Output details

Digital Cameras and Domestic Photography: Communication, Agency and Structure

An article in an International peer reviewed journal examining the topic of domestic digital photography in relation to the theoretical work of Kress and Van Leeuwen and others on visual communication. While finding much of the existing literature useful, the article proposes some significant additions, caveats and modifications to it.

The article reviews a broad range of relevant literature dealing with snapshot photography and theories of visual communication. Through a semiotic analysis of specific images it proposes a novel typology of vernacular digital photography.

The article calls into question some of the dominant assumptions of prominent theorists of visual culture such as Kress and Van Leeuwen. Among other things, it proposes that non-verbal communication remains something of a blindspot for some approaches, for instance, haptic and tactile aspects of the digital camera. Domestic digital photography has remained relatively unexamined in the scholarly literature on visual communication and no substantial theorisation of it exists. The article marks an early intervention into a field which has grown considerably since its publication in 2009.

The article has been cited in scholarly publications including the Journal of Social Semiotics and the Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems. It is set reading for the 'Discourse and Difference' course at Washington University and core reading for Curtin University’s Web207 module.

The article was co-authored with Paul Cobley who worked jointly and in equal measure on the research and subsequent text . Nick Haeffner’s photography was also used to illustrate certain themes in the text.