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Personal photography, digital technologies and the
uses of the visual
Nancy A. Van House
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Visual Studies, 26:2, 125-134, DOI: 10.1080/1472586X.2011.571888
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Visual Studies, Vol. 26, No. 2, June 2011
Personal photography, digital technologies and the uses
of the visual
NANCY A. VAN HOUSE
Photography has been a wildly successful consumer
technology. The shift from film to digital has, if anything,
increased both photographic activity and enthusiasm on
the part of photographers, viewers and subjects. In this
article, I address empirically and theoretically the practical
doing of ordinary, daily photography as it has moved from
film to digital. I describe findings from my own empirical
work over several years with a wide range of people
engaged in both film and digital photographic technologies,
including camera-phones and online image-sharing.
Current developments in digital image-related technologies
are changing the publicness, temporality and volume of
personal photographic images. I describe personal
photography as, in effect, multiple, overlapping
technologies: of memory; relationships; self-representation;
and self expression, all of which are changing in the digital
environment. I draw on science and technology studies
(STS) for help in understanding photography as an
on-going practice of assemblage and performance, and the
changes in photographic technologies as an opportunity to
see technology-in-the-making – the activities by which
people are reproducing sociomaterial relations. In this view,
photographs have agency as they ‘take the relay’ across
space and time. With digital technology we see shifts in the
assemblages of objects, practices and meanings that we call
personal photography, some of which may be more welcome
than others. In particular, personal photographs may be
becoming more public and transitory, less private and
durable and more effective as objects of communication
than of memory.
INTRODUCTION
Photography has been extraordinarily successful as a
consumer technology since its introduction by Kodak in
the late nineteenth century. The shift to digital
technologies has, if anything, increased the use of and
enthusiasm for photography.1
This widespread
popularity has been a motivating factor in this research.
What are people doing with digital images? Does this
differ from what they used to do? And, most important
of all: why is personal photography so very important to
so many people? Why has the transition to digital been
so easy?
Nancy A. Van House is a Professor in the School of Information, University of California, Berkeley. Her research combines science and technology studies, human–
computer interaction, to understand emerging current photographic practices and technologies, and the role of images in activity and interaction.
I define personal photography as that which is done by
non-professionals for themselves and their friends and
intimates. It subsumes but is not limited to family and
tourist photography. A critical question for researchers
and designers of new technologies is why some
technologies are more readily used than others, and how
people appropriate technologies to their own ends.
Digital personal photography is of interest in its own
right, but also as a case study of a technology that has
been smoothly incorporated into on-going practice.
This paper addresses both empirically and theoretically
the doing of ordinary, daily photography as it has moved
from film to digital. I draw on my own empirical work
over several years with a wide range of people engaged in
both film and digital photography. I also draw on science
and technology studies (STS) to help understand the
practices and multiple meanings of photographs and
associated technologies, the transformations associated
with the transition to digital technologies and how these
contribute to the continued popularity of both old and
new photographic technologies.
RESEARCH ON PERSONAL PHOTOGRAPHY
Understanding the actual ‘doing’ of photography is
critical to this kind of investigation. Yet there remains a
relative lack of ethnographically informed research on
people’s actual, daily practices of photography (Rose
2004; Ruby 2005; Shove et al. 2007). Researchers have
also noted a lack of theorising about personal
photography (Cobley and Haeffner 2009).
Current empirical research on personal photography
comes primarily from two areas: social science research
in visual communication, cultural studies and related
areas; and human–computer interaction (HCI). The
social science and cultural studies research is largely
concerned with the place of personal photography in
culture and society. The HCI literature largely addresses
issues related to technology design.
In a landmark study, Chalfen (1987) approached
personal photography from a communication theory
ISSN 1472-586X printed/ISSN 1472-5878 online/11/020125-10 © 2011 International Visual Sociology Association
DOI: 10.1080/1472586X.2011.571888
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126 N.A. Van House
perspective. He asked: ‘What are people doing when they
make, appear in, or look at their own collections of
personal pictures?’ (1). He went into people’s homes to
examine their photographic collections with them. He
described amateur photography as personal expression
and interpersonal communication, ‘the home mode of
pictorial communication’ (2).
Bourdieu (1996) and Bourdieu and Bourdieu (2004)
studied photographic practices among French families to
demonstrate his concept of habitus and his methods of
connecting lived experience to social regularities. He
concluded that decisions about image content,
aesthetics, display and exchange reflect and reproduce
class. He argued that family photography ‘reinforc[es]
the integration of the family group by reasserting the
sense it has both of itself and its unity . . . a ritual of the
domestic cult’ (Bourdieu 1996, 19). Other occasions for
photography, including tourism, were, to him, variants
on its ‘archetypal function’ (35) of family photography.
Recent research has continued this emphasis on practice,
social reproduction and families. Photographs have been
studied as everyday objects, in terms of their role in the
ideology of families and codes of gender, class and
power, and as an aspect of consumer culture, leisure and
identity (Hirsch 1997; Holland 1991; Pauwels 2005,
2008; Rose 2003, 2004; Spence and Holland 1991; Slater
1995). Tourist photography overlaps with family
photography. The growth of personal photography and
of tourism are closely related both in time and in
meaning (Sontag 1977; Urry 2002). Here, too, a
practice-based perspective has been employed (Larsen
2005; Haldrup and Larsen 2003; Garlick 2007).
The emphasis on family photography and, to a lesser
extent, tourist photography comes in part from the
motivation to understand photography in relation to
consumerism, households and everyday life. Another
source of this emphasis, I suspect, is the evidence
available for empirical research in the age of film. A
common method has been to go into homes (usually of
families), view albums and displayed images and
interview household members (Chalfen 1987; Rose 2003,
2004; Taylor, Swan, and Durrant 2007). These archived
images, usually a highly selected subset of the images
made, were likely to be family and/or tourist
photographs.
Photographs have both content and form; they are both
images and material objects. Photographic prints and
their presentational forms (e.g. albums and frames) have
been studied as social and cultural objects from the
perspectives of material culture, cultural anthropology
and cultural geography. As tactile objects, they have an
emotional and sensory impact beyond that of their
content (Edwards 2002; Pink 2006). They carry physical
traces of their social lives. Their meaning is constructed
by their content but also by their archiving and display as
well as the stories told around and with them (Durrant
et al. 2008; Edwards 2002; Rose 2003, 2004; Shove et al.
2007; Taylor, Swan, and Durrant 2007).
The practices around digital photographic technologies
and their relationship to film photography are also of
interest in HCI research. Most HCI research is intended,
explicitly or implicitly, to support the design of
technological systems for image storage, organisation,
retrieval, display and sharing. This research includes
qualitative, ethnographically informed investigations of
people’s real-life activities with both film and digital
technologies, and the ways that they use new
technologies, including online sharing systems and
cameraphones (Ames et al. 2010; Frohlich et al. 2002;
Kindberg et al. 2005; Kirk et al. 2006; Lindley et al.
2009; Rodden and Wood 2003; Taylor, Swan, and
Durrant 2007; Whittaker, Bergman, and Clough 2010;
Van House et al. 2005; Van House 2009). However,
Frohlich and Fennell (2007, 108) note in this literature
an emphasis on people’s activities but a lack of attention
to ‘what digital photography systems are about’.
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY STUDIES
In this paper I ask whether Science and Technology
Studies (STS) can help explain the popularity of both old
and new photographic technologies and practices. A
variety of theoretical perspectives on technology have
been concerned with explaining why some technologies
are adopted and others are not. STS approaches
technologies as sociotechnical systems, on-going
assemblages of diverse social and material elements.
From the perspective of STS, what appear to be durable
technologies are dynamic and unstable assemblages of
diverse social and material elements. The wide
acceptance of personal photography suggests a popular
and effective sociotechnical system, an assemblage of
technologies, objects, understandings whose multiple
meanings are important in a variety of human
activity.
STS is also deeply interesting in artefacts of all kinds:
more than other social constructionist perspectives, it
attributes agency to non-humans, including
representations of all sorts. Photographs are instances of
Latour’s ‘immutable, combinable mobiles’ (Latour 1987)
which carry action and meaning across time and place.
Both paper and digital photographs are artefacts that
carry activity across space and time, but with distinct
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Personal photography 127
differences, as I’ll discuss below. With the surprisingly
easy transition to digital technologies, we have a case
study of technologies-in-the making and the practical
activities by which they are incorporated into people’s
lives and, I will argue, take on both old and new
meanings.
THE CURRENT RESEARCH: EMPIRICAL
INVESTIGATION
In this paper I draw on an interlocking group of studies
and several years of participant observation by my
colleagues and me (Ames et al. 2010; Davis et al. 2005;
Van House et al. 2005; Van House 2006, 2007, 2009)
from 2005 to the present. The participants and methods
of data collection are described in more detail in Van
House (2009).
We studied film and digital photographers;
camera-phone users; and users of Flickr.com (Richter
and Schadler 2009). We interviewed middle-class
American photographers between 2005 and the present.
Participants were mostly in their 20s and 30s, but
included adults of all ages, with the oldest in her 80s.
With all participants, we used essentially the same
protocol for semi-structured interviews. We asked about
people’s past and present photographic practices and
technologies, including the kinds of images they made,
what they did with them and differences (if any) across
technologies. Most interviews included photo elicitation
(Harper 2002; Van House 2006). We viewed
interviewees’ images (paper, digital and especially
online) with them and asked about specific images: what
they were about, why they were taken and what was done
with them, and why. We also asked people with images
online about privacy.
Each participant was interviewed at least once and up to
three times, in their homes if possible, or in our facilities,
over a period of weeks or months, depending on the
study. In homes, we asked them to give us a tour of their
images: prints on walls, in albums and tossed into boxes
and drawers, as well as digital images on their cameras,
computers and online. With Flickr users, we viewed their
public online photographs both before and after
interviews.
In addition, I and my various co-researchers were
participant observers, using the technologies studied.
(One Flickr user agreed to be interviewed only after he
viewed my and my research assistant’s Flickr streams.)
We also informally observed people’s photographic
practices ‘in the wild’, i.e. in public places, in online sites
(notably Flickr.com) and among our own social
networks.
Early in this research, some interviewees were still using
film, particularly the more skilled and critical
photographers, who had considerable investment in film
technologies and skills and were not satisfied with the
quality of digital images. Tourist photographers observed
in action were divided between digital and film. We gave
some participants their first camera-phones. Many of our
participants were among the earliest adopters of Flickr.
By the time of this writing, everyone with whom we are
still in contact has shifted to digital, and public
photographic activity observed casually is almost entirely
digital. Flickr has become mainstream. Use of Facebook
(including photographs) has risen dramatically.
Camera-phones have improved and are nearly universal.
Smartphones (which can upload images to the internet
and view images and other online content) are in
wide use.
FINDINGS OVERVIEW: WHAT DO PEOPLE DO
DIFFERENTLY WITH DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES?
In this section I summarise briefly what we learned that
people do with personal photographs, with an emphasis
on the changes associated with digital image-making and
networking. In the following section I expand on this by
addressing the on-going and emergent interpretations
and meanings of photographs and photographic
technologies in light of developments in technology.
Better Images, More Images, More Varied,
More Often
Although we have no baseline data for comparison, it is
clear that, with the ease and convenience of digital
technologies, the number and also the variety of images
made has increased substantially. Images can be made
any time, any place, without prior planning. Digital
cameras and especially camera-phones support
spontaneous, opportunistic image-making and
experimentation. While people still make traditional
kinds of images, what is considered photo-worthy has
expanded to include the everyday (Murray 2008; Van
House et al. 2005; Van House 2009).
Among our participants, patterns of image-making
shifted remarkably with the transition to digital. People
often carried small digital cameras; some carried them
all the time. We created visualisations of people’s Flickr
streams over time, which showed the usual peaks of
activity for special events, but often also low levels of
on-going activity. Participants made more images of
daily life and not just special events. Camera-phone users
in particular had a camera at hand when something
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128 N.A. Van House
noteworthy happened, as well as when they wanted to
make, say, playful images of friends.
Image quality has also improved considerably, thanks to
the increased functionality and instant feedback and of
digital cameras and the image processing available in
even basic image-management software. A group of
undergraduates reviewed a collection of several hundred
print photographs from the early 1990s that we found in
a box on a street corner. Their immediate reaction was
great surprise at the poor quality of the images.
Convenient and Rapid Viewing and Sharing
Ready access to network technologies such as laptops
and smartphones and ubiquitous wifi means that images
may be viewed, uploaded, emailed, posted online and so
forth immediately after making. The lag time between
making and use has been effectively eliminated. Images
are easily viewed almost anywhere, anytime.
Among our participants, images have become a greater
part of their lives. Sites like Facebook and Flickr and even
Twitter explicitly support image sharing and
image-based communication. Many Flickr users
reported logging several times a day to see friends’
photographs. Personal photographs have become a
means of rapid, although often short-term,
communication with friends.
Shifting Notions of Privacy and Ownership
One of the most significant recent developments in
personal photography is the increased publicness of
personal images. Photographs are commonly displayed
on webpages, blogs and photoblogs (Pauwels 2005, 2008;
Richter and Schadler 2009). On social networking sites
such as Facebook it is now common, almost mandatory,
to post at least a profile image of oneself, and often
photographs of friends and activities, and otherwise
representative of one’s life and interests (Van House
2011). Facebook describes itself as the largest
photo-sharing site, adding 3 billion photographs each
month (Garvey 2010). Not just images but the activity
pictured becomes much more visible, more public.
Related to these changes in access are changed
perceptions of ownership. Whereas printed images and
negatives are under the control of the owner, digital
photographs have slipped the bounds of materiality and
may have a life of their own outside the control of their
makers. Sites such as Flickr are explicitly designed to
make accessible images by one’s intimates and
acquaintances and even strangers. In place of (or in
addition to) disconnected silos of personal collections,
people have access to images and other media from a
wide range of sources and points of view, private and
public. Many of our respondents saw Flickr images –
their own and others’ – as a public resource.2
Some
explicitly linked Flickr with the Open Source movement,
the free sharing and re-use of intellectual property.
Those who tagged (assigned keywords to) their images
often did it as a sort of civic duty, to enable others to find
and use their images.
The other side of this is that many serious art
photographers (professional and non-professional),
including those with whom I have had on-going contact
as a participant observer, are deeply concerned with
preventing unauthorised re-use of their images.
Holding onto ownership of images has become a
challenge.
Multimedia
This malleability of digital photographs also means that
they are easily altered, combined and recombined with
other images and with other media, such as text and
sound. They may take on new life as elements in
multimedia projects. Software as ubiquitous as iPhoto
makes it easy for even casual photographers to combine
images with sound and other media into presentations.
In my experience it is now common to see such shows at
important personal and family events like bar mitzvahs
and funerals.
Large but Fragile Archives
Film photographs have costs and delays around
processing and printing that generally postpone their use
until some time in the future. Once printed, however,
their default, so to speak, is durability. Prints and
negatives can be thrown in a box and retrieved years,
even decades, later. The meanings of archived printed
photographs are often constrained by annotations,
juxtapositioning and sequencing, such as in albums
(Walker and Moulton 1989) which reduces the
ambiguity and discontinuity (Berger 2001) of
photographs. People often write annotations on the back
or even the front of the photograph, which are then
inseparable from the image (see Figure 1).
However, organisation and annotation are labourintensive
and, among our interviewees, something they
regularly said they intended to do but rarely actually did,
with either paper or digital images. In households with
printed photographs, we saw the usual boxes of prints
and empty albums, and heard promises that people
would (someday) organise them. Among our digital
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Personal photography 129
FIGURE 1. Old photographs found at a flea market: annotations on front of photographs.
users, only the most skilled and dedicated photographers
used software like Photoshop®
Lightroom®
to organise
their images.
Digital technologies and archives have a complex
relationship (Van House and Churchill 2008). Digital
technologies have made indexing and annotation easier,
faster and more flexible. Images can be associated and
re-associated, even those from different photographers,
places and times, creating new collections, sequences and
juxtapositions and hence new meanings. Images may
also be combined with text, sound and other media; and
digitally altered,3
creating a wide variety of new products
and meanings.
However, digital files lack the perception of solidity and
the casual durability of paper that goes with paper. While
few of our younger participants printed images,
participants often described prints as more solid, more
‘real’. Digital archives require more intentional
maintenance. Files have to be migrated from camera
memory card to computer, from old computer to new,
from computer to external storage. Storage media, file
formats and photo-management software become
obsolete. Online image hosting sites may fail. Images are
deleted.
Digital images are also often difficult to browse or search.
They are easily effectively lost if they are unretrievable.
Most of our participants did not bother re-naming and
indexing their images, which then disappeared into a
black hole of ambiguously named files or old CDs tucked
away somewhere. Metadata are lost. Sequencing and
associations are lost. The casual encounters with
forgotten images that we saw as people showed us their
old prints are much less likely.
The overall result is that digital photographs may have a
short life span. Among our participants, digital files were
generally perceived to be highly vulnerable. Several
participants expected their digital images to die with
them: no one would search their computers for images to
preserve.
In sum, the sociotechnical networks within which
personal photography now exists includes information
and communication technologies and their associated
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130 N.A. Van House
practices. The volume of images available has exploded:
people are making many more images, and they have
access to images made by many, many more people,
including family, friends, acquaintances and even
strangers.
Second, the temporality of personal images has shifted
considerably. Images can be made any time, any place,
without prior planning. The lag time between making
and use has been effectively eliminated. But digital
images are often seen as both fragile and of short-term
interest. As a result, much image-based activity is both
immediate and transitory
Personal digital archives rapidly grow out of control,
both in size and in organisation. Digital images are not
easily browsed or searched. Conscious effort is required
for their organisation and preservation. And digital files
are vulnerable to obsolescent technology, institutional
transitions and simple neglect.
MEANINGS OF PERSONAL PHOTOGRAPHY
The developments in technology and the associated
changes in activity are important, but they do not
necessarily explain why personal photography was and
remains such a heavily used consumer technology and
popular activity. For this we need to look to the meanings
and uses of photographs and the associated technologies.
STS argues that the meanings of a technology are
multiple, variable and situated. Here I look at some of
the past and present meanings of personal photography
and their interaction with emerging technologies.
Elsewhere, based on some of the interviews reported
here and an extensive literature review, we (Van House
et al. 2005) categorised personal photography into four
social uses: personal and group memory, relationship
creating and maintenance, self-representation and
self-expression. These categories are overlapping. The
point is not to classify images, but to summarise what
people have told us about why they make images and
what they do with them and why these images are so
important; and their understandings of emergent
technologies. Here I describe how these meanings both
persist and change with new photographic technologies.
Memory
Contemporary thought stresses the constructedness and
contingency of memory, photographs and archives, the
contents of which may be carefully chosen to construct a
specific version of the past. Nevertheless, the popular
view remains that photographs ‘capture the moment’.
Our participants talked explicitly about ‘off-loading’
memories to photos. Images are seen as memories made
durable, correctives to fallible human memory.
Images are also seen as having the power to reach back
into the past to see what we didn’t at the time. One
woman showed us a picture of herself taken shortly
before a serious health crisis, saying that she could now
see that she was already sick then, although she hadn’t
known it.
Reviewing their images with us, participants often
expressed surprise and pleasure at an image of a
forgotten event or person. Frequently, the importance of
an image was as an evocative token rather than an
accurate representation. We often heard, ‘This is not a
very good picture, but . . .’, followed by a discussion of
the importance of the image.
With the increased number, variety and sources of digital
images, people have more to support their memory
work. These may now include images of a person made
by others. One woman said that, when she needed a
photograph of herself for some purpose, she would go
through friends’ Flickr images of her to find one she
liked. She also relied on others for other kinds of images.
I don’t take photos anymore of big events.
When I was at Burning Man I didn’t take a
camera, because I knew there’d be enough
photos on Flickr of really anything I might have
wanted.
More than one person talked about the value of
mundane images for autobiography:
It’s like a chronicle of life . . . I just like to save
pictures and archive points in my life. . . . I have
a very strong sentimental streak. [The
camera-phone] was just a very easy way of
saving different points and I could come back
and look at them and get a feel for where I was
and where I’ve come.
Relationships
Who is in a photograph, when a photograph is taken,
who it is shared with and how, the stories that are told
around it, all these have traditionally been important to
relationships. Edwards (2005, 27) calls photographs
‘relational objects . . . occupying the spaces between
people and people, and people and things’.
A recurring theme in the literature on photography is the
power of images of people, especially those absent or
dead (Barthes 1981; Sontag 1977). Several participants
reported using pictures of distant or deceased family
members, past events and places of significance to give
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Personal photography 131
children a sense of history and membership in family.
Photographs are often treated as extensions of the people
represented. Displays are sometimes arranged to reflect
the relationships among the people represented (Rose
2003; Taylor et al. 2007).
Chalfen (1987) describes personal photography as
‘pictorial communication’. A common reason
participants gave for the posting and viewing images
online was keeping in touch with friends and family,
keeping others informed and staying informed about
friends’ lives, especially about significant life events, but
also just making connections (Lampe, Ellison, and
Steinfield 2008; Joinson 2008) without having to actually
interact directly: ‘distant closeness’ (Van House 2007).
A lot of what I do [on Flickr] is letting people
know what’s going on in my life. I feel very
responsible to old friends, to people who I
know would be interested in how I’m doing . . .
I feel like I need to keep uploading pictures so
that they know what’s going on in my life,
because I’m a terrible e-mailer, I never call, so I
better give them something.
Our participants often expressed an appreciation, even
preference, for image-based communication. Many felt
that images were more ‘real’ than text. Some commented
on their efficiency: faster and easier to both post and
absorb than text. One man whose friends used both
Flickr and the LiveJournal blogging site preferred images
because they bypassed what he called his friends’
‘whining’ on LiveJournal. He also thought that friends’
images offered richer insights into what they were doing
and into their emotional lives than they might put in a
text posting:
[L]ooking at somebody’s photo blog you can
see what they’re thinking about . . . I don’t
always assume that a picture of their dog, well,
it’s a picture of their dog but the reason they’re
posting pictures of their dog usually has
something to do with how they’re feeling, the
background behind it.
Respondents noted that relationships are complex and
dynamic, and so are the places of images in those
relationships. Most of our participants articulated
complex criteria for who should be able to see what and
when. People tailor the stories told around images to the
audience (Lindley et al. 2009; Van House 2009). With
face-to-face viewing, this is under the control of the
image owner. Our participants wanted more nuanced
control over Flickr images. Many of them used multiple
social networking sites (in our interviews, Flickr and
Facebook) to posted different images according to the
expected audience and the norms of each site.
Self-representation
Online self-representation has exploded with the heavy
use of the internet and especially social networking sites4
(boyd and Ellison 2007; Livingstone 2008; Van House
2011). One of our participants described a friend’s image
stream as presenting a ‘carefully curated’ life. Elsewhere
(Van House 2011) I argue that making, showing, viewing
and talking about images are not just how we represent
ourselves, but contribute to the ways that we enact
ourselves, individually and collectively, and reproduce
social formations and norms. By making visible both
one’s own and other people’s public representations of
online activity, including photographs, social networking
potentially increases the citationality of people’s online
activity, re-iterating social norms and formations.
Most of our participants, not surprisingly, made
considered, purposeful use of their online photographic
representations, including images of themselves but also
friends, possessions, spaces and activities. Furthermore,
many treated their online images as expressions of their
viewpoint and aesthetics. Several people with
professional backgrounds in design told us that they
were particularly careful to ensure that the images they
posted were consistent with their own aesthetics.
Expressiveness
Expressive personal photography, making images that
are primarily aesthetic or humorous, is not new, but
almost entirely absent from the research, as far as I have
seen (one exception is Bourdieu (1996)). Photography is
discussed extensively as a fine art, but not in the context
of personal photography.
Photography has long been an art practice with relatively
low perceived barriers to entry. Digital technologies have
reduced these barriers even further. Many interviewees
said that carrying a camera-phone, in particular,
encouraged them to see the world as a field of potential
images. One man showed us a striking camera-phone
image of the geometry of files in a doctor’s office:
You think, ‘This looks nice’, and then you make
the connection, ‘Oh, I could photograph this’.
Online posting of images gives photographers an
audience of friends and strangers. Some who took up
photography when we gave them camera-phones and
access to an experimental site for posting images said
that feedback in their online images encouraged their
image-making. My own experience with serious
non-professional photographers suggests that, with the
advanced capabilities of digital SLRs along with online
image posting, more people are engaging in art
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132 N.A. Van House
photography. Serious non-professionals are using sites
like Flickr and their own photoblogs to post their images
for critique by their peers. Some professional
photographers and instructors are offering online
mentoring for a fee. Students post their images online
and then student and mentor can discuss the images via
phone or other media.
STS AND PERSONAL PHOTOGRAPHY
Suchman (n.d.) has noted that STS addresses:
[T]he question of how new objects are
configured in and through technoscientific
practice. This approach sees technologies and
technological artifacts as material and
discursive practices, combined in ways that
constitute durable objects . . . Technologies
appear in these investigations as socio-material
apparatuses that align themselves into more or
less coherent and durable forms. Viewed in this
way, the study of how new technologies emerge
shifts from a focus on invention, understood as a
singular event, to an interest in ongoing practices
of assembly, demonstration, and performance.
The shift from an analysis in terms of form and
function to a performative account, moreover,
carries with it an orientation to the multiplicity
of technoscience objects or, to put it differently, to
the achieved nature of objective singularities . . .
[O]bjects take their shape and meaning not in
any single location but through their
incorporation across diverse milieu. Making
technologies is, in consequence, a practice of
configuring new alignments between the social
and the material that are both localised and able
to travel, stable and reconfigurable, intelligibly
familiar, and recognisably new. For sociology,
technologies-in-the-making afford an opportunity
to investigate the imaginative and practical
activities through which sociomaterial relations
are reproduced and transformed. (Suchman n.d.,
n.p., emphases added)
STS grants agency to non-humans, and not just that
which is delegated to them by humans. Latour (2005)
argues that action is never fully under the control of the
actor; it is ‘distributed among agents’ (50), ‘a node, a
knot, a conglomerate of many surprising sets of agencies’
(44), not all of which are human. Non-humans,
especially those representations that he calls ‘immutable,
combinable mobiles’, ‘take the relay’ (78) of maintaining
social connections and activity across space and time.
Non-humans, Latour says, may be either intermediaries
or mediators. Intermediaries transport meaning or force
without transformation. Mediators, in contrast,
‘transform, translate, distort, or modify the meaning of
the elements they are supposed to carry’ (Latour 2005,
40) in unpredictable ways.
Emerging photographic technologies and practices give
us a case study of technology-in-the-making, the
on-going discursive and practical alignments between
technical and social elements into what appear to be
objects with stable meanings. Photographs are clear
examples of immutable, combinable mobiles. They are
among the agents across which action is distributed. In
particular, they often ‘take the relay’ of action and
relationships across space and time, including, for
example, as objects of memory and of relationship.
Furthermore, they are mediators, not intermediaries.
They often transform the meaning they are supposedly
carrying. Photographs have always had the ability to
convey a meaning other than the owner intended. Their
meanings may change over time, for different viewers, in
different contexts, in different associations with text and
other images. Barthes’ (1981) famous distinction
between punctum and studium is in part of description
of the situatedness of photographs’ meanings.
In both their film and digital incarnations, photographs
are potent agents of memory, relationship, selfpresentation
and self-expression across space and time,
non-humans that are critical elements of important
human activities; hence the wide acceptance of personal
photography. One reason for the ready acceptance of
digital technologies, I argue, is that they do not
undermine the prior meanings of personal photography;
but neither are these meanings left unaltered. The
disruptions of the digital, however welcome, have both
made visible the taken-for-granted role of photographs
and their associated technologies, and destabilised the
assemblages of technologies and practices that we call
personal photography.
On the simplest level, computer technologies are now an
integral part of the sociotechnical system that we call
personal photography. Even casual photographers have
to have some computer skills, and skilled photographers
have to have extensive computer skills.
With these developments we see shifts in the meanings of
personal photographs and photography. Photographs
partake of all the ways that we use computer-based
media, such as for immediate communication and for
social networking. Ownership is fluid; private images are
increasingly public, and public images are available for
private uses. Images are immediate and often transitory.
The private photograph is now often ephemeral and
shared. Furthermore, while people now have access to
more and better images, they are also often overwhelmed
by the volume and the problems of search and retrieval.
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Personal photography 133
Because digital images are more public, malleable and
immediate, they are being used for communication and
interaction more widely and in continually diversifying
ways. On the other hand, photographs as objects of
memory have traditionally depended heavily on their
materiality and durability, both of which are being
attenuated by the digital.
One possible development is that images as objects of
memory will become less personal, more public.
Image-based memory will become more voluminous but
less private and more public, based less on local, personal
images and more on shared ones. We may see a loss of
specificity, of images of local value with local meanings
attached, at the same time that people have more access
to the collective record. We may lose what Nissenbaum
(2009) calls ‘contextual integrity’, an alignment of
information gathering and display and therefore
meaning within specific contexts.
Memory is of course the most obviously threatened, but
many other meanings as well are at least uncertain.
Transitory expressive images (such as the geometry of
files in an office) are different from the durable art of the
great photographers. Personal photographs may be
becoming more public and transitory, less private and
durable, more effective as objects of communication
than of memory.
NOTES
[1] As of mid-2010, 80% of American households owned at
least one digital camera, not including camera-phones.
http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/cea/vision0710/#/
34.
[2] Flickr supports Creative Commons licensing whereby the
owner can specify conditions for re-use.
[3] None of our participants expressed any interest or
concern about the potential falsification of images.
[4] In the US in 2009, among adults 30 years and older, 40%
were using social sites. Over 90% of teens and young
adults were online, and among these, nearly three
quarters used social network sites (Lenhart 2010).
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