Anna NacherInstitute of Audiovisual Arts, Jagiellonian University

Online Photography – media states of matter

A telling infographic from January 2013 illustrates the scale

of the phenomenon: every day an unimaginable 300 million

photographs are uploaded onto Facebook (at a rate of 3500 per

second); within the past two years, this number has increased by

200 million (in 2011, the rate was still only 100 million per

day1). Second on this list is Instagram, with five million photos

per day (58 per second), followed by Photobucket with four million

(47 per second), and finally, in fourth place, Flickr, where users

post 1.6 million photographs daily (roughly 19 per second). Most

of this material was created using smartphones produced by

industry leaders Apple and Samsung.2 The use of mobile phones for

photographic purposes, guided by its own, particular aesthetics,

is considered more of a distinct form of expression in its own

right than an impoverished version of “real” photography, produced

with a camera (usually a digital SLR). The popular Instagram and

Twitter topics #iphonephotography and #iphoneography3 (the latter

term even has its own entry in Wikipedia4) are excellent examples

of this. There is also a whole section of the blogosphere devoted

to iPhoneography,5 as well as a number of popular guides, 1 “Flickr reaches 6 billion photos uploaded”, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/08/flickr-reaches-6- billion-photos-uploaded.html, accessed: 26.02.2013. 2 “300,000,000 Photos Uploaded to Facebook Daily!”, http://grabworthy.com/300-million-photos-uploaded-to- facebook-daily/, accessed:25.02.20133 A popular online guide also operates under this heading, http://www.iphoneography.com, accessed: 14.04.2013.4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhoneography, accessed: 14.04.2013.5 See: http://www.i4neography.com, accessed: 14.04.2013; Life in LoFi, http://lifeinlofi.com, accessed: 14.04.2013; iPhoneography Central, http://www.iphoneographycentral.com, accessed: 14.04.2013.

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including the popular The Art of iPhoneography by Stephanie C. Roberts,

available both in book form and as an application for the iPad.6

The popular iPhone offers a range of add-ons to expand its

capabilities, including special lenses, cases, and tripods, as

well as a wide array of applications for editing photos on the

phone itself. We can safely say that a full-fledged social

movement has formed around mobile photography ‒ especially around

Apple’s iPhone, introduced just six years ago in 2007 – which is

giving rise to a distinct aesthetics (although this phenomenon

needs also to be seen in terms of its marketing contexts and its

place in the company from Cupertino’s brand-building strategy).

Apple’s former rivalry with the PC (Microsoft) has been replaced

by disagreements as to whether iOS (the mobile operating system

used in Apple’s iPhones and iPads) is superior to Android

(associated primarily with smartphones from Samsung) and vice

versa.

This has reached what can most certainly be called a frenetic

flood of images. The staggering statistics cited above constitute

merely a small part of what has grown to become a major focus of

research in the digital humanities (and social sciences), an issue

usually referred to as big data.7 A mere glimpse at the impressive

6 S. C. Roberts, The Art of iPhoneography. The Guide to Mobile Creativity, Pixiq, New York 2012.7 The term refers to automated methods for analyzing and processing massivedata sets. This includes, for example, projects being carried out in the area ofcultural analytics by Lev Manovich and others. One of these is ImagePlot software for analysing visual data, also used by Polish researchers in cultural studies, including dr Radosław Bomba, http://lab.softwarestudies.com/p/software-for-digital-humanities.html (accessed: 28.03.2013) and a Polish research projectbeing carried out by a team from the University in Lublin: http://wizualizacjasztuki.umcs.lublin.pl (accessed: 04.10.2013). In order to more fully understand the scope of the issue, it is necessary to realize that these huge data sets, which are composed of intentional cultural texts, are justthe tip of the iceberg. David M. Berry cites data from the American-based Wal-Mart alone, which manages one million transactions per hour, adding additional bricks to the database, which a journalist from The Economist quoted by Berry

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figures involved demands we acknowledge the views of those who

have written about the universality (or even the ubiquity and

omnipresence) of photography.8 A look at today’s popular social

networking practices leads us to similar conclusions ‒ this

concerns not only the ubiquitous sharing of photos of even the

most trivial moments in our social lives (which leads some critics

to arguable conclusions about our living in an era of narcissistic

media, or so-called MeMedia9), but also the popularity of all sorts

of modifying, remixing and reconfiguring, at the centre of which

lies photography (including popular memes and virals and the

growing popularity of animated “gifs”). However, I would like to

look here not just at digital photography and its specificities,

but at various forms of photographic presence in the third era of

computing (following the eras of the mainframe and the PC),10 that

of ubiquitous computing, also known as ubicomp11 ‒ although I will be

estimated in 2010 to be 2.5 petabytes of data (corresponding to 167 times all the books stored in the Library of Congress); see D.M. Berry, The Philosophy of Software. Code and Mediation in the Digital Age, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2011. When we realize that in addition to this, any large commercial organization managing data exchanges associated with the use of barcodes and RFID tags, the amount of data visible “on the surface” in the form of images is indeed just a drop in theocean of a massive information flow.8 A. Fetveit, “The Ubiquity of Photography”, [in:] U. Ekman, Throughout. Art and Culture Emerging with Ubiquitous Computing, MIT Press, Cambridge 2013.9 S. M. Petersen, Common Banality; The Affective Character of Photo Sharing, Everyday Life and Produsage Culture, doctoral dissertation, IT University, København 2008, http://gendannelse.nu/wp-content/uploads/Common_Banality_PhD_Thesis_Soeren_Moerk_Petersen.pdf, accessed: 3.03.2013; see also: M. Sandbye, “The Family Photo Album as Transformed Social Space in the Age of ‘Web 2.0’”, [in:] U. Ekman, ed.,Throughout... op. cit.10 U. Ekman, “Introduction”, [in:] U. Ekman, (ed.), Throughout... op. cit.11 Issues associated with this new paradigm have not yet drawn the interest of Polish researchers: besides Martin Składak’s article published in Przegląd Kulturoznawczy in 2007 (and thus, in terms of ubicomp – a very long time ago), there have been no synthetic studies on this subject. The literature in Poland is still dominated by a research model aimed at analyzing virtuality, and studies of the Internet, communication practices typical of this environment, and specific forms of cyberculture (e.g., video games), new media art and CMC. See: M. Składanek, “Hybrydyczne przestrzenie interakcji człowieka z komputerem w perspektywie postulatów Ubicomp”, Przegląd Kulturoznawczy 3/2007. Anna May in her book Media w podróży, Poland’s first comprehensive analysis of mobile media

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focusing on a form that is modestly referred to as “postdesktop”

computer technology (based mainly on the logic of cloud computing

and an entire ecology of mobile media). Ubicomp currently includes

geomedia12 (based on cybercartography and tracking) and the Internet

of Things (objects with communication capabilities, such as RFID

technology).13 Although rhetoric about a “digital revolution” is a

now well-recognised and often even deconstructed element of the

marketing narrative of Silicon Valley companies, and should thus

be taken with a grain of salt, the fact is that over the past

decade, there has been a significant qualitative change in the way

computer technology is configured. On the one hand, we have

witnessed its diffusion and incorporation into in new areas of

everyday use (particularly in urban areas); on the other ‒ there

has been a blurring of the boundary between the material and

digital worlds (as indicated by the popularity of the concepts

mixed reality and augmented reality, as well as the emergence of new

discourses, she does not even use the concept ubicomp, but she does describe projects realized within this paradigm (e.g., designing HRG game by means of Blast Theory). See. A. Maj, Media w podróży, Wydawnictwo Naukowe ExMachina, Katowice 2010. She makes up for her earlier lack of this key term, by referring to ubicomp in a text published a few years later in an anthology: A. Maj, “Mindware: technologie umysłu i umysł technologiczny w perspektywie antropologiimediów i badań nad komunikacją”, [in:] P. Celiński (ed.), Mindware. Technologie dialogu, Wydawnictwo WSPA, Lublin 2012.12 Pojęcie geomediów zaproponowali Lev Manovich i Tristan Thielmann. Ich zdaniem

pozwala ono uchwycić zjawiska w znacznie szerszej perspektywie, niż popularnie używany w geografii termin GIS, wzbogaconej o procesy kulturowe towarzyszące nowym technologiom lokalizacyjnym i cyberkartografii. Por. or. L. Manovich, T. Thielmann, Geomedien: Raum als Neue Medien-Platform? Ein Interview mit Lev Manovich [w:] red. J. Döring, T. Thielmann, Mediengeographie: Theorie – Analyse – Diskussion, Transcript, Bielefeld 2009

13 This is the stance adopted, for example, by authors in the anthology edited by U. Ekman, Throughout... op. cit. Other works on the Internet of Things include business analyses (concerning the possibilities for developing these technologies), as well as critical approaches. See E. Townsend, ICT KTN, Future Internet Report, UK Future Internet Strategy Group, May 2011, https://connect.innovateuk.org/web/ictktn/document-library, accessed: 12.02.2013; R. van Kranenburg, The Internet of Things. A Critique of Ambient Technology and All-Seeing Network of RFID, Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2008.

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terms such as physibles14). In other words, before our very eyes, the

technological environment through which our contact with

information occurs has undergone a significant reconfiguration ‒

its characteristics lead us to speak increasingly about a

postvisual culture (somewhat paradoxically given the flood of

constitutive practices surrounding photography).15

In 2006 (and thus a relatively long time ago in terms of the

rise of ubicomp), Adam Greenfield, whose career in interactive

design has included work with the consulting firm Razorfish,

Toyota, Sony and Nokia, coined the term everyware to describe this

computing environment. The term is ‒ as can be easily noticed ‒ a

play on words, in which -ware simultaneously makes reference to

both “software” and “hardware”, while also (due to similarities in

how they sound) to words describing location and ubiquity: where and

everywhere. Greenfield describes this term primarily by means of its

situational aspect: “In Everyware, all the information we now look

to our phones or Web browsers to provide becomes accessible from

just about anywhere, at any time, and is delivered in a manner

appropriate to our location and context. In Everyware, the

garment, the room and the street become sites of processing and

mediation.”16 I hesitate, however, to use the term “new media” in

this context for several reasons: first, because of the marketing

aspects related to the notion of “new” technology, which hinders

critical reflection about it; secondly, due to the illusion of

radical change associated with the discourse of technological

“revolutions”; and thirdly, because “new” in terms of media has a

14 A neologism proposed by the Pirate Bay community to describe objects manufactured on 3-D printers, which are listed as a separate category on their website.15 M. B. Hansen, “Ubiquitous Sensation: Toward and Atmospheric, Collective, and Microtemporal Model of Media”, [in:] U. Ekman (ed.), Throughout... op. cit.16 A. Greenfield, Everyware... op. cit., “Introduction” (Kindle version).

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historical dimension that is often forgotten (every media

technology was once “new”17). What is specifically “new” in

technologies based on cybercartography has been identified as a

form of reconfiguration by Francesco Lapenta, who indicates in his

writing that these “are not new media per se, but platforms that

merge existing technologies (electronic media + the Internet +

location-based and Augmented Reality technologies) in a new mode

of digital composite imaging, data association and socially

maintained data exchange and communication.”18

I think that the contemporary passion for photography, which

is undoubtedly one of the most distinctive online phenomena today,

needs to be examined in light of this broader background. From

this perspective, we can see changes not only in social practices

and the conventions of representation (especially interesting

topics of analysis here include the transformation of the family

album and the photographing of special occasions19), but also ‒ as

a result of the changes resulting from the shift to digital

17 The category of “new” in relation to the digital audiovisual media is debatable, a point about which too little is written in Poland; see: L. Gitelman, G. B. Pingree (ed.), New Media, 1745-1915, MIT Press, Cambridge–London 2003; L. Gitelman, Always Already New. Media, History and the Data of Culture, MIT Press, Cambridge–London 2006. Rodowick Rodowick writes about the debatability of the category of “new” with regard to digital audiovisual media (especially film, butalso photographic images) in The Virtual Life of Film, Harvard University Press, Cambridge–London 2008. According to Rodowick, the “newness” of digital media andwireless technologies appears to contradict a generally accepted evolutionary teleological narrative, if we consider the contexts dealt with in the archaeology of media. See also: W. Uricchio, “There’s More to the Camera Obscurathan Meets the Eye”, [in:] M. B. F. Albera, A. Gaudreault, Arrêt sur image et fragmentation du temps / Stop Motion, Fragmentation of Time, Cinema Editions Payot, Lausanne 2002. An interesting problematising approach to the linearity of the evolutionary narrative is often invoked in the Polish context through the concept of remediation; see: J. D. Bolter, R. Grusin, Remediation, Understanding New Media, MIT Press, Cambridge 199918 F. Lapenta, “Geomedia: on location-based media, the changing status of collective image production and the emergence of social navigation systems”, Visual Studies, vol. 26, No. 1, March 2011, p. 15.19 J. van Dijk, Mediated Memories in the Digital Age, Stanford University Press, Stanford 2007.

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photography ‒ in the ontology of the photographic image. What kind

of changes? Above all, the focus of discussion today ought to be

on network media photography, rather than on just digital

photography. The same image often becomes both a visible symptom

of and a tool for networking ‒ as with photos that have been

geolocated using GPS. Of continued importance are the implications

resulting from the fundamental features of digital images: this

form of photography consists merely of a series of data, and in

the area of computer technology, there is a separation between the

medium of storage (usually as code stored on various types of

memory cards, but also on a hard disk or in the memory of a mobile

device) and the medium of display (various forms of screen media).

In such a reconfigured technological environment, in which a vital

role is played by mobile media (smartphones and tablets equipped

with cameras), there is a departure from understanding the

photograph as an object, towards photographs being perceived and

structured as a stream (justified by the numbers cited earlier),

and usually as performative in nature. This can be clearly seen in

the case of mobile applications such as Instagram20 or Snapchat,21

but this formula also encompasses the most typical version of the

Facebook interface, with its dynamic “updates”, in which a

prominent place is occupied by photographs posted by friends

(often sent via Instagram). Such a situation could arise as a

result of one of the elements of the backbone of ubicomp, namely

logic of data clouds, in which data is stored on public servers,

rather than on private user stations, making it accessible from

any location and device.22 Finally, one of the most important 20 http://instagram.com, accessed: 5.04.2013.21 http://www.snapchat.com, accessed: 4.04.2013.22 In 2012, Apple introduced the iCloud service, which hosted contents for uses of the company’s devices and offered automatic synchronization, as a response to Google Drive.

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changes concerns a feature that is probably the most obvious and

most often discussed s aspect of photography : its ability to

store memories, and its relationship with memory. The example of

the previously cited Snapchat application (where images disappear

from company servers and user devices after a few seconds)

illustrates a trend that Mark B. Hansen calls movement towards a

model of atmospheric, impersonal, and micro-temporal media.23 I

would like to focus on these aspects of the modern passion for

photography a little more closely.

The paradoxes of materiality: from cloud to stream

Let us start with the basic features of digital objects ‒

which apply equally to both images and text (and all other forms

of content, e.g., audio) ‒ a topic Lev Manovich dealt with in his

writings more than a decade ago in his analysis of an aspect of

digital media that termed “the language of new media.”24 In the

case of digital objects, what we are dealing with is essentially a

code that can be run through various interfaces (and today,

different devices as well). Arild Fetveit reminds us that this has

led to a radical separation between the medium of storage and the

medium of display25 ‒ which is one of the foundations of the logic

of computing. At this point, however, we can map out a trajectory

of reflection that differs from the one quite often encountered in

studies of digital media, which reduce complex issues related to

the socio-cultural dynamics of media technologies to an allegedly

23 M. B. Hansen, Ubiquitous... op. cit.24 L. Manovich, The Language of New Media, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 2001.25 Fetveit, The Ubiquity... op. cit. Friedrich Kittler wrote about this earlier, predicting – long before the days of widespread digitalization and the popularity of the internet – the end of the diversity of media in favour of a metamedium, such as the computer; see: F. A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Stanford University Press,Stanford 1999.

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conclusive bounded variation in code. J.D. Bolter writes here of

the “code perspective” and criticizes it as essentialism and a

return to technological determinism.26, In his most important book,

Manovich himself states that the separation of code from the

interface is the chief feature of digital media (and not, as

popularly believed, interactivity), a claim which has given rise

to demands for the elaboration of a postmedia aesthetics. Its main

task would be to develop categories that would allow us to

“describe how a cultural object organizes data and structures user’s

experience of this data.”27 According to the author, however, these

categories “should not be tied to any particular storage or communication media”,28

which sounds controversial. Although at first glance it offers

interesting possibilities, such as allowing you to focus on the

conventions of representation, the circulation of content, and

user practices at the intersection of various media; however, it

also triggers additional reflection. Does such an approach not

imply too large a dose of abstraction (the category of programming

and software, so important to Manovich, is understood according to

the formalist tradition, derived from cybernetics, as an operation

on symbols)? Is the cultural importance of media, after all, not

closely linked to their materiality?29 This last question also

concerns digital media, in spite of the widespread and often

26 Traces of this attitude can be seen particularly in the field of softwarestudies, where the primacy of the “hard structure” of digital media in the form of code and software is sometimes too strongly emphasized, without sufficient attention being paid to the importance of socio-cultural practices. See: J. D. Bolter and his polemic with the theses of Lev Manovich in The Language of New Media in “Remediation and the Language of New Media”, Northern Lights, Vol. 5, 2007.27 L. Manovich, Post-media Aesthetics, www.manovich.net/DOCS/Post_media_aesthetics1.doc, accessed: 23.03.2013.28 Ibid.29 Signifigant attention has been focused on this issue by, among others, N.Katherine Hayles, see: How We Became Posthuman. Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, And Informatics, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London 1999; see also: Writing Machines, MIT Press, Cambridge 2002.

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strong belief about their radical dematerialisation or

immateriality.

An important distinction introduced by Fetveit would be very

useful here ‒ according to the author, dematerialization relates

only to the medium of storage “in the sense that they are no

longer physical objects we could hold in our hands as much as they

are data codes kept in computer files.”30 At the same time, it

should also be remembered that the term “media” is a rather

complex concept and includes ‒ in addition to technology and a

physical carrier , also includes patterns of perception, aesthetic

aspects, and socio-cultural practices.31 This problem is

particularly interesting in the context of photography because

although the transformation described seems to chiefly concern

digital objects, Fetveit reminds us that we can trace the history

of the separation of the storage media from the form of display,

going back to the invention of the negative process developed in

the early 1830s by William Fox Talbot. According to Fetveit, in

this case, we can even say that the invention prefigured what

digitization would bring. In fact, both Talbot’s calotype and

somewhat earlier experiments by the French artist and cartographer

30 A. Fetveit, “Convergence By Means of Globalized Remediation”, Northern Lights, Vol. 5, 2007, p. 60.31 The fact that this term has slightly different connotations in discussions on aesthetics and in studies in the field of media theory also does not help matters. Although in the 1990s and the first years of the twenty-first century, there were predictions of end of media and of our entry into a postmedia era (particularly in relation to digital media), but there is no indication that older media, such as film, photography and television, have completely gone out of date – as the theory of remediation rightly suggests, we are rather dealing with a variety of reconfigurations and a complex process of transformation in the media.

See: R. Krauss, Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, Thames & Hudson, London 1999; L. Manovich, Post-media... op.cit.; J. D. Bolter, R. Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, MIT Press, Cambirdge 1999, A. Fetveit, Convergence... op. cit.; W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2005.

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Antoine Florence closely resemble techniques of photocopying

(including printing) ‒ Florence, who is not well known for his

role in the development of photographic techniques, first proposed

using the word “photographie” (which was not used by either Talbot

or Daguerre) in 1832, while working in a remote corner of Brazil,

where it was difficult to find a printer. Florence invented what

we would call today a “copy house” (i.e., a place for photocopying

documents).32 Equally interesting in the context of the processes

that resulted from the separation of the media of storage and the

media of display (and providing further evidence of its

prefiguration) is Talbot’s suggestion that he invented the

technique so that it “could be used by friends to share letters

and images.”33 This brings to mind the ease today with which

content is shared through formal and informal networks of

distribution. It appears that this observation is related to the

material conditions of the process itself ‒ while Talbot (and

before him ‒ or almost parallel to him‒ Florence) worked primarily

with paper (a medium that is more mobile and easier to “share”

with others), Daguerre, as we know, developed a method for fixing

an image on a metal plate.

Today, the consequences of the separation of these two types of

media are fully evident and are revolutionizing both the daily

practices of those participating in culture, and the business

strategies of the entertainment industry, discourse on copyright

law, and many other areas. After all, we are speaking of a

situation in which content can be displayed in many different

32 M. W. Marien, Photography. A Cultural History, Laurence King Publishing, London 2002.

33 Ibid., p. 18. See also U. Giersch, “Marzenie kartki. Fotokopia a powielana kultura”, [in:] A. Gwóźdź, Ekrany piśmienności. O przyjemnościach tekstu w epoce nowych mediów, Wydawnictwa Akademickie i Profesjonalne, Warszawa 2008.

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media, and its transmission, modification and distribution ‒

especially in the case of networked media ‒ is essentially just a

question of instinct and habit. This is in spite of the efforts of

the entertainment industry and hardware and software manufacturers

to act as a centrifugal and braking force: a silent war is being

fought not only between the proponents of strict enforcement of

producers’ rights to online content, but also between the various

corporations promoting specific data encoding formats, as shown in

Adobe Flash’s recent last loss to HTML5. Although the digitizing

process eliminates a wide range of physical and chemical processes

that are essential to classic photography and its effects

(including the type of paper and a number of details relating to

analogue editing), digitality has its own forms of materiality ‒

even if they appear to be paradoxical and concerned less with the

media itself than with the manner in which the computing

environment is organised. In light of my earlier mention of

calotype, the prototype process which introduced the division

between the medium of storage and the medium of display, it would

perhaps be worth more fully problematizing the materiality of

classic photography, as well ‒ for now, however, what interests us

is the next coming phase in the organization of digital media,

which is also governed by its own logic: ubicomp (postdesktop

computer technology), and its online nature. Photography has been

at the forefront of this; as early as the year 2000, Yahoo!

offered users a photo hosting service on its servers under the

name Yahoo! Photos. You could use it to store an unlimited number of

photos, as long as they were in JPG format. In 2003, Picasa

appeared with a similar service, but with software that also

allowed you to organise, tag and edit your photos. Flickr is

frequently mentioned in the same breath along with other platforms1

and services that were supposed to be the “new” face of the

Internet, defined by the catchy and soon trivialized marketing

term “Web 2.0”.34 In 2004, Flickr was acquired by Yahoo! (a move

that did not go unnoticed by members, who strongly protested

against the need to log on using a Yahoo! ID), whose previous

photo service was quickly shut down. Flickr offered a number of

new features (including the ability to geolocate images, long

before Google introduced it) that would later be copied by

competitors, who ‒ in the absence of new ideas from Yahoo! about

what to do with Flickr ‒ popularized and redefined the concept of

photo sharing. Flickr was also a social networking service ‒ it

not only allowed you to store and organize your photo collection,

but also to create a profile, make friends and search the

databases of photographs stored on it (using search criteria based

on a bottom-up classification system, known as a “folksonomy” or

social tagging, or by indexing photographs according to formal

features, such as a given colour, element, location or theme).

Relevant thematic groups have also formed, in which the sharing of

collections or albums represent a form of discussion ‒ a

pioneering step in terms of how the flow of content is organized

in services such as Instagram. Flickr to this day is available in

two versions: free and Pro (paid) ‒ the latter providing more

advanced means of organising photos into an unlimited number of

albums and sets.35 Flickr is also frequently presented as a model

34 See: M. Lister, J. Dovey, et. al., New Media: A Critical Introduction, Routledge, London 2003. The newness of what Tim O’Reilly designated the Web 2.0, appears tobe more controversial, given the history of its technological backbone and the history of communication practices that take into account social experiments to a greater degree, at earlier stages of the development of the Internet, in formsof BBS, The WELL community, and the “digital cities” movement. The controversy around the concept of Web 2.0 is indeed goes much deeper. See: M. T. Schaeffer, Bastard Culture! How User Participation Transforms Cultural Production, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2011.35 Strangely, the author makes no mention of the free vs. Paid service in

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example of content created by the users themselves (one of the so-

called specific determinants of Web 2.0, which today is also

analyzed from the perspective of digital labour, the burden of unpaid

work performed by users, essentially on behalf of the companies

managing the content36). It quickly became clear that the service

was more than an online album for storing photos ‒ even early

versions of websites for storing photos quickly revealed a

performative dimension. According to Jose van Dijck, citing the

work of Barbara Harrison,37 the uploading of photos into the cloud

has triggered transition from photography understood as self-

representation to photography conceived primarily in terms of

self-presentation (a conclusion that finds confirmation in the

character of popular social networking sites). We should add here

that both Flickr and Picasa appeared before the popular Facebook

service existed (which has its early origins in an illegal service

for assessing photos of students in the university database).

Today we are facing another change ‒ Flickr, Picasa, and (the

still popular in the U.S.) Photobucket are losing ground to

applications like Instagram, which went live in October 2010

(initially available only for iOS, and since April 2012,

available for Android, as well), and the even younger Snapchat,

created by two Harvard students in 2011. Instagram’s acquisition

by Facebook in April 2012 for the mind-boggling sum of one billion

dollars (Instagram then only had 13 employees) sparked a strong

the analysis of the transformation of the family album, seen in the potential opportunities offered by Flickr; see: M. Sandbye, “The Family Photo Album as Transformed Social Space in the Age of ‘Web 2.0’”, [in:] U. Ekman (ed.), Throughout... op. cit.36 See: T. Terranova, Network Culture. Politics for the Information Age, Pluto Press, London 2004; T. Scholz, “Facebook as Playgorund and Factory”, [in:] D. E. Wittkower, Facebook and Philosophy. What's on your mind?, Open Court, Chicago and La Salle, Illinois 2010.37 See J. van Dijk, Mediated... op. cit.; B. Harrison, “Photographic Visions and Narrative Inquiry”, Narrative Inquiry 12, No. 1, 2002.

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media response ‒ it was labelled another Silicon Valley success

story, with a narrative similar to that of other such events: two

Stanford University students, Kevin Systrom and Michel Krieger,

created the app while still students, as a projectfor a class. In

comparison, Flickr was acquired by Yahoo! for barely a fraction of

that amount, $ 35 million ‒ this also illustrates how far photo

services have risen in popularity. The acquisition of Instagram

was accompanied by debate on a point of contention that had been

discussed several times earlier during repeated reconfigurations

of Facebook’s terms of use: the rights to the images posted on the

site. Eventually, the company withdrew a controversial provision

in its terms of use which stated that the service had the right to

publish the photographs posted on it without informing the user.

Kevin Systrom had to officially assure users that he did not

intend to deprive them of their rights to the photos they posted,

but many users ended up leaving Instagram, including institutional

users such as NASA (which posted photos related to their space

programs) and National Geographic.

Digital photography in popular applications today is primarily

created using mobile media ‒ which has contributed to improved

performance parameters in the cameras that are now a standard

feature on phones (especially on more advanced versions, i.e.,

smartphones). The latter are becoming increasingly popular,

including in Poland. Reports (usually the results of market

research) indicate that 5.5 million Poles regularly use a

smartphone to access the internet.38 Given the current state of

mobile photography ‒ as indicated mainly by Instagram, Facebook

38 T. Grynkiewicz, “Rok mobile, czyli dylematy ery smartfona”, gazeta.biz, 28.01.2013, http://wyborcza.biz/biznes/1,101716,13307084,Rok_mobile__czyli_dylematy_ery_smartfona.html, accessed: 20.02.2013.

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and Snapchat ‒ the logic of the cloud is becoming the logic of the

stream, with the posting of photos on popular sites becoming a

means for forming new relationships, a tool for creating one’s

identity, and currently one of the main types of network

“communities”. This is reflected not only in the success of

Instagram, which has been called a “photo-only version of

Twitter,”39 but also in microblogs on platforms like Tumblr, where

(photo-) graphic content is often more important than the text.

Whereas before the advent of smartphones with high-quality

cameras, the sharing of photos on the internet was an occasional

phenomenon, usually associated with the commemoration of a

significant moment in one’s life (milestones, holidays, travel40),

the “era of Instagram” is characterized primarily by content whose

primary feature is its documenting of the most ordinary moments in

our daily routine (Instagram photography has raised to the rank of

a separate species images associated with the consumption of

meals, with handbooks on how to use filters and applications even

suggesting which ones are the best for such occasions). Indeed,

users of Instagram (and the social networking sites integrated

into it) live in a photographic cloud, surrounded by fleeting

images that often elicit the transience of a moment out of daily

life ‒ with no need to permanently fix it. It is worth examining

this change ‒ and to ask what actually comprises the specificity

of today’s online media.

39 J. Wortham, “A Stream of Postcards, Shot by Phone”, New York Times, 3.06.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/04/technology/04photosharing.html?pagewanted=1&ref=instagram, accessed: 14.04.2013.40 The links between digital and mobile photography, including the moblog form, is analysed by A. May in Media w podróży, Wydawnictwo Naukowe Ex Machina, Katowice 2010. K. Olechnicki has written about photoblogs in Pamiętnik z opcją przekazu. Fotografia, fotoblogi i fotoblogerzy w kulturze konsumpcyjnej, Wydawnictwa Akademickie iProfesjonalne, Warszawa 2009.

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Celluloid nostalgia and photo streaming

One of the most interesting features of Instagram is its

special relationship to the materiality of analogue photography.

There is a clearly nostalgic evocation of its substantive

complexity in the aesthetics of the filters used for automated

photo editing. The application’s key function is not so such much

storing photographs, as stylising them ‒ a principle that indeed

brings to mind a photo version of Twitter. Each user sees a stream

of images that is shaped by the friends they choose (their photos

appear on the application’s home page). You can also search for

images using a location tag or hashtag (a tag preceded by a #

sign, another similarity with Twitter) ‒ with the photos you send

yourself being organized similarly. The application is integrated

with Flickr, Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare. A location

is suggested by Foursquare and pinned on a photomap attached to

each user profile. You can “like” photos and comment on them, as

well. The essence of Instagram, however, is what users can do with

a photo directly in their cameras, not only by using one of the

available filters, but by means of a whole range of additional

applications for editing photos. An interesting example is the

user gallery of @tonydetroit, documenting that city’s decline,

about which he writes: “There are only 6000 people living in

downtown Detroit. I am one of them. This is my story.”41 The photos

@tonydetroit publishes evoke the atmosphere of an abandoned city,

a hauntological atmosphere in which traces of a former presence

express abandonment, decay and blight. In this sense, he is a true

Instagram artist; his photos can be viewed in a commercial online

gallery dedicated to the application (Instacanvas),42 in which one

41 Description from a user profile on Instagram.42 See: http://instacanv.as/tonydetroit, accessed: 22.04.2013.

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can clearly see the “logic of remediation” and the flip side of

Instagram’s complex relationship with the materiality of the

process of digital photography ‒ you can purchase the photographs

in the gallery as framed images, ready-for-framing “canvasses”,

postcards, and iPhone cases. Most of the photographs have been

subjected to editing with applications and software beyond

Instagram’s standard set of filters. @tonydetroit, however, never

reveals the secrets of the techniques he uses. His profile is

followed by more than 300,000 members, and each photo he places

quickly becomes the subject of lively discussion.

Other applications being offered by developers are also

interesting from the perspective of the nostalgic return to the

material aspects of photography: among the filters you can use to

modify the photos you take, we find eloquent names like Lo-Fi,

Toaster, 1977 and Nashville. The latter creates a Polaroid effect,

and at least two filters yield black-and-white images with a

substantial (given the technical parameters of the iPhone, which

despite having a high quality camera, is still essentially a

smartphone) depth of field. Almost all of the filters allude to

the aesthetics of forms of photography from the past. They reflect

the fashion for vintage and retro, but they can also be seen as an

attempt to bring back the aesthetics associated with a materiality

specific to analogue photography. In addition to this, there is a

range of other applications with similar visual effects and an

entire palette of filters stylized to duplicate the aesthetics of

the photography from the 1960s and 1970s, such as Hipstamatic,

Vintage Cam or Camera + (the advertising slogan for Hipstamatic is

“Digital photography never looked so analog”, and Vintage Cam’s

entire interface is based on that of a manual analogue camera).

Among the many handbooks available, there are ones that allow you 1

to use filters found in photo editing applications (such as

Photoshop) or online, which is another intriguing phase of

remediation.43 It is offers a set of other tools that prompted a

New York Times journalist to state that Instagram has generated a

photo-ecosystem ‒ one element of which is Instacanvas, 44 though

this is not the only platform that allows you to materialize

Instagram photography. There is a wide range of applications that

make it possible to obtain an similar artefacts: for example, you

can create an album out of your favourite photos and share it on

social media, as well as print them out; you can put together a

collection of postcards and send them by post; and you can even

frame photographs in bamboo frames and hang them on the wall. In

an era in which the popularity of 3D printers and physibles

(discussed earlier) is growing, the future seems to be hold out

many as yet undiscovered possibilities. This “wild growth” of add-

on services, software and platforms, is another sign of success ‒

a model whose worth has already been proven by Facebook and

Twitter.45

Instagram is structured more like a stream of photographs (and

even here you could find other features it shares with the

43 “Recreating Instagram’s Retro Filter Effects”, http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/tutorials/visuals/recreating-instagrams-retro-filter-effects/, accessed: 12.04.2013.44 J. Wortham, “Instagram Spawns a Photo Ecosystem”, New York Times, 28.04.2011, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/28/instagram-spawns-ecosystem-of-photo-start-ups/, accessed: 20.04.2013.45 Elsewhere I argued that in the case of social platform that is Facebook,a source of success was not only that they offer appealed to users who wished tomake the main terminal of your Facebook network operation, but –above all – the fact that Facebook became the host for many minor sites, applications and games, creating a complex network ecosystem. See: A. Nacher, “Web 2.0: między wikinomią a kontrkulturą – przypadek Facebooka”, Annales Universitatis Paedagogicae, Studia de Cultura I, Folia 88, 2010, http://www.scribd.com/doc/63564224/Web-2-0-mi%C4%99dzy-wikinomi%C4%85-a-kontrkultur%C4%85-przypadek-Facebooka, accessed: 14.04.2013.

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audiovisual media ‒ television comes to mind ‒ such as a form of

transmission) than a photo album or static collection. A

particularly radical version of such a stream is, however, the

previously-mentioned Snapchat, an application created in 2011 by

two Stanford University students, Bobby Murphy and Evan Spiegel.

Originally, it was only available for iOS, but since October 2012

a version has existed for Android users, as well.46 The

application, which describes itself not as an app for photo sharing,

but for photo messaging ‒ its icon is telling, depicting a graphic

representation of a ghost, like that from Disney cartoons.

Snapchat gives photography a hauntological and aural dimension –

it allows you to exchange photographs (as well as videos and

graphics), but each image appears on your friends’ screens for

only a very brief period of time, determined by the user (but not

longer than 10 seconds). During that time, the recipient must

touch the screen ‒ screen prints are possible, but information

about any reproduction of the contents are submitted to the

sender. The contents are thus not intended to be stored, giving

the photos a completely different function than storing memories.

They represent the purest form of self-presentation, hence photo

messaging seems to be adequate and meaningful description. The

media have taken to describing this with the phrase “impermanent

photo messaging.” According to information from the autumn of

2012, users are sending one another 20 million photos a day in

this manner.47 This form of communication, as the site’s creator,

Evan Spiegel, notes is closer to a phone conversation and direct

46 J. Wortham, “Growing App Lets You See It, Then Don’t”, New York Times, 8.02.2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/09/technology/snapchat-a-growing-app-lets-you-see-it-then-you-dont.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0, accessed: 10.09.2013.47 B. Gallagher, “You Know What's Cool? A Billion Snapchats. Apps Sees Over 20 Milions Shared Per Day, Releases on Android”, Techcrunch, 29.10.2012, http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/29/billion-snapchats/, accessed: 24.04.2014.

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interaction ‒ in our era of scandals associated with the release

of photographic content without the owner’s knowledge and the

growing fears of specialized surveillance technologies that make

use of the mechanisms of big data, Snapchat can be seen as a safe way

to share photos.

The opportunities for and remediations of photography in the

age of online digital media that I have presented here are just

the tip of the iceberg. In conclusion, I would like to mention one

more aspect of the paradoxical ontology of digital photography on

the web. This time the photograph will also be subjected to

processes that force us see it as an element that is internally

dynamic, but seemingly congealed in the form of an artefact.

Photography is an interesting phenomenon in that it has become

both a symptom of and an instrument for combining modern media

technologies: a passion for photography is expressed in this case

in the practice of geotagging and geolocation with GPS or NLS

(Network Location Service). The most popular and most common

example of this is Panoramio, which adds an additional layer to

Google Maps and Google Earth (Since 2007, Panoramio has been owned

by Google, which in increasingly integrating this service with its

other tools, including the social network Google+ and the

aforementioned Picasa photo collection service). In this way, the

photograph seemingly becomes a stationary object on a map, but in

reality, it is a form that has undergone several levels of

processing, and whose data flows between several layers of

technology. It becomes a moment in which the intense flow of

information is immobilised, an image frozen for a moment and

assigned to a specific place. Today, this takes place

automatically ‒ the majority of applications on smartphones allow

photos to be geolocated (this is the case with Foursquare, which 2

is a cross between a game, and a loyalty program and marketing

tool similar to Yelp). Digital cameras are also equipped now with

GPS units , some of which also allow you to browse a map with

geolocated photos directly on the screen of the camera and to

determine the direction in which a photograph was taken. In this

way, thanks to the “compression” of a number of technologies into

a single function available on your device, the highly complex

technological environment in which the geolocation of photos takes

place escapes our notice. When Flickr ushered in the era

geotagging photos (and shortly afterwards Picasa and several other

sites, including Trippermap, also introduced the option), the

whole system was based on the manual placement of photographs onto

a cybermap. In 2006, in order to obtain precise geolocation data

using GPS, enthusiasts began developing their own systems: one

popular technique was to connect a camera to a mobile GPS

transmitter (types used for tourism and navigation were available

on the market then). Another way ‒ because not all cameras could

synchronize directly with a mobile device ‒ was to use special

software that allowed you to combine EXIF files with the relevant

coordinates from a transmitter (TripTracker was especially

popular48). In this case, one can also see the leading edge of

technological innovation in the passion for photography ‒ that

which today is fully automated and requires no more attention than

the split second required to touch the screen of a smartphone,

such as linking a photo sent on Instagram to geolocation data in

Foursquare or Facebook (and through it to the map service in

Microsoft’s Bing) ‒ not so long ago, required one to build many

more material links through which a photograph would be placed at

the intersection of GPS connectivity, cybercartography practices,

48 http://triptracker.net, accessed: 28.04.2013.

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Internet connectivity (often wireless) protocols, and the logic of

several or more interfaces. This is actually not so much a place

for placing photographs as it is one that allows us to see an

advanced media presentation. Have the material networks that

create the state of communications, tracking and imaging

technologies today really disappeared? No, although we are no

longer aware of them, they are activated whenever we view images

of distant places in the familiar Google Maps or when we choose a

restaurant using the database available in Foursquare, guided by a

photo of the interior of the premises uploaded by someone using

photography to express their attitude to a place they have visited

and their own aesthetic tastes, and to negotiate with the familiar

acquired cultural conventions of photography.

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