About Networking The Audience

Photographs are widely relied upon to record the world. They are produced to be the keepers of happy memories, the sources for news, a way to see with your own eyes that what is said or written is true. Witnessing, proving, illustrating and capturing elements of events in the world out there are all things photographs can do. But in recent decades, through digital circulation, they arguably increasingly also serve to create the world, as much as describe it.

In an article on digital photography in everyday life, media and information scholar Edgar Gómez Cruz argued that “Photography has gone from being a medium for the collection of important memories to an interface for visual communication.” For professional photographers and artists, photographs have arguably always functioned as interfaces for visual communication. However, the ways photographs can be distributed on and through emerging technologies is rapidly reconfiguring the construction of photographic meaning, putting the audience on an equal footing with professional creators and transforming a medium of broadcast into one of recursive remediation and exchange.

Photographs now also serve as vernacular languages on the internet, with the visual literacy of print becoming replaced by a new visual fluency as some of the distinctions between the roles of maker and viewer further erode. By sharing images across digital networks, adding them to a continuous flow of images, we all participate in transforming what photographs can do and how they may amplify messages and meaning. More explicitly and fluently than before, still images function as dynamic vessels of meaning, existing enmeshed within planetary-scale databases and travelling endlessly throughout communications networks. An image made on a mobile phone in Chicago, say, and shared to a social media feed might strike a chord for a Berlin-based viewer who, by reposting it via an app designed in Mumbai, propels it onward to reemerge as a meme in a Tokyo pop culture page, or in a dataset used to train facial recognition systems in Lagos, or transforming an interior designer’s moodboard in São Paolo.

In 2022, MA Photography and Society (MAPS) student Will Boase published a thesis which argued that digital circulation was transforming photography’s role in the world. In response, MAPS initiated the Networked Audience research program, which set out to explore how and where photographs travel online, and how these journeys transform them, their messages, their relationship to other types of imagery including AI generated ones, and the people they encounter. The research program was led by Will and MAPS senior lecturer Andrea Stultiens. Andrea brought her long standing interest in the affordances of distributing historical imagery through online platforms to these moments, while Will continued to expand his ongoing research into experimental publishing, alternative circulation and the potential of mobile phones as spaces for distribution and remediation of photography and visual culture. Over the course of its two-year duration, the program resulted in a host of moments of engagement with interested students, academics and personal connections. Outcomes include essays, seminars, websites and toolkits, and Will now continues his research as a doctoral student at Aalto University.

The individual trajectories culminated in two public symposia with contributions from international guests as well as MAPS students and alumni. The first symposium took place inside an exhibition in the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam, presenting outcomes of a long-term and ongoing activation of a collection of colonial photographs initiated by Andrea. Some of these photographs, produced by Dutch traveller Paul Julien, were widely distributed in print media for exclusively western audiences. Through fieldwork and shares to social media this changed, which resulted in the correction of misunderstandings added to the photographs by Julien himself and collectively produced visual responses to them. The symposium was conversation rather than presentation based, and centralised image objects that were brought in by participants and ‘circulated’ to the audience through live screening using a mobile phone camera. In a particularly striking conversation, museum restorators Virginia Morant and Milene Trindade. They spoke about the tensions they have to navigate; between their enthusiasm for photographs, the restrictions in terms of visibility of original materials necessary for the sake of preservation and, sometimes, the integrity of the photographic object and its context.

This special edition of Trigger, published as a thematic online series on its website, continues these earlier discussions and expands them into new and intriguing directions.

An open call was issued among MAPS alumni, students and staff, resulting in the contributions to this Trigger issue. They range from an exploration of the Digital Treasury, which reconstructs and makes accessible Ireland’s national archives destroyed in 1922, to reflections on nostalgia and temporality inspired by a trio of Instagram pages memorialising the post-Soviet era in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Across contexts and platforms, this publication addresses the ongoing transformation of photography from the perspective of viewers who are also now makers and publishers. Along the way, each contributor formulates their own response to what it means for audiences when photography is understood not as a means of inscription, but as a medium of exchange.

The publication exists also as a bot to be accessed mainly through the Telegram app (though it will also open in a desktop browser). The development of this digital component was supported by the Department of Art and Media Aalto University. Telegram was chosen as a platform because it enables direct-to-reader publishing and allows reader response, and because of its popularity in Finland. We recognise that it is a politically problematic platform, but we believe that to reach new audiences we must go where those audiences are. As with much of the digital world, our use of this platform is pragmatic and limited, and does not imply any support for its owners.

As you read the articles contained within, we invite you not just to look into the screen in your hand, but also at it. Consider the implication of the device that delivers these words from their writers, via a Belgian editorial team and Telegram’s murky Russian networks, to your screen which was likely assembled on a production line in Vietnam or China and whose use profits shareholders and tech oligarchs in America and Europe. These little screens epitomise not only the mainstream media format of the current moment, but also the economic systems that this media format has enabled; globalised trade, frictionless commerce, and surveillance capital. As the guest editors, we (Andrea and Will) would like to thank FOMU/Trigger, the KABK and Aalto University for recognising the urgency of this topic, and we extend our gratitude to all of our writers for joining us on this adventure. If you would like to add your voice to the discussion, simply hit the contact button at the bottom of any page to access the Telegram channel chat.