Social Photography Research Articles

Social photography as social history: the mundane streets of Melbourne

Social photography as social history: the mundane streets of Melbourne

‘It’s Just Pictures’: The Death of Social Photography as we Know it

The widespread adoption of smartphones and increased use of social media has changed how people document and share their everyday lives. As social media has evolved over the last decade, so has social photography practice. In this short paper, we discuss this evolution in relation to our work in progress within an ongoing longitudinal qualitative study spanning over ten years. In this project, we have conducted semi-structured interviews with the same group of informants in 2012, 2017 and 2022. This methodological approach has allowed us to examine how social media users reflect on experience, use and practice. In this paper, we highlight how during this last decade there has been a shift in how people document and share their everyday life in social media. More than ever before, social media users of today are able to document and share snapshots of everyday life, keeping friends and memories close and easy to access. However, in the early days of social media, people were more active in terms of their own production of content and posting of pictures, while today, they share less new material. From our analysis, we discuss how our informants report a shift in how they experience social photography, from being a process of editing and sharing photos intensely, to a more passive approach where they describe taking a lot of images, but not sharing them on social media to the same extent as they did before. Based on one representative example from our empirical material, we discuss the implications of the development of social media platforms over this past decade, and how the possibility to edit and share with others ‘in the moment’ has transformed into something less social over these years. We show how social media photography has evolved from being a practice of editing and sharing memorable content, to being less interactive, and instead involving more individual consumption and reflection, as well as sharing photographs in smaller circles. While the claim that social photography is ‘dead’ is rather bold, we do believe that there is a trend towards a less social and more individual engagement in social media photography.

The Work of Valeriy Miloserdov: Ukrainian Social Photography of the 1990s and 2000s in the Context of Contemporary Art Trends

The article is dedicated to the work of the outstanding Ukrainian photographer Valery Miloserdov, whose photo works and big photo projects, which he began to create since the 1980s, are today not only important documents of the time, but also entered the space of contemporary artistic culture, actualizing a wide the circle of the latest artistic issues, namely: the document as an artifact, social photography as cultural research, the place of documentary photography in contemporary art. The artist's work emphasizes the multi-meaning of the documentary photo in the modern cultural space, the importance of the author's point of view, which imbues it with individual perception, thus translating it into the realm of art, where photography is one of the most influential conceptual practices today.

The Power of Images: Exploring Gender Performances of Filipino Female Celebrities on Instagram

Instagram is a social photography ‘app’ designed to run on a Smartphone through which the social media user can produce visual and textual impressions, thus allowing the ambient viewer to interact and distribute these impressions (Mirsarraf et al., 2017). This study aimed to examined how social media networks are changing the way female celebrities portray themselves to the public and how these digital platforms are assisting in the cultivation of celebrity personas. This study was analyzed using feminist theory, and framing analysis. The results revealed that each female celebrity used Instagram in different ways; however, there were commonalities to their self-representation. Anne Curtis Smith, Liza Soberano, and Kathryn Bernardo all used the medium as more or less a self-promotion tool. Anne Curtis Smith created a somewhat accessible persona, though this was done through self-objectifying, body centric, and sexually explicit images and messaging; Liza Soberano created an accessible persona through less objectifying visual messaging; and Kathryn Bernardo created a dynamic and distant persona through sexualized and dream-like imagery and subject matter.

Reparative Public Musicology: Empowering and Centering Community Knowledge Production through Counter-Storytelling Practice

Reparative Public Musicology: Empowering and Centering Community Knowledge Production through Counter-Storytelling Practice

KineCAM

The kinegram is a classic animation technique that involves sliding a striped overlay across an interlaced image to create the effect of frame-by-frame motion. While there are known tools for generating kinegrams from preexisting videos and images, there exists no system for capturing and fabricating kinegrams in situ. To bridge this gap, we created KineCAM, an open source1 instant camera that captures and prints animated photographs in the form of kinegrams. We present our experience using KineCAM to create a portrait series, and discuss how this type of customizable instant camera platform can create new opportunities for experimental and social photography.

“We Live in a Wagon Never Going Anywhere:” The Representations of Housing Conditions and Tuberculosis in Zagreb between the Two World Wars

The collection of Vladimir Ćepulić’s photographs named The Housing Misery in Zagreb, with wagon apartments as one of its main themes, documents the perception of tuberculosis, particularly its epidemiological aspect, between the two world wars. The representation of tuberculosis as a threat is realized in these photographs through the demonstration of dire housing conditions in which parts of Zagreb’s poverty-stricken population resided. Ćepulić’s photographs are discussed in this paper in relation to the history of public health research and its implications for social work. By publishing and exhibiting these photographs, Ćepulić insisted on raising the public consciousness about potential focal points of tuberculosis and its means of spreading. His ultimate goal was to improve the housing conditions, develop the city infrastructure and curb poverty. The new concept of protecting the health through prevention and broader societal changes is underscored in photography as the ever more popular method used in public health campaigns. The preserved collection of photographs is a unique document of this phase of Zagreb’s history and a pioneering effort in social photography.

Participatory photography and undocumented migration through Mexico at the intersection of social work and anthropology

This article reflects on participatory photography in the context of ethnographic fieldwork at a humanitarian migrant shelter in Central Mexico to consider broader intersections between social work and anthropology. I describe how shifting immigration enforcement trends across Mexico reconfigured my original plan for integrating participatory photography into my work as a researcher and shelter worker. Tracing these changes through three cases examples, I highlight tensions between photography as a reflection of social experience and photography as a mechanism for enacting social change. In light of recent critiques surrounding formulaic and cursory discussions of empowerment in participatory photography, I argue that unexpected shifts in research and practice strategies are themselves meaningful data, especially in uncertain policy environments.

Ephemeral Photowork: Understanding the Mobile Social Photography Ecosystem

For many years, researchers have explored digital support for photographs and various methods of interaction around those photos. Services like Instagram, Facebook, and Flickr have demonstrated the value of online photographs in social media. Yet we know relatively little about these new practices of mobile social photography and in-situ sharing. Drawing on screen and audio recordings of mobile photo app use, this paper documents the ephemeral practices of social photography with mobile devices. We uncover how photo use on mobile devices is centered around social interactions both through online services, but also face-to-face around the devices themselves. We argue for a new role for the mobile photograph, supporting networks of communication through instantaneous interactions, complemented with rich, in person discussions of captured images with family and friends; photography not for careful selection and archive, but as quick social play and talk. The paper concludes by discussing the design possibilities of ephemeral communication.

Psychological Aspects of Social Photography

The purpose of the research is to analyze the main features of social photography in the psychological aspect of the photographer. The research methodology is based on the application of a system-integrated approach to the review of this problem, within the framework of which a whole range of cultural, philosophical, psychological and professional qualities that affect viewers when viewing photographs is considered. The scientific novelty lies in the analysis of modern typological features and characteristics of social photography. The opinions of scientists from different times on issues of the psychological aspects of social photography were also systematized and generalized. Conclusions. We have analyzed the components of the psychological aspect of social photography. With the help of the analysis, the value of psychology in the work of the photographer specializing in the field of social photography has been established. Structural components that form a psychological aspect in the photo have been developed in detail. The factors that influence the rating of social photography have been summarized. The importance of the psychological aspects of social photography has been determined, since during the work at the same time the process of becoming the author himself, and his main task is to not just capture the environment but through his work to express feelings, emotions and thoughts.

Asserting Photography’s Social Function: Exhibitions of Soviet Photography in Interwar Czechoslovakia

Several large-scale photographic exhibitions featuring substantial participation from the USSR were organised in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. Despite the number of local and foreign actors they involved, and the critical response they triggered, they have raised limited scholarly interest so far. To shed light on the conditions under which these events were planned and realised, it is necessary to turn to exhibition catalogues, archives of the organisers and press reviews. Based on this data set, this article questions the part these displays played in propagating Soviet photographic discourses and aesthetic models in Czechoslovakia. New evidence from the archives of the Soviet All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad (Vsesojuznoe obščestvo kul’turnoj svjazi s zagraničej [VOKS]) suggests that the Marxist critic Lubomír Linhart was the most committed mediator of Soviet photography and promoter of its documentary and utilitarian approach. By orchestrating the Soviet participation in the two exhibitions of social photography in 1933 and 1934, the International Exhibition of Photography in 1936 and in several unrealised projects, Linhart and other supporters of the USSR had succeeded, by the late 1930s, in asserting the photographer’s social function in Czechoslovakia, in close relation to the Soviet discourse on functional and politically committed photography.

Instagram and intermodal configurations of value

Abstract This paper explores how ideological positions associated with food are construed multimodally in Instagram posts produced by everyday social media users. Discourse about food choices is an important site for revealing syndromes of values that characterise the ideological positions that are embedded in everyday life. An example of a highly valued food is the avocado which is an important bonding icon in semantic domains from veganism, clean eating, keto/low-carb eating, ethical/sustainable eating to fitness. We explore how values associated with avocado toast are enacted intermodally through the interplay of meanings made in the images, captions, and tags in a corpus of 64,585 Instagram posts tagged #avotoast. The study draws on previous social semiotic work on visual intersubjectivity and everyday aesthetics in social photography (Zhao and Zappavigna 2018a) to interpret the visual meanings made in these posts. It also draws on research into intermodal coupling (image-text relations) and ambient affiliation (online social bonding) (Zappavigna 2018) to understand how different values are construed in these texts. A modified grounded theory approach is used to isolate and exemplify the visual and textual features at stake, and then to explore ideological positionings through close multimodal analysis. A particularly interesting pattern in the corpus is the interaction of aesthetic and moralising discourses. For instance, a regulative metadiscourse realised through hashtags is used to project an instructional discourse about how to eat and what is considered ethical, sustainable, and nutritious food consumption. Rather than being directly encoded as judgement of behaviour these assessments tended to be expressed as appreciation of food items and their aesthetics or worth (e.g., clean, healthy, etc.).

Social protest photography and public history: "Whose streets? Our streets!": New York City, 1980-2000.

"Whose streets? Our streets!," a traveling exhibition that debuted at the Bronx Documentary Center in January 2017, brings together the work of 37 independent photographers who covered protests in New York City between 1980 and 2000. Collectively, they chronicle social justice struggles related to race relations and police brutality; war and the environment; HIV/AIDS and queer activism; abortion rights, feminism, and the culture wars; and housing, education, and labor. The exhibition and companion multimedia website demonstrate the role that photographers, activists, and ordinary people play in enacting democratic social change. They also highlight social protest photography as an important source for doing public history.

Exploring the Life Cycle of Smartphone Images from Camera Rolls to Social Media Platforms

Recent critiques contend that “Far too much current writing on photography—even in pieces about social media and photography—fixate on professional photographers,” so this piece seeks to buck that trend by focusing on ordinary smartphone owners and how they use their mobile devices to capture or create, stylize, and represent their worlds. More specifically, this study examines the “life cycle” of images from capture or creation on the device to potential editing and sharing on social media. It does so through a multimethod, qualitative approach that blends an examination of the users’ camera rolls and images they post to social media platforms with in-depth interviews to contexualize and explain their practices. The results indicate that the ordinary individuals in this sample created vastly more images than they shared and that they used their mobile devices chiefly to preserve memories, document new or unusual experiences, preserve inspiration, provide accountability or evidence, and to create visual media as a stand-in for verbal communication. Of the images they did share, ones with common reference points were most likely to be distributed, followed by ones showing new, rare or unusual experiences, ones that were unified or consistent with other images previously posted, and images that flattered the uploader.

Shoah Selfies, Shoah Selfie Shaming, and Social Photography in Sergei Loznitsa's Austerlitz (2016)

Shoah Selfies, Shoah Selfie Shaming, and Social Photography in Sergei Loznitsa's Austerlitz (2016)

포스트포토그래피 시대의 사회 사진: 장소의 사진에서 비장소의 사진으로

포스트포토그래피 시대의 사회 사진: 장소의 사진에서 비장소의 사진으로

Un patrimoine visuel sous le communisme. La photographie amateur et sociale du président tchécoslovaque Antonín Zápotocký

Résumé Antonín Zápotocký (1884-1957) est surtout connu pour avoir été le deuxième président de la République socialiste de Tchécoslovaquie entre 1953 et 1957. En revanche, son activité de photographe amateur et sa participation au mouvement de la photographie sociale tchèque durant l’entre-deux-guerres n’ont pas encore été étudiées. Les tirages originaux ont disparu et les sources écrites qui documentent cette activité sont rares. Seul demeure son fonds personnel de négatifs, qui a été pris en charge entre 1981 et 1987 par deux institutions communistes, l’Institut du marxisme-léninisme et l’Union des photographes tchèques, et se trouve aujourd’hui aux Archives nationales tchèques. Cette patrimonialisation reste aujourd’hui le principal fil par lequel il devient possible d’interpréter les photographies de Zápotocký. Cet article se propose d’analyser les discours et les formes que la patrimonialisation a élaborés à partir des négatifs originels. Il éclaire ainsi les tensions entre usage public et privé, entre document et art, qui sont à l’œuvre dans les photographies de Zápotocký.

“Visual Affluence” in Social Photography: Applicability of Image Segmentation as a Visually Oriented Approach to Study Instagram Hashtags

The aim of the study is to examine the applicability of image segmentation—identification of objects/regions by partitioning images—to examine online social photography. We argue that the need for a meaning-independent reading of online social photography within social markers, such as hashtags, arises due to two characteristics of social photography: (1) internal incongruence resulting from user-driven construction and (2) variability of content in terms of visual attributes, such as color combinations, brightness, and details in backgrounds. We suggest visual affluence—plenitude of visual stimuli, such as objects and surfaces containing a variety of color regions, present in visual imagery—as a basis for classifying visual content and image segmentation as a technique to measure affluence. We demonstrate that images containing objects with complex texture and background patterns are more affluent, while images that include blurry backgrounds are less affluent than others. Moreover, images that contain letters and dark, single-color backgrounds are less affluent than images that include subtle shades. Mann–Whitney U test results for ten pairs of hashtags showed that eight pairs had significant differences in visual affluence. The proposed measure can be used to encourage a “visually oriented” turn in online social photography research that can benefit from hybrid methods that are able to extrapolate micro-level findings to macro-level effects.

Social Design and Photography: A Path to Social Change

Social Design and Photography: A Path to Social Change

Review: The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media, by Nathan Jurgenson

Book Review| December 01 2019 Review: The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media, by Nathan Jurgenson The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media, by Nathan Jurgenson. Verso, 2019. 144 pp./$19.95 (sb). Stephanie Amon Stephanie Amon Stephanie Amon is a writer in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the associate editor of In the In-Between: Journal of New and New Media Photography. For more information see www.stephanieamon.com. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (2019) 46 (4): 85–88. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2019.464008 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Stephanie Amon; Review: The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media, by Nathan Jurgenson. Afterimage 1 December 2019; 46 (4): 85–88. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2019.464008 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAfterimage Search Snapchat sociologist Nathan Jurgenson's new book, The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media, is a sprawling consideration of social media as a new photographic ecosystem. Jurgenson crystallizes a working definition of the “social photo” that works against the widespread dismissal of contemporary media culture as socially invalid and inauthentic. It also delineates the replacement of photographic nostalgia with ephemerality and reconsiders documentary vision in light of the social media feed. Jurgenson states that he aims “to sensitize more than convince,” and The Social Photo does ultimately fall short of any unified theory of social media photography (11). It skirts both the social-scientific evidence and theoretical depth that could have made a more meaningful contribution to the literature, but it seeds a rethinking of mass photography and does so fashionably. Jurgenson ascribes three primary qualities to social photography, which he describes as “a type of photography made ubiquitous by... You do not currently have access to this content.