Just Outside The Zeitgeist

Project Brief 2: The Social Role of Family Portraiture – Post 1

Family photography is for the people whom are not in the pictures.

Memory does not provide perfect recall and since the necessary technology was developed, humans have been documenting their lives in an attempt to record their own history. It is the consensus of a society that defines the past and this can be seen even on the micro-scale of personal videography and photography. “The temporal shifting that occurs during filmmaking includes the filmmaker’s projection of how future generations and perhaps anonymous viewers will see and judge the contents of the film” (Bevan, 2012, pg. 549). An example that is explored in Bevan’s article is the family film and its role in the television show Mad Men. The video piece I created attempts to explore the position family portraiture and photography has in a social context.

Old media generations placed a prestige on photography as it granted visual proof of past moments and allowed for the people who did not experience the events to understand what they missed. The long-established cultural practice of family photographs has changed as it entered the post-modern world. With the introduction of the internet and social media, family photos have pivoted from merely being “framed and displayed in the home, kept in wallets or presented as a series of pictures in photo albums” (Pauwels, 2008, pg. 34). The social media injection into photography is one of instant sharing, posting online for everyone to see. The link between the old and new media approach to personal photography is the desire to share these images with other friends and family, whether it be in a photo album or on Facebook. The image provides a conversational springboard to inform the outside viewer of the story behind the photo. “The notion of family time as rare and special has its roots in the late nineteenth century when the sort of ritualized family moments that have come to be called ‘quality family time’ became common among the growing middle class of Europe and North America” (Hallman & Benbow, 2007, pg. 873). The stature given to family portraits has created a sanctity around them, leading to a main goal of demonstrating the family’s nature through the image. “One of the most accepted notions about early photographic portraits is that their subjects either conformed to bourgeois ideals of materialistic display and “family values,” or they aspired to do so.” (Hudgins, 2010, pg. 560)

Instead of telling someone about the story behind the pictures shown in the video above, I thought to simply record the audio of the photoshoot to pull back the curtain in a unique way. I did not want to use video because it provides too much information and the visual element would turn into a more public artefact. By forcing the audience to imagine what the scene looks like, they must draw upon their memories of taking similar photos and the long process they have gone through to end up with a perfect family portrait.

Bibliography

Bevan, Alex (2012) ‘Nostalgia For Pre-Digital Media in Mad Men’ Television & New Media, vol. 14(6), pp. 546 – 559

Hallman, Bonnie & Benbow, S. Mary (2007) ‘Family Leisure, Family Photography and Zoos: Exploring the Emotional Geographies of Famillies’, Social and Cultural Geography, vol. 8(6), pp. 871 – 888

Hudgins, Nicole (2010) ‘A Historical Approach to Family Photography: Class and Individuality in Manchester and Lille, 1850-1914’ Journal of Social History, vol. 43(3), pp. 559 – 586

Pauwels, Luc (2008) ‘A Private Visual Practice Going Public? Social Functions and Sociological Research Opportunities of Web-based Family Photography’, Visual Studies, vol. 23(1), pp. 34 – 49

Project Brief 2: More Control Over New Media – Post 2

New media allows the creator to have more control over their content.

The establishment of social media changed the way individuals shared, published and edited their original content. Film photography gave people the ability to capture a moment in time and view it later on after the developing process. Digital cameras introduced instant gratification by displaying the picture on the device seconds after it was taken. This allowed photographers, casual or professional, to adjust their pictures on the fly. Memory cards were upgraded to store more images, allowing creators to take countless shots to ensure a plethora of choices for a favourite photo to emerge.

Enter camera phones, the device easily carried everywhere that can be used by anyone. A whole new generation of archivists, witnessing and recording their lives through a handheld device to share online for others to see. There is a social climate that suggests that someone must digitally save a moment for it to be believed, that others will only accept your story if you have visual proof of its existence. One new element introduced by interactive social media environments “is the degree to which such environments allow individual user feedback to affect and be incorporated into the stream of presented information” (Southwell & Lee, 2004, pg. 645).

I created the video above to showcase how an individual well-versed in social media creates content. My roommate Joshua and I constantly take photos or videos and spend hours editing and discussing them so I began to see the differences in how we each approached the task. I would open my phone’s camera application while Joshua would go straight to Snapchat, posting the picture there while I would post mine to Instagram later on. Joshua’s process is one focused on entertaining others in quick bursts as he keeps other people in mind when he uses Snapchat. If he finds something that is funny or he takes an appealing photograph, he will post it to his story which allows anyone to see it if they choose do to so. Other he curtails to specific people, using in-jokes and a shared interests to create a picture or video targeted for one person.

Joshua’s thought process in the above video reveals the desire people have to control as much of the new media sharing experience as possible. In a study undertaken for the Centre for the Study of Behaviour Change and Influence at the University of the West of England, it was shown that “Snapchat was mainly used to communicate with a single person rather than a group of people, and this person mainly includes close friends, partners and family members” (Piwek & Joinson, 2015, pg. 364). Users want diverse options when it comes to producing content for sharing online.

New media and the internet have given creators an overabundance of tools to edit and perfect the artefacts they create while also providing numerous avenues to share their work. New advances in established media forms, such as photography and videography, allowed creators to use “some of the formal and stable arrangements within the field [of photography], and these subtle changes are capable of transforming the entire configuration of the practice itself and therefore the field as a whole” (Cornelio & Cruz, 2014, pg. 10).

The sharing and creation of visual mediums is being consistently updated in response to the demand of the users. Social media applications such as Faceboook, Instagram and Snapchat are always being modified with new features and tools to give more control to the user as to how they shape their personal online experience.

 

Bibliography

Cornelio, G & Gomez, E (2014) ‘Co-creation and Participation as a Means of Innovation in New Media: An Analysis of Creativity in the Photographic Field’, International Journey of Communication, vol. 8, pp. 1 – 20

Piwek, Lukasz & Joinson, Adam (2016) ‘“What do they Snapchat About?” Patterns of Use in Time-Limited Instant Messaging Service’, Computers in Human Behaviour, vol. 54, pp. 358 – 367

Southwell, Brian & Lee, Mira (2004) ‘A Pitfall of New Media? User Controls Exacerbate Editing Effects on Memory’, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, vol. 81(3), pp. 643 – 656