Snapshot Culture. The Photographic Experience in the Post-Medium Age

From the 2000s onwards, the experience of photography has changed radically because of various social and technological events: the embedding of cameras into multimedia and multifunction mobile devices, the expansion of photographs’ arena of visibility to the Internet, and the spread of easy-to-use photo-editing software for both desktop computers and mobile devices. On one hand, social and media mutations have set the scene for the emergence of experimental and non-professional practices that have progressively reshaped photography’s spatiotemporal and sociocultural boundaries: editing, filtering, remixing, posting, sharing, tagging, commenting etc., have become part of our natural everyday behaviour. On the other hand, and as a result, those changes exacerbated the crisis in photography theory: the fierce debate about the impact of digitalization on the ontology of photography that dominated the 1990s sounds hopelessly obsolete and unproductive today. Rather than a theory of post-photography centred on (the loss of) indexicality and the rhetoric of the ‘death of photography’, what the new photographic culture calls for is a reconsideration of the epistemic and interpretive models devised to describe the relationship between representation, art, reality and identity.