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Ubiquitous Photography

Article  in  European Journal of Communication · April 2013

DOI: 10.1177/0267323113476943c

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Book reviews 205

sense of how its perceptions of the kaleidoscopic, the unstable and the ambiguous might
help to progress the existing agenda of media research.

Martin Hand
Ubiquitous Photography, Polity: Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA, 2012; 220 pp.: £14.99

Reviewed by: Michael Pickering, Loughborough University, UK

Over the past 10–15 years, there has been a quite remarkable shift. The film camera and
the analogue photograph have virtually disappeared from the realm of photographic pro-
duction, while the digital camera and the digital photo-image have become widespread
and commonplace. Quite what to make of this shift is no easy task. It involves not just
the replacement of one media technology by another, but also the far greater proliferation
of photographies and an unprecedented level of visual mediation of both eventful and
mundane human affairs. There is as well a number of continuing convergences: PCs,
laptops, tablets, notebooks, cellphones and so on incorporate digital image-making,
manipulating, storing, sharing and distribution facilities. All this is bound up with what
constitutes the latest stage in the democratization of photography, which has steadily
increased since the introduction of the Kodak camera in the late 19th century. In the early
21st century, everyone seems to be involved in taking pictures. Along with this the
expansion of photo-sharing beyond family and friends means that digital images are
spreading everywhere via social networks and participatory online sites such as Flickr
and Facebook. It is this ubiquity which is the central theme of Martin Hand’s contribu-
tion to Polity’s Digital Media and Society series.
The aim of the book is to map out this broad and unstable terrain and place it within
some degree of historical perspective. Given the breadth of what is involved, Hand
sensibly confines his discussion to personal photography. This not only helps provide
focus but also has the virtue of developing a more refined sociological understanding
of social, cultural and technological change, for it is clear that if such an understanding
is to be achieved, it is to the realm of routine, everyday life that we should turn. Of
course, it is no longer quite so clear where the demarcation between personal photog-
raphy and other photographic practices may lie. Certain automated features of digital
cameras seem to be changing the acquisition and application of skills and expertise
that were prerequisites of amateur and professional forms of analogue photography.
The categories of personal, amateur and professional photographer are, in some ways
at least, no longer as clear as they were. Nevertheless, the category of photographic
practice we call ‘personal’ remains in most cases distinct enough, and certainly so as
an object of research.
Regarding the question of ubiquity, Hand’s take on this lies in its reference to the
pervasive discourses, technologies and practices of photography across all domains of
contemporary society, as for example is evident in the ways in which personal life is
being made more and more visible, and photography is being made an increasingly prev-
alent component of numerous social, political and cultural forms. These developments
can be duly noted, and there is much that seems for now acceptable in Hand’s general
discussion of them, but in the face of film photography’s demise, it is salutary to

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206 European Journal of Communication 28(2)

remember that digital cameras, and the photographic practices emerging through their
use, have only become pervasive over the past couple of decades, and radically so only
over the past decade. Change can easily be exaggerated in the short term. It is then that
it seems most dramatic, and of course it takes a good while for change in home-mode
media technologies to be reflected in everyday social practices, for such practices involve
a complex flowing together of inheritance, accommodation, adaptation and emergence.
This is not intended to undermine what is in many ways a level-headed and balanced
discussion, but rather to suggest that the rush to explain and evaluate recent change is a
good deal more perilous than many seem to assume. When explanation and evaluation
are made with intemperate speed, what is said may seem in immediate terms to be very
much of the moment, but once that moment has passed, and we move even a couple of
decades down the line, what has been pronounced in this manner can seem at best poorly
measured, and at worst manifest folly.
Hand recognizes this at least to the extent that he is keenly aware that the ways in
which the analogue/digital distinction is posed is what remains crucial, and that across this
distinction lies the still developing relationship between conventional and emergent prac-
tices. Hand is certainly not one to jump precipitously into declarative judgement in the
ways others have in talking of ‘the death of photography’ or of a move into a ‘post-
photographic era’. As Hand quite rightly notes, there is ‘no doubt that digital technologies
are different, both materially and discursively, but the ways in which this is so depend
upon their embeddedness in practices’ (p. 19). Appropriately then, questions of continuity
and change are central to Hand’s opening chapter, which examines the extent to which
photographic digitization affects the dominant theories of visual culture, consumption and
technology in late modernity. The qualitative differences between film and digital culture,
with attendant questions of variation, malleability, manipulation and durability, are
explored, as is the issue of the changing agency of the photographer and the redistribution
of photographic skill. There are valuable points made throughout the book, but the most
rewarding chapter, in my view, is that devoted to memory and classification, and the ways
in which these are in the process of alteration as a result of digitization.
It is, quite definitely, not a matter of straightforward transformation from one set of
practices to another, but rather a variable and ongoing mix of old and new modes of clas-
sification, ordering, storage and retrieval in the interests of memory-making and memory
re-making. This includes the album, which has for well over a hundred years been the
centrepiece of personal and domestic photography. The album is not disappearing, as
was forecast, but either continuing along more or less established lines, being reconfig-
ured in ways which mimic the conventional album, or taking on new forms that were not
possible in previous sociotechnical constructions of memory. Although it may be too
early to tell, what seems to be emerging is, among other things, a further stage in the
democratization of domestic memory-making. With film photography, following its loss
of association with social privilege, a gendered division of labour remained in place for
most of the past century: men took the photos, women collated and curated them.
Although there were always exceptions proving the rule, this pattern appears to be chang-
ing, partly because of the erosion of older gender roles and relations, and partly because
of the production of individual albums, with each member of a household constructing
their own mnemonic archives. Hence, in Hand’s words, ‘we are witnessing a

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Book reviews 207

multiplication of album-making rather than its disappearance’ (p. 163). Such appears to
be the case, but it is important to underline the need for greater investigative thorough-
ness whenever we are attending to the relatively new.
This is closely related to the problem with much of the writing on digital photo-
graphic practices. The problem is threefold. First, it is unclear what may be characteris-
tic of these practices because, as already noted, they are in the process not only of
emerging from what digital hardware and software make possible, but also in the pro-
cess of trialling what to inherit and retain, take over and make over from pre-digital
photographic practices, particularly where those practices were woven into the frames
of remembering that have been integral to people’s life narratives, both as individuals
and as members of such groups as family, close friends, workmates and the like. Yet in
the face of this, even when there is no immediate rush to explain and evaluate, there is
a marked tendency to extrapolate only from the newer ways in which photo-images are
used and deployed, particularly via online sharing procedures and social tagging, to the
forms of meaning and levels of significance these developments may have for partici-
pants, in their diverse and variably extended lives. There is then often a generalized,
even at times a universalized quality to what is being claimed, as if all social media
facilitate the uses made of them in the same or closely similar ways, or as if all partici-
pants in online networking sites engage in those sites or derive pleasure or value from
them in the same or closely similar ways. There is a considerable degree of media for-
malism in all of this. As we read through claim after claim, in article after article, the
need for empirical evidence of use and participation becomes more and more pressing.
Such evidence is, far too often, singularly lacking.
That is the third aspect of the problem – the very small extent of ethnographic research
into personal photographic practices. The dearth of such research must be overcome if
we are to develop a more informed understanding of the messy, intricate, in some ways
still inchoate nature of the development of practices in social media use and participa-
tion, those drawing on digital images being one of the most important arenas for such use
and participation. Here is another reason why – for me at least – Hand’s chapter on
memory and classification is the most rewarding in the book, for it is there most of all
that he draws on his own detailed interview data, and it is then we hear everyday users of
digital cameras or networking sites describing and reflecting upon their experiences.
This is in itself rewarding in a number of ways, not least because it shows us how impor-
tant it is not to make diametrical contrasts between analogue and digital photographic
practices but, instead, to delineate and make sense of the complex relations between
them in order to see how they inform popular engagements with time now and time then,
time past and time passing, time in the longer run rather than just the short.
In his concluding chapter, Hand points to the danger that the necessary ethnographic
attention to the ‘local assembly’ of the relations between photography, individual and
collective memory might result in ‘a form of micro-empiricism that cannot tell us any-
thing at all about digital culture more generally’ (p. 187). That would depend, of
course, on how such attention is realized and how the subsequent data are analysed.
The danger itself does not provide a sound reason for eschewing the fieldwork we
require when what is missing from much of the theorizing about digital culture is any
detailed evidence to support what is so expansively claimed about the consequences of

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208 European Journal of Communication 28(2)

technology for social change. It is time to give serious intellectual attention to the gen-
eration and analysis of such evidence. Hand’s book is an important call for this, not
least because of his recognition of the wide-ranging significance of personal photogra-
phy in contemporary everyday culture.
The relations between ‘old’ and ‘new’ photographic technologies point to situations
and responses to situations that remain fluid and ‘on the move’, involving the mutual
interaction of forces of change and structures of continuity. Generally, Hand tells the
story of this well. He does so in part because he is cautious not simply to play up what is
novel, or simply to play down what is being inherited and taken forward. The current
scenario may be one of contradictory tendencies, with for example mnemonic photo-
graphic practices becoming more individualized and privatized, and the images produced
becoming more widely distributed, publicly accessible and collectively defined, but the
analytical challenge in all of this is to grasp together these tendencies and show them as
part of the same complex picture. Hand proves to be a reliable guide in taking us through
what remains a rather bewildering landscape, one which we need continuously to moni-
tor, attending as much to the experience and practice of those involved in making and
engaging with personal photography as to the technologies and software facilities they
deploy in doing so.

José Marichal
Facebook Democracy:The Architecture of Disclosure and the Threat to Public Life, Ashgate:
Farnham, UK and Burlington,VT, 2012; 193 pp.: £55.00

Reviewed by: Natalie Pennington, University of Kansas, USA

José Marichal’s book on the role that Facebook can play in political participation and the
construction of political identities online offers a refreshing look at Facebook outside of
the typical constraints of the interpersonal. At times however the book misses out on a
discussion of key theoretical concepts in computer-mediated and political communica-
tion that are needed to understand just how far one can take the argument about the
public–private nature of Facebook. One cannot help but feel frustrated reading this book
at times, wondering why it is Marichal does not spend more time addressing things that
he picks up and moves away from rather swiftly, such as: latent ties, social identity,
Facebook use during the 2008 presidential election in the United States, the hyperper-
sonal model (Walther) and more. All of these are topics worthy of consideration, but
need more attention paid to them in order to develop a more comprehensive understand-
ing of Facebook. More often than not, Facebook Democracy skims the top level of litera-
ture related to understanding the role Facebook can play in the creation of a public
identity versus personal, leaving the reader with more questions than answers to those
initial questions posed by the author.
Marichal’s description of what he calls the ‘architecture of disclosure’ (the crux of the
book) is fascinating and spot-on in addressing how the nature of the company (because,
as Marichal notes, Facebook is a private business, not a public service) can dictate how
people go about disclosing information online. Addressing the push–pull of public and
private, Marichal suggests that at the end of the day there is a chance for Facebook to be

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