Social Photography

Jörg Colberg has a new piece up, as he does every Monday. He appears to have found his gigantic astronomy brain in the closet or something, because for once he's not giving us yet another dreary review of some pretty book of glum photos. He's actually thinking thoughts and writing them down, and stuff. Anyways, it's worth your time to read it this week.

There's lots of things I could quibble with here and there in it, but mostly I am pleased he's actually thinking.

The stuff about authorship is well noted, and for once he's managed to work in a Barthes reference that isn't to Camera Lucida. At this point he kind of lurches a bit trying to connect the death of the author business to what he terms the "social photo" which is something I am myself very interested in. He makes the claim, unsupported as is traditional in photographic theory, that we take these photos because it is a socially expected act, like shaking hands.

I have no idea whether Jörg would agree with me or not here, but two things strike me. First, this is as usual more of a spectrum than a pair of buckets. It's not like there are Serious Art Photos and Social Photos with nothing in between. Second, I think you can say more than "it's social and that is the end of it."

There are myriad reasons for taking a photo, just as there are for doing anything. When I shake someone's hand, it is the end of a fairly frantic process of social evaluation. Do they want to, expect to, shake hands? Do I want to shake their hand? Am I shunning them, or trying to make nice with them, or what? How much do I like this person? Are my hands wet? Did I just sneeze into my hand? Are they going to try to turn it into a shake/embrace, and if so how do I feel about that? What will the result be, socially, of this momentary interaction?

Most of this is unconscious, or barely conscious. Just part of the normal navigation through society as executed by a standard East African Plains Ape.

In the same way, when I take some snap of a thing, there's a lot going on. I am testing my eyes, putting things into a frame just for practice. There's probably something here I might want to show someone, maybe. Who? Maybe I have an idea, maybe not. Do I want to share this visual with someone, and if so, what are my expectations for the result of that act? Is this a private photo, only for me? Is this Serious or Social?

As someone who styles himself a "working artist" with a wildly variable degree of irony, there's almost always some slight artistic conceit in play. There is also some notion, probably, of maybe showing this thing to some kind of audience, possibly an audience of one, possibly an audience of the world, possibly an audience I have not identified.

This segues into the second point, which is that social acts are never really just pro forma reactions that we do for no reason. Even the Gesundheit! Jörg refers to has a social purpose, no matter how reflexive it is. We want to be seen as a thoughtful person, or we simply want to reach out to people around us, or whatever, so we train ourselves to be one of those people who has that reflex — not everyone does.

The handshake, as noted above, is intensely social. It is, like a gear in a watch, one of those myriad little motions which both abets and embodies the functioning of society.

So what effect are we looking for when we photograph the Eiffel Tower on our Paris visit? We're going to show it to someone, maybe. Then they will know that we went to Paris, and that it was important to us. As Sontag notes, we make things Important by photographing them. The photograph is not merely a social reflex, signifying nothing. It signifies what we thought was important or notable.

I have long held that these social photos, and the sharing of them, is akin to a "look at that!" reaction. Imagine you're walking on the beach with a friend, and you notice a particularly striking shell. You point and say "look at that shell!" Your friend looks, and sees. You share a moment. You have selected the shell out of all the debris on the beach, in this moment, as notable, and it is the pivot around which a tiny interaction with your friend turns. There is no more to it than that, but you have shared the shell for a moment, and your relationship has absorbed this little transaction as it has absorbed 1000s of others. Your relationship with your friend is built on, embodied in, these myriad transactions.

And so also the social photo. These are the bricks upon which, and of which, our relationships are built. Our Facebook Friends know we went to Paris, or to the beach, and they click Like. It's not much, but then, "this tea is quite good" isn't much either.

A whole bunch of not-much adds up to a fair bit, in the end, though.