Digitalising and online sharing

French film theorist André Bazin, too, thought about photographs as objects in their own right. He argued that “no matter how fuzzy, distorted or discolored, no matter how lacking in documentary value the image may be, it shares, by virtue of the very process of it’s becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction (…). Hence the charm of family albums. Those grey or sepia shadows, phantom-like and almost undecipherable, are no longer traditional family portraits but rather the disturbing presence of lives halted at a set moment in their duration, freed from their destiny (…).” According to Deepali Devan, family and studio 108

portraits in particular raise interesting questions about affect, because of the genre’s visual conventions, such as repetition of pose, certain props or framing, that can be universally recognized. This specific type of affect, described by Devan as ‘cumulative’, describes emotional reactions triggered by a photographic portrait. As has been established in Chapter 1, I classify the photographs that form the case study as portraits, and the affect they create is not necessarily a result of each individual image (though it’s noted that this does happen) but rather because of the qualities that each shares with a similar body of images that is already recognizable by the viewer. Moreover affect is produced not only by the image itself, but also by the way in which it is used. In other words it is also the cumulative affect created by the image’s circulation and genre-context that creates its meaning and affective responses to it. 109

Recent developments in digital cultures have created yet another space for photographs to be circulated. The process of digitalization, a change long predicted but whose actual effects are only now beginning to be examined in critical discourse, facilitates the possibility for images like those from the Jagla collection to also be eligible for a further, separate and different life and circulation through online sharing and usage. As observed by Joanna Sassoon, throughout their lives

Bazin, “The Ontology”, p. 14.

108

Dewan, Hackett, “Cumulative Affect”, pp. 338-339.

photographs, both as images and objects, have the potential to move across a number of spaces, including the sites of production, use, reproduction and preservation. Each change in ownership and context of the image accumulates the past uses and introduces new meanings. While the notion of the photograph as 110

an object that can have a unique value and meaning is generally accepted, it is worth considering what happens when that image-object undergoes digitalization. As humans we comprehend the world in two distinct but related ways; we use language to derive meaning and describe the world we see, and we experience the world through our bodies and senses, feelings and emotions. However digital information offers a third, more abstract way, in which our sense of sight is given the task of replacing language and bodily experiences. When looking at Fig. 1 and Fig. 2 we experience an affective response as we can imagine quite clearly what the physical object looks like, despite not being able to touch it.

Sassoon points out that the process of digitalization cannot be seen as simply changing the physical state of a photograph from a material form to a pixel. She explains that “if a photograph can be seen as a more complex object than simply an image, digitizing can be seen as more than simply a transformation of state, or a transliteration of tones. The process of digitizing involves a more complex cultural process of translation- or a change between forms of representation.” It 111

might appear that the process of translating a photograph from a material form to a digital form is neutral and unmediated. When thinking about the case study, one can conclude that the digital scan is not so much different from its original, possibly besides a diminution of image quality. However as Sassoon points out, basing her argument on the writings of Walter Benjamin, it is crucial when determining the translatability of a photograph to explore the specific, pronounced nature that is intrinsic to the original. These can only be identified by looking at “the materiality of the photographic object as well as its sources of meanings and contexts.” 112

Sassoon’s argument is that digitization reduces the complexity, subtlety and readability of the photographic object, because it flattens it to a single dimension. “Thus it can be argued that digitization is limiting understanding of photographs to

Sassoon, “Photographic Materiality”, p. 202.

110

Sassoon, “Photographic Materiality”, p. 198.

111

Ibid.

their being an aesthetic medium rather than a document of evidence.” She further 113

explains that as much as transformation into a digital image marks a new stage in the life of a photograph, it also means the loss of context. She talks about custodial institutions who are directly changing the meanings of photographic objects. One example of this could be the misplacement of the relationships between photographs as determined by original owners when sequencing images in their albums as discussed in the second chapter. When taken out of the album’s pages and digitally presented as individual image, an original meaning of the image is lost. However there seems to be another interpretative possibility, namely when 114

digitisation enables quite the opposite, enriching both the life and the meaning of the photograph. In the case of Mr. Jagla’s family collection, for example, not all the photographs were scanned. Of those that were digitalized a few were shared online, on a web page dedicated to the history of Poles in Africa (Fig. 4). By scanning and sharing Mr. Jagla indeed gave the images yet another life and purpose as well as deepening their understanding and meaning, by making the images public and allowing more people to see them and to react to them. This suggests that even if the individual meaning of an individual image diminishes by sharing in in the online space, the collective meaning that the image represents, increases.

It should be pointed out that hand in hand with digitalization and sharing comes a change in access to images, as well as (perhaps even more importantly) a change in the perception of ownership. As observed by Nancy Van House, a researcher interested in digital technologies, photography and archives, while printed photographs and negatives are solely under the control of their owner, digital images, because of the change in format that allows them to slip the bounds of materiality, may have a life of their own, without the control of their owners. 115

Even the act of my writing this thesis is a perfect example of this happening. Although I asked Mr. Jagla for permission to use the images and write about them, I found the images before I knew him and could have written this without ever contacting him. I first saw the images online on a website called “afryka.org”, and in my quest to find out more about the family in the photographs, I started searching for ways of getting in touch with the person who posted them there. Mr. Jagla owns

Ibid, pp. 200-201.

113

Sassoon, “Photographic Materiality”, p. 202.

114

Van House, “Personal Photography, Digital Technologies”, p. 125

the prints of the photographs taken in Uganda that have now been digitized and uploaded online in an attempt to find out more information about his family’s history. However by the act of uploading the photographs online, Mr. Jagla has given up control over how other people will use the images; in this particular case what I’m writing or who will read and see this thesis. According to Van House, “current developments in image-related technologies are changing the publicness, temporality and volume of personal photography”. She argues that with digital 116

technologies taking over we see shifts in the collection of processes, the accumulation of objects, practices and meanings, that we group together and call family photography. To be more specific, vernacular photography is becoming public and temporary, less private and long-lasting and more functional as objects of communication rather than depositories of memory. In the presence of new 117

technologies and electronic information archives, like family albums, are becoming fluid and memory becomes more of a performative process that can be revised and updated to include changing preferences of the personal past. In the same time the concurrency of new technologies and photography can be beneficial to communities who have been struggling to maintain familial ties and maintain their cultural identity. That phenomenon can be observed when looking at online usage of the previously private photographs of the Jaglas and other families, and the effect is has on a community of people who share the same story and can now better place that within the historical, collective past. When photographs can be accessed and are allowed to circulate they can support the remembrance and telling of alternative stories, but the meanings that they will offer will be again new, stripped of their materiality and rendered ageless, again frozen, this time at the moment that they left their paper behind.118

As has been demonstrated, the study of affect in relation to a photographic image can inform our knowledge, and trigger critical enquiries into the process of understanding photographic meaning not only on the indexical level, but also on a wider, somatic level of perception. The friction between the materialist way of thinking about images, formulated through discourse and popularized by Alan

Ibid.

116

Ibid, p. 128.

117

Cross, Peck, “On Photography, Archive and Memory”, pp. 132-133.

Sekula, John Tagg or Victor Burgin, and the thinking of Roland Barthes, who was arguably one of the first who placed feeling and affect at the center of photographic theory, typifies the wider turn in academia’s approach to objects that took place in the last thirty years. The content of an image arguably still remains the basis through which the image is understood, but affect and material tools add yet another, broader dimension to our cognitive processes. Additionally, with digital culture’s ongoing and rapid developments continuing as I write, yet another space has been created in which photographs may be circulated and exist. This evolution merits consideration as it also has been demonstrated to have affective qualities. Although the process of digitalization has begun to be examined critically only recently, the act of scanning and online sharing, too, are becoming an important part of the lives of an image. The Jagla photographs that this thesis refers to are objects but now exist in digital form too. Each of them is a piece of paper, that was cut and covered with light-sensitive emulsion and chemicals and is now stored somewhere in a box, aging with each passing day. Over time, as the material characteristics change and the photographic print gets older, the impact on the way the image is read and more importantly felt, changes too. As the photos are held in somebody’s hands and their faded surfaces touched and felt under the fingertips, one can relate and respond to them in ways that cannot be understood by means of language, discourse or power alone. Family photographs contain emotional and affective qualities that have an ability to reach much further and wider than just their individual owners. However, as pointed out by researchers such as Sassoon or Van House, that process of being able to affect collective readers rather than just single users is changing and expanding with the exponential growth of digitalization and the possibilities offered by online sharing and how images are communicated in contemporary society. The lives of these photographs, taken in Uganda almost seventy years ago, were extended when they entered an unpredicted online space. Consequently new meanings were created as the Jagla images were freed from their physical form and began a transformation as the ownership over them eroded, changed and became a shared, collective value. Their role as social documents and as tools for creation and retention of Polish identity and history has been extended too, outside of personal and into collective meanings.