Socially latent images: Eva and Franco Mattes’s personal photographs

Abstract

The age of ubiquitous photography has not only embedded the ability to easily share photographs, it has also constructed widespread expectations of content being shared. Such presumptions of sharing are profoundly influencing our relationship with photography, particularly as the hypervisibility of shared images produces an increasingly unstable invisibility of ‘unshared’ images. These contemporary concerns can be productively explored and theorized by considering the work of artists Eva and Franco Mattes. In recent works that use personal photographs, the Matteses reveal prescient insights into photographic concerns around latency, (in)visibility and shifting distinctions between personal/private/public. By investigating the Matteses’ works through these prisms, I argue that the age of social media entails internalized and naturalized presumptions of sharing. This has not only affected how and why photographs are taken, it transforms the status of contemporary photography more generally, creating conditions where once unshared/private personal photographs may now instead exist in a broader state of ‘social latency’.