How digital photography remade our world
The selfie, the faux-vintage photo, the self-destructing image, the food photo, these new visual forms and the devices and platforms that facilitate them have fomented a cultural revolution. Not only has the art of photography and the industry around it been transformed, but the way we under-stand ourselves has changed. The Social Photo provides a language and conceptual framework to comprehend photography in the age of social media. This updated edition includes a new preface contemplating the fate of the social photo in the era of AI-generated images.
With the rise of the smart phone and social media, cameras have become ubiquitous, infiltrating nearly every aspect of social life. The glowing camera screen is the lens by which many of us apprehend and communicate our experience. But our thinking about photography has been slow to catch up; this major fixture of everyday life is still often treated in the terms of art or journalism.
In The Social Photo, social theorist Nathan Jurgenson develops bold new ways of understanding the transformations wrought by these image-making and sharing technologies and the cultural objects they have ushered in: the selfie, the faux-vintage photo, the self-destructing image, the food photo. Jurgenson shows how these devices and platforms have remade the world and our understanding of ourselves within it.
The description and cover above are taken from the Paperback (2026) edition. Other editions may vary.
Physical Info: 1.77 x 21 x 14 cm | 144 pages | Paperback