endotic photography

Mentions

• “In the hands of an individual, the camera denounced the “positivist utopia of order, synthesis, and totality,” replacing these categories with “disorder, fragmentation, and contingency” (Amad, 2010, p.21).” ⤴️
• the beginning of the last century, when serious concerns arose in response to the proliferation of the first consumer-oriented cameras. Those concerns were raised by the excess of visual images that came from amateur snapshooting, by extension questioning their historical, archival, and personal significance.” ⤴️
• “If, arguably, a few decades ago people would reach for recording technologies such as personal cameras mostly to document moments of special situations, unusual events, or exceptional times in their everyday lives, such as family events, ceremonies, holiday, and so on (van Dijck, 2007), today we increasingly use cameras less in exceptional circumstances than in moments of boredom, in other words – whenever we want.” ⤴️
• “the function of an image changed from a carrier of memory to a unit of communication” ⤴️
• “indiscernibly caused us to swap selectivity for excessiveness and reflectiveness for immediacy in how we document our everyday lives.” ⤴️
• “a text entitled “The Camera as Historian,” and is one of the earliest articulations of these growing concerns: One of the outstanding characteristics of our time – as contrasted with the past – is its tendency towards the elimination of waste of power – the economical direction of human activities so as to increase their productivity and effectiveness – the utilization of what have heretofore been regarded as ‘waste products.’ To the engineer it is abhorrent that any energy be allowed to run to waste. But in the domain of photography the amount of horse power running to waste is appalling – and all for lack of a little system and co-ordination. Shall this be allowed to continue? Shall the product of countless cameras be in the future, as in the past (and in large measure today) a mass of comparative lumber, losing its interest even for its owners, and of no public usefulness whatever? This is a question of urgency. Every year of inaction means an increase of this wastage (Gower, et al., 1916, p.6).” ⤴️
• “The amateur photographer, seen as an untrained witness to the “non-eventness of the everyday”(Highmore, 2002, p.34) was problematized as a new agent entering the archive, and a potential source for rethinking historical imagination and representation.” ⤴️
• “Sharpening the attention toward details, ephemeral and momentary, portable cameras in the hands of amateur photographers were capable of productively tackling the dominance of static, “higher vision,” “generalized views,” and “naturalistic” depictions, a problematic inheritance from realist painting that, as Lux asserted, made professional photographers act like “bad mirrors” failing “to do justice to the object” (ibid., p.86)” ⤴️