Dive into the archives.
- this photo is me #6 (the ending)
What is a completely new experience for a “normal” member of society is being exposed to an abstract audience of the World Wide Web – audience that they can identify very vaguely if at all. Additionally through the Internet photographic services an ongoing conversation is enabled. Services like Flickr allow the users to “comment” on each other’s photographs. And by this ongoing conversation such services become social institutions in their own rights – with a complex web of social connections, own codes of conduct, own law enforcement etc…
- this photo is me #5
In the reality of Internet every photographer (creator of visual representation) can reach an audience consisting of people they never personally met. Internet services that allow access to this audiences are user cantered and however it is possible to remain relatively anonymous more and more users decide to tie content they publish over Internet with quite personal information. The consequence of this state of affairs is that it becomes more and more important to the individual how the content of the photograph published represents them (Giddens A, 1992: 8). “It became clear” writes Susan Sontag, “that there was not just a simple, unitary activity called seeing (recorded by, aided by cameras) but “photographic seeing,” which was both a new way for people to see and a new activity for them to perform”.
- this photo is me #4
It was only later, based on the map that I developed a linear order for the text of the essay. When one disembarks on the journey into the unknown, a map can always come handy. And reading Foucault I learned to appreciate uncertainty as necessary condition of critical enterprise, rather than associating it “with the miscarriage of thought, with error or carelessness”
- this photo is me #3
As Bauman writes “identity appears stable and solid only when it is looked at from afar and for a brief moment” (Bauman Z, 2001: 128). This brief gaze at who we appear to be can be happen through a photograph. In this sense photos are documentation of what you consume, of what you own (clothes, life style, alcohol everything is bought) as well as an attempt at giving some lasting form to what’s liquid. They are also projections of who we want to be, which might be very important since Bauman identifies dreams as a frail binder of reality. Everything more realized than a dream is a form of limiting of freedom and freedom of consumption seems to be the freedom of identity.
- this photo is me #2
The photo that represents a person is telling in a lot of aspects: what is on it pictures not only who the person want to be perceived as but also how they want to perceive themselves, how they want to manifest what they are or could be. “We get a great deal of our enjoyment”, writes Mead, “of romance, of moving pictures, of art, in setting free, at least in imagination, capacities which belong to ourselves, or which we want to belong to ourselves” (Mead G, 1992: 201).
