I just finished reading an in press article, it's due Autumn 2005, to which I want to draw your attention.

Cohen, Kris (in press). What does the photoblog want? Media, Culture & Society .

Abstract: Theoretical accounts of photography have persistently emphasised, departed from, and returned to the issue of the Real, thereby positioning the Real behind or at the heart of what photography purportedly is and does. But these familiar and familiarising consistencies in the writing about photography do not make photographs less of a paradox at the level of being (what they are), or less equivocal at the level of their expressive content (what they mean or know). Digital photography problematises the issues yet further even while writing about digital photography reasserts the familiar pieties. This paper presents the results of an ethnographic study of photoblogs as a way of addressing impasses in the literature on photography and digital photography. Blogs have become popular in the last three years as an internet-based technology for writing the self. Photoblogs are a type of blog which add photographs to text and hyperlinks in the telling of stories. In this paper, I argue that photoblogs are 1. entities which identify the repetitions which paralyse writing about photography and 2. entities which want to position photographs as something more than an outcome, photobloggers as something more than selves (or authors), and the photoblog as something more than a technology.

This article has been part of my blog bibliography for sometime, though I just got around to reading it today. Cohen has done an excellent job exploring the practice and thought processes of photobloggers. The idea that while photoblogging gives a purpose to the practice of picture taking it is not in and of itself the reason one takes pictures, can probably be extended to text blogging as well. Many text bloggers either write or at least document and analyze internally, the same materials they post on the blog. While the blogging process facilitates the capture of these words it is not the sole arbiter of the creation.

There are related aesthetic considerations: by and large, photobloggers don't like flash photography. They actively eschew it, in fact, preferring blurs and indecipherability to the disfiguring glare of a flash bulb. They also don't like posed photographs, unless the pose is self-consciously struck and thus internally critical (via irony, caricature or mockery) of posing, as such. Because they don't tend to like poses, many invent shooting tactics that disarm people's hair trigger proclivity to compose themselves for a camera: they 'shoot from the hip', they shoot over their shoulder, they shoot when friends' mouths are full, when no one is expecting, they shoot surreptitiously on the train or anywhere. Photobloggers explain their various disinclinations by saying they'd rather have pictures of people as they 'really are.' People don't smile abstractly or pose artificially or glow strobically in 'real life', so why would they want a photograph of such effects? (p. 10).

Again this is analogous to the rough and ready form many blogs adopt. Misspelling is irrelevant, formats to confining, the goal of the writing is fast and loose and get it online.

I think Cohen's article is important first because it is an initial attempt to characterize a new phenomena - photoblogs. Secondly it gives those of us who work with text blogs a view of a similar but different entity that may allow us to look at our environments with new eyes.

Posted by prolurkr at March 16, 2005 07:11 PM

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