Photo by Island Capture Photography (Creative Commons)

I want to suggest that conventionally when we consider the role of the photograph in society, we see this as a kind of three stage movement. First there is the practice of photography itself. We have assumed that this was merely the requisite technology, largely the handmaiden to the desire to have a photograph. Then there is the object, the photograph, and that was assumed in turn to be the handmaiden to the ultimate aim, which was to record something. The photograph was there to serve as an object of memory, a technical facility to retain an image beyond the relatively poor ability of the brain to accurately retain images of the past. It could be as an art, but it was more often a wedding or holiday.

Today most photographs are taken for their use in social media. Figures quoted online vary but it is suggested around 350 million photos are shared per day on Facebook, 55 million on Instagram, 400 million on WhatsApp and 450 million on Snapchat.

I want to suggest that as a result, we need to completely turn on its head our conventional understanding of photography. Memory has been reduced merely to the legitimation of having a photograph, but the photograph itself has lost its position as the aim of the exercise since mostly the photo is merely the excuse for what now takes centre stage which is the act of taking a photograph. Photography as an activity has moved from background to foreground. Fortunately we can see this sequence more clearly because it corresponds to the development of three social media sites in sequence. The movement from Facebook to Instagram to Snapchat/WhatsApp.

Photography on Facebook
Facebook now appears as the convenient bridge between more traditional photography and the more recent social media. Facebook places considerable importance on the photo album and the collecting of images. Everything shared whether tagged or not is also stored. One of the reasons Facebook’s long term future is likely to be older people, is that it is very effective in this role, certainly compared to conventional photograph album and the analogue photo. As Xinyuan recently noted you can turn to QQ to see yourself as you looked ten years ago when you first joined QQ, soon this will be common on Facebook.

Photography on Instagram
Photography on Instagram has a much more transient feel than Facebook. In working with young people I find that Instagram gives them a kind of creative project. All day they can think about what would make a good photograph? (similarly, what would make a clever tweet?). If they don’t see anything else, they can always take a Selfie. This gives purpose to the day and becomes a bulwark against the constant concern with being bored. As such, where once we framed the photograph, now we use photography to frame experience. Here we see the reversed sequence. Storing the photo, as in Facebook, is exposed as mere excuse for having a photo, which in turn is mere excuse for the real purpose, which is the project enacted by the act of photography itself.

Photography on Snapchat/WhatsApp
It was Snapchat that bludgeoned to death our conventional view of photography. If the photo can only last for a maximum of ten seconds, then we can’t even pretend it’s about memory or even about the image. The point about Instagram is now made explicit. It can only be the act of taking that matters. Except that on Snapchat/WhatsApp we realise that this is not just individual experience it is a social act, we take pictures in order to share, and to see the response to our sharing. We have to take the word ‘Snapchat’ literally – the photograph is just a form of chat, saying Hi, a more interesting emoticon. WhatsApp is a bit less violent a repudiation of the photograph, but still highly transient. Clearly we may work with all three of these social media and all three of these relationships to photography.

As I will argue in a more extended paper, the mistake is to think this makes photography more superficial, actually I will argue this makes photography more profound.

Photo by Elisabetta Costa

Social media photography in my field site in south-east Turkey is extremely self-oriented. I have recently been asking friends and informants why people post specific images, and the answer has always been the same: “They want to become popular!” For example food is a very common image on Facebook and it is always represented in similar ways: in special occasions during dinner with friends or family, as soon as the wonderful food is ready and put on the table or on the floor someone takes the picture and posts it on Facebook. In few cases I had to wait up to twenty minutes before eating because everybody wanted to take a picture and upload it on Facebook, or keep it on their phones to show it to friends. When people organise dinner with friends or extended family and the food is particularly good-looking, taking a picture and making it public is a must. As everybody told me, the main goal is to appear awesome and become popular. On Facebook there are not pictures of ordinary food during ordinary dinner, or pictures with amazing food eaten with ordinary family members. It’s always a combination of good food and good people, the best way to impress the public. Even when the picture portrays a group of friends or family members, the picture is more oriented toward increasing the popularity of the person than to strengthening social ties with others.

In Dry Rock Town people spend hours looking at the Facebook walls of acquaintances and gossiping about them. This activity is socially accepted, and usually done together with friends or relatives. Women especially enjoy their time together in front of a smartphone or preferably a laptop, commenting about other people’s life as based on what they see on their Facebook walls: “She became fat…He got married to that beautiful woman…He is still single…She always wears beautiful clothes…He has a good job…He became rich…She always goes to the hairdresser…etc, etc, etc.” People gossip in particular about acquaintances or distant family members with whom they don’t have daily interactions, and that are Facebook friends of friends. In a town of 80,000 inhabitants where everybody knows all of the families in the town (and consequently everybody recognizes everybody as a member of a family), Facebook is the best way to get updates and have fresh information about other people’s lives. Because of gossiping, chats, and rumors, the content Facebook walls often ends up being what people know about a certain person. For this reason Facebook visual material is accurately chosen and updated in order to improve self-images, increase respectability and honor. Facebook is used as an identity card to present the self to friends of friends, and friends of friends of friends, and eventually the whole town and the extended family.

People are continuously involved in the practice of updating new pictures that can increase their social reputation. Thus the very practice of posting photos of amazing dinners and holiday trips is one of the main pleasures derived from these activities. It surely increases the their social fame within the town, and with friends and relatives.

Image courtesy of Chris Zielecki, Creative Commons

Well into the thick of looking at what people post, there are the obvious recurrences of photos of family, friends, selfies or being seen somewhere, like a club, event or on holiday. There is also another genre that I think begins with photos of food. There are lots of posts of food at restaurants, but there are also lots of photos of self-prepared food. In Trinidad, there is definitely a sense of photos being posted because they are a ‘Trini’ dish, but what of cakes and cupcake decorating for example, that aren’t particularly Trini? Especially being the last week of the year and Christmas week, there are more photos of ‘things I have made’ than usual. The ‘things I have made’ genre also extends to parties, weddings and baby showers- social gatherings, where trinkets on tables, flower arrangements, gifts for guests are also the products of assemblage by individuals and not commercially bought as finished products (which, I suppose would be ‘things I have bought’.)

We have started asking informants what they think of things posted by others. Sandra, an admin assistant in her late twenties, mostly posts photos of things she has cooked or baked. Another informant looked at images only of her posts and described her dishes as cosmopolitan and therefore, Sandra must be or aspires to be a cosmopolitan person. One of Sandra’s friends posted origami Christmas decorations to her wall with paper that Sandra had bought her for her birthday. Another friend volunteers to make party trinkets and decorations for their friends and posts them on her own timeline, so following the chain of associations by following one friend’s post to another friend’s timeline, we can start to assume that this is a crafty bunch of friends that have a shared interest in DIY.

Razvan and Danny discussed some time ago what Facebook might mean for commercial photography and for professions such as the wedding photographer. With camera phones and quick filter apps such as Instagram, any photo can look good and is instantly available at no cost. Instagram is not big in my fieldsite in Trinidad, but photography for the social pages of newspapers and Facebook are. Photographers go to fetes, events and parties, photograph people and post them, so individuals don’t have to pay anyone for professional photos to be taken. Some of these photographers are amateurs themselves who build their profile by branding images and posting them on Facebook.

The two weddings I was invited to during my last period of fieldwork also had invitations made, not from a commercial design firm, but through a Photoshop savvy relative who simply printed the invitations at the local office shop (and one of the couples posted photos of the invitation on Facebook). Printed Christmas cards are also a long standing tradition in Trinidad, and this week, I have seen a flood of posts of Christmas images and photos of people modified by an editing app that surrounds the image with Christmas-themed borders and decorations.

Of course, like any observation, I would need to systematically investigate the genre of DIY and ‘things I have made’ further, and its relevance to social media. The town of El Mirador is still a place where brands and the amount spent on commercial goods are indicators of status, but there are also conversations around ethical consumption, waste, and environmentalism that are resulting in a small DIY subculture. It also a town where DIY has been valued for at least two generations, with the building and modification of homes; painting, renovation, and adding extensions (where men and their relatives do this rather than hiring work men). The key difference is that for the previous generation, such forms of DIY weren’t able to be shared and catalogued through a platform like Facebook. Homes had to be visited in order to be appreciated. But now, I don’t have to eat one of Sandra’s magnificent cupcakes to appreciate the time, creativity and labour she has put into it.

Photo: Tom McDonald

At 5:30am yesterday I was stood on the side of the road in my fieldsite, a small town in Shandong, waiting for the bus. Next to me was a grandmother sat on the side of the road selling cherries. A young man, probably in his early twenties, approached me and politely asked if it was alright to take a picture of us together, a common experience that most foreigners in China will be familiar with.

The man was dressed in cotton cloth trousers, black cotton shoes, and a white T-shirt. He had a slightly unkempt bowl-haircut. It was obvious that he was from the countryside. Indeed, he confirmed that he was from one of the nearby villages and worked in one of the local factories as a labourer.

He pulled out an old, white telephone. The telephone was an affordable Chinese-branded device with a basic colour screen and a cheap built-in camera.

The young man asked the cherry-seller if she would take the photo of us. The cherry-seller tried, but it was apparent that this elderly lady had very limited experience of either operating the phone or photography, so after three failed attempts, and fearing the bus would arrive at any moment I instead proposed “let’s use my phone to take the picture and I’ll send it to you”. I pulled out my iPhone, flipped the screen and took three picture of together. Then I asked him what his QQ number was. He said “I don’t have one”. I asked about Weixin. “None” he replied.

I was momentarily stunned.

I had previously thought that for young labourers such as this were perhaps the most avid users of QQ (in fact Jack Qiu suggests that Chinese social networking is particularly important for the working class in society). And yet, here, in front of me, was a living, breathing exception.

The story ended happily, as on the final attempt the sage grandmother got the hang of the young man’s phone and managed to take a satisfactory picture of the two of us standing next to each other. However, the young man left before I had a chance to ask him why he didn’t have a QQ number. A friend in Beijing offered an explanation when I showed them his photo “this man is very honest,” one proffered, “you can tell by the shape of his nose [referring to Chinese face-reading]. It could be that some people from the countryside think that QQ is a bad thing”.

Is my Beijing friend right? Is there really a moral discourse surrounding the Internet that is enough to keep some young people from using it? Are there more non-users like this young man? And if so, why haven’t Tencent or Sina’s offerings been able to penetrate this part of the market?

One of the benefits of long-term anthropological fieldwork in a normal small town like this is that it offers a chance to uncover groups of people, user experiences and human behaviours that might otherwise go undiscovered if we were to instead use other social science or market research methods. By the end of our fieldwork I hope to have more answers.

Photo by Jolynna Sinanan, effects by Charlotte Mohammid

After my first month of fieldwork in El Mirador, I had gotten into a comfortable pattern of hanging out in hubs around the town, chatting with people and keeping up to date with what’s going on in the news and what people were talking about.

The big issue in Trinidad a couple weeks ago surrounded Dr Kublalsingh, a prominent academic at the University of the West Indies (UWI), well known environmental activist and the face of the Highway Re-Route Movement. Dr Kublalsingh and his supporters are opposed to the construction of a section of the highway that is proposed to link the southern towns of Debe and Mon Desir. The protest culminated when Dr Kublalsingh went on hunger strike for 21 days, he set himself up in front of the prime minister’s office in Port of Spain during business hours and continued until the government agreed to review the plans for that section of the highway and release the information informing their decision so far to the public.

Back in El Mirador, I was hearing different opinions on whether Dr Kublalsingh was right or wrong, that the highway is good or bad, that what he and his supporters were doing was meaningful or pointless. I decided that if I was going to understand this better, my camera and I needed to spend some time in Port of Spain.

My first day was Day 15 of Dr Kublalsingh’s hunger strike and the protest had taken a dramatic turning point. His health was deteriorating rapidly with grave implications for permanent organ damage and his family had become far more vocal with concerns that he should stop. On the other hand, Dr Kublalsingh had become very much a celebrity figure and charismatic leader as the face of the movement and for democratic expression in Trinidad. And most of this played out on Facebook. I uploaded my photos from the day and within hours, particular photos had been shared, liked and tagged amongst people I didn’t even know. I followed the movement until it ended, mostly photographing and following the effect of posting photos, which has now opened up a key question for me while I do this research: What does the face in Facebook mean in Trinidad?

Trinidadian anthropologist Dylan Kerrigan reminds us that ‘in political anthropology, the hunger strike is seen as a front-of-stage social drama. It is a cultural performance for a broad audience. It is not just the hunger striker who is on stage. The authorities, politicians, media and general public all become performers in the drama too.’

Here, a lot of the drama was portrayed, polarising and mobilising people online and in the media. More so, I would argue it was the images of Dr Kublalsingh, the toll the strike was taking on his body, the determination in his eyes, the effort that was captured in his media comments at the end of the working day that people responded to and cemented their views on what he was doing. The body was both viewed as “Look at how passionate this man is about his cause” as well as “Look at how crazy this man is and what he is doing to himself” and the same image could be used to reinforce both views.

Dr Gabrielle Hosein at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at UWI argues that Dr Kublalsingh’s hunger strike shows hunger for information, reflective of a country’s hunger for a responsible government, transparency and accountability.

The circulation of images and in particular, an iconic image of a hungry body for a social and environmental movement is indeed a focal point on this very large political stage.

References:

Kerrigan, Dylan, ‘Political jiu-jitsu?’, The Trinidad Guardian Newspaper, 09.12.’12

Hosein, Gabrielle, ‘A hunger strike in a hungry nation’, The Trinidad Guardian Newspaper, 28.11.’12