Photography as ?
Photography can play tremendously different roles in everyday life. Anthropologists like Margaret Mead have imagined photography as a tool to capture the raw moments of her field site. Anthropologists such as Sunsan Sontag and Shireen Walton have challenged the notion that photography can capture "truth" or can act as "raw" data, but that does not mean photography does not play important roles in the construction of everyday experiences. Here are four interesting ways photography featured in the trips.
Photography as a Tool to Legitimize Experience and Expertise
Photography is not just used to capture moments of the experience or to serve the guests' interests. Photography legitimizes the hosts' expertise and helps to romanticize the experience. As Sontag argued, photography often frames and limits experience by forcing the photographer "to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir" (2005, 6). Due to the nature of photography, the photographer has to choose where to point his or her camera and decide what will be included and left out of the frame. By encouraging or dictating the guests to take pictures of something, the hosts are able to assert that what they're showing is worth seeing, "and therefore worth photographing" (Sontag 2005, 43).
On all of the trips I went on, there was a recursive interaction between what was pointed out, what was shot, and how those shots reinforce the importance of the subjects that were being shot. After my host pointed something out, all of the guests would direct their cameras toward the subject and take a shot. After the shot has been taken, the guests would all either marvel at their tiny camera screens or lift up their cameras again to take another shot. The guests internalized the belief that if our hosts directed our attention to something, it must be worth shooting. If the photo did not turn out as they expected, the guests would then shoot again because the problem must not be that the object is actually not photogenic enough; if anything is wrong, it must be because they photographed it wrong. These types of events repeated themselves numerous times throughout the trips and solidified my hosts' status as experts. Here's a promotional video Airbnb produced for one of my hosts. It captures the type of cycle I'm talking about (I wrote a line of code so the video will be on loop & muted!):
At the end of two of the trips, the hosts encouraged us to show them our pictures and debrief the experiences. The one that didn't, we were constantly looking at the photos that were being produced. We were constantly deleting, creating, deleting, and recreating the moments. For all three experiences, by the time the guests got home, the photos would have already been filtered. The ones that survived from the cut, or as two of my hosts put it, the ones that are "Instagrammable," would be the only ones left. Though "memories are created just as much as they are recalled from photographs," these highly selected photos contributed to a highly romanticized memory of these experiences. These positive sentiments then, ideally, enter back into the cycle of legitimizing the trips by guests giving the hosts good reviews.
Photography as Communication
Before leaving The Photographer Gallery, my host took out her phone, snapped a casual photo and uploaded onto her Facebook: "I never really care about these photos, it's mostly just to communicate that I'm doing these trips, as kind of like a marketing strategy. Just to check-in so people know I came here."
During the trip in Notting Hill, R, the other guest, repeatedly switched between asking me to take photos using my camera and taking photos on her phone. "I just want to take some photos and send it to my husband in India so he knows I'm doing things," R said while she edited her photos slightly before sending it off to her husband on WhatsApp.
When we were on top of 1 Poultry, overlooking the city of London, during the architectural trip, two teenage girls asked their mom to snap a picture of them on their phone. The mother turned away and said in a tone of disapproval, "no, I'm not taking an Instagram photo for you." The girls looked a little bit embarrassed as I was there to witness their mother's disapproval of their social media usage. I offered to take a picture, "I can take a picture with your camera if you want to!" The girls hung their cameras on their necks and said, "no it's ok, I think we want to take one with our phones." I laughed and said, "Is this for Instagram or Snapchat?" They laughed awkwardly and said, "yeah maybe for both, we just want our friends to see this too!"
All of these instances echoed Jose Van Dijck's argument that digital photography, especially the ones taken with cameraphones, is often used as a communication mechanism. The two girls and their mom's response demonstrated the conflict: "whereas [many teenagers'] parents invested considerable time and effort in building up material collections of pictures for future reference, youngsters appear to take less interest in sharing photographs as objects than in sharing them as experiences" (2008: 61). She further drew a parallel between digital photography's role as communication with postcards, highlighting the transience of digital photography: "like postcards, cameraphone picture is meant to be thrown away after they are received. In this way, the cameraphone merges oral and visual modalities -- the latter seemingly adapting to the former. Pictures become more like spoken language as photographs are turning into the new currency for social interaction" (ibid, 2008:62).
Transience has been built into apps like SnapChat and Instagram stories—photographs are not meant to be saved or kept. With photos that are sent through WhatsApp or other chat apps, digital photography lies somewhere in between van Dijck's description of how "parents" use photographs and how "teenagers" use digital photographs. Many phone settings allow WhatsApp photos to be automatically saved. While these aren't curated like family photobooks are, they may simultaneously serve the purpose of memory-keeping and communication. The role of archiving photos is not discussed here, but these photos can then be further archived or deleted as their communicative purposes have been served. In all of the described incidences, it was clear that cameraphones have indeed merged oral and visual modalities. Even more, the teenage girls' intentional decision to use their phone rather than the camera to take photos further elucidates the diverse roles cameraphone-produced-photographs play compared to a traditional camera that may not have Wi-Fi functions built into them. As more and more "proper cameras" incorporate sharing functions by allowing photos to be transmitted to phones or directly uploaded to multiple social media platforms, the distinctions between cameraphone and just-camera produced photos may not be as significant. Either way, these instances demonstrate digital photographs important role as communication.
Photography as Not-Just-Documentation
During a Multimedia lab meeting with some Ph.D. students in UCL's Anthropology department, where we explored ways to use photography and other non-textual mediums to conduct and present research, I was prompted to showcase my preliminary website. Before I had a chance to go into some of the photos I took (click here for the gallery), two of the students raised their questions. "It looks like these photos have been severely edited in terms of colors, lighting, and even the framing. Doesn't that distort the documentation a little bit?" Another asked, "These are obviously selected and curated. What did you do with the rest of the photos you took that day?" Both of these questions presumed that photographs should serve as untampered-with documentation of anthropologists' fieldwork and those "raw data" should be presented and properly archived.
This bias towards seeing photography as primarily a means to "catch and preserve, by film" is nothing new and has been demonstrated by anthropologists like Margaret Mead. With that said, such narrowly defined understanding of photography not only contributes to the false idea that "raw" or "objective" data exist, but also makes it difficult to take what my hosts do seriously. Inspired by Marilyn Strathern's Partial Connections (where she structured the book like a fractal) and Annalise Riles' The Network Inside Out (where she focuses on the forms instead of the content that her informants worked with), I attempted to produce photographs that look like the ones my hosts might take. I went through the process of framing, editing, and finally presenting, in ways that echo my hosts. As Riles argued, the "ultimate result does more than render the ethnographer as a character in the story . . . The effect is to recreate aesthetically that possibility of anthropology after poststructuralist critiques: in turning our model inside out" (2001: 19). To demonstrate my point, here are some of the ways my hosts present their photographs. Feel free to scroll through my gallery and see if you can identify which photos were taken on which trips!
G's website and his architectural photos
L's Instagram page
S' Instagram page
Photography as Souvenir
My hosts didn't have to read Sontag's On Photography to understand that one of photography's primary roles in these trips is to "capture something people can take home." With that said, Sontag's detailed portrayal of the variety of "souvenirs" helps to understand the different roles photography played in these experienced.
As Sontag argued, "photographs offer indisputable evidence that the trip was made, that the program was carried out, that fun was had" (2005, 6). From an experiential point of view, a camera "makes real what one is experiencing . . . for giving an appearance of participation" (ibid 2005, 7). S echoed Sontag by saying photography is "basically the way to capture the memory of having walkers there. Otherwise sometimes, well it's quite strange, think of it like if you think about it, everything that's happening now if you don't have a record of it, like, what's to say that it actually happened, you know?" In other words, photography as souvenirs serves as certifications for the experience so one could say "I did that." Not only so, to my host S, the photographs that are taken on these trips are different from apps and features such as SnapChat and Instagram stories. To her, there's a sort of immortality to these souvenirs. She said, "For Instagram stories, you take them and they disappear after 24 hours. That's completely different than if you have the photo and you know when you look back and you're like oh look, I did that. You Know? Like when you talk about it, you have all these memories that you associate with the photo." Quoting Sontag again, "after the event has ended, the picture will still exist, conferring on the event a kind immortality (and importance), it would never otherwise have enjoyed" (2005, 8).
"You know people want go and, they want to grab a souvenir [from these trips] and if that's going to be a photograph, great." — G
"Why I like to mix photography and the walking tour is, I can't just have a walking tour because, even if I'm not a blogger, I have to [provide] some sort of thing that this thing in time existed. . . They just like to have one small picture or one small token or even like if it's something that isn't like food, something like material that they, you know, they see it and they remember it." — S
"The student wants to gain something. They want to buy something. I paid you money, I want to take home something from this." — L