unthinking
photography

Internet Photography extends to unprecedented social fields, challenges social norms and questions the previously established cultural, economic and ethical values of photographs that circulate within network culture.

Capturing the internet photographically means positioning the camera inside databases, screens and algorithms. Internet Photography is not simply about the production of new photos, but instead it investigates the renewed role of the photographic medium as it impacts the formation and understanding of personal memory and social realities.

Photography needs to explore the vast amount of photos circulating on the Internet, overlaying the physical and online worlds with wide personal, legal and economic consequences. Hence, Internet Photography inevitably has to address privacy abuses, economic exploitation, political spin, personal traumas and low self-expression.

The ethics of photography seek new balance and boundaries within an environment of disruptive potential, capacity and speed. The aesthetics of Internet Photography are influenced by the same techniques, contexts and visual styles brought about by the underpinning components of the Internet, such as coding, networking and ubiquity.

Photography has repositioned itself at the centre of visual culture through canny artistic strategies such as figuration and abstraction; recontextualisation and appropriation; emotional response and social reporting; for denunciations and self reflection.

As a society and as individuals, we face the new power of photography and it’s potential to affect what we accept as ethical and aesthetic norms. It is the duty of art to explore all potentials, dangers and contradictions of this new state of the photographic medium on the Internet.