Review: Wells, Photography: A Critical Introduction: Ch 3: 'Sweet it is to scan...' , 4th ed, 2009 CONTIUED

Photogenetic Draft No. 24, 1991 ©
Joachim Schmid

Kodak
The arrival at the turn of the century of the Kodak camera marked an important change in personal photography.  Cameras now became accessories of middle class life, tools for shaping the identity of the family. Holland quotes Don Slater on how the new consumer technology arrived denuded from its mechanical and conceptual processes.  By just clicking a button and returning the package to the lab, the operator was deprived of the means of understanding how images are created and from being able to use those skills and knowledge to create something more radical.  Holland notes, though, that a new skill was in fact introduced, that of framing and arranging the content of the image.

Outside of professionals, the full photographic process became the province of “amateur photography,” a mostly male pastime fascinated with technology and aesthetic control and which has “retained its long-lived aspiration to ... pictorialism...” p143

Review: Wells, Photography: A Critical Introduction: Ch 3: 'Sweet it is to scan...' , 4th ed, 2009

A personal photo from my own collection:
the church family

The chapter title comes from an 1899 poem printed in a book of advice for amateur photographers in which the author reflects on the joy of looking at the photographically immortalized faces of deceased family and other loved ones.  It has been used, presumably, because of the shift in meaning of scan, which can now mean to digitize an image.

As with academic treatments of other forms of photography thus far encountered, chapter author Patricia Holland cautions private photography is fraught with exception making generalization difficult.

Holland prefers private or personal to family photography, for though in its history it has been associated with the family, it often covers far more than family life.  That we have come to see it as “family” photography, though, may tell us something about how we conceive of image making and the purpose of family.  What is unique about photography as a family activity is that it produces objects that are loaded with meaning and subject to interpretation.  They are typically taken to portray the subject as he or she wishes to be seen.  They are also valued less for their quality than for their content and context in confirming identity.