Camera Phones and Mobile Intimacies
- Submitting institution
-
The University of Westminster
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- q399z
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
-
-
- Book title
- The Evolution of the Image
- Publisher
- Routledge
- ISBN
- 9781138216037
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- March
- Year of publication
- 2018
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- Yes
- Additional information
- The chapter examines the history and subsequent impact of the cell phone camera on social conceptions of intimacy, privacy and the self. Despite the invention of the camera-phone in 2000, some twenty years ago, the material social-cultural impact of the millions of mobile camera devices around the world remains a neglected topic in the history, criticism and theory of photography.
Bate argues that the shifts in new media photographic practice are enabled through the automated technics of phone-based picture-making processes, which are directly linked to the upsurge of new types of plural image aesthetics and the simultaneous mutation of once distinct roles of professional, amateur and enthusiast photography - now merged in new hybrid forms across social media space. The chapter further argues that the specific optics of camera-phone lenses have normalized a wide-angle ‘close-up’ vision, which itself has contributed to mutations in spatial logic and notions of intimacy.
In drawing together different aspects of technics and their relations to human use, Bate develops a new framework and analysis, drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘technologies of the self’ to support the argument. The chapter suggests that the material effect of these new devices and practices is to re-draw the boundaries between public/private, exterior/interior, and inside/outside. No longer defined as ‘private’, intimacy is externalized and the dual facing camera of phone-based pictures in effect mutates the individual’s relation to space and identity. There is an echo of the old ‘mirrors and windows’ distinction here, but it is mutated through processes of visualization that now seek to make the interior visible, externally through photographic visibility.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
