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Latvian Photography 2022, 2022

In this article I propose to think about photography without images, i.e., focusing on the medium as practice, apparatus, and form of social interaction. Based on concepts created by Pierre Bourdieu, Vilém Flusser, and Lev Manovich, among others, this article attempts to depart from the image-centered, art-historical approach to photography that has dominated this field so far. Instead of repeating the romanticized narrative of “great” or “important” images and their “talented” makers, this article proposes to look beyond the images’ surface and examine unpublished or deleted photographs in archives and on social media, the significance of darkroom work and collective or shared authorship, photography on the NFT art marketplace, and the role of AI and automation in photographic production. The article discusses the work of photographers, artists, digital creators, and social media content producers such as Sultan Gustaf Al Ghozali, Caroline Calloway, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Zenta Dzividzinska, Alan Govenar, Ivars Grāvlejs, Lucia Moholy, Emma Agnes Sheffer, Alnis Stakle, Sophie Thun, and others.

2016

This chapter examines the revolution in self-representation across the cyber-space engendered by the advent of new interactive social medias. It argues that in the attempt to face the challenges of self-imaging in everyday life and in an era where discourses of “identities in flux” have become the norm, photographic trends on Facebook usage seek to portray a sense of coherence of the self through popular media practices. In this dimension, the new media spaces have provided a propitious space of autobiographic self-showing-narrating through a mixture of photos/texts in a way that deconstructs the privileges of self-narration hitherto available only to a privileged class of people. The self (and primarily the face) has thus become subject to a dynamic of personal and amateurish artistic practices that represent, from an existentialist perspective, the daily practices of self-making, un-making and re-making in articulating one’s (social) being.

Twenty-two years since the arrival of the first consumer digital camera, Western culture is now characterized by ubiquitous photography. The disappearance of the camera inside the mobile phone has ensured that even the most banal moments of the day can become a point of photographic reverie, potentially shared instantly. Supported by the increased affordability of computers, digital storage and access to broadband, consumers are provided with new opportunities for the capture and transmission of images, particularly online where snapshot photography is being transformed from an individual to a communal activity. As the digital image proliferates online and becomes increasingly delivered via networks, numerous practices emerge surrounding the image’s transmission, encoding, ordering and reception. Informing these practices is a growing cultural shift towards a conception of the Internet as a platform for sharing and collaboration, supported by a mosaic of technologies termed Web 2.0. In this article we attempt to delineate the field of snapshot photography as this practice shifts from primarily being a print-oriented to a transmission-oriented, screen-based experience. We observe how the alignment of the snapshot with the Internet results in the emergence of new photographies in which the photographic image interacts with established and experimental media forms – raising questions about the ways in which digital photography is framed institutionally and theoretically.

This article is an exploration of what selfies and other images are and do in Not Safe For Work (NSFW) communities on tumblr.com. By analyzing ethnographic and interview data, images and blog outtakes, this article spotlights four kinds of conflicts that arise around how selfies and images are used. These are about: (a) reactions to photo-shopped images, (b) altering other people’s selfies and/or reposting them as your own, (c) misunderstandings from separating text from image (caption-stripping), (d) disrespecting the self-shooters’ way of curating their blogs. Boundary theory as well as concepts of social afterlife of content and assumed trust are used to illuminate that images, including selfies, have significant, yet different meanings to different people and play an important part in creating and maintaining meaningful relationships and communities.

acuads.com.au

Artelogie. Recherces sur les arts, le patromonie, et la littérature de l'Amerique Latine, 2015

The growth of internet penetration in Latin America, as digital culture scholars have revealed (Taylor & Pitman, 2013), has seen the emergence of tactical media practitioners who push the boundaries of aesthetic form and received discourses. This article examines the use of performance, photography and social media in works by Venezuelan artist Érika Ordosgoitti to assert that her use of Facebook is a deliberate form of “electronic disturbance” (Critical Art Ensemble, 1994) that expands the traditional spatial and temporal horizons of performance. By shorting conventional circuits for the circulation of art, Ordosgoitti’s practice engages broader audiences in critical debates about normative controls of photography and bodily representation in social media. Ultimately, the article contends that the depiction of artist’s nude body is a critical gesture that replaces the complacent selfie with a contestatory “shareware body”. To cite: Lisa Blackmore - « Online photography beyond the selfie : The “shareware body” as tactical media in works by Érika Ordosgoitti », in Artelogie, n° 6, Juin 2015. URL: http://cral.in2p3.fr/artelogie/spip.php?article346

This chapter focuses upon a central digital and visual phenomenon of contemporary culture: selfies. The main premise for my argument is that the conditions that configured the development of imagery as a core element in online interactions were shaped in early textual-based practices and therefore represent a distinct trajectory from the tradition of self-portraiture in painting and photography. Building upon a previous account on the topic (Gomez Cruz and Thornham 2015), I suggest that selfies represent the latest stage of an evolution and convergence between technologically mediated practices of communication and visual cultures. This convergence has been refined through mass adoption, technical innovation, corporate and media discourses and the rise of algorithmic culture (Striphas 2015). Digital photography practices, and specifically selfies, represent an interesting case study to characterize some of the virtues and possibilities of digital ethnography. At the same time, the digital, as an object of inquiry “makes us aware and newly self-conscious about those taken-for-granted frames” (Miller and Horst 2012, 12) and photography (traditional, familiar, vernacular) was one of them (see Gómez Cruz 2016; Hand 2012). By bringing together digital ethnography and the study of contemporary digital and visual practices such as selfies, I illustrate how digital ethnography represents a powerful tool to envision early emergent phenomena in digital culture (Hand 2008) while it is taking place. In particular I explore how use of previous fieldwork, as an historical archive, could help us rethink current phenomena in alternative ways and via alternative, even non-linear, genealogies, while attempting to avoid focusing merely on new technological platforms or iterations. I close with three elements that I consider fundamental to understand digital ethnography as an epistemic intervention in the era of Big Data

International Journal of Communication, 2015

As digital technology becomes increasingly powerful and portable, means of self-expression have fundamentally changed. To speak in this media milieu is to tweet, update a status, or post photographs to social networks. These forms of self-expression provide new means of communicating the self and articulating a sense of connection to others. The selfie, a form of self-portraiture typically created using smartphones or webcams and shared on social networks, has rapidly risen into the common visual vernacular and seems to accent a culture obsessed with itself. While labels of narcissism abound, the selfie also invites a different consideration about the complex nature of networked society. At the moment of capture, a selfie connects disparate modes of existence into one simple act. It features the corporeal self, understood in relation to the surrounding physical space, filtered through the digital device, and destined for social networks. Each of these elements appears in relation to the others, attracting competing logics and languages of belonging and expression into one quick photograph. In other words, the selfie exists at the intersection of multiple assemblages (DeLanda, 2006; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Wise, 2005) that draw complex and often contradictory subjectivities together. In this essay, I examine the selfie as a representational form within locative media that enunciates each of these inherent dimensions as it manifests within a constellation of assemblages. This positioning allows for critical examination of selfies as entanglements of subjectivities within a massively mediated and networked society. Assembling Subjectivities in Locative Media Media studies scholarship has embraced the physicality of media, recognizing that digital media use has moved from stationary screens into our pockets. De Souza e Silva (2006) described this mediainterface shift as moving from "cyber" to "hybrid": "Because mobile devices create a more dynamic relationship with the Internet, embedding it in outdoor, everyday activities, we can no longer address the disconnection between physical and digital spaces" (p. 262). Unbound from desktop computers, portable media devices provide users active Internet connections even in remote places. Users now exist in an always-on and always-connected world that seamlessly moves in an online and offline hybridity, speaking the multiple languages and embodying the various subjectivities between them.

Past, future and change: Contemporary analysis of evolving media scapes, 2013

n his 1934 book Art as Experience, John Dewey called for the reintegration of art with the processes of everyday life. According to Dewey, since the industrialisation of western society, art has become a compartmentalised sphere set apart from ordinary culture. This thesis asks, 'what might the reintegration of art and life look like, in the early twenty-first century in Australia?' Utilising a practice-based research approach, I have developed and refined a new method of art practice – bilateral blogging – which works within the rhythms and spaces of everyday life. Inspired by the 'blurring of art and life' carried out by artists such as Allan Kaprow, the projects developed in this thesis – Bilateral Kellerberrin and Bilateral Petersham – extend twentieth century avant-garde art practice into the existing spaces of Australian neighbourhoods. This thesis shows how artworks like these, comprised of localised social relations, might also begin to document the specific interactive experiences which go into their own making. I demonstrate that as a form of art practice, blogging can deepen engagement with everyday experience. It can produce a more dialogical relationship between artist and audience, and, importantly, it is able to generate rich documentation of situated experiences. Blogging is thus a research tool with the potential to bring to light aspects of everyday life which normally go unnoticed. Through close reflection on the processes and outcomes of my own blog artworks, I have also developed a new way of identifying some of the aesthetic qualities of the experiences from which my relational art projects are made. Building on the work of William James, John Dewey and Allan Kaprow, I propose that attention plays a crucial role in transforming social interactions into aesthetic experience. The method of bilateral blogging developed in this thesis uses attention as a framing device, catalysing seemingly incoherent events into an intelligible, expansive structure. This thesis thus makes three substantial contributions: a new method for making relational artworks; the production of an experiential document of the particular environments in which these artworks are situated; and a new approach to understanding the functioning of aesthetic experience. Taken together, these contributions bring a fresh perspective to discussions around the blurring of art and life, and the use of art as a mode of enquiry.