Abstract
The innovations of digital photography are transforming people’s experiences of producing, manipulating, sharing, and using their personal photographic images. The essentialist and representational dualistic viewpoints of photography that were initially developed in the era of the Daguerreotype appear no longer tenable in the contemporary photography era. This study focuses on the ever-changing role of personal photographic images in the three typical photography events, i.e., the selfie production, the real-time beautified video sharing on the social media, and the production of deepfake AI face-swaps. The study is inspired by the Deleuze-Guattari’s conceptual framework that is mainly composed of the concepts of minor literature, assemblage, becoming, and de/re-territorialization, and defines personal photographic images as both an assemblage and a constitutive part of larger assemblages, i.e., personal photograph production and usage events. The tetravalent model of assemblages is used as a major analysis toolkit to achieve the research purpose. A thorough analysis and discussion shows the material and expressive components that compose different sizes of assemblages and the emergent capacities. It also discloses how digital photography apps play as a line of flight to de/re-territorialize the presumed representational association between individuals and their photographic images. The images have become one of the multiplicities or becoming of individuals, either interacting with individuals, acting on individuals, or extending individuals’ disembodied experiences. This study seeks to develop alternative theoretical lenses on the role of digital personal photography in everyday life and the rhizomatic experiences that it generates.
Highlights
With the development of digital imaging technology, a variety of different types of face- manipulation photographic apps, such as selfie, face filter, and face swap apps, have quickly proliferated
The increased number of photographic faces and bodies, which are saturated on the Internet and social media, is no longer a banal representation or an “incontrovertible proof” (SONTAG, 2005) of one’s existence and identity
Selfies are primarily viewed as a means of online self-presentation and promotion driven by certain psychological factors. Their concentration on the dominant and standardized usage of digital photography, such as representation, identity construction, and life recording, obviously reveals their adherence to the essentialized, dualistic definition of photography that were initially developed in the era of the Daguerreotype
Summary
With the development of digital imaging technology, a variety of different types of face- manipulation photographic apps, such as selfie, face filter, and face swap apps, have quickly proliferated. Selfies are primarily viewed as a means of online self-presentation and promotion driven by certain psychological factors Their concentration on the dominant and standardized usage (or major usage in Deleuze-Guattari term) of digital photography, such as representation, identity construction, and life recording, obviously reveals their adherence to the essentialized, dualistic definition of photography that were initially developed in the era of the Daguerreotype. This study conceives the production and manipulation of personal photography with digital apps as minor photographic practices. Most of previous classical theorists and writers who mainly observe the predigital photography tend to develop their arguments within a dualist or tripartite structure They concentrate on the relationships between the photographic image and reality, between human beings and photograph, and between technology and photograph, or the representational system composed of the world, photographic images, and human beings. This procedure seems to make the subject “live inside rather than outside the moment” and grow into the picture (BENJAMIN,1972, p. 17)
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