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CHAPTER ONE
Ubiquitous Photography: A Short Introduction
Over the last two decades digital images have become ubiquitous aspects of daily life in advanced capitalist societies. The rise of digital photography as an ordinary practice has trans-formed the landscape of visual communication and culture: events, activities, moments, objects and people are ‘captured’ and distributed as images on an unprecedented scale. Alongside dramatic changes in the relative dominance of the photographic, computer and telecommunications industries and the use of digital images in journalism, art, tourism, archives and medicine, people routinely make and store thousands of digital photos recording the eventful and the mundane. Many of these are distributed by email or through web applications such as Flickr and Facebook, producing searchable archives of everyday minutiae. Others remain in private collections, albums and traditional modes of display and viewing. Some become intellectual property or commodities, while others assume the potential to shape global events. It is hard to imagine any aspect of contemporary life that has not become visual content, as communications and social relations are increasingly mediated through or accompanied by digital images. The weaving of photographies – as images and ideas, as devices and techniques, and as practices – into every corner of contemporary society and culture produces quite a different scenario from that envisaged during the late twentieth century. Where many once imagined a future of digital simulation and virtual reality, we now arguably have the opposite: the visual publicization of ordinary life in a ubiquitous photoscape.
This book examines the current pervasiveness of still photography and imaging in relation to academic debates about digital culture. The simple observation framing it is that we are witnessing the death of film but the proliferation of photographies. This is true in terms of the disappearance of film manufacturing and processing, the production of film cameras, the availability of darkrooms, and the use of film in anything other than specialist domains or niche communities of practice. Since 1999, there has been a decline in the number of film-based photographs and a dramatic growth in the creation of images using digital cameras. For example, in 2002 there were 27.5 million digital still cameras purchased worldwide, compared with 63 million analogue (film-based) cameras (Lyman and Varian 2003). Worldwide shipments of digital cameras increased to 119 million in 2008 and, at the time of writing, are projected to be 120 million in 2011, while film cameras have all but disappeared (Digital Photography Review 2011).
As photography is woven into digital media, it is becoming something of a banality in terms of its corporate, institutional and everyday prevalence. At the level of popular cultural practices, new social media have come to be increasingly visual, from websites that allow for free image hosting and sharing such as Photobucket and Flickr, indexing sites such as Digg, and social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, to the increased use of photos in blogs and personal web pages. In terms of the extent of viewable digital images, at the time of writing the ‘online photo management and sharing’ site Flickr hosts over 4 billion images, with almost 5,000 images being uploaded per minute. Similarly, the visual content storage and sharing site Photobucket currently receives 4.7 million images on a daily basis. It is perhaps surprising that Facebook hosts more photos than the explicitly photo- orientated Flickr, with over 15 billion in 2009 and current uploads of a staggering 4 billion per month. These vast dynamic repositories of images provide a glimpse into the massive production of photos in the conduct of everyday life. Similarly, the expansion of corporately managed visual content appears exponential. At GettyImages.com, users have access to 24.7 million images, with a variety of rights-controlled and royalty-free stock images available.
Taken as a whole, from the use of images in reporting, advertising and institutional practices of record keeping to the vast numbers of digital snapshots taken in daily life, contemporary Western cultures involve unprecedented levels of visual mediation. This is partly an outcome of the ever increasing ownership of digital cameras. But it also entails a vast increase in the use of wired and wireless networking technologies, of laptops, tablets and cellphones that now incorporate visual technologies and a variety of capturing, storing and distributing practices. Alongside the convergence of the camera and the computer, there is an emerging interplay between the digital camera and the phone, smartphone and cameraphones, particularly in the Asian economies, where over 80 per cent of cell/mobile phones are now also image-capture devices. According to market research forecasts, worldwide shipments of cameraphones will jump from over 700 million units in 2007 to surpass 1.3 billion in 2012 (Infotrends 2010). These devices in turn enable and are enabled by new visual rhetorics and techniques, all of which are producing a novel landscape of screens and images. In all the above senses, digital imaging has shifted from a professional or specialized process to a routine and unavoidable aspect of everyday life. At the same time, what was once amateur or snapshot photography has become potentially global in scope.
Personal photography is the focus of this book partly because of the clearly identifiable increase in image-making as an ordinary aspect of people’s lives. A second reason is that, as Shove (2003) has convincingly argued, the domain of the ordinary is precisely what should concern sociologists and others when trying to understand social, cultural and technical change. Theories of digital imaging and photography have been skewed mostly towards philosophical concerns with the ontology of the image or with the professional domains of photojournalism and art photography. As a counterpoint to this, I suggest that the domain of personal photography provides a particularly useful way of identifying emergent aspects of sociotechnical stability and change in the domain of digital culture.
For these reasons, the confines of photography studies, with their primary focus on the visual image, are necessarily limited in their scope for understanding the broader dynamics of digi-tization. This is not a book about images primarily, and it is not written by a professional or serious photographer. It is a book about the dynamic constellation of practices under the umbrella of ubiquitous photography, and how such practices of making, storing, distributing and displaying images are emerging on the ground. However, I argue that such a scenario requires analyses that pay serious attention to the theory and history of photography but equally are able to move well beyond those boundaries. While this is partly a story of rapid technological change – the digitization of photography – it is also an investigation of how the more subtle and precise ways in which digitization relates to a variety of image-making practices and technological devices has become compelling territory for understanding the dynamics of digital media and society.
Personal and ubiquitous photographies
Twenty-two years after the arrival of the first consumer digital camera, Western culture is now characterized by ubiquitous photography. (Rubenstein and Sluis 2008: 9)
The above observation suggests radical change at the present time, but this is not the first moment in history when photography has been considered ‘ubiquitous’. As Hirsch (2000: 175) observes, the New York Times ran a story on 20 August 1884 concerning an ‘epidemic’ of cameras, with amateurs described as ‘camera lunatics’ training their cameras on those simply walking down the street. The scenario of having one’s picture taken unawares seemed radically intrusive, even though there were relatively few hand-held cameras in circulation by today’s standards. Nonetheless, familiar responses emerged: concerns about the acceptable boundaries between public and private, the suitability of previously unseen objects or actions, the breakdown of societal boundaries of decency and ‘good taste’, as places were ‘besieged’ with amateur photographers, and so on. In order to understand what may be different at the present time, it is worth briefly highlighting some of the ways in which personal photography has evolved, all of which will be explored in more detail throughout the book.
The evolution of personal photographies
To begin, we should ask what we mean by personal photography and how this relates to ubiquitous photography. Personal photography includes those photographic practices and images that are inextricably part of personal life – whether the individual taking of pictures, the images we use to represent ourselves, the pictures we collect or display for ourselves, or the sharing of pictures with others as part of personal communication. These forms may be distinguished from institutional, governmental, scientific and broadly professional forms of photography and imaging, although the categories have latterly become blurred, as will be explained. The story of personal photography involves its vast expansion and diversification over the last one hundred and fifty years, in tandem with technical, socioeconomic and cultural shifts in personal life. While personal photography has often been located within the domestic sphere or the family, it cannot be reduced to amateur, private, popular, family or snapshot photography as if all these were the same. Personal photography is inextricably tied to broader changes in what counts as ‘family’, how social identities have shifted in relation to patterns of work and leisure, gender, and how the use and analysis of personal photographs have altered in line with scholarly approaches to history and memory (see Holland 2009; Spence and Holland 1991; Slater 1995).
Personal photography has diversified from the expensive and, to some extent, difficult production of single images during the nineteenth century, through the mass production, distribution and consumption of ‘snaps’ throughout the twentieth century, to the apparently infinitely expanding and diverse personal images people instantaneously produce and consume in the twenty-first century.
Early forms of personal photography between the 1840s and the 1880s were located mainly within the middle-class home and consisted of portrait images of idealized Victorian domesticity and military or exploratory travel. To be an amateur photographer – or a ‘hobbyist’ – to have one’s family represented, to have the means to obtain private images or capture the ‘exotic’ of faraway places (related to the new practices of tourism and travel) for collecting and displaying purposes, were all conditions of privilege and, to a certain degree, wealth. Plenty of amateur photographers were women, but only those with relative wealth and domestic servants to allow for such a new leisure pursuit. Many of these aspects changed at the turn of the twentieth century as a result of new technologies of the camera, changing expectations about visual imagery, and the emergence of consumerism as a distinctive way of living in the West.
Whether through the postcard or the ability to pay for pictures in instalments, the turn of the twentieth century saw a rise in less advantaged socioeconomic groups being able to do personal photography and therefore engage in new forms of self-representation (Wells 2009). The forms such photographs took ranged from the apparent realism of the sporting event or working conditions to the staged portraiture in which people were placed against ‘exotic’ backgrounds. The emergence of mass forms of photography – made possible by the launch of the Kodak camera in 1888 – had a huge impact on who was able to do personal photography and precipitated the very idea of ‘snapshots’, through which many more people were able to develop their own forms of informal personal photography, often derided as being devoid of technical knowledge and skill. This, in turn, reinforced a distinction that continued throughout the twentieth century between ‘personal’ (frivolous) and ‘amateur’ (serious) popular photography, both of which have remained distinct from professional or ‘art’ photography. These distinctions also remained gendered: personal photography and practices of album-making were positioned towards women, while serious amateur photography, alongside professional and art photography, were dominantly framed as ‘masculine’.
During the twentieth century the broader forms of popular photography proliferated through postcards, the mass production of photographic prints (which could incorporate personal portraits), and the use of photographs in rapidly expanding popular media such as newspapers, magazines, and so forth. Practices of personal photography also expanded and diversi-fied, particularly in relation both to tourism and new modes of travel (car, rail, flight) and to the widespread adoption of the family album as the preferred mode of representing or, indeed, ‘producing’ the family. The largely Kodak-inspired association between personal photography and memory, developed at the turn of the twentieth century, became established and normalized across social classes during the 1950s and 1960s, as rising prosperity and the domestic economy became important locations for new ideals of family life and consumption. Images of Christmas, birthdays, holidays, and so on, became the standard stock of the family album, while at the same time idealized images of home and of family circu-lated more frequently within the burgeoning forms of popular entertainment, especially television and an expanding magazine industry.
In what might broadly be described as a continuing democratization of personal photography, during the late twentieth century, practices of album-making and personal photo collecting expanded to include not only the family but, more often, friends and broader social networks, and also individuals themselves. The individual use of cameras within family arrangements became more common, as did the acceptability of personal imagery across popular media (e.g., as an aspect of celebrity culture). The emergence of digital photography at the level of the ordinary consumer during the 1990s transformed this landscape of personal photography in many different ways, extending the distribution of the personal or private image into a range of public spheres and global media.
The advent of personal photography, as one of several new visual technologies of the nineteenth century, is itself embedded within changes in visual mediation across Western culture. The ways in which new visual techniques were understood in terms of truth and fantasy, evidence and authentic representation, will be looked at in more detail in chapters 2 and 3. The emergence of new visual objects – photographs – precipitated new practices of collecting and organizing perceptions of the domestic sphere and the outside world. The ways in which photographs have been valued as material and symbolic objects has also shifted over the aforementioned period, bringing into question whether the digital photo can be valued as a durable form of self-representation.
This expansion and diversification has been made possible by technological change at the level of photographic industries in general, alongside specific developments in consumer-level cameras and processing techniques aimed at ‘simplifying’ photography (see Slater 1991). As will be explored in chapter 4, there have been comparable instances of significant technical change throughout the history of personal photography that have altered people’s perceptions of what photography is and is for and who can do it, and have reconfigured what has counted as photographic skill and expertise. In this way, the actual activity of doing personal photography as well as the visual content it has produced will be considered in greater depth throughout.
Such technological developments make sense only in the contexts of late modernity and consumer capitalism. Many of the apparent certainties of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries represented within personal photography – the stability of family, employment, selfhood – can now be seen as ideals rather than realities, but they have also shifted in terms of being dominant ideals. Throughout the history of personal photography, ‘the domestic’ has been reshaped as part of processes of individualization in Western culture, the rise of ‘identity’ as the dominant category of self-consciousness, and the emergence of ‘leisure’ as a series of consumer practices in their own right. The ways in which, for example, memory practices have become commodified and tied to the consumption of technologies is of particular significance for the ongoing evolution of personal photography (see chapter 5). Personal photographies have not simply expanded, but have evolved within the wider field of photographies that have, in turn, been undergoing significant change.
Why ubiquitous photography?
Although there have been previous perceptions that cameras are everywhere, it is certainly the case that there are more cameras in use and more people engaged in practices of personal photography than ever before. What is the significance of this? The ubiquitous presence of the camera changes what can be, and is, seen, recorded, discussed and remembered, making the visualization of public and private life bound up with relations of power, expertise and authority. Indeed, the current ease of making images in everyday life has recently made personal photography subject to state intervention in the name of the prevention of terrorism, at least in the US and the UK. For example, alongside the restrictions imposed on taking photos of the police, the ordinary ubiquity and politicized practices of photography have taken centre stage in public protest:
The protests during the G20 summit were a carnival of photography. If they achieved nothing else – and that seems likely – they showed how the camera has become startlingly ubiquitous, as ordinary a recording instrument as the ballpoint pen but infinitely more believed than any words in a notebook. (Jack, 2009)
The June 2010 G20 summit in Toronto became a comparably visual event, with cameras and cameraphones described as the new ‘weapons’ in the struggle between law enforcement, professional journalists and ordinary citizens. Each attempt to assert rhetorical authority over public understanding of the event – to control how events are visually mediated – creates a panoply of visual claims and counter-claims regarding the conduct of all those involved. In these cases, what we have seen is the increasing visualization of everyday experience – also including accidents, social disorder, and natural disasters – and debates about the relative authenticity attached to it.
Figure 1.1 Camera wars
There have been other visual controversies stemming from the reconfiguration of personal photography through digital media, such as the attempted removal of pornographic images from Facebook in 2008, resulting in the controversial deletion of images of breastfeeding, and the ability to locate images of people’s homes through the online mapping tech-nologies of Google Earth and Street View. The permeability of public a...
