Chapter 1 From Sewers to Selfies: the Evolution of Photographs into Infrastructure
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Abstract
During its history of almost two centuries photography has been typically analyzed as an art and technology of representation, where one thing, the photograph, stands in for another, the scene captured on a flat medium like paper. This article investigates a parallel development to photographic representation: a set of moments over much of the discipline’s history where photographs have been organized within technological systems of conveyance and presentation; in short, where photographs participate within various media infrastructures. Consisting of halftones in the late nineteenth century, wirephotos around the mid-twentieth century and, finally, smart phones coupled with photo-sharing websites and applications in the early twenty-first century, photographs have taken key roles as a visual currency within the mass (and later) social media. Like other infrastructural systems, photographs have fostered the astounding artificial environments of modern society, situations where a given place and its human interactions are augmented and transformed by goods, people or, in this case, visual imagery from elsewhere.