, U of Leeds

• The Stock Selfie: Vernacular Photographs, Commercial Performances and Approximate Lives - Paul Frosh, Hebrew U of Jerusalem

• From My Medium to Your Message: Internet Memes and the Political Economies of Fun - Theresa M Senft, New York U

• The Janus-Faced Role of Images in Digital Photography - Asko Tapani Lehmuskallio, University of Tampere