Minutes after this photo was taken: the temporality of the family photograph in the newspaper
Beard, Sophie (2011) Minutes after this photo was taken: the temporality of the family photograph in the newspaper. In: Contemporary Vernacular Photographies Symposium, 3 September 2011, University of Westminster. (Unpublished)
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Invited talk; invited by The Photographers Gallery.
It is the context of the family photograph in the newspaper that makes its reading strange as the image shifts from the private to the public. Developments in technology have changed the way family photographs are translated within the news with the shift from analogue to digital. This has resulted in the blurring of the boundaries between the public and the private in the press.
Drawing on my personal archive of collected examples of family photographs in newspapers this paper will focus on the temporal qualities of the family photograph in the context of the newspaper. It will discuss the way the press utilise the notion of time and how this influences the way photographs are subsequently read. This is evidenced by the newspaper captions and headlines that often have a temporal dimension, such as 'The last family photograph' dramatically making clear the finality of these images. In a sense these family photographs take on a new and important responsibility of being the last visual record. These 'last' pictures are also different in experienced temporality; they are the last photograph for the family, but the first photograph for the reader i.e. 'the first picture of the last picture.'
On-line social networking sites like Facebook have allowed the newspapers greater access to family photographs resulting in the use of more candid types of imagery. Developments in technology have also brought about a shift in the viewers expectations of immediacy. Family photographs are taken so close to the time of the reported incident that this 'proximity' of the photograph to the event becomes a signifier of meaning in and of itself. Whether the image is a good family photograph or not is outweighed by the temporal nearness of the incident. The immediacy of the image is conveyed by the headline; 'minutes after this photo was taken'. Perhaps it can be argued that this prioritisation of time evidences the emphasis placed on the photograph as object/commodity in its presentness at the expense of the meaning within the photographic image itself.
Co-organised by The Photographers' Gallery, and the research events and networking project Archiving Cultures, part of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture at the University of Westminster.
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