SNAPPING, SHARING… BEING Digital Online Photography and Identity Construction
Ana Paula Mireles Andrade Research M.A. Artistic Research
University of Amsterdam Master Thesis
June 2015
TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION………...p.3 CHAPTER 1………..p.9 I AM… here, there, everywhere.
Identity construction within the offline and online realms
CHAPTER 2………...p.17 CULTURE VS. NATURE
The role of photography in the construction of identity
CHAPTER 3………...p.26 CROSS OVER
Online digital photography as a mediator between online and offline identities CONCLUSIONS………p.33 BIBLIOGRAPHY……….p.40
INTRODUCTION
Since the introduction of mobile phones in the late 1980’s these devices have become “the most quickly adopted consumer technology in the history of the world”1 and in 2014 the number of registered active cell phones surpassed the number of people in the world when reaching 7.3 billion devices2. Technology has evolved and now, with a cellphone, we can always be connected with the world. This, together with other technologies and practices, has speed up the generation and distribution of information as soon as is published by the user. This new paradigm is called ‘real time web’. Which, in contrast with the traditional web, works with pieces of information instead of whole units. As a result it offers better flow in communication, consents to build on top of each other, and grants the user the possibility of setting their personal preferences. Furthermore, it allows the reception of information as soon as is uploaded by the user, which allows the immediate dissemination. All of these advantages have resulted in an exponential growth of social usage3.
One of the most commonly used features of mobile phones within real time web is to make pictures and share them on social networks. Today, to mention a couple of examples from the many different platforms used for this activity, 27,800 images are uploaded to Instagram every minute, and on Facebook this number goes as high as 208,3004.
This idea of carrying around a camera phone in our pocket and have the possibility to snap at the tip of our fingers without any limits forgetting the 12, 24 or 36 film format has generated an exponential growth in the production of images that
1 Rainie, Lee, “Cell phone ownership hits 91% of adults, Pew Research Center, June 6th 2013, Web. <
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-‐tank/2013/06/06/cell-‐phone-‐ownership-‐hits-‐91-‐of-‐adults/>, January 6th 2015.
2 Pramis, Joshua, Number of Mobile Phones to Exceed World Population by 2014, Digital Trends,
February 28th 2013, Web. < http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/mobile-‐phone-‐world-‐population-‐ 2014/> January 6th 2015.
3 Cfr, Sainz, Rosa María, ed. “Qué es Real time web?”, Real time web: una nueva conciencia global,
Telefónica, España, 2011.
4 Bañuelos Jacob & Francisco Mata, ed. Fotografía y dispositivos móviles. Escenarios de un nuevo
paradigma visual, Tecnológico de Monterrey, México, 2014, pp.47, 97.
have overloaded the Internet. Making pictures has become one of the most repeated practices in our everyday life.
This new paradigm has provoked many changes in the way we use and approach photography:
-‐It changed the filters of what is worth capturing: we don’t have to think twice before snapping a photo since we have no limits in quantity. A photograph no longer means a material investment, and it can be easily discarded if we decide that we have no use for it.
-‐It has also altered the way we conceive our private moments. In the past we kept the photographs of our personal life to ourselves, or we shared them with our close ones after they had been printed and organized in albums. Nowadays we photograph our personal moments to make them public and share them on the spot with hundreds of people hoping to get some reaction from the others whether it is a like, a comment, a meme, or another image. The private has become public.
-‐Finally, all of these practices have changed the way we understand and perceive photography. We used to think of it as something that would help us preserve a specific event or person, to remember special moments, to look back into our lives and think this is what I have done, this is where I have been, this is what has made me who I am. Whilst now we use photography to share the present with others, thinking how many responses it will get, how the other will see us, we do it not to look back on them but to look at our present and construct a future, we are thinking this is what I am doing, this is where I am, this is who I am becoming every moment that passes.
Thanks to mobile phone photography new genres have arisen within the medium like the ‘selfie’ or ‘food porn’; and for it new hardware has been developed like the selfie stick, hat and drone; or Dinnercam, a light-‐box specially designed to place your smartphone in it and get a perfectly lit dish for you to share as food porn. New software has been developed as well for immediate post-‐production and easy sharing of mobile images. Since smartphones became the number one device to take pictures and Nokia was selling more photographic devices than Kodak, the digital cameras had to evolve in order to keep up with the new uses of photography and thus
many of them incorporated a share button into them. Trough these developments we have changed our approach to photography shifting its use from being a memory tool into something that gives sense to our existence, it no longer provides an insight to our past, but to our future. So it is safe to say that it has changed photography, but has it changed us5? Has it changed the way we see and represent ourselves? And if so, how and to what extent?
Within the real time web we have many different platforms that allow us to shape our online identities. Blog sites like Blogger or Wordpress provide the opportunity to share information uploaded by the user free of charge and without any coding knowledge. This has attracted many people to express their opinions and thoughts in the public arena. They are mostly based on text, but can also host videos and images. Other sites are more specific about the media, for example for video sharing there is the most popular YouTube, but also others like Vimeo or Revver. And of course there are platforms specifically designed for photo sharing. The first one of these was PhotoBucket (2003) but this idea has come a long way being one of the most targeted by developers to fit the different needs of the user.
Google has two different platforms when it comes to images: Panoramio which is exclusively geolocated to work with Google Maps; and Picasa which allows the creation of photo albums that can be shared with other users via email or by being linked with social networks. Apple created specifically for IPhone the image social network Instagram, which thanks to its growing popularity is now available for other systems like Android. It is based on the idea of sharing your images in social networks, allowing the user to post-‐produce the photo with a variety of filters with just one touch. And finally, the most famous site is Flickr because it not only provides the amateur user with all the social advantages of the others, but also offers copyright protection, which has attracted also professional photographers to its use.
The key aspect for the popularity of all this platforms is the social interaction through social networks. We use all these pictures to showcase ourselves by creating
5 By us I am referring to social network’s users; I wanted to make this clarification because the social
and cultural changes occurred thanks to new technologies have impacted even the people that have no smartphones, or no access to internet or that for whatever reason decide not to use it even if they have it available, but the impact on them is different and would require another research.
profiles on Facebook, Tinder, LinkedIn, Twitter and so on. But given all these possibilities, why do we keep coming back to the commonplaces in photography? Beyond the fact that all tourists might capture a landmark in the same way or any other commonplace that you can think of, it is also noticeable that regardless of the frequency of the posts, each profile has certain patterns that get repeated. For example, there are people who mainly post food porn, or party pictures, or selfies, etc. and some of the patterns are very similar to those of other users. It seems that what we are trying to do in these profiles then is to construct an image-‐based identity. But is it the same one that we try to construct offline?
Theorist and photographer Joan Fontcuberta writes in his book La cámara de
Pandora: “Windows system has become a powerful metaphor to conceive our identity
as a system that is multiple and disseminated… a decentralized self that needs to exist in many worlds at a time, playing different roles. Life may be just another ‘window’… Today, the electronic screen allows us to cross-‐dress our identity at will"6. But, is it merely a cross-‐dressing? Is it just something external to us that we change as casually as we change clothes? Frequently when I discuss with people the topic of my research the first response is: “Oh, so you mean how we are all fake on the Internet?” It seems to be a general idea that whatever we do online can be just a pretension and is completely external to us, but what I aim to explore in the context of this thesis is whether or not we may be interiorizing our online profiles and as a result, modifying our offline identity as well. If this is the case, I would like to question what the role of photography is in this process.
In order to answer this question I will start by defining what identity is. Whenever we speak of identity in everyday life we understand what we are talking about with a certain degree of accuracy, but it actually is a very complex process that needs to be addressed in order to proceed with the research. I will dedicate the first chapter of this thesis to understand what identity is both offline and online, and how do we construct it.
6 Fontcuberta, Joan, La cámara de Pandora. La fotografí@ después de la fotografía, Gustavo Gili,
Who we are is one of the oldest questions human beings have asked, one might even say that it is the ability to ask this question what essentially makes us human; therefore a great number of authors from many different disciplines have studied it. Whilst I will be looking at different theories, the main source that I will use for this thesis is the one by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Two of his theories seemed particularly relevant for this research: first, he considers that the image plays a fundamental role in the construction of the Ego. Second, throughout his writings he explored the relationship we have with the gaze, and the implications it has in constructing our identities.
By using these concepts I am not attempting to provide an answer to this ancestral question of who we are, instead, the aim is to clarify how I understand the concept in order to move forward in the research. After having established the factors that constitute identity, I will be able to insert a concept of identity within the online and offline context and see how every factor comes into play in each one; and with it individualizing the characteristics of identity in both worlds, what the differences and similarities are and thereby determine how do they relate.
Once I have clarified this, I will explore on the second chapter what the relation is between these identities and photography. To do so I will make use of two theorists: on one hand there is the photographer and academic Joan Fontcuberta who argues that the social and cultural uses of photography are intimately related with the technical aspect of it. Following the theory that Marshall McLuhan wrote in The
medium is the massage (1967) about the nature of the media, I will explore the
ontological issue of what photography is. On the other hand, there is the media theorist Jose van Dijck who claims that the inherent qualities of photography continue to be the same regardless of the technical differences and the changes in use are the result of a complex socio-‐cultural restructuration. I will confront their respective points of view and make a comparative analysis between the analogue, the digital and the Internet eras in order to understand if that relationship has changed throughout this development both in the nature of the media and its repercussions in society.
Finally, a third chapter will be dedicated specifically to online photography and how its practice could be the link between our offline and online identities; whether it
works as a mediator or as a divider. I will support this chapter with the theories that Hito Steyerl has developed in several essays. Steyerl analyses the global circulation of images in both her artistic work and her theoretical research. I will pay special attention to her concept of ‘circulasionism’ developed in the essay Too much world: Is
the Internet Dead7. To complement Steyerl’s ideas I will also take into consideration ‘the new aesthetic’ from James Bridle presented at the conference Waving at the
Machines at Web Directions South 2011. With these two authors as core of the chapter
I will study the passage from the virtual to the real world. I will argue that the common practice of making and sharing photographs in social networks is the way in which we cross over the screen and link both the offline and online identity.
In sum, this research has aims at understanding further the implications of an act that we are doing more and more with each passing day. It is commonly conceived as something so banal and superficial due to its ephemeral nature and the commonplaces usually interpreted as passivity and lack of creativity that we repeat this act without thinking what the consequences could be. This is why I believe it to be so important to study it, because it is a phenomenon that whether we like it or not, it is happening and it will not be ending soon.
CHAPTER 1
I AM… here, there, everywhere.
Identity construction within the offline and online realms
In 2012, Tobias Leingruber, an artist from F.A.T Lab created an unofficial Facebook ID card. The project is called Social ID Bureau and consisted in a performance in Berlin where he handed out over 150 Social Networks ID Cards. Each one included your real name, username, sex, location, the date you joined the social network, and a QR code that will send people straight to your profile.
Leingruber clarified in his artist statement that from all the social networks that we use, he chose Facebook because it has taken a predominant role into conforming our identities online. For example, many apps in order to install and function ask for a verification of your identity by linking themselves to your Facebook account. One of the most important premises for the artist was to question the issue of privacy, who controls your identity? What would happen if your Facebook profile became more important than government identification? “For the good or bad we are losing anonymity and Facebook Inc. is establishing order in this "world wild web"”8 he continues. But the privacy issue exceeds the scope of this research; instead I would like to focus on the crossing of borders between the offline and online identities.
While Facebook is the leader in conforming and verifying our online identities to the extent of being a condition in order to use other apps -‐ as Leingruber says -‐ it is slowly crossing over to the offline world too. Some companies are using online profiles to offer personalized services. One example is the website Hotelied that advertises itself as: “Hotelied unlocks personalized unpublished rates at luxury hotels. Finally a hotel booking site where it pays to be you”. So it is a service completely based on your online identity, that links to your social network in order to get your information and with it find you the best deals in hotel booking. Of course we know that the advertisement we get while surfing the net are not random but target specific according to our browsing history, but this concept goes a step further towards
8 Leingruber, Tobias, “Social ID Bureau”, Update May 2012, Web. < http://www.socialidbureau.com/>,
Leingruber’s hypothetical world; it is not just offering you something you might like, is about offering you a personalized deal because they are assuming that who you are online is also who you are offline.
When Internet first reached the common user it was much more anonymous, which represented a risk for some people but was a creative and liberating feature for others. I still remember when people started making friends or dates online and how the main concern was that you could be talking to someone completely different than who they claim to be. Because behind the screen you could be an old fat man chatting as a teenage hot girl. And although the idea of pretending to be someone you are not by creating fake profiles on social networks is still around and is commonly called ‘catfishing’ (making reference to the 2010 documentary film Catfish that later became a TV program made by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman), it is no longer the norm.
Little by little this anonymity has disappeared and it has definitely hit the most drastic change so far since the creation of big conglomerates like Google or Facebook. These companies are pushing the user into “forming a single public identity that's an aggregated version of their offline past, the online present and their combined future”9 explains Aleks Krotosky in his analysis of online identity for The Guardian. But while it has become the main tendency, it is also worth mentioning that there are many other sites that are fighting against it by building networks based on anonymity like 4Chan or the Tor Project. Is it thus realistic to argue that offline and online identities are completely detached from each other? Is there communication between them? Or are them the same thing? In order to try an answer these questions, it is important to establish what identity is and how we build it.
A small clarification is in order. I will avoid the terms real (for the offline) and virtual (for the online) as they are colloquially used for two reasons: first because they are terms that have different connotations within different contexts and disciplines that enclose a broader spectrum than the one this research aims at; second and more important, because as I will argue, what happens online is as real as what happens
9 Krotosky, Aleks, “Online identity: is authenticity or anonymity more important?”, The Guardian, April
19th 2012, Web. < http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/apr/19/online-‐identity-‐ authenticity-‐anonymity>, December 23rd 2014.
offline. Having said this, lets just add that online will be the term I’ll use to refer to the activity that happens when we are connected to the Internet; and offline on the other side will refer to what happens outside the Internet.
To begin with definitions and etymology, I turn first to the Oxford Dictionary. The origin of the word identity comes from the Latin idem, later identitas that means ‘same’; and the current definition is “the fact of being who or what a person or thing is; the characteristics determining who or what a person or thing is; an object serving to establish who the holder, owner, or wearer is by bearing their name and often other details such as a signature or photograph”10. So, far from its origin it now means something unique. But, a second definition within the same dictionary proposes: “a close similarity or affinity”11, in which case goes back to the Latin origin of ‘same’.
We can see that there is a tension within the definitions, on the one side is about a certain innate quality that defines who we are, that unique and specific person can only be me and nobody else. But on the other hand is about the sameness, the similarity, but to what? And how can I be unique and the same as something/someone else simultaneously? The answer lies in our social nature. Who we are goes beyond our individuality, part of it is also linked to a group/nation/team to which we belong instead of other; we become individuals within a society.
According to Jacques Lacan –as I will present in more detail-‐ since a very early age when the Ego is being formed we recognize ourselves in an external figure, in the other. And we struggle our entire lives trying to figure out who we are within our cultural and social groups. In his analysis of Jacques Lacan’s work Steven Z. Levine states: “…our questions are addressed (…) to the generalized Other of the cultural order into which we are born, in which we are educated, which we are willingly or unwillingly join, and in the various idioms of which we must try to formulate answers to our nagging questions”12 like who am I? We cannot answer this by ourselves but also in relation to our surroundings.
10 Oxford University Press 2010, Oxford Dictionary of English, 2012, Mobile application software. <
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/oxford-‐dictionary-‐english/id665056146?mt=8>, December 23rd
2014.
11 Oxford Dictionary of English
After analyzing the theories of George Herbert Mead, Erving Goffman, Sigmund Freud and Louis Althusser, Kath Woodward argues, that identity is formed by the interrelation between ‘agency’ which is the control that we have over who we are, (this would be the individual part) and ‘structures’ that are the external forces that shape us (this would correspond to the society in which we are becoming individuals)13. To summarize her research very briefly: individuals are free to conceive themselves and understand their world and experiences, but they will always be influenced and limited by their material body, the language and symbols they use to express themselves, the society and culture in which they move and the economical possibilities that they have.
As we can see, authors from many disciplines agree that our identity is formed both from inside and from the outside. I would like to use Jacques Lacan to explain how we incorporate this process in our personal development. The reason I am using his theories is because I believe he is key to addressing our current subject by assigning a very important role to images in the construction of identity. Lacan divided the constitution of the human experience in three levels: the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary. The Real is the ungraspable ground in which the Symbolic and the Imaginary stand; the Imaginary would be the one that holds the images from our visual recognition called signifiers; and the meaning of these images are the signifieds which belong to the Symbolic14.
Since my own research is based on identity construction through photography I concentrate in the Imaginary. The Imaginary concerns the visual images, either perceived or imagined. Although Lacan’s theories evolved and developed throughout his career, the fundamentals of the Imaginary were presented in The Mirror Stage as
Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience15 (1949) because the core of the Imaginary is the formation of the Ego in this stage. The Ego is not something we are born with, but it is something that we struggle to construct
13 Cfr. Woodward, Kath, ed. “Questions of Identity”, Questioning identity: gender, class, nation,
Routledge, London, 2000.
14 Cfr. Levine, Lacan Reframed, pp. xv-‐xvii.
throughout our entire lives because the Imaginary is always in contrast with the Symbolic: “…on the one hand, there was the ideal Ego of the Imaginary other that the emerging Ego aspires to be like; and, on the other hand, there was the Ego-‐ideal, the position of Symbolic speech from which the aspiring Ego wished to be judged as wholly exemplifying its ideal. At its core the Ego was split, alienated from itself as an alter Ego, constructed on the basis of a visual model found outside itself”16.
This visual model is the image of a person that sees herself in the mirror between the age of six and eighteen months. In other words, the Ego is born within a visual scenario and it happens when the self is encountered outside of us in a mirror image external to the individual. With this theory, we can see the bifurcation of our self-‐image that is conformed by our internal recognition based in the reflection of something external. “The infant’s mastery is in the mirror stage, outside himself, while he is not really master of his movements. He only sees his form as more or less total and unified in an external image, in a virtual, alienated, ideal unity that cannot actually be touched”17. This is one of the theories that can explain why the question of who we are always includes our perception of us reflected in the other. Of course, this is not the only factor because we also have to consider the society and culture in which we are constructing this identity.
Louis Althusser proposed that we are surrounded by structures that he calls ideologies and through them we recognize ourselves in imaginary relationships to our real conditions of existence18. These ideologies need a material representation, and are determined by Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA) which he defines as “a certain number of realities which present themselves to the immediate observer in the form of distinct and specialized institutions”19; then through interpellation of these external forces we understand ourselves and assume them as part of our identity. They can be religious, cultural, political, amongst others.
16 Levine, Lacan Reframed, p.17.
17 Bice, Benvenuto, The Works of Jacques Lacan. An Introduction, St. Martin’s Press, NY, 1986, p.55. 18 Cfr. Althusser, Louis, Lenin and Other Essays, Monthly Review Press, NY, 1971, p.162.
He states that in the pre-‐capitalist era the predominant system was the religious ISA that had also cultural and educational functions and it worked closely with the family. Then, in mature capitalism the educational ISA took power because it is in school where the know-‐how is taught to children that will be then ejected into the production system as peasants, technicians, white-‐collar workers, executives, intellectuals and so on and so forward conforming the different layers that allow the capitalist production system to replicate itself20. Nowadays, I would like to propose that what guides society for the most part is the communications ISA via new technologies.
We are being more and more pushed to move into the online world, and the more we do it, the deeper we get in. Labor is moving into the digital from the networking and recruiting sites like LinkedIn, to the work environment itself in platforms like oDesk.com. Higher education as well: one can upload academic knowledge on websites like Wikipedia, Google Scholar. It also takes place in the context of digitalizing books, as well as with the growing offer of courses and degrees that can be taken long distance. This is just to name some examples but the same is happening in any other activity that we can think of. The most obvious example is the market. According to Nielsen’s Global E-‐commerce Report from August 2014, online shopping grew 20% from 201321. We can find anything from every part of the world without leaving our homes, and with it comes the advertisement that is offered on the basis of our previous purchases. If we want to buy an item online we need to have a Paypal account, or at least have access to Internet banking. In order to have that account we need to have an email address and so the endless chain goes, the more we consume, the more we are producing.
Since the online world is becoming a part of our intimate and familiarly milieu, we need to grow and develop our personalities in it as well. But even if the online world refers to the same definition of identity, it includes a different process of construction that was not considered by the previous one. “Digital identity is
20 Cfr. Althusser, Lenin and Other Essays, pp. 151-‐158.
21 Nielsen Holdings N.V., “E-‐commerce Shifts Into Higher Gear Around the World”, Global E-‐commerce
Report, August 2014, Web. < http://ir.nielsen.com/files/doc_financials/Nielsen-‐Global-‐E-‐commerce-‐ Report-‐August-‐2014.pdf>, April 21st 2015.
constructed by different types of data that the user may or may not have the intention to reveal, which gives a declared identity conformed by information expressed by the person; an acting identity formed according to the actions that the person does online; and the inferred identity that is made by the analysis of the actions”22.
In other words, online identity is mainly referred to as the profile created throughout our different accounts and activities on Internet from our identity data that matches our offline life, to our behavior while we navigate websites for economic transactions, shopping, searching, or liking on social networks. The life and dissemination of these identities is also different from the one offline, which is also why there are services especially dedicated to help the user control their online reputation, i.e. Reputation.com, Internetreputation.com, or Webrunner.
Another part of our online identity is conformed by a person's photo stream, for example Facebook is so convinced of the importance of the image as part of someone’s identity that has just paid $1bn for the photo-‐sharing service Instagram23. This topic will be addressed more in depth in the next chapters of this thesis, but before moving on to that, I will summarize the topic by going back to the questions proposed at the beginning of the chapter.
What is, then, identity? Identity is a complex set of characteristics that put together conforms who we are. It goes from innate qualities like DNA and physical features to a psychological image that we create throughout our lives based on our experiences, the people around us and the environment in which we move. It is thus something that is in constant construction.
And is there a difference between online and offline identity? Online identity is separate from offline identity, which is why we can catfish or we can have different personas at the same time. They are different because they happen in different settings and they are built in different ways by different factors. On the other hand, they share some similarities: they both respond to the same question of who we are;
22 Sainz, Rosa, ed. Identidad digital: el nuevo usuario en el mundo digital, Fundación Telefónica, España,
2013, p.11. My translation.
and they are both formed by how we see ourselves, how we imagine the other is going to perceive us, and the other’s concept of who we are.
Then, they are two things but they are also connected. An online identity that doesn’t correspond to an offline one is considered an Internet bot (web robot). And an offline identity is becoming more and more difficult to have without an online one. Now that this is defined it is possible to explore the role photography plays in the
CHAPTER 2
CULTURE VS. NATURE
The role of photography in the construction of identity
As we have seen in the previous chapter, identity is in great part formed by mental images, but what about its material representation? It is here that photography comes into play. “Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication”24 wrote Marshall McLuhan in 1967 analyzing television. If we accept this statement then we can assume that the relationship between photography and identity construction cannot be the same in the digital age than it was before. Even if we photograph the same things, it is different if it is done with a printed image captured in a negative film with a photographic camera with the scope of being kept in an album; than a digital photography taken with a mobile phone and posted live to be seen and commented by hundreds of people.
Jose van Dijck argues that communication and identity formation were always intrinsic to photography since it was an analogue media, and the increase in use for ‘live’ communication instead of storing pictures of ‘life’ in digital photography is not the result of technology but because of a socio-‐cultural change25. This is as true of digital photography as it was for the analogue. Photography was part of the socio-‐ economical changes of the industrial revolution. It was associated with its indexical quality because it was born within the philosophical context of positivism. Because of this, it was constrained to provide proof and work as an evidence tool that sustained truth. Then yes, culture plays a part but it is not the only factor.
Inventions are made according to the needs of the society that makes them, but it is also true that a society evolves thanks to the new possibilities that the new technology offers. Then, it is not only the socio-‐cultural that changed the medium, but also the other way around. Additionally, the new uses that van Dijck refers to
24 McLuhan, Marshall, The Medium is the Massage, 1967, Penguin Design Series, Penguin Books, 2008,
p.8.
25 Cfr. van Dijck, Jose, “Digital Photography: Communication, Identity, Memory”, Visual Communication,
correspond not to digital photography, but to mobile photography, which is, technically speaking a different thing. To explain this further, let’s analyze the nature of each one of the three stages in the development of photography, because as McLuhan stated it is there where our relationship with it can be explained.
The term analogue means “a thing seen as comparable to another”26 and thus when we talk about analogue photography we imply that what we see in the photograph even if it is just a representation, looks like its referent. This is not the place to expound on the chemical aspect of the photographic technique, but in order to understand this indexical relationship it is necessary to summarize the basic principles of the way it works. When the shutter of the camera opens, the film becomes exposed to the light reflected by the objects that are in front of the lens. Since film is celluloid covered by a light –sensitive emulsion made with silver-‐halides, it reacts to this exposure because the light rusts its molecules and produces darkness. As a result, the lighter objects that reflect more light cause more rusting and thus become darker in the negative, whilst the darker objects have the opposite effect. In consequence, when we press the button to make a photograph the physical objects that we are photographing imprint the film creating an image that remains latent until it is developed.
Because of this indexical quality embedded into its very nature, analogue photography was always associated with its verisimilitude as a proof, despite the fact that it could be altered and post-‐produced, which was known since its invention. But if this was known, why did we give it the attributes of truth telling? Because, it was born in a socio-‐cultural moment in which such a device that could provide scientific documentation was needed.
Digital photography on the other hand is named as such because the image is transformed into digits. The physical mechanism is in its basis the same as in the previous cameras: when the shutter is opened the light reflected from the objects goes into the back of the camera making an imprint, but this time there is no film, but a CMOS or CCD sensor which is also light-‐sensitive. In this case then the reaction is not
physical but electrical. A sensor is a grid in which each square registers a determined amount of light by adding electrons to each cell that then are translated and stored in binary system which will later be read as pixels. The more light each cell receives the greater number of electrons.
As we can see digital cameras work very similarly to analogue photo cameras, the biggest change being that the components of the image are no longer grains, but pixels. But this small technical change entails a larger ontological transformation to the point that many authors do not even consider it photography anymore but post-‐ photography. One of such authors is Joan Fontcuberta, who published in 2011 the manifesto: Post-‐Photographic Decalogue27. In his earlier book La cámara de Pandora.
La fotografí@ después de la fotografía he explores in depth this new paradigm, and for
him the fact that a digital photograph is composed by graphic units that can be individually altered makes it a media much more related to painting or writing than to analogue photography; which means that making an image is the result of a series of decisions and with it the indexical qualities get lost and “the sense construction replaces the representation of reality”28. Thus for him the change in the use that we give to photography is not fundamentally cultural, but it is embedded in the technical generation of the image.
The third step in this evolution is mobile photography, which is still in debate within the academic circles as to whether it is a different type of photography or if it is just one of the branches of the digital photography29. Personally I subscribe to the idea that it is an autonomous media even if it is done with digital technologies; on the one hand because the image processing is different, on the other because it changed once more our approach to photography. I will explain this further.
The first main difference would be that we are talking about phones that can take pictures, not cameras that can make phone calls. This might seem a little dismissive yet the obvious needs to be stated in order to explain the relationship
27 Fontcuberta, Joan, “Por un manifiesto posfotográfico”, La Vanguardia, May 11th 2011, Web. < http://www.lavanguardia.com/cultura/20110511/54152218372/por-‐un-‐manifiesto-‐
posfotografico.html>, March 5th 2015.
28 Fontcuberta, La cámara de Pandora, p.63. 29 Bañuelos, Fotografía y dispositivos móviles.
between the device, the technology and the user. Although it is also fair to say that with the exponential hype in making mobile photographs manufacturers have put more and more attention into improving the technology of the cameras and image processors of smartphones. Then, even if nowadays some devices are developed with the specific function of image making in mind; many of them are not, and this was even less the case when the phenomenon started. Also, a few technical details need to be specified at this point in order to make the proper comparison with its predecessors.
Camera phones capture the image through a lens that lets the light in so that it can be received by a CMOS sensor, just like digital cameras do. The difference is that they don’t have a physical shutter or diaphragm, which causes a shutter lag. What this means in practical terms is that from the moment you press the button there is a small delay before the actual picture is made. Although many people may not know the technical explanation for why this happens, for sure they have noticed it. Maybe even without realizing it we have changed the way we use our phone to take a picture because we always have to snap a little earlier than the actual picture is made, and thus we are taking the picture thinking ahead.
The other thing that changes is that the image is not imprinted as a whole but is processed as a swipe; similar to how a scanner works. This alters the result of the image, especially if the subject is in motion, but also means another ontological change in the evolution that Fontcuberta was talking about. According to him analogue photography is imprinted and digital photography is written30; but what is mobile photography then? If the image is not created in a fixed moment but just as a beam of light that passes through and carries on, why not consider then every picture as something ephemeral; as a mere glimpse of our identity?
Now that the differences between each kind of photography have been cleared up, we can better understand how the nature of the image relates in different ways to memory and identity construction. And for that allow me to recall the film Blade
Runner (1982) in order to illustrate the starting point of the argument. The premise of
