“Digital technology, in addition, makes it very easy to insert images into written text or give a caption (and place text on) to a picture. It also allows our self-images of those of others to be readily taken on phones or palm sized video cameras, and shared via e-mail and posted on social networks Web sites. These viewings of self have become routine, alongside the “mundane” seeing of our image in the daily round – in the bathroom mirror in the morning or evening, perhaps in a lift mirror at work, on a CCTV screen in a shop, or by glancing at our photo on an identity tag or card. Most viewings of images of self, whether digital or otherwise, tend to be cursory and sporadic without much circumspection – but, just occasionally we are “brought up short” by “catching” our image in a shop window or other reflection, and ask “Who is that?” “Is that me?”; as we ponder for a moment, the image in front of us – our own “reflected self?”
Forum Qualitative Social Research, Vol 12, No 2 (2011)
In this section of this paper I was interested how he talks about the accessibility of photography in todays world, to which the reason being is how fast the digital world is producing cameras on small hand held devices such as phones. The article mentions the ‘self image’ and how easy it is for people to share their images on networking sites. The selfie now being another option to view ourselves with having to find a mirror. This interested me as mainly my whole concept is based around the early stages of photography and how during the 1860s photography became accessible to the working classes, but during this time most of these people form working class backgrounds had never seen their own reflection and they were unsure of what they actually looked like. Comparing this to todays society where almost everybody has access to not only their own reflection but to a hand held device that can allow you to capture your own self portrait in less than a second makes me wonder if by having so much access to this takes some degree (or a large amount) of our real identity away. It allows us to cover out identity up as we feel we are being constantly judged or categorised.
“Apart from as a mirror, there are other significant ways through which we interpret our self images. On seeing the photograph it may take on the properties of an impenetrable “screen” simply a flat surface that cannot be seen through (i.e. like a cinema, computer or TV screen). A screen can “screen off” something by obscuring, protecting or hiding; in this sense the memory(ies) that a particular photograph may be associated with “mask” an earlier, a contemporary (at the time of photography), or even a later experience (including in the “present” of the viewer). Or the photograph may be taken as a “window”or a portal” – a fully transparent surface that we can see, and even imaginatively be transported beyond. In between screen and window lie other possibilities, particular points on a continuum, ranging from near transparency (almost as a window), through various degrees of opaqueness, “frostiness” or “cloudiness”, to where an image of self is difficult to recognise but will emerge if we peer long and hard enough.
The next part, from the same article, I included because it talks about other ways we interpret our self images. It talks about how we look at recent pictures of ourselves and if we compare that picture to one that has been taken in the past we have put a screen. My idea relates to this in the sense that I am masking the identity of my subjects by putting up a screen and obscuring their identity. And another way (and I think the most reasonable) of interpreting this is that the photograph, not unlike a mirror can been seen as a screen as it is a flat surface that is allowing us to view ourselves but it doesn’t give us more than what is on the paper.
Emmett Hunt Photography 