Two years ago, I went on a trip to Disney World with my partner during Reading Week. The trip would be my 5th time to “the World” but my first time going without the family, including my mom who is obsessed with taking the same pictures, by the same landmarks every time we go. Having … Continue reading
Shove et al. in 2007 conducted a study with nine one-to-one interviews of amateur photographers, a local camera club, a focus group and workshop. Before diving into the analysis, they outlined three elements of photography: practitioners, participation and material. They also differentiated “early photography”, “popular photography”, “digital photography”, giving a brief history of “early photography … Continue reading
Critics devoted to the study of family photography have privileged the materiality of this phenomenon. Approaches have largely examined the printed materials themselves, preferring a semiological close reading of noteworthy images (69). Rose notes an oversight in the scholarship on photography, and insists that family photographs cannot be defined simply by their visual content (74). … Continue reading
Catherine Zuromski accomplishes a surface reading of the snapshot photography genre, specifically in the domestic setting. She divides her collection of observations and interpretations into two distinct sub-categories: snapshot photography as image-object, and snapshot photography as a set of practices. The album keeper, or owner of the photographs has the agency to organize, embellish and … Continue reading
Hirsch opens her introductory chapter with an overview of some of the key points Roland Barthes makes in a section of Camera Lucida wherein a photograph of Barthes’ mother as a child is “read” by Barthes; this description of a photograph is what Hirsch calls an “imagetext” (10). When one looks at and is “looked … Continue reading