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Practices and Flows of Digital Photography: An Ethnographic Framework

Jonas Larsen a
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Department of Sociology, Social Work and Organisation, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

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Mobilities
Vol. 3, No. 1, 141160, March 2008

Practices and Flows of Digital

Photography: An Ethnographic
Framework
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JONAS LARSEN
Department of Sociology, Social Work and Organisation, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

ABSTRACT This article develops a methodological framework for undertaking empirical studies
of practices and flows, of doings and circulations, of digital tourist photography. The article
outlines what might be termed a non-representational approach to photography concerned with
affordances, actor-networks, hybridized practices and networked flows of photographs. The
article falls in three parts. It begins with rethinking photography theory. Traditional dualisms
between affordance and practice are challenged, and photography is conceptualized as a
hybridized, embodied performance. How digital photography changes photographys traditional
affordances is then discussed. The third part discusses various methods to describe how
affordances of digital tourist photography are used, twisted and resisted in concrete hybridized
practices. I suggest undertaking multi-sided ethnographies with busy photographers to craft
non-representational accounts of mobile practices of photographing and flows of photographic
images across various sites and actor-networks. In a broader sense, this article is a
methodological contribution to the new mobilities paradigm.
KEY WORDS: digital photography, ethnography, tourism, non-representational theory

Introduction
Around 1840 Talbot and Daguerre announced the principles behind the
photographic processes (Urry, 2002, p. 149). Early photography was a skilldemanding practice (especially with regard to chemical and technical knowledge)
performed by professionals, wealthy amateurs and very dedicated travellers with
inclinations for scientific expeditions or art: taking photos was resolutely elite and
male. It was in the late 1880s with Kodaks launch of user-friendly, lightweight and
cheap Brownie cameras that ordinary people began to practise photography on a
significant scale. The Brownie camera was a light, mobile hand-camera pre-loaded
with a 100-frame roll film that was sent back to a Kodak factory for developing and

Correspondence Address: Jonas Larsen, Department of Sociology, Social Work and Organisation, Aalborg
University, Aalborg, Denmark. Email: jonaslar@socsci.aau.dk
1745-0101 Print/1745-011X Online/08/01014120 # 2008 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17450100701797398

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re-loading. Once cumbersome, technical demanding and messy, the making of

photographs was now organized as a straightforward, user-friendly practice that
enabled people without any prior photographic skills to take photographs. As their
slogan, which came to identify the company, said, You Press the Button, We Do the
Rest. A whole new photography actor-network was assembled (Latour, 1991,
pp. 111121).
Now, a century later, it appears that photography is, once again, changing
dramatically. Cameras and photographs are digitalized and they converge with new
media technologies such as the internet, emails and mobile phones. Kodak stopped
selling traditional film cameras in North America and Western Europe in 2004.1 In
that year some 68 million digital cameras were sold worldwide.2 State-of-the-art
digital cameras feature Wi-fi technology for instant sharing at-a-distance.3 For
instance, in 2006, 61% of Danish households owned at least one digital camera
compared with 35% in 2004.4 In 2004, 246 million camera phones (mobile phones
with digital cameras) were sold worldwide nearly four times the sales of digital
cameras.5 However, while camera phones lag behind in the ever-increasing megapixel6 race, many mobiles now come with 3.2 or more mega-pixel cameras, which is
sufficient to produce high-quality (smallish) photographs. And mobile phone
commercials (see, for instance, Nokia)7 increasingly highlight the camera. Similarly,
digital photography converges with computer networks: personal computers, lap
tops, colour printers, editing software, email accounts, the internet, web blogs/home
pages and so on. Computer networks delete, display, improve, circulate and print
photographs. The internet is routinely integrated into the everyday lives of most
people in the developed world. For instance, 85% of Danish households have one or
more home computers, and 80% of these households are connected to the internet.8
The home has become a communication and information nucleus (Wellman &
Hogan, 2005). Digital photography is a complex technological network in the
making rather than a single fixed technology.
This article examines digital photography within a context of tourist photography,
and how it potentially changes the networks, circulations, materialities, performances, objects and meanings of tourist photography. The specific aim is to outline a
methodological framework for researching digital tourist photography (and by
implication new media and mobile communications more broadly). In a broader
sense, this article is a methodological contribution to the new mobilities paradigm
(Hannam, Sheller & Urry, 2006). By tourist photography I broadly refer to leisurely
picturing practices conducted away from home. But this does not mean that tourist
photography is all about consuming places. Tourist photography and everyday life
are not separate worlds but bridges constantly traversed by photographing tourists
on the move. It is a form of photography intricately bound up with performing
social relations and picturing co-travelling significant others, which also means that
many otherwise ordinary places are transformed into dramaturgical landscapes
(Haldrup & Larsen, 2003; Larsen, 2005). This article stresses the convergence
between tourist and home photography by describing how digital tourist
photography is networked with everyday communication technologies and people
also perform it at home.
Taking inspiration from Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) (Latour, 2005; Michael,
2000) and non-representational theory (Thrift, 1996; Lorimer, 2005), the article

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challenges approaches highlighting either society-shapes-technology or technologyshapes-society. ANT and non-representational geography are middle ground
positions that rephrase the debate from terms such as determine, impact or shape
towards terms such as networks, relationality, hybridity, affordance and so on.
The social and technological are seen as mutually determining. This article considers
photographys hybridiness of the technical and social, and its hybrid performances
of corporeal humans and affording non-humans. Photography is a technological
complex with specific affordances and a set of embodied social practices or
performances. The article shows that the newness of digital photography relates
both to digitalization of images, media convergence and new performances of
sociality (relating to broader social shifts towards real-time, collaborative,
networked sociality at-a-distance).
While much (earlier) writing on digital media resembled technical determinism by
only considering technical affordances, it will be argued that technologies cannot be
separated from embodied practices, from doings. The word technology, as the
words etymology reveals, is not only artefact but also knowledge and craft.
Technologies specific affordances shape but do not determine if and how they can
be used and made sense of in practice (Norman, 1999). And this is particularly the
case with new technologies such as digital cameras and camera phones that are
still in the process of being tested and appropriated by consumers. They are to some
extent underdetermined (Poster, 1999, p. 16), they have interpretative flexibility
(Pinch & Bijker, 1984). This also means that digital tourist photography can be many
different things according to how they are assembled, made meaningful and
performed in specific contexts, by humans and non-humans. This is why this article
speaks of practices of photography. These include: looking for, framing and taking
photographs, posing for cameras and choreographing posing bodies. Then there are
post-practices of editing, displaying and circulating photographs. And, finally, there
are the unpredictable flows of photographs as they travel through and take
(momentarily) hold in wires, databases, emails, screens, photo albums and
potentially many other places.
Yet photographing is absent from most theory and research that jumps straight
from photography to photographs. They go directly to the representational worlds
of photographs and skip over their production, movement and circulation. The
diverse hybrid practices and flows of photography are rendered invisible (but see
Cohen, 2005; Larsen, 2005). It is telling that the opening line of The Photography
Reader is, What is a photograph? (Wells, 2003, p. 1). This is also the case in recent
books on visual methods. For example, all the chapters in Gillian Roses Visual
Methodologies (2001) concern already produced and in-place images in order to
analyse their messages their content or meanings or codes (see also Van
Leeuwen & Jewitt, 2001). Another example relates to tourism studies many
representational semiotic or content studies of postcards and brochures but
hardly any of their production, distribution and consumption in practice (see Crang,
1999; Larsen, 2006). Such representational accounts have been successful in
analyzing photography as texts and scripts, but they have been blind to issues of
technology and hybridized performances, which also means that they have neglected
much of the significance of digital photography.

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The article falls in three parts. It begins with rethinking photography theory.
Traditional dualisms between affordance and practice are challenged, and
photography is conceptualized as a hybridized, embodied performance. Then
follows a discussion about how digital photography changes photographys
traditional affordances. The third part discusses various methods to describe how
the affordances of digital photography are used, twisted and resisted in concrete
hybridized practices. I suggest undertaking multi-sided ethnographic observation of
and interviews with busy photographers to craft non-representational accounts of
their picturing practices and flows of tourist images across various sites and actornetworks.

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Re-thinking Photography
Before we can re-think photography, it is necessary to understand how photography
studies have been haunted by an unproductive dualism between the technical and the
social. On the one hand, there is the so-called realist school that theorises
photography itself; its proponents are concerned with understanding the naked,
pre-discursive nature of photography (Bazin, 1967; Barthes, 2000). In The ontology
of the photographic image, Bazin argues that photographys nature is its essentially
objective character derived by being an inherently truthful and unbiased technology:
For the first time, between the originating object and its reproduction there
intervenes only the instrumentality of a nonliving agent (1967, p. 13). As the later
Barthes insists: in photography I can never deny that the thing has been there
(2000, p. 76). In this tradition discussions about digital photography relate to
digitalization and manipulation, with the computer darkrooms ability to reach
into the guts of a photograph and manipulate any aspects of it in increasingly
undetectable ways (Ritchen cited in Lister, 2001, p. 333). While aware that
manipulation is an integral part of the history of photojournalism, they are
concerned, somewhat paradoxically, that press photography loses its truth status
and yet becomes more effective at deceiving us.
On the other hand, there is the discourse/semiotic approach (Berger, 1972; Burgin,
1982; Tagg, 1988; Kember, 1998). Here photography is argued to be social and
historical rather than technical; the social is constitutive of what photography is and
photographs are seen as man-made and embodying a way of seeing rather than
mirrors of nature: they are ideological artefacts, always coded (Berger, 1972, pp. 9
10). From this position the idea that digital photography represents something
radically new is a myth because old discourses and codes instruct digital
photography and semiotic analysis undermined the truth status of photography
decades ago. Such humanistic approaches define media through how (different)
humans and societies ascribe meaning to them, and such inscription is largely
thought to be independent of the actual material design of the technology. To cite
Kevin Robins: the question of technology is not at all a technical question (1991,
p. 55). Here there can be no study of technology, only of how cultures through
human agency take possession of them.
The problem with these two positions is that they purify technology by privileging
either the technical or the social character of technology. This separation between
technology and culture is questioned by non-representational geography and ANT.

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Latour would argue that the dual mistake of the realists and humanists is to start
with essences, either those of subjects or those of objectsNeither the subject, nor
the object, nor their goals are fixed for ever. We have to shift our attention to this
unknown X, this hybrid which can truly be said to act (1993, p. 6). ANT and nonrepresentational geography show how technology, culture and society intertwine and
interact in all kinds of promiscuous combinations. Societies are heterogeneously
made up of humans, technologies, cultures and natures. And the inescapable
hybridity of human and non-human worlds is stressed (Thrift, 1996, p. 24).
People possess few powers which are uniquely human, while most can only be
realised because of their connections with inhuman components (Urry, 2000,
p. 14). ANT and non-representational geography refuse to equate agency with
intentionality and linguistic competences, and see it instead as the capacity to act or
have affects. Agency is a relational achievement between humans and non-humans,
involving the creative presence of organic beings, technological devises and
discursive codes, as well as people, in the fabrics of everyday living (Whatmore,
1999, p. 26; see also Bingham, 1996, p. 647).
ANT argues that a particular technology emerges out of the relations between
social, natural and technical actors (Michael, 2000, p. 18). Technologies are hybrids.
From this position photography is so evidently material and social, objective and
subjective, that is, heterogeneous. It is a complex amalgam of technology, discourse
and practice. Photographic agency is a relational effect that first comes into force
when a heterogeneous network of humans and non-humans is in place, as Latour
shows in his analysis of Kodak (1991). In other words, we need to consider its
technological, semiotic and social hybrid-ness; the way in which its meanings and
powers are the result of a mixture of forces and not a singular, essential and inherent
quality (Lister, 1995, p. 11). One way to illustrate what it means to speak of
photography as a hybrid is through Latours hybrid of the citizen-gun (Michael,
2000, p. 26). For Latour, it is neither the person nor the gun that kills, but the
citizen-gun, the hybrid. Similarly, neither photography technologies (cameras,
mobile phones, computers, printers and so on) nor the photographer makes pictures:
it is the hybrid of what we might term the networked-camera-tourist. Photographs
are man-made and machine-made.
However, one shortcoming with ANT studies is that they give scant attention to
concrete, lived and embodied practices of hybrids. In his otherwise sympathetic
review of ANT, Dant highlights that in concrete ANT studies it is noticeable that
there are very few accounts of the perceptual or tactile interaction between humans
and objects in the network, few detailed field observations, photographs or use of
video to study the process of the network that would allow the material objects to
have a presence in the accounts (2005, p. 81). Another shortcoming is that they tend
to grasp technologies as exclusively performing practically, and they therefore
neglect that most technologies enable a wide range of function-expressions and
opportunities for performing taste and self-identity (Michael, 2000, pp. 3536).
For instance, photography is intricately bound with self-presentation and monitoring bodies, with strategic impression management (Goffman, 1959, p. 10).
Following Said we may say that the very idea of photography is a theatrical one
(1995, p. 63). Posing illustrates this: I have been photographed and I knew it. Now,
once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the

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process of posing, I instantly make another body for myself, I transform myself in
advance into an image (Barthes, 2000, p. 10).
To study how digital photography is performed in practice we can learn from nonrepresentational geography. To put it briefly, non-representational geography is
concerned with bodily doings and technical enactments rather than representations
and meanings. It challenges the textual dominance in geography by being concerned
with performative presentations, showings and manifestations rather than
merely representation and meaning (Thrift, 1997, p. 127). It is concerned with the
more-than-the-representational (Lorimer, 2005). Non-representational studies are
busy, empirical commitments to doings near-at-hand, in ordinary and professional
settings, and through material encounters (ibid., p.84). A non-representational
approach to media studies moves the focus from consumption to how ordinary
people, as creative, expressive, hybridized beings, use media technologies and
produce media products, such as telephone calls, emails, music, film, web-pages and
photographs. It examines how photography performances are enacted consciously
and not least unconsciously in relation to dominant cultural notions of body
aesthetics, intimacy, love and normality (Larsen, 2005, 2006). It suggests that we also
speak of people not only as consumers or audiences but also as producers.
Affordances
While I have argued against reducing the significance of new media to technology, it
is nonetheless crucial to have a basic understand of digital photographys
affordances. Affordance is a term coined by cognitive psychologist Gibson to
develop an ecological theory of perception and to discuss action possibilities (1979).
He defines affordance as what it (the environment) offers the animal [including
humans], what it provides or furnishes (1979, p. 127). Thus, affordance is relational:
it is a product of a given material make-up and the physical capacities of a given
animals body. To humans, a flat surface say a lawn affords, for example,
walking, running, jumping and lying, while a deep sea only makes swimming
possible. A Gibsonian affordance is independent of culture, prior knowledge and the
actors ability to perceive it. A Gibsonian approach to digital cameras would argue
that their very materiality affords certain performances and not others.
However, the problem with this objective take on affordance in relation to
photography is that tourists have prior experiences with cameras and cameras are
used for photography and nothing else (even though they might have many other
affordances!) in modern societies. This is why we need to turn to Donald Normans
understanding of affordance that has been popularized within the fields of humancomputer interaction (HCI) and interaction design. In contrast to Gibson, the later
Norman prefers to speak of affordances as perceived affordances (1999). He makes
a distinction between Gibsonian real affordances and perceived affordances that
depends upon intentions, cultural knowledge and past experiences. A Normanian
affordance is the design aspect of an object that determines just how the thing could
possibly be used (1988, p. 9). In the following discussion of the affordances of digital
photography I speak of perceived affordances as I take for granted that digital
photography is perceived as a technology of photography by experienced

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photographers. The section begins with discussing how digital cameras (including
camera phones) are different from analogue cameras.

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Digital Cameras and Camera Phones

As material objects, the design and functionality of digital cameras resemble
analogue cameras (less so with camera phones) and both are technologies designed
for making photographs. But there are also differences. While analogue cameras
depend upon high-street developing to make their photographs come to life, digital
cameras make them by themselves and display them instantly on the (variably sized)
screen on the back of the digital camera or front of the mobile phone (see Figure 1).
Whereas analogue photographs always depicted past events taking place elsewhere
what Barthes (2000) called that has been digital cameras screens can also show
ongoing events right here, when the spaces of picturing, posing and consuming
converge. Digital photography is typified by instantaneous time (Lash & Urry,
1994). They seem designed for a late modern consumer society, a now society where
pleasures need to be immediate and the deferral of gratification seldom is acceptable
(Bauman, 1998).
Another difference which is related to this concerns the possibilities of deleting.
With analogue cameras every click materializes as a material object (if the film is

Figure 1. Screen. Source: author

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developed!) but images that do not charm at first glance on the digital screen can be
erased and re-taken at no extra financial cost. This flexibility affords more casual
and experimental ways of photographing. Indeed Sonys campaigns taught: Dont
think. Shoot. Viewing, deleting and re-taking integrate with taking photographs,
which make it easier (yet time-consuming because of re-taking) to produce images
that live up to the postcards, ideals of loving family life or desired self images.
The screen affords new sociabilities for producing and consuming photographs
(see Figure 2). In terms of production the screen can turn photographing into a social
and collaborative event because onlookers can also monitor the screen when
picturing takes place and the result is immediately available for inspection and
therefore for comments from onlookers (who may turn into co-producers) and
posing actors, and they may demand that the image must be deleted and re-taken,
perhaps several times. In an early experimental study of camera phones the
participants said that the posers often asked to see the picture right after it was
taken, and if they did not approve of the facial expression, many would ask for a retake (Koskinen, Esko & Lechtonen, 2002, p. 83). Based upon another ethnographic
study, Scifo found that the camera phone is not only an increasingly personal
technology but also a collective technology, a resource for face-to-face sociality
within contexts of local interaction and principally within a group of peers (2005,
p. 367). The flexible digital camera seems like treat to a consumer society saturated
with fashion, lifestyle magazines, commercials, models, celebrities and reality shows

Figure 2. Co-production. Source: author

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where ordinary people become overnight celebrities. In such a society, what

Goffman called the presentation of the self takes on renewed importance, and
digital cameras satisfy peoples desire to be able to control how they are presented
photographically.
And unlike analogue cameras, camera phones and especially digital cameras can
store substantial numbers (depending on the size of the memory card) of
photographs that can be viewed anywhere and anytime. They are designed as
technologies for storing and viewing photographs too, and since they do this digitally
they potentially dematerialize photographs. Analogue photographs were inescapable
both images and physical objects but this is not the case with digital photography
(something ignored in a recent monograph on the materiality of photographs, see
Edwards & Hart, 2004). While digital camera screens have a material tactility, the
photographs they display are images, not physical objects. Immediate displaying,
cost-free deletion/re-picturing and casual picturing mean that digital cameras offer
instantaneous results and second chances; so many photographs lives may be airy
and short-lived. Okabe & Itos Japanese research found that most of the images
taken by camera phones are short-lived and ephemeral (cited Gye, 2007, p. 284).
This contrasts with analogue photography where most photographs were destined
for a long life as material objects because it is difficult to discard photographs of
loved ones, being material objects full of life and emotions (Barthes, 2000). So
people invested much energy in making and choreographing each photograph (see
Larsen, 2005).
Whereas analogue photography was directed at a future audience, pictures taken
by camera phones (and digital cameras with WiFi technology) can be seen instantly
not only by co-travellers but also by people at-a-distance with mobiles with MMS9
service (technologies permitting). MMS-messages travel timelessly and if the
receiver has the camera phone at-hand, s/he can see (and reply to) pictures of events
unfolding more or less in real time. Such live photography affords live postcards
not I was here but I am here (Bell & Lyall, 2005) experienced face-to-screen
rather than face-to-face. In a study of Italian teenagers and young adults, Scifo
found that they send MMS messages to tell what they experience right then, right
there (2005, p. 369). Being part of the ubiquitous mobile phone, camera phones are
more likely to be at-hand and part of everyday practices than digital cameras.
Research in Japan by Daisuke and Ito show that in comparison to the traditional
camera, which gets trotted out for special excursions and events noteworthy
moments bracketed off from the mundane camera phones capture the more
fleeting and unexpected moments of surprise, beauty and adoration in the everyday
whereas the capturing of travel photos was down the bottom of the list (cited in
Goggin, 2006, p. 145).
Networking Digital Cameras
Mobile phones and especially digital cameras are designed to be networked, with
home computers, editing software, emails, home-pages/web blogs, printers, photo
paper, printing kiosks and high street printing; only then do they potentially realise
their (relational) affordances in full. Computer networks enable images in camera
phones and digital cameras to be enlarged, improve aesthetically, travel and appear

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on paper and other material surfaces. Without such more or less mobile and
immobile moorings and facilitators, digital photographs would not travel far
(MMS-messages being the exception) or gain much material presence (see
Nightingale, 2007, p. 294).
If we return to Kodak we have one example of how digital photography is
networked. Their so-called Easyshare system consists of digital cameras, free
software, printers, online printing service, inkjet paper, printing kiosks and more.10
In their own words, Easyshare is the simplest way to shoot, print, and share digital
pictures. The free software is the vital bridge between the camera, computer and
printer and Easyshare has various related affordances that through straightforward
post-photography production can be activated. Whereas Kodak once said, You
press the button, we do the rest, they now seem to say, We deliver the network,
your and Easyshare edit, organise, print and distribute photographs. Easyshare
edits images through cropping, rotation, red eye reduction, light enhancement,
scene/light balance and various fun effects/creative projects; organise sequences
of individual photographs into thematic albums; make prints by selling printers,
inject paper and offering on-line printing and printing kiosks (paper photographs are
a good business for Kodak!); facilitate free distribution of photographs (and
comments) through emails to one or many ties. The key here is sharing. Easyshare is
inscribed with social network qualities of sharing photographs, both virtually and
materially, close by and at-a-distance. This instructs photographers that while digital

Figure 3. Computer screen. Source: author

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camera screens display photographs, these photographs are too airy, small and
spatially fixed to be shared properly in mobile societies where many strong ties are
at-a-distance and much socialising takes place face-to-screen (Wellman & Hogan,
2005; Larsen, Urry & Axhausen, 2006). It is much easier and faster to let
photographs travel as email attachments than by post. The latter requires stamps,
envelopes, extra hard copies, a trip to the post office/box and it takes at least two
days if the destination is abroad. Emails, it seems, are born to travel: they are
indifferent to distance and number of destinations; they travel equally fast and
cheaply to distant and many destinations as to near and single ones. In theory, this
means that tourist photographs can easily be distributed and re-distributed to
significant others at-a-distance.
While Easyshare (and emails more generally) affords free mass (re)distribution of
images by email, it does not provide global exhibition on the internet. There are
now numerous homepage and blog providers, and they have greatly expanded and
made more accessible the ability to publish easily (and freely) on the net, resulting in
an explosion of private sites and blogs. According to the blog search engine
Blogpulse, as of 29 June 2007, there are 51,084,232 blogs globally, with 118,225 new
ones established, and 834,032 new blog posts indexed, in the previous 24 hours
(www.blogpulse.com/index.html). Many of these are personal journal-style blogs, a
type of online diary frequently updated with textual accounts and photographs (this
is also the case with many home pages). One popular site for bloggers and many
others is Flickr (www.flickr.com). It is straightforward to upload and share
photographs from camera phones and digital cameras to blogs or virtual albums on
Flickr. For instance, the Nokia camera phones and Flickr are now networked since
their latest models have in-built Flickr connectivity so it only takes one press on the
button to send pictures to ones Flickr blog (www.flickr.com/nokia/, www.nokia.dk/
campaign/photo_by_n73). Blogs can be published for a private and invited, or a
global and open, audience. Some 80% of Flickrs users exhibit their photographs to a
global audience (Davids, 2006), which means that everyone can travel to them,
comment upon them, and link them to other blogs and sites. This is in contrast to
much analogue photography that was introvert and consumed in solitude or face-toface with friends and family members.
Home pages and particularly blogs may also affect how tourists do photography
while travelling. Most hotels, guesthouses and camping sites these days offer
internet-connected computers and internet cafes proliferate, so it is easy to maintain
blogs on the move. Indeed there is a subgenre of blogs called travel blogs. This is
how the site Travel Blog describes itself:
Travel Blog is a collection of travel journals, diaries and photos from around
the world. Designed for travellers, this site includes features that allow you to
update friends and family on your adventure. (www.travelblog.org)
Such sites are not only about travel tales but also places where people carve out
moments of connection and sociality within mobility (Molz, 2004, p. 179; with
regard to mobiles, see White & White, 2006). Molzs (2006) research shows how
blogs for round-the-world travellers are stable addresses in their moving world. They
allow friends and family members to keep track of their adventures, whereabouts

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and well-being in more or less real-time, so surveillance can also be an issue when,
for instance, parents virtually travel along with their children. As Callon & Law
maintain more generally, presence is not reducible to co-presence co-presence is
both a location and a relation (2004, pp. 6, 9). Blogs are alongside mobiles and
emails one of those machines, in Urrys words:

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that allow people and networks to be connected to, or to be at home with,

sites across the world while simultaneously such sites can monitor, observe,
and trace each inhabited machine others being uncannily present and
absent, here and there, near and distant, home and away, proximate and
distant. (2004, p. 35)
This illustrates how digital tourist photographys time-space compression means
that people may increasingly consume their friends and family members holiday
photographs without necessarily being face-to-face with them.
This section has discussed the technical affordances of digital photography.
Photographys convergence with mobiles and the internet means that the technical
possibilities of photography expand dramatically: tourists can consume their
photographs instantaneously on the screen; continuously delete and re-take
unsatisfactory images; send live postcards by mobiles; email photographs to their
network back home; and update blogs with their latest photographs so that people
can travel along with them. And when they return home, they can connect their
camera (phone) with their home computer and delete, edit, archive, burn, distribute
and print photographs. The materiality and destination of tourist photographs have
never been more unpredictable, and the next section develops mobile ethnographic
methods to examine empirically how the discussed affordances of digital tourist
photography are performed in practices where they are preformed by cultural
constraints and conventions. Here we turn attention from abstract readings of
affordances to situated practices of photography. As Cooper et al. say: A
technology may have, or be conceptualised as having particular potentials, but the
latters realization or reconfiguration, or subversion, takes place in and through,
and thus depends on actual situated everyday practice (2002, pp. 286287). Or to
cite Norman: the only way to find out what people do is to go out and watch
them: not in the laboratories, not in the usability testing rooms, but in their normal
environment (1999, p. 41).
Mobile Ethnography
Ethnography is appropriate for conducting non-representational practice studies of
tourist photography because one of the central commitments of this method is to be
in the presence of the people one is studying, not just the texts or objects they
produce (Miller, 1997, p. 72). Observations of events as they unfold are
characteristic of ethnography. It is a method that requires co-presence with the
performing people under study, hence, the term participant observation.
Ethnography allows naturalistic studies of how digital tourist photography takes
place as it occurs in its natural settings. Much qualitative research in contemporary
sociology and geography relies more or less solely on interviews (Crang, 2002). Even

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in studies of embodied practices, what really matters is talk talk is made to stand
in for all the complexities and subtleties of embodied practice (Latham, 2003,
p. 1999). Ethnographers and non-representational researchers do not trust interviews
on their own: they also examine what and how humans do things, corporeally,
socially and in conjunction with non-humans (Herbert, 2000). As Erving Goffman
said: I dont give hardly any weight to what people say, but I try to triangulate what
theyre saying with events (1989, p. 131). Or to cite Daniel Miller: ethnography
evaluate[s] people in terms of what they actually do, i.e. as material agents working
with a material world, and not merely what they say that do (1997, pp. 1617). This
is partly because there can be significant differences between what people do in
practice and what they say they do in interviews and partly because most everyday
practices take the form of habit, derived in practice. Much social life is conducted
unintentionally and habitually. Humans seldom think-to-act (Thrift, 1999, p. 297).
This also explains why many interviewees accounts of their everyday practices are
ambiguous, incomplete and sometimes almost lifeless (Latham, 2003). Compared to
qualitative interviews, observations better capture the bodily, enacted, technologised
and here-and-now quality of practices because they focus on immediate physical
doings and interactions rather than retrospective and reflexive talk about how and
why such performances take place, and what they mean. Yet interviews that allow
space for the unexpected and peoples accounts of how their performances are
meaningful are vital to avoid portraying performers as cultural dopes (as has been
the case in much writing on tourist photography, see Larsen, 2006). While this article
argues for ethnographic observations it is crucial that this method is a supplement to
qualitative interviews.
Traditional ethnographies take place within a clearly localized site or field. Both
ethnographies by sociologists of urban and community life and by anthropologists of
distant cultures have privileged roots over routes, dwelling over travelling. As
Clifford says with regard to the latter: In the disciplinary idealization of the field,
spatial practices of moving to and from, in and out, passing through have, tended to
subsumed by those of dwelling (1997, p. 67). Once arrived, anthropologists became
homebodies abroad that privileged face-to-face interactions and neglected the
traffic and communication connecting the site to the outside world. This is why
traditional ethnography can be said to be a-mobile despite the journey to the site.
Wittel sums up:
Long term participant observation in a locally limited area privileges face-toface relationships and tends to overlook forms of interaction that are more
mediated. It privileges permanent residence and tends to overlook movement.
It privileges boundaries and thus difference and tends to overlook connections
and connectivity. (1990)
Since humans and non-humans are increasingly mobile it is critical that
ethnography engages with the mobilities that connect fields across distance. These
mobilities are:

Physical travel of people, as tourists, business people, exchange students and

migrants.

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N
N

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J. Larsen

Physical movement of technologies and objects, by train, wagon, plane, ships and
so on.
Digital movement of images, music, film, texts, documents through emails, text
messages and so on.
Imaginative/virtual travel of people through memories, images, brochures, Google
Earth, home pages, blogs and so on.
Communicative travel of people via letters, text messages, telephones, emails and
so on (see Larsen, Urry & Axhausen, 2006).

The increase in the density and reach of such mobilities explains the need to take
on board what Marcus coined multi-sited ethnographies that move out from the
single sites and local situations of conventional ethnographic research designs to
examine the circulation of cultural meanings, objects and identities in diffuse timespace (1995; see also Hannerz, 2003). Multi-sited ethnographies are designed
around chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtapositions of locations to
follow the physical, virtual, imaginative and communicative journeys of humans
and non-humans. Unlike traditional ethnography that defines sites as material
dwelling places, multi-sided ethnography of networks also deals with virtual sites
such as databases and blogs, not in an isolated cyberspace, but in relation to
physical everyday places such as internet cafes, workplaces and private living
spaces, as virtual worlds and material worlds are not separate entities (Wittel,
2000).
Multi-sited ethnography privileges routes rather than roots: connections and
networks. Following Wittel, it represents a move from ethnography of fields (a
geographically defined locality) to ethnography of networks:
Networks are still strongly related to geographical space - like field. Unlike
field, a network is an open structure, able to expand almost without limits and
highly dynamic. And even more important: A network does not merely consist
of a set of nodes, but also of a set of connections between the nodes. As such,
networks contain as much movement and flow as they contain residence and
localities. An ethnography of networks would contain the examination of the
nodes of a net and the examination of the connections and flows (money,
objects, people, ideas etc.) between these nodes. (Wittel, 2000)
Multi-sided ethnography is less about sustained dwelling in one field as it is about
following the flows of humans and non-humans in and across a particular field, so
the ethnographer needs to travel much, physically and through communications: it is
mobile ethnography par excellence. Ethnographers might still start from a particular
field, but they will have to trace and move along those connections which that are
enacted from that field (Hine, 1990, p. 48). This focus upon networks, connections
and flows also means that multi-sided ethnography and the methodology of ANT
are related. ANT is a descriptive method that follows the relational practices of
actor-networks. They trace the footsteps of the hybrids under study and describe
their ways of accomplishing the field by weaving together various places and actornetworks. ANT is clearly multi-sited by arguing that relations in and out of the field
in question are as important as what goes on within it as these constitute the field to

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much extent and hence, the boundaries of a field is primarily a practical

achievement (Johannesson & Brenholdt, p. 3, forthcoming; Latour, 2005).
This section has discussed how ethnography is useful in analyzing photography as
a mobile practice. One reason is that ethnography combines interviews and
observations which provide a rich understanding of how events take place both in
action and words. Seen in this light, we need ethnographies of how digital tourist
photography takes place, explicating the various technical, social and aesthetic
hybridised practices typical to this form of photography. One aspect of this research
is exploring to what degree actual practices of digital tourist photography are as
unpredictable and differentiated as suggested in this article. But I have also argued
for the need to mobilize ethnography to follow the flows of humans and nonhumans criss-crossing and connecting sites at increasing speed and distance. With
the help of multi-sited ethnography it is possible to study how digital photographs
travel across various sites/screens and bridge home and away. It makes it possible to
study how digital tourist photography is also produced, displayed, consumed and
circulated beyond extraordinary tourist attractions: in hotel lobbies, internet cafes,
hotel rooms, cafes, airports, by the swimming pool, private homes and many other
places. The next section discusses how we in practice can use such multi-sided
ethnography to describe the manifold practices and flows of digital tourists as they
take place at tourist attractions, internet cafes, and private homes and enrol many
other communication technologies. It also highlights some of the research questions
that these ethnographies need to engage with.
Ethnographies of Digital Tourist Photography
First, there is the tradition of observation of peoples mobile practices at a
particular place (a method Goffman especially undertook), for instance at a tourist
attraction where many tourist photographers come together. This involves observing
and perhaps recording visually (in the tradition of visual ethnography, e.g. Pink,
2001) the embodied, social and material practices, technologies and performances
defining digital photographing at a tourist attraction. (With regard to photographic
observations of analogue tourist photography, see Larsen, 2005) It can also involve
interviewing-while-photographing so that qualitative interviews can be approached
ethnographically, that is, when picturing performances occur. We have seen that
digital cameras have different affordances to analogue cameras, but how and to what
extent are they performed differently? For instance, are deleting and re-picturing
now part of making photographs? Does this influence verbal and corporeal
performance of framing landscapes, instructing posers and posing for cameras? Does
the interactive screen make photographing more collaborative and joyful? Such
observations and interviews can also take place in hotels and local internet cafes to
explore if and how tourists send postcard picture emails and upload blogs or social
networking sites with new tourist photographs.
Second, there is a need to put more emphasis upon participation and multi-sided
ethnographies. Single-sited ethnographies at tourist attractions suffer from the fact
that tourists often spend very little time at an attraction before moving on.
Researchers often end up glancing at passing flows and doing hurried interviews. As
Bruner reflects:

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A key difficulty in studying tourists is methodological the tourists move so

fast through the sites that it is hard to keep up with them. It is relatively easy
to begin a discussion but in the middle of a sentence the tour leader announces
that the group is moving on to the next site, and your informant has
disappeared. I felt that the only way for me to enter into tourist discourse
would be to join the tour group. As a guide, I would be an insider and I could
observe how the tourists actually experienced the sites and events to which they
were exposed. (2005, p. 228)
Bruner decided to become a guide to follow tourists, another solution is to
participate as tourist (whether openly or disguised) on a guided package tour. This
permits close proximity to a group of tourists for a fortnight or so, allowing
sustained observations and small-talk when pictures are taken, re-taken, discussed,
deleted and circulated at attractions, on the move, in hotels and so on. It will also
highlight how tourists take photographs outside iconic tourist attractions, use
mobiles to send live postcards, upload photographs to blogs/homepages, and
consume and edit photographs during their journey.
Third, and finally, there is a need for home ethnographies to explore post-travel
photography work and the afterlife of digital tourist photographs. It is through posttravel photography work at home that the afterlife of each of the holiday
photographs that made it home is determined and re-worked. The mobile and
material biographies of photographs how they travel, materialize, de-materialize
and change meaning according to how and where they travel and (de)materialize
are central questions in relation to post-travel home ethnographies. The key here is
that interviews and observations take place in the interviewees private homes and
actively enrol non-human actors such as computers, printers, email accounts,
cameras, mobiles, virtual/physical albums, printed photographs, posters and so on.
Such post-travel research can help to unveil how tourism performances effect, and
sometimes take place, in home geographies, something that most tourism research
has been blind to. It has the potential to destabilize the common idea that tourism
and everyday life are different worlds (Larsen, 2008).
From a media perspective, post-travel photography work and the afterlife of
digital tourist photographs are imperative because, as we have discussed, the
destination and materiality of tourist photographs have never been more
unpredictable. I have stressed that digital photography is designed to be connected
with computers, the internet and printers, but it may also be the case that many
tourist cameras remain unconnected even at home. We have also seen how
software such as Kodaks Easyshare affords great opportunities for editing,
archiving, exhibiting, printing and distributing photographs but it may also be the
case that computer-uploaded tourist photographs end up being exterminated or
indiscriminately filled in nameless files. So we need to explore the time, creativity and
work put into editing, archiving and exhibition photographs. A company like Kodak
attempts to persuade tourists to print their digital photographs, but how widespread
is this? And what kind of images are printed and for what reasons? Are photographs
more affective and precious in paper form? What pleasures, obligations and work are
involved in running blogs and homepages? Is it common to send tourist photographs
by email, and what are the practical problems? Lastly, how are digital photographs

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157

put on show face-to-face: do people gather around the computer, television screen,
albums or selected print-outs?

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Conclusion
Within the past five years or so, photography have been transformed massively.
Analogue photography, with its analogue cameras, paper-photographs, postcards
and tactile albums, is being replaced by digital photography and its network of
digital cameras, camera phones, MMS-messages, personal computers, email
attachments, blogs, home pages and so on. Cameras are converging with mobiles
and computers. In the not too distant future it seems likely that most photographs
will be taken and distributed from mobiles, the ubiquitous everyday technology of
the 21st century.
The major aim of this article has been to develop a methodological framework for
undertaking empirical studies of practices and flows, of doings and circulations, of
digital tourist photography. The first step was to rethink tourist theory. I argued that
conventional media as well as tourism theory and methodology deal with issues of
representation and downgrades or neglects issues of materiality and doings. In
contrast, with selective inspiration from ANT and non-presentational geography this
article has developed what might be termed a non-representational approach to
photography that goes beyond representation by focusing upon practices how
human and nonhuman formations are enacted or performed and not simply on
what is produced. It is concerned with affordances, actor-networks, hybridized
practices and networked flows of photographs. Thus whereas representation used to
be a fitting basis for tourist photography theory, practice or non-representational
theory is now also an illuminating concept although the intention has not been to
replace one with the other. While this approach takes affordances seriously it does
not conceive digital tourist photography to have some essential character because
that will ignore the polyphonous interpretations and diverse practices that can be
performed under the umbrella of digital photography. Instead it is argued that
digital photography is partly being constructed through being performed.
This is why it has been argued that ethnography and non-representational
photography theory go well together. Ethnography is particularly suitable for
exploring practices and flows of photography because it allows naturalistic and
situated observations and accounts of how networked-camera-tourists do photography. However, it has also been argued that we need to move beyond traditional
ethnographies and engage with so-called multi-sited ethnographies. Photographs
unpredictably travel in and out of virtual sites such as digital cameras, camera
phones, computer databases, emails and blogs as well as material sites and
technologies such as attractions, internet cafes, transit places, private homes, offices,
printers, picture frames and so on. Digital photography networks mobilise and speed
up the travel of tourist photographs, and this explains the need for multi-sided
ethnographies. Although Sheller & Urry (2006) do not discuss multi-sited
ethnography as a source of inspiration for mobile methods, these two methods
have similarities. Both are concerned with following flows of diverse mobilities of
people, objects, images, place myths and so on, in and across multiple sites, in order
to highlight how local performances and places are in part constituted through

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J. Larsen

distant flows and mobilities. Both have an agenda of mobilizing the social sciences
in order to overcome sedentary approaches to places and dwelling without at the
same time promoting a nomadic metaphysic. I have shown that a multi-sided
approach to tourist photography requires that we travel along with tourists and not
only conduct ethnographies at tourist attractions but also, at the minimum, in
internet cafes and tourists homes. The scene is set for innovative multi-sided
ethnographies of digital tourist photography and beyond.

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Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/Default.aspx?id53948032&p150
http://www.computerworld.dk/art/30029?a5kw_fp&i524
http://www.kodak.com/eknec/PageQuerier.jhtml?pq-path56433&pq-locale5en_US&_requestid56976
http://www.dst.dk/Statistik/Nyt/Emneopdelt.aspx?si55&msi56.
http://www.strategyanalytics.com/press/PR00165.htm
A measure of resolution that reflects the ability of a digital camera to record detail and be enlarged
without losing clarity.
See for instance http://www.nokia.dk/campaign/photo_by_n73/.
http://www.dst.dk/Statistik/Nyt/Emneopdelt.aspx?si55&msi56.
Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) is a telephone messaging systems that allows sending
messages that include images and video and not just text as in Short Message Service (SMS).
http://www.kodak.com/eknec/PageQuerier.jhtml?pq-path59/19/37&pq-locale5en_US

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