The Networked Audience - why digital photographs are only a small part of digital photography
Author: Will Boase
Publisher: MAPS 2022
Published:
Total Pages: 90
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFrom 2010 to 2020 I lived in Uganda, where I worked as a photographer and photojournalist. I would correspond with clients on email, make and file my pictures digitally, and send PDF invoices. I can count on the fingers of one hand the times I saw my photographs physically printed during that period. And yet as I look back on it, nobody ever mentioned how weird this all was. We just got on with it and worked- after all, I needed to get paid, and being new to the business I guessed this was just how it was. It was only when I moved to Europe to join the MAPS course and was confronted with the (to my mind) extravagant market in photobooks juxtaposed against a shrinking pool of physical newspapers on the press stands that I really began to think about this more. It seemed strange that I was making, selling and consuming digital images, and the digital space and its audiences were growing exponentially, while at the same time every conversation I was having was about the object, about books or exhibitions. It seemed like there are images, and there is photography. Why are the two diverging? Radio evolved into podcasts. TV turned into TikTok. This thesis, then, sets out to ask what it is that photography says it does, or thinks it does, and what it actually does in the age of the smartphone. Critics love to tell their readers that photography is dead, but for some reason you can find all those same critics cheerfully posting their lunch on Instagram. This thesis is an invitation and a challenge to photography, to admit that things have changed and to embrace this as an opportunity rather than a threat.
