Snapchat and a New Framework for Photography
Images are more personal than ever before. What does that mean for photography?
As a millennial, I have found Snapchat to be one of the most interesting developments of the social media age. This is because even though I am a “digital native,” as Marc Prensky would put it,[1] Snapchat makes me feel anxious. Snapchat is a social media platform based on “image messaging”: users communicate one-to-one or in groups by sending real-time photographs called Snaps — often with text or doodles on them — that disappear after a few seconds. As a fine art photographer, I put considerable energy into producing each photograph. I need to ask myself several questions before taking a picture: How would I frame a corner of the world shown only to me in the way it is to me? What would I take the picture of? What message would I convey in the picture? These are questions that I subconsciously answer every day while clicking away, but they certainly can’t be answered in the split second it takes to send a Snap. To me, the idea of taking a picture every time I want to message a friend is exhausting; that would be like making croissantswhenever I got hungry. When I confessed these concerns to a Snapchat-proficient friend, she told me: “Don’t think too hard. Just take a picture of whatever’s around you. It really doesn’t matter.”
According to my friend, taking Snaps is a completely different experience from how I usually take pictures. But what is it about Snaps that make them so easy — almost too easy — to take? How are Snaps different from other types of photography? To answer this question, we need to look deeper into what kind of messages Snaps encode.
“Even when the sender of the Snap isn’t technically in the Snap, Snaps have the unique power of making the person behind the lens very present.”
What my friend was really saying is that Snaps are not about their content; Snaps are about the people who took them. They are a way for users to tell their friends what they are doing without textual explanation. Unlike most photographs, Snaps come with a very recognizable name tag; users can’t even view Snaps from friends before tapping on the senders’ names first. So when people view a Snap, they don’t analyze it like they would other photographs; they focus on the real-time nature of the Snap and focus on what their friends are doing at the moment, drawing from a rich context of who their friends are. And this different focus can really change what message we take away from a photograph. For example, when I see a commercial photograph of a cake, I might focus on how soft the cake looks and whether I want to buy it or not. When I see a fine art photograph of a cake, I focus on what the cake might represent or how the photographer cut, placed,and lit the cake to convey his or her message. When I see a Snap of a cake from my best friend, I think about how she told me just the day before that she was going on a diet. Even when the sender of the Snap isn’t technically in the Snap, Snaps have the unique power of making the person behind the lens very present. Receivers of Snaps are prompted to imagine the sender in the setting that the Snaps depict.
“A Snap is a photograph in the first person.”
The senders know this as well: when people send a Snap from a Zedd concert, they don’t mean to say “a Zedd concert is happening”; they mean to say “I am at a Zedd concert.” This is in stark contrast to, say, photojournalism, where a photographer would almost always mean to say “this is where the Syrian War is happening” instead of saying “I am where the Syrian War is happening.” A Snap does not simply share a view; it shares a space with a focus on its sender as the viewing point. In a way, it focuses from its sender. In other words, a Snap is a photograph in the first person, distinctively more so than other types of photographs. This is not to say that other photographs cannot be used to express the photographer. We can still learn much about a person by the way he or she describes the world in sentences like “This is __________,” but such sentences come from a focal direction quite different from “I am __________” sentences.
An example of a fully zoomed out Snap Map.
“The two-dimensional Snaps from multiple angles help the users visualize a three-dimensional space on the “Snap Map.” ”
The features and products produced by Snap Inc., Snapchat’s parent company, suggest that these characteristics are very much intended. On June 21, 2017, Snapchat’s developers introduced a feature called “Snap Map” that allows users to view Snaps from around the world by tapping on a zoomable map of the world. The “Snap Map” provides an opportunity to see sporting events, celebrations, and breaking news from various smartphone camera angles.[2] By seeing an event second-hand through others’ first-person perspectives and combining these perspectives, users can create a concrete idea of a space and time thousands of miles or twelve hours away from them. Imagine scratching a lottery ticket. One scratch through the ticket would reveal part of the ticket but not enough to actually read the code. However, multiple swipes from different angles would reveal the code more and more until it is finally readable. As such, the two-dimensional Snaps from multiple angles help the users visualize a three-dimensional space on the “Snap Map.” Snapchat’s decision to lay out Snaps according to their geographic location further reinforces and makes explicit the idea of Snaps as sharing spaces.
Another Snapchat product called Spectacles embodies the first-person nature of Snaps — think Google Glass, but just for taking Snaps. A reporter for The Verge simply called them “camera-equipped sunglasses.”[3] These smartglasses can take Snaps from a small lens in the corner of their frame and sync with your smartphone to upload them. Spectacles minimize the obstacles between simply looking at something in everyday life and taking a Snap of it. It is as close as it gets to the first-person: The Snap is natural as users don’t even have to stop to take it, and everything is recorded from right next to the eye. Aside from VR, Snaps from Spectacles give their viewers the closest experience they’ll ever get to quite literally putting themselves in other people’s shoes.
A Spectacles user. © The Verge
What does all this mean for modern day photography? It may very well challenge the traditional understanding of the relationship between the photographer, the audience, and the picture content. In 1980, French philosopher Roland Barthes named these three agents in his book Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography to theorize on them.[4] The photographer was the Operator, the audience was the Spectator, and the object of the photograph was the Spectrum. He argued that “photography transformed subject into object”; in his own terms, photography has turned the Spectrum — which sometimes include human beings who can act as subjects — into objects. In the traditional framework, the Spectrum subjects itself to the judgment of the Spectator through the eyes of the Operator.
“Snaps may be the least burdensome form of photography that has ever existed.”
This framework of thinking about photography originates from an era where only professional photographers were able to take pictures. Each Operator had a vocational responsibility to present the Spectrum to the Spectator with an aim to portray the Spectrum in a certain way, be it representational (such as in photojournalism), commercial, or artistic. This framework remained applicable for the following decades when professional photography still remained dominant. However, the advent of smartphones has changed the context of photography at large. More people have access to a high-definition camera than ever before. The number of smartphone users is forecast to grow to around 2.5 billion in 2019.[5] Non-professional photography outnumbers professional photography by a significant margin as well. The iPhone has been the most popular camera for years.[6] Anybody with a phone can take pictures, and these anybodies no longer have vocational responsibility over their pictures. Storage methods shifting from film to digital has also allowed people to take disposable pictures without any hesitation. Put simply, there’s a lot less at stake for the modern smartphone photographer: the equipment is more accessible, storage is as good as unlimited, and no one expects them to offer a meaningful perspective through their photographs. Snapchat takes this even further. Snaps don’t even have to be about anything, and they disappear after a few seconds anyway. They may be the least burdensome form of photography that has ever existed.
These massive changes in the media environment call for a change in the philosophical framework of photography. Of course, Barthes’s old framework mostly still stands in the world of professional photography. But while non-professional photographers are Operators of the pictures on social media, the way they approach photography cannot be correctly represented by Barthes’s framework. A new framework capable of encompassing this new type of photography needs to be developed, and Snapchat, with its hyper-disposable nature, could be the best tool with which to determine what this new framework might look like.
“The Operator contextualizes his or her present space into the Spectrum and Spectators read the encoded message accordingly.”
There are two major changes that could be made to Barthes’s framework. First, the Spectrum should be redefined to include the notion of space as the Operator defines it. Snap Operators are not trying to single out an object worthy of becoming a Spectrum from their surroundings. Anything in their surroundings becomes the Spectrum simply because they are the most accessible. Snap Operatorsaren’t trying to produce a two-dimensional image. Rather, they are trying to share a three-dimensional space. When information from several Operators are overlaid on one another on a “Snap Map,” the Spectator receives this information not as a single frame and image but as a space as theOperators define it. The information is less tailored than in professional photography, but it is raw and organic.
Another, and more important, change would be including the Operator in the implied Spectrum. Snaps are rarely understood by the Spectator as a standalone Spectrum; the Spectrum is always understood in relation to the Operator. Because all Snaps are real-time, each Snap comes with the implied information that the Operator is seeing the Spectrum at a given location at a given time. Each Operator acts as a tiny broadcast station sending out information about their location in space-time to the world. Multiplied with the context of the Operator’s life that most Spectators possess, the presence of the Operator grows ever larger even in Snaps where the Operator might not be shown. The Spectrum itself is a real-time documentation of a contextualized Operator’s life. Operators don’t choose a Spectrum because it has a certain quality that it possesses independent of the Operator; they choose the Spectrum because it exists around them at the moment, a quality completely dependent on the Operator. This is why in the case of Snaps, the significance of the Spectrum is fundamentally tied to the Operator. The Operator’s existence is embedded in the Spectrum.
Therefore, in the era of Snaps, a new philosophical framework to discuss photography might look like this: the Operator contextualizes his or her present space into the Spectrum and Spectators read the encoded message accordingly. It is clear that the first person is gaining more ground in our media narrative, with another obvious example being the rise of selfies and vlogs. As humans share more of their life through the Internet, we are beginning to produce — and read — our photographs like diaries rather than like the news reports of old. It is high time that we decide whether this change will lead to acceptance of diverse perspectives or the loss of meaning for perspective itself. Will the abundance of visual perspectives create a contextualized space where we acknowledge the active presence of others? Or will the deluge of perspectives reduce our appreciation for them and make them disposable? The way this change will impact our interpretation of media will be organically defined by how we continue to produce and read photographs.
[1]Prensky, Marc. “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants Part 1.” On the Horizon, vol. 9, no. 5, 2001, pp. 1–6.
[2]“About the Snap Map.” Snapchat Support, 21 July 2017, support.snapchat.com/en-US/article/about-snap-map2.
[3]O’Kane, Sean. “Snap Spectacles review: Fun that’s totally worth the trouble.” The Verge, 21 Nov. 2016, http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/21/13671164/snapchat-spectacles-glasses-review-camera-sunglasses.
[4]Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.
[5]eMarketer. “Number of smartphone users worldwide 2014-2020.” Statista, June 2016, http://www.statista.com/statistics/330695/number-of-smartphone-users-worldwide/.
[6]Perez, Sarah. “iPhone models dominate Flickr’s list of most popular cameras in 2017 with 54% of top 100 devices.” TechCrunch, 7 Dec. 2017, techcrunch.com/2017/12/07/iphone-models-dominate-flickrs-list-of-most-popular-cameras-in-2017-with-54-of-top-100-devices/.