Snapshot Culture. The Photographic Experience in the Post-Medium Age

From the 2000s onwards, the experience of photography has changed radically because of various social and technological events: the embedding of cameras into multimedia and multifunction mobile devices, the expansion of photographs’ arena of visibility to the Internet, and the spread of easy-to-use photo-editing software for both desktop computers and mobile devices. The term ‘snapshot culture’ is proposed to name the combination of ontological, technological, aesthetic and practical shifts in contemporary photographic experience. By ‘photographic experience’, we mean the extension of the medium of photography to all those objects, processes and practices that continue to posit the ‘photographic’ as the primary means of understanding and communicating about our lives. The digitalization of photographic aesthetics and related media practices provides an elective case for studying some of the most challenging developments in visual media aesthetics within the broader landscape of the post-medium condition and for reflecting on how photography theory has responded to such challenges in the post-theory era. This special issue offers a critical investigation of photography’s ‘persistence’ in the media experience through both an analysis of concrete objects and phenomena and the refinement of theoretical approaches to photography.