Sentient Photography: Image-Production and the Smartphone Camera

Abstract

Thanks to the smartphone, photography has become pervasive in contemporary digital culture. Yet the smartphone’s very ‘smartness’ profoundly alters the relations of control between humans and technologies in image-production practices. Unlike dedicated cameras, smartphones use built-in sensors for small-scale positioning to ‘sense’ user’s bodily orientations and states of motion. Combined with photographic applications, this ‘sentience’ enables devices to direct user actions and to require user compliance in order to create an image. In this paper, we analyze image-production in three smartphone applications to chart a continuum between two techno-cultural poles. At one pole smartphone photography accommodates a range of human-technological interactions, including the development of new forms of play and experimentation. At the opposite pole, it executes algorithmically-choreographed sentient photography in which ultimate decisions are made by context-aware learning software, radically reconfiguring the distribution of agency between humans and technologies. The development of sentient photography, we conclude, represents the integration of the photographer’s body itself into platform control of image-production.

Acknowledgement

The authors dedicate this article to their colleague and teacher the late Professor Yeshayahu Nir - director, photographer and pioneer of photography research in Israel.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In the analogue context the advice of the light-meter is accompanied by an additional force constraining the photographer’s decision: the economic costs of film and the development and printing of ‘unsuccessful’ low-light images.

2. The virtual ‘films’ and ‘lenses’ are available for purchase through the application (the purchasing process is itself part of the Hipstamatic user experience).

3. Certain DSLR cameras allow photographers to define in advance certain conditions (such as poor focus) under which the camera will not take a photograph. The crucial distinction between this situation and the Pano is that the latter’s ability to end the image-production process is a default and can be neither selected nor over-ridden by the photographer.

4. At least as far as the user is concerned: Google may save this ‘incorrect’ data.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Doron Altaratz

Doron Altaratz is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research spans media studies, computational photography, and human-computer interactions.

Paul Frosh

Paul Frosh is a Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research interests include visual culture, media aesthetics, cultural production, media and nationhood, media witnessing and cultural memory. His books include The Image Factory: Consumer Culture, Photography and the Visual Content Industry and Media Witnessing: Testimony in the Age of Mass Communication (edited with Amit Pinchevski). His most recent book is The Poetics of Digital Media (Polity 2018).