
Åsa Thelander
Lärare

Instagram photography as embodied practice: performances and gazes
Författare
Summary, in English
By gaze we mean certain institutionalised ways of looking at, sensing, and comprehending images on the Instagram platform. The concept of gaze may however refer to different things. Most notably is perhaps the sociologist John Urry’s (1990, 2002) formulation of the tourist gaze to describe the learnt ability of how to see things, which is a collective and culturally shared ability (see also Foucault, 1977). The tourist gaze includes the distinct, striking, unusual, and extraordinary. These values are used and reproduced in advertisements, place promotion and by the tourists. In later texts about the tourist gaze, Urry and Larsen (2011) emphasise the social aspect of tourist photography. This definition of tourist gaze makes the concept useful when practices of photography are studied in order to discuss social conventions and norms of that which is seen. It makes it possible to demonstrate and discuss parallels to other visual norms and practices.
The paper addresses the pre-conference theme on mobile (in)visibilities by examining Instagram photography as a performance disciplined by gazes. The findings of the study point to the tensions between different gazes and how they discipline how participants imagine the organisation in photographic practice. Hence, the inclusion of social media in communication strategies does not necessarily reinvigorate images of the organisation, since conventional gazes govern images on social media. The study elucidates how a visual practice is socially constrained, which results in that only certain aspects of the organisation are made visible and regarded as photo worthy, while others remain unseen.
Avdelning/ar
- Institutionen för strategisk kommunikation
Publiceringsår
2018
Språk
Engelska
Dokumenttyp
Konferensbidrag: abstract
Ämne
- Media and Communications
Nyckelord
- photography
- performativity
- gaze
- disciplinary power
- vision
Conference name
European Communication Research and Education Association, 2018
Conference date
2018-10-31 - 2018-10-31
Conference place
Lugano, Switzerland
Status
Published