The Life of Digital Photographs: The Case of Tourist Photography

The Life of Digital Photographs: The Case of Tourist Photography
PhD, Jonas Larsen, Lecturer in Social and Cultural Geography, ENSPAC, Roskilde University, Denmark

Inspired by ideas that things have lives, the mobilities paradigm's (Hannam et al. 2006) attentiveness to the spatiotemporal (im)mobilities of things, practice approaches to photography and multi sited ethnography, this talk discusses and empirically track the life (the conception, birth, transformative years, ageing and death) travel, detours, makeovers and destinations of (analogue and digital) photographs in our present network societies.

So this talk ‘tracks' photographs spatialities and temporalities, their physical and digital materialities and (im)mobilities and ‘placing' within and beyond ‘networked households'. This is done in a historical perspective, seeing the new in the light of the old, so both breaks and coexistences between older and newer forms of photography are reported. I argue that in order to explore the life of photographs we need to think of them as corporeal, travelling, aging and affective humans rather than conventionally as bodiless, timeless, fixed and passive images. I begin with a brief theoretical discussion of how we can understand the life of more-than representational photographs, and then I turn to my ethnographies to flesh out empirically the life of tourist photographs