Mobile Perspectives
Smartphone Photography as an Operational Medium
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Yeon Kyoung Lim
The medium specificity of smartphone photography changes our way of seeing and perspectives. For example, using frontal cameras on smartphones, selfie culture has emerged, such that differentiation and distance between photographer and subject has been eradicated or redefined. And the resolution of smartphone photography is inferior to other digital cameras, and the depth of smartphone photography is relatively flat. These technical properties lead smartphone users to pay less attention to the authenticity of the digital picture and its similarity to the original(Walter Benjamin). With the medium specificity, smartphone photography acts as an operational medium in that the media specificity makes smartphone photography oscillate between representation and post-representation. With the perspective of representation, smartphone photography still functions as a representational medium to record and retrieve body images of beings in the world. At the same time, smartphone photographs don’t focus as much on representing the presence of a subject in front of the camera, they focus more on what photographer-user might like to see. Thus, smartphone photography is operated by the collective agents of smartphone users, digital images in smartphone albums, contacts and social media networks and mass-market applications. A smartphone photograph transforms and converges into another in the collective operation, such that it loses its coherent form and remains in a raft of details. It becomes a “multiple without an original” (Rosalind Krauss). This paper will extend the status of smartphone photography as a “multiple without an original” to the posthumanist ontological locus in the digital era.
iPhoneography and Instagram: The Rise of New Visual Trends in Photography Through Social Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Eman Alshawaf
The image-based social media platform Instagram has introduced new dynamics to contemporary image-making and the field of visual communication. As a space that caters to sharing images, it has popularized iPhoneography, a practice based on the use of smartphone devices for image sharing purposes. This relatively new practice has not only encouraged amateur photographs to participate and find their voice but also encouraged the introduction of new visual trends and new creative communities. Using qualitative methodology, this paper highlights a number of new photographic trends that gained popularity in the last 5 years and also examines the role of professional amateur image-makers in establishing and promoting these trends.
Performing the Digital Queer Archive: Strategies of Self-Styling and Branding on Instagram by Black Queer Performance Artists on Instagram as Archival Work
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Katlego Disemelo
Social media networks have provided several platforms for queer visibility within the public sphere. These media can be seen as significant modalities by which queer subcultural practices of self-expression, consumption, and world-making take place. They facilitate, indeed encourage, the construction of various queer identities and practices – albeit in hyperreal form. This paper examines the online practices of self-styling and branding undertaken by three Black gender non-conforming performance artists from Johannesburg, South Africa. The Instagram profiles of three female impersonators and beauty queens will be herein investigated. These performance artists are, namely, Muzi Zuma, Alexis BlackPearl Kubeka, and Eva Motaung. By undertaking a semiotic and critical discourse analysis of images from these three Instagram pages, this paper explores each artists’ curatorial practices of self-branding. Borrowing from the analytical model of visual consumption, this study interrogates the intersecting discourses of “queerness,” race, sexuality, gender, class, cosmopolitanism as foregrounded in these digital images. Each artists’ responses to interview questions about their curatorial choices, styles, and modes of self-representation will also be analyzed. Borrowing from queer, critical feminist and post-feminist theoretical frameworks, it shall be herein argued that these Instagram posts serve as vital documentary queer archival material. Moreover, I posit in this paper that these visual modes of digital self-representation and branding function as semiotic iterations of contemporary politics and tensions post-apartheid public visibility and queer consumer culture in South Africa.
