Shanks and Svabo, “Mobile Media Photography” (2014): Summary

“Mobile Media Photography: New Modes of Engagement” is an essay by the archaeologist Michael Shanks (Stanford University) and Connie Svabo (Roskilde University), published in Digital Snaps: The New Face of Photography, edited by Jonas Larsen and Mette Sandbye (I.B. Tauris, 2014). It examines what happens to photography when the camera becomes a phone connected to a network.

A symbolic year: 2012

The essay opens with two events of 2012. In April, Facebook bought Instagram, a start-up with fewer than two dozen employees and some 30 million users, for one billion dollars. In January, Eastman Kodak, the company that invented the snapshot and dominated twentieth-century photography, had filed for bankruptcy. Together they mark the passage from film to the mobile, networked image. The authors also point out what Facebook acquired: millions of geotagged photographs, and with them information on what users like, when, with whom and where.

Mixed realities and dispersed production

Shanks and Svabo describe mobile photography as part of a “mixed reality”, where physical places and digital networks overlap. Image production is no longer centralised: users choose, produce, alter and share content as well as consuming it. Journalism is a telling example. People at the scene of an event can share it long before professional reporters arrive, and the live, unfolding account takes precedence over the polished report.

From representation to engagement

The central claim is that mobile photography is less about representing the world than about engaging with it. Photographs become ways of being present, of connecting with others and of performing everyday life. Sharing, tagging and commenting are part of the photographic act. As an archaeologist, Shanks reads these images as traces of practice rather than as finished pictures.

Why read it

Written at the start of the smartphone era, the essay remains a clear framework for understanding Instagram culture, citizen journalism and post-photography. It is a useful companion to our articles on smartphone photography and Instagram.

The book

Digital Snaps gathers studies of everyday digital photography: family pictures, tourism, camera phones and online sharing. Its editors, Jonas Larsen and Mette Sandbye, argue that photography research should study practices and networks as much as images. Shanks and Svabo’s chapter fits this approach by treating the smartphone as a device that changes how people engage with places, events and each other. Their perspective, informed by archaeology and design, emphasises the material traces that photographic practices leave behind, from devices to data.

Reference

Michael Shanks and Connie Svabo, “Mobile Media Photography: New Modes of Engagement”, in Jonas Larsen and Mette Sandbye (eds), Digital Snaps: The New Face of Photography, London: I.B. Tauris, 2014. The chapter is protected by copyright; the book is available from the publisher and in libraries.