De la cultura Kodak a la imagen en red: Una etnografía sobre imagen digital

De la cultura Kodak a la imagen en red, una etnografia sobre imagen digital Edgar Gomez-Cruz UOC Press, 2012, 290 pages ISBN:978-84-9788-633-8 (paperback) Price 26.50€ Reviewed by Gaby David, EHESS Paris Unpacking the concept of the “networked visual image,” what for E. Gomez-Cruz is mainly the result of the interrelation of social processes and technology, the book De la cultura Kodak a la imagen en red, una etnografia sobre imagen digital combines a richer online and offline fieldwork, or the “onlife”, framing an observations in how people agent their photographic practices. Organized in three parts, the first chapter contextualizes the digital photograph and its social functions, develops the idea of what photography is, finishing with an in-depth historicization that scopes from the very ontology to a more practical and modern acknowledgement of mobile photography practices. The second chapter, a case study of SortidasZ, a Catalan Flickr group in which Gomez-Cruz participated, provides a rationale for an auto-ethnographic praxis portraying the anthropological, technological, socio-technical and multiple routes of the group. It describes digital photographic practices and the role of mediated technology for the configuration and construction of social networks. Chapter three, closely linked, examines how the offline practices of these groups, its rituals and gatherings are as important to consolidate a community of practice. A fourth chapter describes the socio technical mechanisms that make meaning and thus value. It is through the contacts, the comments, the groups and the new “online curation” that constitutes Flickr both as an exemplary case study of both a conversational place, a photo-school paradigm and an online gallery. In chapter five the author decides to base his analysis only in the production and distribution of photographical digital images. His interviewees give a lot of importance on how the image was done in a technical sense, but at the same time he recalls that when creating images (and I’d add - when creating whatever the outcome might be) they think very carefully, and even ahead of time, which channel of distribution they will be using to share their contents. Visual narratives are now much more intertwined and overlapped and hence circuits and dynamics that are previous to the 2.0 web become outdated. Rather than merely having a representational and memorial usage, photography is more linked to performance, to connectivity and to daily narrative usages. (p. 249). Visual sharing platforms and its usages are in constant micro-movement. As seen by Gomez-Cruz, many of those visualists, formerly posting their images on Flickr moved and became Facebook users. Then to even more visual based mobile apps such as Instagram1 or the more ludic and ephemeral Snapchat2. With each different possible dispositif/platform/site people learn to manage their self-medialization. Gomez-Cruz summarizes it: “Facebook is for parties, Flickr for art” (p. 155). Like Chesher (2012), he remarks that these platforms are successful because they have smartly unified the creation process and distribution. Therefore, I’d add that: in order to understand how people are learning from their own informal personal education, the significance of these informal educative experiences needs necessarily to be                                                                                                                 1

Instagram is a free mobile photo and video sharing networking app that permits users to apply digital filters and also share their images in a variety of other social network sites. 2 Conceived as a free photo-messaging application Snapchat is a photo app for playful and ephemeral uses of mobile photos. Users take photos, add text and drawings on them or make and send videos, where the most distinctive particularity of it is that when sending these images, users set a viewing time limit that can range between one to ten seconds. This time lapse determines for how long recipients can view this ephemeral data.  

taken into account. They could be both added and/or linked to formal education frames as well as included more in academic researches. Part six, studies self-portrait through synergy, as games of identity construction, as photographic experimentation, as “I-narratives” and therapeutic self-portraits. Visual diaries, sexting, and so on, many are the facets that constitute visual models of an intimate digital photography. Had this book been published after the word selfies was acclaimed word of the year by the Oxford English Dictionary, in 2013, it would have been right to call this chapter the selfies chapter. Regardless, one perceives that Gomez-Cruz smartly observed and sensed what was socially going on, way even before the world named this popular usage. “The self portraits are as the paradigmatic practice of the networked image” (p. 174) and Flickr its “photographic institution” (p. 216). His deductions should help us comprehend visual platforms as tools, and far more only just people’s actions displayers. Media and communication related micro observations change and then expire quite fast but are the principal way of understanding bigger changes. Newer sites should be understood in link to the other existing ones. In this vein, chapter seven sheds light on how difficult, troubling - and why not assume to say it obsolete, it is to continue with binomial Cartesian definitions such as amateurs and/or professionals and then discusses some of the new exhibition and distribution forms. The main conclusion is what “networked visual image” means. Taking up and extending Chalfen’s Kodak culture (1987), the author points out that even if he had named it Flickr culture, his research could also apply to an Instagram culture (p. 230), to which I’d add Snapchat culture and maybe other names and visual dynamics that we are not yet able to envisage. This ethnographic work has pertinent observations to make on the nature of digital photography and visual culture. Most important of all: we can no longer think about photography as we used to do. Photography is no longer analogical or digital. Hence it has to be analyzed and understood as what it is today. Now photography is a “networked image” (p. 231) a whole lot of connections: an interface, a dispositif, the photo itself, its comments, links, likes, jokes, sharing platforms, followers, posts and reposts (p. 162). These changes imply we redefine not only what photography is but also a new epistemology of media (p. 175). A personal tone makes the rigorous book easy to read. Yet, one thing could be done: sense the book itself in network, amplifying online. One wants to visit the Flickr groups he mentions, discover the images, even maybe “like” them and leave some comments. As his book objectives, it is as if one needs to search for and connect to many of the multiple references Gomez-Cruz quotes. In the future these types of quantified books ought to be published either in an extended format or as e-books enabling enriching hyperlinks, and could then be, as he himself says referring to images: “an excuse for interaction” (p. 176). The book’s exhaustive bibliography is remarkable. Advisable for translators and social science publishers, I believe and hope this book will become a key reference for interdisciplinary students, photographers, culturalists, ethnographers, sociologists, media anthropologists, Internet researchers as well as for any curious kindred learner spirit. In-depth sociological studies of visual objects are few and in an undeniably affective constellated networked age Cruz’s book is a weighty contribution.   References Chalfen, R. (1987). Snapshot Versions of life. Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.

Chesher, C. (2012). Between image and information: the iPhone camera in the history of photography in L. Hjorth, J. Burgess, I. Richardson (Eds.), Studying Mobile Media: Cultural Technologies, Mobile Communication, and the iPhone (Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies), pp. 98-117. London: Routledge. Du Gay, P., Hall, S., Janes, L., Mackay, H. & Negus, K. (1997). Doing cultural studies: The story of the Sony Walkman. London: Sage.