Personal photography, digital technologies and the uses of the visual

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Abstract
Photography has been a wildly successful consumer technology. The shift from film to digital has, if anything, increased both photographic activity and enthusiasm on the part of photographers, viewers and subjects. In this article, I address empirically and theoretically the practical doing of ordinary, daily photography as it has moved from film to digital. I describe findings from my own empirical work over several years with a wide range of people engaged in both film and digital photographic technologies, including camera-phones and online image-sharing. Current developments in digital image-related technologies are changing the publicness, temporality and volume of personal photographic images. I describe personal photography as, in effect, multiple, overlapping technologies: of memory; relationships; self-representation; and self expression, all of which are changing in the digital environment. I draw on science and technology studies (STS) for help in understanding photography as an on-going practice of assemblage and performance, and the changes in photographic technologies as an opportunity to see technology-in-the-making – the activities by which people are reproducing sociomaterial relations. In this view, photographs have agency as they ‘take the relay’ across space and time. With digital technology we see shifts in the assemblages of objects, practices and meanings that we call personal photography, some of which may be more welcome than others. In particular, personal photographs may be becoming more public and transitory, less private and durable and more effective as objects of communication than of memory.