Daniel Stephen Vaughan Palmer

Emotional Archives: Online Photo Sharing and the Cultivation of the Self

This paper focuses on the archiving of emotion in online photo sharing, and specifically on biography sites in which we are encouraged to package our lives as a succession of dramatic moments. It considers how social software functions to animate memory and history in ways that extend photographys role as a medium through which individuals confirm and explore their own identity. The paper focuses on thisMoment (www.thismoment.com), which innovates certain key features of popular photo archives such as Flickr and Nokia Lifeblog. On this site, visual “moments” are given an emotional classification (“This moment made me feel … happy/proud/etc”). Perhaps more importantly, a dynamic visual timeline enables users to supplement their own photographic memories with fragments from the mass media, thereby aiding memorialization and personalizing history. Such practices inevitably arrive in the context of contemporary developments in neo-liberalism, and despite significant continuities demand a rethinking of dominant theories of popular photography.

A Collaborative Turn in Contemporary Photography

This paper addresses emerging forms of collaborative photographic practice, including those enabled by digital networked technologies and by contemporary artists. I argue that although histories of photography invariably privilege individual figures, contemporary developments should be understood in terms of important precursors such as community photography in the 1970s. The paper concludes with some observations about artists Stephen Willats and Simon Terrill, who have sought to establish a relationship between authorship and community in their photography, and whose work can now be viewed in light of networked photography.

In Naked Repose

This paper examines the role of the face as it is caught suspended in private contemplation in candid photography. It starts with a celebrated lineage of photography of anonymous faces that promise the revelation of a secret, absorbed self: Paul Strands 1916 portrait of a blind street peddler, made with a special right-angled lens; Walker Evanss New York subway portraits (1938–41), shot clandestinely from under his coat; Luc Delahayes L’Autre (1995–97), “stolen” from the Paris Metro in the 1990s; and Philip-Lorca diCorcias Heads (2001), gigantic strobe-lit portraits on the streets of New York. The paper then turns to Australian photographer Cherine Fahd, whose work insistently alludes to the redemptive potential of this promise. This potential is interpreted in terms of Emmanuel Levinass ethical responsibility to the other, Ariella Azoulays “civil contract of photography” and Giorgio Agambens eschatological understanding of photographic testimony.

Enumerating photography from spot meter to CCD

The transition from analogue to digital photography was not accomplished in a single step. It required a number of feeder technologies which enabled and structured the nature of digital photography. Among those traced in this article, the most important is the genesis of the raster grid, which is now hard-wired into the design of the most widely employed photographic chip, the charge-coupled device (CCD). In tracing this history from origins in half-tone printing, the authors argue that qualities available to analogue photographers are no longer available to digital, and that these changes correspond to historical developments in the wider political and economic world. They conclude, however, that these losses may yet be turned into gains.