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The Authentic Snap? D.I.Y. Reporting in the Age of 'We Media'

This is a commissioned chapter for the cross-disciplinary publication of peer-reviewed papers Visual Conflict: On the Formation of Political Memory in the History of Art and Visual Cultures, which examines how the visual histories of warfare and conflict have evolved reflecting and responding to the shifting nature of war. Using the December 2008 riots in Greece as a historical case study, Moschovi’s chapter explores issues of authenticity and credibility, immediacy and amateurization raised in relation to current photographic practices and the new ecology of Web 2.0, examining user-generated imagery taken by means of mobile-phone cameras, their distribution on social networking sites and their cultural currency in different contexts. Facets of this research were disseminated in two international peer-reviewed conferences: the 36th Association of Art Historians Annual Conference, University of Glasgow (April 2010) and Photography and International Conflict, UCD Clinton Institute for American Studies, Dublin, Ireland (June 2009). The research for this paper has also formed a major direction for a multidisciplinary, international conference entitled The Versatile Image: Photography in the Era of Web 2.0 that Moschovi organized and introduced at the University of Sunderland, June 2011. With Julian Stallabrass, Martin Lister, Mia Fineman and David Bate as keynote speakers, the conference explored the ontological, conceptual, technical, and aesthetic premises of photography in the era of Web 2.0, identifying novel uncharted avenues and methodologies of research in this rapidly evolving field.