Imagenaciones // Edgar Gómez Cruz

Beyond Representation: Photography as a sociotechnical practice.

Edgar Gómez-Cruz, PhD.

Internet Interdisciplinary Institute

Open University of Catalonia

The main accounts of Photography had understood it mostly as a representation (Barthes, 1980, Berger, 1972, Bazin, 1980, Sontag, 2006). Many of the discussions about digital photography had been related to the continuity (or not) of digital image as a device for representing the real, with some commentators and academics talking about the “dead of photography”, the “death of the camera” (Rubinstein, 2005) or a “post-photographical era” (Robins, 1996; Batchen, 2002). Those analyses have been made mostly from art, semiotic, philosophy, communication and media studies. Although there are several empirical studies on digital photography, there seems to be fewer ethnographic and long term research about the practices of digital photography and the way they gain social meaning (though there are several good examples of it).

Based on an ethnographic fieldwork of one year…