Taking Snapshots, Living the Picture: The Kodak Company's Making of Photographic Biography

In this article I explore how George Eastman and the Eastman Kodak Company encouraged early twentieth-century camera users to think of snapshots as pictorial biographies. Analysing a wide selection of articles from the Kodakery, one of Kodak’s most popular magazines in the first half of the twentieth century, I demonstrate that the company endeavoured to secure its prominence in the photographic market by encouraging members of the public to integrate picture-taking into everyday life, and regard photographs as self-contained repositories of biographical details. To this end, Kodak framed the speedy pace of life that characterised the practice of being in the industrial world as a reality that allegedly weakened the human eye and mind’s ability to process the experience of life itself. Introducing the idea of the camera and picturetaking as the ultimate cures for this purported human deficiency, Kodak provided camera users with advice that helped to cement an understanding of photographs as surrogates of both the changing human body and individual subjects’ experiences in time and space. As in popular culture, and sometimes also in academia, photographs are still widely regarded as pictorial biographies, I argue that considering the popular photographic industry’s role in shaping photographic practices and photographs’ perceived meanings can help clarify the relationship between photography and life-writing

Has Instagram Fundamentally Altered the 'Family Snapshot'?

This paper considers how parents use the social media platform Instagram to facilitate the capture, curation and sharing of ‘family snapshots’. Our work draws upon established cross-disciplinary literature relating to film photography and the composition of family albums in order to establish whether social media has changed the way parents visually present their families. We conducted a qualitative visual analysis of a sample of 4,000 photographs collected from Instagram using hashtags relating to children and parenting. We show that the style and composition of snapshots featuring children remains fundamentally unchanged and continues to be dominated by rather bland and idealised images of the happy family and the cute child. In addition, we find that the frequent taking and sharing of photographs via Instagram has inevitably resulted in a more mundane visual catalogue of daily life. We note a tension in the desire to use social media as a means to evidence good parenting, while trying to effectively manage the social identity of the child and finally, we note the reluctance of parents to use their own snapshots to portray family tension or disharmony, but their willingness to use externally generated content for this purpose

FAMILY HOUSES AND SOCIAL IDENTITY: COMMUNICATIONAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE HOMES OF RIDGE COUNTY (PENNSYLVANIA, ARCHITECTURE, ETHNOGRAPHY, MATERIAL CULTURE, NON-VERBAL)

This study provides an analysis of the communicative use of family homes within the daily life of a rural community. As an ethnography of communicative behavior, the nature and functions of the home as a medium of communication are explored within a specified social context so that the social and cultural influences which shape its use and interpretation may be examined. The study explores the structure of rules, roles, values, customs and beliefs which organize how homes are used, how they are evaluated, and how they come to assume meaning within this frame of reference. It was hypothesized that family homes, as media of social communication, function as artifacts of and instruments for the structure of social relations that prevail within the community that employs them. Research was directed, therefore, to examining the role of family homes in the expression of patterns of association and differentiation through which social identity and the community\u27s system of social status are negotiated, marked and maintained. The study draws on fourteen months of fieldwork, during which family homes were investigated as complex, multi-modal systems of communicative activity. Patterns of household maintenance, rules and customs in the use of household and community space, comparisons of house size and layout, traditions in the acquisition and use of furnishings, and patterns in taste preferences are each examined as integrated aspects of this system of communication. In this way a structure of shared values, standards and traditions is described which is shown to regulate the conduct and interpretation of activity in this sphere at a variety of levels. While previous research has emphasized the home\u27s value as an index of social class, this study finds that households are, in this insular community, devoted centrally to the expression of a family\u27s social orientation and moral repute. Processes of status comparison are muted, while homes serve to mark and maintain interdependent networks of kinship and affiliation through which social life is ordered and personal identity is defined. Change and systematic deviations from these common standards are examined and an effort is made to discuss the generalizability of these findings to other socio-cultural settings

FAMILY HOUSES AND SOCIAL IDENTITY: COMMUNICATIONAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE HOMES OF RIDGE COUNTY (PENNSYLVANIA, ARCHITECTURE, ETHNOGRAPHY, MATERIAL CULTURE, NON-VERBAL)

This study provides an analysis of the communicative use of family homes within the daily life of a rural community. As an ethnography of communicative behavior, the nature and functions of the home as a medium of communication are explored within a specified social context so that the social and cultural influences which shape its use and interpretation may be examined. The study explores the structure of rules, roles, values, customs and beliefs which organize how homes are used, how they are evaluated, and how they come to assume meaning within this frame of reference. It was hypothesized that family homes, as media of social communication, function as artifacts of and instruments for the structure of social relations that prevail within the community that employs them. Research was directed, therefore, to examining the role of family homes in the expression of patterns of association and differentiation through which social identity and the community\u27s system of social status are negotiated, marked and maintained. The study draws on fourteen months of fieldwork, during which family homes were investigated as complex, multi-modal systems of communicative activity. Patterns of household maintenance, rules and customs in the use of household and community space, comparisons of house size and layout, traditions in the acquisition and use of furnishings, and patterns in taste preferences are each examined as integrated aspects of this system of communication. In this way a structure of shared values, standards and traditions is described which is shown to regulate the conduct and interpretation of activity in this sphere at a variety of levels. While previous research has emphasized the home\u27s value as an index of social class, this study finds that households are, in this insular community, devoted centrally to the expression of a family\u27s social orientation and moral repute. Processes of status comparison are muted, while homes serve to mark and maintain interdependent networks of kinship and affiliation through which social life is ordered and personal identity is defined. Change and systematic deviations from these common standards are examined and an effort is made to discuss the generalizability of these findings to other socio-cultural settings