Abstract
Martin Hand's Ubiquitous Photography, part of Polity's ‘Digital Media and Society Series’, places photography and image-making within a series of much wider debates around visual culture, consumption, and technology. This is achieved through a focus on practice which responds to over-determined or essentialist arguments that privilege the production, use, or content of the image. The significance of photography as a ubiquitous social practice is illustrated through an interdisciplinary engagement with a range of ideas about authenticity and authorship; skills and image manipulation; mobility, distribution, and communication of visual culture; as well as memory and the preservation of images through archiving and album-making. Hand also uses original empirical research to tease out how the changes in photographic practice are experienced and assigned different meanings by different kinds of photographer: casual snap-shot taker, serious amateur, and professional.
Chapter 1 addresses the question of how, and in what ways, photography and particularly personal photography has become ubiquitous. Hand argues that the proliferation of photographic practice can be understood through a range of diverse social and technological processes theorized in sociology, media and communications, and science and technology studies. This sees the digitization process as extending, intensifying, and reconfiguring practices rather than being a disruptive break with the past. This is illustrated in Chapter 2 with a brief overview of the history of photography within the changing contexts of visual culture, consumerism, and technology from the late 19th century up to the present day. In Chapter 3, the focus is on the image in terms of its materiality, reproduction, variation, manipulation, authenticity, ephemerality, and durability as seen through an understanding of the practices and environments in which the meanings of these terms are constructed. Chapter 4 places the image and photography in a suite of technologies, devices, and platforms showing the parallel evolution of analogue and digital trajectories which are not pre-determined by the technology despite claims to the contrary.
Chapter 5 looks at how the combination or entanglement of ideals, technologies, and practice have changed the way people store and share their personal photographs and the possible effects these changes have on individual and collective memory. This chapter seems qualitatively different from the first four as it features much more of the empirical data and in so doing shows more of the nuances of individual interpretations of what it means to both make and have images made public. Hand selects the domestic activity of album-making to illustrate how traditional practices have evolved into the digitized craft practice of scrapbooking. He goes on to discuss tagging and the classification of photographs on photo-sharing platforms such as Facebook and Flickr. The interview responses from students reveal how these new technologies are giving rise to new ideas and possibly a new ethics of what is acceptable and required in terms of maintaining and monitoring one's public image on-line. The final chapter concludes that a critical engagement with photography practice contributes to our understanding of social change at the intersection between technology and culture.
The book is easy to follow and the argument is clear, accessible, and convincing. The interdisciplinary approach achieves an impressive breadth of inquiry covering a range of theories on visual culture, media and communications, consumption and commoditization, mobilities, and digital culture. The unavoidable trade-off is the lack of analytical depth which is not a criticism given the author's intention to place photography within these wider historical, social, cultural, and political debates. The use of original empirical evidence brings to life how users are reconfiguring their understanding of photographic practice within new socio-technological ecologies. While the quotations are rather long, I would have liked more of this data in Chapters 3 and 4. There are two particular areas which are touched upon in the empirical data and could have been explored further from the perspectives of different practitioners: first, the changing constitution of the identities of the serious amateur versus the professional photographer; second, on the inter-generational differences between those who have grown up with the technology and those who have adapted their practice to accommodate it. One unfortunate omission is the lack of any spatial comparison to either the theorizing or the data; ubiquity is constructed from a particularly Western perspective. I was also disappointed by the photographs which in most cases were superfluous: pictures of cameras, scrapbooks, and web-pages.
In terms of who this book will be most suited to, I felt that the arguments would not be new to readers of this journal, although as Hand concludes, their application to photography provides a particular exemplar for thinking around society, technology, and culture. The inclusion of original research gives it a broad appeal to those already versed in the arguments and also introduces some of the possible trajectories for further research particularly with regards to the intersection of photography and social media. This is certainly a good introductory text for students of media and communications, visual culture, digital technology, or science and technology studies.