Ninth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

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.