s2 art's List: PhD-Research

• whenever they felt bored, they spent their time taking photos of themselves and experienced a new sense of existence.
• To photograph with camera phones is to play.
• It is an everyday event, rather than a meaningful ritual designed to record and commemorate the past.
• Although sometimes kept, their photographs are not particularly memorial in the traditional sense. In addition, the screen of the camera phone is not large enough to truthfully represent the time and space of the past; it’s very small and the images are distorted. In short, to photograph with a camera phone is to assume that the event is easily forgettable.
• Figures and animals that are photographed at a distance by camera phones are sometimes hardly recognisable; only the photographer can see them. For example, S3 (age 18) said that she took a photo of some water because she liked its sound, and S10 said that she took a photo of a squirrel on the grass. Yet neither of these images was very recognisable. S 14 (age 21) explained the various looks of her pet from seemingly identical pictures. Such photographs depict experiences so personal and subjective, yet so vague, that only the individual photographer can interpret them. At the same time, any photograph, even those taken for personal satisfaction, is available to be shared with others. As discussed above, to photograph and view images with camera phones is therefore not only a personal activity, but also a form of play with friends.
• There are obvious a serious of paradoxical inversions here between the public and private nature of the camera photographs. John Berger (1980) divides the uses of photography into the private and public. The former recollects and maintains a record of an individual’s experiences, which are ‘appreciated and read in a context which is continuous with that from which the camera removed it.’ By contrast, the latter records certain events and scenes, which are ‘torn from [their] context,’ and ‘lend [themselves] to any arbitrary use’ (Berger, 1980: 51-52).
• The public photograph plays the role of witness and reporter about an event whose original context and meaning the reader would not necessarily know. When the photograph taken by a camera phone is displayed and circulated via a person’s mini-homepage or a bulletin board in a cyber-community café, the context in which to be appreciated and interpreted will be changed. In this context, the boundaries between the private and the public become blurred. When the photographs taken by the camera phone capture the moments of everyday life or self-expression and become remediated by the Internet, these personal expressions gain a public channel for circulation; the photographer can expand the space for self-presentation and self-exposure. As her camera phone becomes connected to the Internet, she becomes more conscious of what photographs she will select to show; she is more careful in managing impressions. This expands her pleasure as a producer of her own self-presentation and meaning-making.
• However, the ways in which the interviewees have used the camera phone to increase intimacy with media technology, to present themselves, to capture a moment of everyday life, to share the experiences of photography and seeing, and to pursue pleasure, suggest that these women are not the mere owners of camera phones, but performers who create various cultural meanings. They develop a more intimate relationship with technology, challenge the conventions of gaze, give meaning to what is taken, and circulate their own expressions. These processes of cultural meaning-making neither directly subvert the existing gendered system, get away from the context of commercialism, nor constitute a feminist mobilisation. However, the uses of the camera phone seem to affect, to some degree, women’s receptiveness to new media technology, and the ways in which they present themselves and have relations with others. With the camera phone, women have another tool that will help them to be cultural producers.

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