Picture This

Questions for pilot survey

2006-08-04T12:17:00.000+10:00

1. Age? Gender? Nationality?

2. What kind of mobile phone do you have? How long have you owned this particular model?

3. What do you do with your camera phone images? (You may slesct more than one option)
a) View them on the handset
b) Use them as wallpaper on the phone
c) Send them to friends and family - by bluetooth or infrared
- by email
d) Upload them to a computer - by moblogging
- manually
e) Other - please detail

Of all of the above options which do you do most often?

4. In what kinds of setting and for what purposes do you use the camera function on your mobile phone?
a) Recording moments with family/friends/acquaintances
b) Recordning interesting or unusual things/moments in your daily life
c) Travel and scenery
d) As a memory prompt (For example, to remind yourself of something that you plan to do, buy, read, etc in the future)
e) Other - please detail

Of all of the above options which do you do most often?

5. What approximate percentage of photographs that you have taken in the last month were taken by
a) camera phone
b) digital camera
c) traditional film camera

6. Do you know how to upload your camera phone images to a computer?
Yes No

7. Where possible, upload your last 6 camera phone images to this Flickr site.

Would you be prepared to take part in a more extended interview in relation to mobile camera phone usage? If yes, please leave your contact details.

Themes

2006-08-03T11:18:00.000+10:00

History of snapshot photography
Relations between snapshots and families
storage and distribution family photography
transition to digital photography and issues realting to storage access and distribution
uptake and use of mobile camera phones
impact on family photography

Forty, Adrian & Kuchle, Susanne (eds) The Art of Forgetting (New York: Oxford, 1999)

2006-08-03T11:06:00.000+10:00

"'Come home, my boy', the Alzheimer ridden father implores his prodigal son, 'all is forgotten'. His confusion of forgiving with forgetting underscore the close etymological connection of amnesia with amnesty" (ix)

"The Western tradition of memory since the Renaissance has been founded upon an assumption that material objects, whether natural or artificial, can act as analogues of human memory. It has been generally taken for granted that memories, formed in the mind, can be transferred to solid, material objects, which can come to stand for memories and, by virtue of their durability, either prolong or preserve them indefinately." (2)

The dematerialisation of photography can be related to iconoclasm - the destruction of visual imagery and monuments. See 52 for a discussion of Yates, medieval memory and forgetting.
Memoria - things of the mental world have a necessary correspondence to things belonging to the moral and temporal world.
Mneme - the counterpart to memoria. The ability to remember by chance something previously experienced. (54)
The synaesthetic experience of remembering.
"We should consider the possibility that, rather than being the norm, the modern industrial economy with its attachment to material rather mental resources, may be the odd one out." (62)

Domestic photography and digital culture - Don Slater

2006-07-13T11:58:00.000+10:00

"Domestic photography and digital culture" in Lister, M. (ed) The Photographic Image in Digital Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1995).

"Photography is intimately bound up with domesticity and the private world and has been since its inception." (129)

Slater argues that the evidence for this lies in the undertaking of four activities in domestic settings:
1. family photography
2. amateur photography as a consumerist hobby
3. photographic amusements have engaged us domestically since photography's inception ("from the Victorian stereoscope through video and computer games" 129)
4. photography domesticates the public sphere and gives public significance to the private.

Family and photography are also linked, according to Slater, through consumer culture and leisure - "photographic equipment and images enter the family in the form of consumer goods".

"The means of making, manipulating, presenting and consuming images constitute a major consumer market which - certainly since Kodak in the late nineteenth century - provide domestic life with powerful means of self representation, tools of symbolic reproduction. The means of representation are structured to produce and exploit profitable social relations and activities in domestic life. For this reason alone there is a pressure for photography to structure everyday life in the very process of representing it." (129 - 130)

'As family albums and photographic advertising alike repetitively display, it is through the family at leisure, at play, at busy rest, in a time of extraordinary ordinariness, that we have come to represent the family to its members and its publics. It is in its 'free' time and activities that the family, and through it the individual, is to recognise meaningful personal life." (130)

The effects of mobile privatisation produce, according to Slater, a popular fear image of a fragmented family, each alone in their own private space and engaging in highly individualised home leisure activities.

"...leisure commodities in the home, far from being useful tools for engaging with everyday domestic life, structure it out of meaningful existence. Electronics, in this view, produce solipsism rather than sociality. Perhaps the future family will only exist in its snapshots, which are themselves integrated into the digital flow which destroyed it." (132)

Self representation as self construction: our active imposition upon ourselves of codes of gender, family, class, appearance within the processes of processing of presenting ourselves to the camera, selecting photographable moments and selecting presentable photographs.

“Editing the family album is both an operation on memory and therefore upon personal and familial identity and their intense mutual dependency; as well as a construction of future memories in the photographic practice of the present. We construct ourselves for the image and through images.” (134)

Emphasises the relationship between snapshot photography and leisure.

“Over a long historical process, it is leisure time and experience that has emerged as the primary site for the sentimentalisation of family identity: it is seen as the time and activity in which real personal meaning is to be found”. (135)

Leisure brings together three major themes:

1. liberal equation of freedom of the individual is located religiously, morally and sentimentally in family life.

2. the very privacy of leisure aroused fears of (working class) idleness and vice and led to the promotion of structured leisure activities and imposition of bourgeois norms of consumption – bourgeois family life held up as an ideal

3. the regulation of leisure went hand in hand with its commercialization – family consumption of goods, entertainments, activities and events seen as suitable leisure activities.

“Photography emerges into this setting in a doubled form: it is both a commodity and a meta-commodity, leisure and meta-leisure. That is to say, photography is – on the one hand – just one of the new types of activities and objects that make up the leisure time of the family; yet – on the other hand – it is a means of representing that time and its values, and for symbolically reproducing it and the family.” (135)

Emphasises the relationship between snapshot photography and leisure.

Leisure brings together three major themes:

1. liberal equation of freedom of the individual is located religiously, morally and sentimentally in family life.

3. the regulation of leisure went hand in hand with its commercialization – family consumption of goods, entertainments, activities and events seen as suitable leisure activities.

“It is possible however that neither the practice nor the metaphor of the family album is any longer central to identity formation and that this might be due to the intensification of consumer culture and privatized leisure.” (138)

Even though research shows that we hypervalue the family album as an artifact, research also shows that the amount of time we spend looking at it minimal.

“Taking pictures is a taken for granted part of leisure activities; but looking at them is marginal”. (139)

"Baudrillard may believe that the Gulf War happened mainly on TV but the wedding damned well took place and here's the photo (and video) to prove it." (145)

John Berger About Looking

2006-05-31T17:50:00.000+10:00

From Uses of Photography

"...unlike memory, photographs do not in themselves preserve meaning.They offer appearances - with all the credibility and gravity we normally lend to appearances - prised away from their meaning. Meaning is the result of understanding functions. "And functioning takes place in time. Only that which narrates can make us understand." Photographs in themselves do not narrate. Photographs preserve instant appearances.
Habit now protects us against the shock involved in such preservation."
(51)

"We must now distinguish between two quite distinct uses of photography. There are photographs which belong to private experience and there are those that are used publicly. The private photograph - a portrait of a mother, a picture of a daughter, a group photo of one's own team - is appreciated and read in a context which is continuous with that from which the camera removed it. (The violence of the removal is sometimes felt as incredulousness: "Was that really Dad?") Nevertheless such a photograph remains surrounded by the meaning from which it was severed. A mechanical device, the camera has been used as an instrument to contribute to a living memory. The photograph is a memento from a life being lived.

The contemporary public photograph usually presents an event, a seized set of appearances, which has nothing to do with us, its readers, or with the original meaning of the event. It offers information, but information severed from all lived experience. If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger. The violence is expressed in that strangeness. It records an instant site about which this stranger has shouted: Look!" (51-52)

Surveying and related issues

2006-06-20T12:33:00.000+10:00

In progress...

Part of my research will necessitate the contruction of research surveys. As someone with a non-empirical background this will present some challenges.
1. Survey strategies
Firstly, what are the options when it comes to empirical surveys? What kind of survey will produce the kinds of data I need for my project? Secondly, should I opt for an online survey, paper survey or face to face (or a combination of all three)? What number of surveys are required to produce a reasonably reliable outcome? If I opt to undertake face to face interviews, how long should they be and how should I record them?

I plan to informally survey a number of academics who have undertaken this style of research and see if I can learn from their experiences. What kinds of strategies have they used and why?

2. Survey questions
The key issue in the construction of my survey questions will, of course, have to be determined by what it is I want to find out. That said, I know that the correct construction of survey questions can make the difference when it comes to generating useful data.

Analysing photosharing sites and software

2006-06-19T15:35:00.000+10:00

In progress....

After beginning a listing of photosharing sites, I quickly realised that an analysis of all of the possible sites was going to be impossible. For that reason I think that I will need to narrow down the analysis to some of the more popular and family oriented sites. This would still involve some degree of categorisation of as many sites as possible to determine which ones could be considered both popular and family oriented. I would then also provide a detailed description of the site and its features. The analysis would then need to focus on the following:

What are the affordances of the site in relation to photosharing between family members? What are the features that enable the photosharing to take place? Does the site facilitate a dialogue between family members about the photos stored there? How does it enable this?

What are the assumptions that underpin the design of the features of the site?

How easy or difficult is it to use the site? (This is a particularly challenging question as the answer is not only dependent on the facilities of the photosharing site but also on the competencies of the target users. One way to assess this would be to select a small group of users (5?) with a range of computing competencies and get them to test various ascpects of the site for ease of use.)

How does the site market itself to particular demographic groups? This would be determined partly by the look and feel of the site but also by the features that the site uses to distinguish itself from other photosharing applications.

Archiving a list of photosharing programs

2006-05-30T12:52:00.000+10:00

I have begun archiving a list of online photosharing sites so that I can analyse how they work. This is also a test post to see how posting to Blogger by email works. I tend to use email more than any other networked service. I've also been checking out Blogger's new mobile posting service but of course at the moment it is only available in theUS.

How apt for this project! The relation between the...

2006-05-30T12:57:00.000+10:00

How apt for this project! The relation between the image and memory is such a fascinating one. Do images contain memories or prompt memories? Clearly, software programs such as this are built around an implicit belief in the former...