Digital Snaps

Book excerpt: Photography as an everyday practice is once again changing dramatically. At this moment of transition from analogue to digital, Digital Snaps aims to develop a new media ecology that can accommodate these changes to photography 'as we know it'. Expert contributors representing varied disciplines demonstrate how and to what extent the traditional social practices, technologies and images of analogue photography are being transformed with the movement to digital photography. They zoom in on typical, vernacular, everyday practices: the development of the family photo album from a physical object in the living room to a digital practice on the Internet; the use of mobile phones in everyday life; photo communities on the Internet; photo booth photography; studio photography; and fine arts' appropriation of amateur photography. They explore how this media convergence transforms the media ecology - the networks, objects, performances, meanings and circulations - of vernacular photography, as we research it through ordinary people's use of such new cameras and interactive Internet spaces as part of their everyday lives.