The emergence of snapshot photography as a popular social practice has to a great extent been taken for granted, but the reasons why we take snapshots is one of my principal research questions and by implication so is the reason for its continued popularity and technological development. I have already considered the discourse that supports the argument that there is an innate drive to externalise memory as images in relation to the theory of originary technicity. In this section, I strive to establish a link to another of Bernard Stiegler's philosophical views of the evolution of technologies, namely, industrialisation and institutionalisation. Arthur Bradley considers how the evolution of real time industries is influenced by the social and cultural impact.
In his book Originary Technicity: The Theory of Technology from Marx to Derrida, Bradley considers Bernard Stiegler's view of capitalism and what Stiegler calls `hyper-
industrialisation’. Bradley’s discussion is concerned with the institutionalisation effect of Real-Time industries like film and television, but the principles can just as well be applied to the industry that gave us snapshot photography. Stiegler is concerned by the industrialisation of time, memory and desire by the influences of
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argue that the globalised social practice of snapshot photography owes its ubiquity to what has been described as entrepreneurial institutionalisation and the
commodification of desire to consume. Bernard Stiegler’s papers “Pharmacology of Desire: Drive-based Capitalism and Libidinal Dis-economy” and Erich Hörl’s paper, “Prosthesis of Desire: On Bernard Stiegler’s New Critique of Protection” provide an overview of the concept of the desire to consume in a capitalist society and the understanding of desire in general. In a recent paper, Stiegler offers an interesting update on the notion of desire in relation to mass consumption and narcissism - a concept that will be also discussed in relation to social constructivism and the
snapshot (Batchen, 1999; Belk et al., 2003; Hörl, 2014; Schroeder, 2015; Stiegler, 2011b). I am tempted to view Stiegler's arguments in the light of our understanding of
parietal art, the marks, drawing, and painting that have been discovered on rocks and the walls of caves that were made approximately forty million years ago and reflect the use of lithic and other mark making technologies. Today we have personal picture-making devices called smartphones that are used to record every facet of our lives as pictures. Although the purpose of parietal art is the subject of significant discourse, there is a broad consensus that the work is of ritualistic significance, playing an important part in the continuity of cultural life (Hyde, 2007, p.253). The associated ritual was thought to be shamanic, part of social renewal and
remembering, (Eliade, 1996, p.361). The influences of the capitalist institutional culture on social behaviour can be seen as shamanic when viewed in terms of the control of libidinal desires and psychological manipulation; ostensibly for the greater good of social cohesion, cultural progress and maintenance of the collective memory.
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A wide variety of writers have remarked on elements of snapshot photography that they consider contribute to the psycho-social fetishization of the practice. Catherine Zuromskis, Ann Marsh and Sontag describe ritual, repetition and performativity as properties of snapshot photography that compound the influence of the institutions in their appeal to the `desire to photograph’ as Batchen describes it (Batchen, 1999; Marsh, 2003; Sontag, 1979; Zuromskis, 2013).
The apparent simplicity of snapshot photography belies its underlying technical complexity and vulnerability to aesthetic blunders. Snapshot takers generally follow a procedure, established by, example, practice, subliminally acquired knowledge, and the osmosis of social convention. A ritual prescriptive performance learned by repetition and imitation, giving snapshot photography the characteristics and appeal of a ritualistic behaviour or performance. I recognise the ritualistic behaviour from the days when I was an altar boy. We performed the ritual by following a strict procedure that was learnt by example and repetition. Later as a wedding photographer, I followed a strict shooting list of poses and situations to ensure conformity. The process was both prescriptive and ritualistic.
A number of references are made to ritual, performance, and performativity in relation to snapshot photography. Barthes makes reference to photography being a performance when he described the pose as a performance that reminded him of
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theatre and the Tableaux Vivant12. The use of the term Tableaux Vivant could be said to
embrace the essence of the snapshot, a moment of a performance frozen in time. Barthes uses the term in recognition of the performance that accompanies the theatricality of striking the pose that is a feature of the quintessential snapshot. He acknowledges elsewhere the use of the term Tableaux Vivant in relation to the still image from a movie, being able to extract the whole diegesis of the film (Barthes, 1993b).
Barthes described photography as theatre, as did Ann Marsh, in her book The Darkroom: Photography and the Theatre of Desire. Marsh explores Jaques Lacan’s
Freudian notion that, “photography preserves the ancient desire to become Other” a totemistic way of explaining the primal desire that links mimesis with the primitive theatre of cave art, a notion consistent with the assertion that, snapshot photography is performative. A variety of writers borrow John Austin’s linguistic term
performativity and repurpose it to describe the gestural intentionality of the
performance that is an intrinsic part of participating in the posing and taking of the snapshot by both the photographer and the referent (Austin, 1975; Barthes, 2010; Lacan & Wilden, 1968).
An important contribution to this study is the role played by George Eastman in the popularisation of photography and the invention of the snapshot photography.
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Eastman was driven by the capitalist desire to simplify Fox-Talbot’s technology of mark-making with light so that he could both enjoy the pleasures of photography without the need for the skills and facilities to undertake what was an otherwise complex process and to popularise it. He disrupted photographic technology by simplifying the processes involved in the creation, taking and printing of
photographs and in doing so widened its appeal. Through a process of entrepreneurial institutionalisation Eastman promoted this simplified form of photography by exploiting the psycho-social factors that drive the desire, to consume, whilst promoting social conformity, ritual, and performance (Munir & Phillips, 2005, p.1672).
Eastman created a paradigm shift in social behaviour by the application of theories of social constructivism and commodification (Hand, 2012, p.26). The snapshot was conceived and photography was transformed from a gentleman’s hobby and a middle-brow art into a universal social practice. In 1888 Eastman replaced the complexities of wet-plates13 with the Kodak, a camera preloaded with flexible film,
sufficient for one hundred exposures, at a cost of twenty-five-dollars. The concept of simplified photography was promoted with the advertising slogan, “You press the button, we do the rest.” In 1900, Eastman democratised photography by introducing the “Brownie”, a camera marketed to children for one dollar, the snapshot was born
13 Wet Plates - The "collodion wet plate process", required the photographic material to be
coated, sensitised, exposed and developed within the span of about fifteen minutes, necessitating a portable darkroom for use in the field.
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and the Kodak culture became pervasive, ubiquitous and global (Olivier, 2007, p.1). The next hundred years was to see visual culture transformed by mass consumption and a libidinal economy fuelled by real-time technologies and the realisation of Stiegler's notion of the transmission of memories through the transmission of
artefacts that encoded our memories as images as marks on a cave wall to ultimately traces on a screen (Stiegler & others, 2008).
This may be an over-simplification of what is an extensive and complex discourse. However, for the purposes of my argument, I feel it will suffice to support my
contention that we take snapshot photographs to fulfil a primordial desire, the desire to remember and share our experiences. The ritualised performance is a subliminal aesthetic experience for the both the photographer and the referent (Parker &
Sedgwick, 2013). The outcome, a photograph is, once taken, of similar temporality to the formation of a memory, almost subconscious, dismissed until confronted in the future, an image manifesting as a latent memory encoded as traces of the past awaiting cognitive reconstruction.
Linking the humble snapshot back to primal forms of representation, and suggesting that cave art and snapshot photography are a form of prosthetic or exteriorised memory, created with mnemonic mark-making technologies provides some of the scaffolding for the theoretical framework of this study. However, it does not explain why snapshot photography is so compulsive. Is there something about performance or the materiality of the snapshot that is important?
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