Digital Photography and Everyday Life: Empirical studies on material visual practices explores the role that digital photography plays within everyday life.

With contributors from ten different countries and backgrounds in a range of academic disciplines - including anthropology, media studies and visual culture - this collection takes a uniquely broad perspective on photography by situating the image-making process in wider discussions on the materiality and visuality of photographic practices and explores these through empirical case studies.

By focusing on material visual practices, the book presents a comprehensive overview of some of the main challenges digital photography is bringing to everyday life. It explores how the digitization of photography has a wide-reaching impact on the use of the medium, as well as on the kinds of images that can be produced and the ways in which camera technology is developed. The exploration goes beyond mere images to think about cameras, mediations and technologies as key elements in the development of visual digital cultures.

Digital Photography and Everyday Life will be of great interest to students and scholars of Photography, Contemporary Art, Visual Culture and Media Studies, as well as those studying Communication, Cultural Anthropology, and Science and Technology Studies.

About the Author
Edgar Gomez Cruz is a Vice-Chancellor Research Fellow at RMIT, Melbourne. He has published widely on a number of topics relating to digital culture, ethnography, and photography. His recent publications include the book From Kodak Culture to Networked Image: An Ethnography of Digital Photography Practices (2012). Current research investigates screen cultures and creative practices, which is funded through RCUK and Vice Chancellor research grants. Asko Lehmuskallio is Chair of the ECREA TWG Visual Culture and founding member of the Nordic Network for Digital Visuality. As researcher at Universities of Tampere and Siegen, he specialises in visual culture, mediated human action and networked cameras. Recent books include Pictorial Practices in a "Cam Era": Studying non-professional camera use (2012) and #snapshot: Cameras amongst us (co-ed, 2014).

Reviews

"This is an outstanding collection of essays which invites a radical rethinking of photography. Each chapter dismantles conventional understandings of photography by examining in detail a specific assemblage of social practice, camera technology and light-generated image. What photography is, what it does and what it might do is thus rendered radically open, and photography is once more made as remarkable, emergent and diverse as it was a century and a half ago. Essential reading for anyone interested in photography and visual culture."

Gillian Rose, Professor of Cultural Geography, The Open University, and Author of Visual Methodologies

"This exciting and multifaceted book casts new light on the practice of photography. Highlighting the various processes of communication, networking and human-nonhuman relationality in different parts of the world, it shows the photographic medium as literally teeming with life. This is a must-read not just for scholars and students of photography but for anyone who reads the news, uses social media, moves from place to place or owns a camera phone!"

Joanna Zylinska, Professor of New Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Curator of Photomediations Machine

Book Information
ISBN 9781138899810
Author Edgar Gomez Cruz
Format Paperback
Page Count 296
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 430g