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May 16, 2011
In A Life More Photographic: Mapping the networked image in Photographies (vol.1 no. 1 March 2008) Daniel Rubinstein and Katrina Sluis explore the world of popular digital snapshot photography. In the days of film this personal world was known as the Kodak culture.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, bone, Victor Harbor, 2011
'Kodak culture' refers to the archetypal readymade image: placeholder for memories, trophy of sightseeing, produced in their millions by ordinary people to document the rituals of everyday life.
Rubinstein and Sluis say:
the technological innovations that made storing limitless numbers of images possible on cheap hard disks and memory cards, and fast and economical distribution of photographs through a high-speed Internet connection, would not have amounted to a restructuring of the place of photography in society if they had not been augmented by a shift in the marketing of computers. At the axis of this second digital revolution in photography was the re-branding of the home computer as the centre of ‘‘digital lifestyle’’.
This concept aims to situate the computer at the heart of family life, replacing the television and the sound system, the coffee table, the phone, the family album and the slide projector. Part of this re-branding exercise earmarked photography, together with music and video, as central to the ‘‘fun’’ things that the computer can do.
By discretely eliminating references to craftsmanship and specialist knowledge from digital photography software, photography is incorporated into the suite of friendly multimedia applications designed to appeal to every computer user. This re-branding of photography occurred in tandem with the disappearance of the camera inside the telephone, thereby bonding photography to the most important device of personal communications that ever existed – the mobile phone.
The consumption of personal photography has become intimately linked with the software interfaces which mediate their display on-screen and photo-sharing platforms such as SmugMug and Flickr. This networking of the snapshot provides something which vernacular photographers have always lacked: a broad audience.
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