NETWORKED PHOTOGRAPHIC PROJECTION

“ … the age of the photograph corresponds precisely [with] the explosion of the private into the public, or rather in the creation of a new social value, which is the publicity of the private: the private consumed … publicly.”

- Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

After nearly 175 years, the photographic apparatus has become so enmeshed in the daily lives of individuals that the image is now typically experienced with such normative indifference that photographic representation is taken practically as common sense, even natural.

Under the managing guidance of a succession of cultural institutions – from Eastman Kodak to the Farm Security Administration (a Depression-era agency set up by FDR that John Tagg's The Disciplinary Frame notes as playing an essential role in developing ‘documentary’ forms of photography as part of the discourse of democracy, tying photographic practice to as part of modern citizenship) to the Joint Photographic Experts Group (a German organization responsible for the eponymous .jpeg format) – photography has been swept up in a number of social projects, ranging from nation-building to democratic self-empowerment, in the hope that the performative force of photography could shape society by projecting particular meanings and models of ritualized action. To what degree these programs of social engineering have been ‘successful’ remains to be seen.

However, what does seem to be clear is that communities in our current era are historically unique in their dependence on photographic imaging to build and maintain – often simultaneously – national, communal, even family relationships and identities.

 The sociological work of Sabina Mihelj (2011) has shown that – despite the rise of global multimedia networks – nationalism has not disappeared in the modern world, as many digital utopians and globalists had predicted. We should not underestimate how photographic imaging technologies (on both the end of consumption/production and that of distribution) have helped to make this possible. By establishing specific vernaculars of photographic production in the news media, celebrity tabloid coverage, and family events, subjects are positioned within localized discourses of visual culture. Particularly in the case of photographic devices designed for consumer use, the camera comes to play a myriad of roles in the banal practices that reinforce both national and individual identity and the ritualistic use of tethered media technologies as a form of social inclusion/exclusion or boundary-making (see S. Mihelj's Media Nations and N. Couldry's Media Rituals for more on these processes).

Since snapshots represent not only what Catherine Zuromskis calls the “most banal form of image-making,” but also the vast majority of photographs taken, this particular photographic discourse must undoubtedly have an intimate relationship with the establishment of the subject in visual culture.

The network effect that defines contemporary forms of computer-mediated socialization further integrates the photographic apparatus into the experience of the (tele)present self. As snapshot photography becomes more and more of a daily rituals due to the convergent forces of increasingly photographically capable smartphones, the prevalence of televisual discourses that celebrate the ‘ordinary’ or ‘reality’, and the constant need for new content on social networking platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, there has been a considerable change in both the social position of the self-portrait and the sheer number of self-portraits being created. While personal photographs of the cultural elite began to fade out of the public discourse in the years leading up to the 1930s (not coincidentally the same period in which photography was pegged as a tool for social renewal, education, and consumer/citizen empowerment by outspoken practitioners like Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Lewis Hine), today celebrities, politicians, technicians and ordinary individuals alike seem to be caught up in a normalizing discourse of the photographic self-portrait - or as it has been dubbed in recent years: the ‘selfie’.

In journalistic accounts, this is typically explained as a consequence of the incredible ease of operability that the general user interface of the smartphone offers, a maligned, overstated narcissism in millennials, the number of pictures capable of being stored digitally, and the inherent portability of our now ubiquitous handheld multimedia devices. (Storage and accessibility are often cited as a primary difference between analog photography anddigital imaging, however note that as early as 1913 there was a 35mm camera known as the ‘Tourist Multiple’ capable of shooting more than 750 exposures on a single roll, surpassing the onboard storage of some lower end phones.)

Rather than being a simple result of the intentionally ‘dumbed down’ design of the camera in screen-based mobile phones or an effect of consumer empowerment, the rise of the selfie should instead be linked to the evolving role of televisual discourses in maintaining disciplinary regimes of self-control in cultures of consumption. Consider for a moment that in 2008 – only four years after its launch – Facebook became the world’s largest repository for photographic images with over 40 billion images on file. On top of this, as of 2012 Facebook’s approximately 1 billion users upload more than 300 million photographs to the site every day, making this number an exponential function and one of the primary tasks of the platform. With this in mind, Facebook’s sudden purchase of the photo-sharing application Instagram – at the time a 19 month-old ‘company’ consisting of 12 people with no prospective earnings – for nearly $1 billion seems almost reasonable.

Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram are inherently dependent on its users’ submission to photographic self-imaging for a sense of legitimacy. Indeed, this is what separates most modern platforms from the older cyberspace where “nobody knows you’re a dog.” For Facebook in particular, this is of the utmost significance; the site strives to link a user’s offline identity with their mediated Facebook self-presentation. In fact, anonymity is not permitted within Facebook’s terms of service, and the photographic self-portrait plays an essential role in legitimizing this claim of coherence between online and offline subject positions, essentially enabling what Manuel Castells (in his own techno-utopian way) called “mass self-communication.”

It is the symbolic position of Facebook as a platform for ritualized identification, participation in photographic production, and self-affirming communication within a recently expanded televisual discourse that seeks to position and classify individuals as at once ‘ordinary’ and within the culture industries as pseudo ‘media personalities’ that most accurately explains the modern surge in photographic self-portraiture. However, as Judith Butler has made clear, this is not a simple act of submission – it is the necessary negotiation of a sensible position for the subject within a pre-existing discourse of visual culture. If the individual refuses to take up a position within this discourse, then for all intents and purposes, they do not exist as a subject and forego participation in this interpretive community. By maintaining a Facebook profile, the subject of visual culture is not only granted access to the ostensibly participatory pseudo-public of televisual representation (that until very recently was most commonly associated with the consumption of broadcast television and cable news), but is positioned as a member of that televisual public as part and parcel of a particular group of intimate, more traditional community relationships. As anthropologist Daniel Miller has noted on the use of Facebook in Trinidad:

“Facebook provides the co-presence of the intimate … through [an] entirely public domain where a thousand other friends can simultaneously overhear. The everyday then becomes a kind of substance that is mixed into the Facebook pot, along with poet[ic]s and politics.”

- D. Miller, Tales From Facebook

Much of this mediated intimacy is enabled by the projective qualities inherent in the subject’s relationship with photographic images – described as the emotional bonding of ‘televisual affect’ in the work of critical media theorists Lisa Blackman and Valerie Walkerdine – which serve as the primary way that most people define their online presence on these sites. Thus the construction of the mediated-self today is generally interwoven with the domain of the profile picture.

On Facebook, a profile picture amounts to something like a creative mugshot – a sort of photographic placeholder for identity – and many self-portraits (and even some portraiture done by others) display this characteristic of technologized self-maintenance that bears a striking similarity to the police photographs referenced. However, this participatory photographic self-surveillance is tempered by an unprecedented (and often strangely sensual) intimacy – in both physical proximity with the camera and the general blitheness and spontaneity at the point of capture. The camera is experienced as a welcome intruder for subjects of visual culture, as would be expected by the subjectification process laid out by Butler. And there is plenty of evidence to this end in the deluge of normalized photographic self-representation flooding Facebook and Instagram everyday.

Looking to these selfie photographs, it’s clear there is a considerable amount of homogeneity in projection through photographic self-portraiture. Generally, subjects are positioned within an arms’ length of the camera (typically a screen-based smartphone) with beaming smiles or ‘come hither’ pouts. In some cases, a mirror is used to capture both the photographer/subject and the camera, making the presence of the photographic imaging device a significant part of this self-projection. Indeed, the make and model of the phone used to capture a self-portrait is often a statement of status as much as fashion.

However, it is also apparent that these ritualized actions are not without their fair share of iterability; there is a significant amount of play and transgression involved in the photographic capturing of the self. Participants often will make faces to the camera, upsetting the normalized photographic projection characteristic since the appearance of the family photo album (though of course there are plenty of subversive performances in the face of the family photograph, which could be an essay in itself). Subjects will occasionally even appropriate photographs of others, drawings, press photographs, memes, or other apparently unrelated images as self-portraits, disrupting the typical function of photograph for their own projective ends.

Even so, because these photographic representations are tethered to the user’s Facebook profile, they come to serve as individualized projections of identity and inevitably establish the individual as a subject of visual culture. This technical structuring of the self as visual subject involves a great deal of performative action. In staging the self in relation to the camera – that is to say, constructing the visual subject within the photographic apparatus – there are a number of important variables to consider concerning the capturing and eventual creation of self-image. In operating a camera (or more commonly today, another screen-based device including a camera), particularly when the image created is intended to be shared digitally across social networking services, there is a consistent emphasis on choice: the decision about which moment to capture, what angle from which to shoot, what photographic technology to use in the first place (webcam, smartphone, digital SLR, scanned film, roller coaster souvenir photo), what to wear, what facial gestures should be assumed, and what, if any, editing or filtering should be made to the image before publication. In many cases, these decisions are likely made subconsciously, and form the basis of the inherently performative consumerism involved with photographic representation. In the words of John Schroeder:

“Visual consumption encompasses critical ways that people represent themselves. What we see, what we notice, what we photograph are all important consumer processes … In one sense ... one might say that the consumer produces representation through photography. This apparent paradox - production through consumption - characterizes consumer culture.”

– J. Schroeder, Visual Consumption

The selfie is the contemporary equivalent of the autograph: a stylized representation of the self meant to be uniquely indicative of the subject. It is a way of saying, “this validates me” as a legitimate subject in a culture increasingly organized around the consumption of media. In the sphere of networked, computer-mediated communication, this projection to the camera is the necessary work, in every instance, of self-imagination for a potential position within televisual discourse. Rather than dissolving the unitary subject (as had been the hope of some academics and indicated by the work of postmodern photographers like Cindy Sherman), photographic representation has instead been appropriated by the global institutions of a consumerist, neoliberal lifestyle as a way of framing the production of identity within normalized frameworks of meaning. The selfie is intimately bound with what it means to be part of the televisual in this context, and as such is linked with the ideologies of fame, narratives of technological progression, conspicuous consumption, and celebrity culture.