Domestic Photography and Technological Paths

In this book, we use the term domestic photography to describe the photographic activities of ordinary people taking and using images for non-professional purposes. Also, in our use of the term we focus on the kind of use in which photography is not a hobby as such but embedded in other activities. The word ‘domestic’ implies that the activities take place mainly in homes, and the home is the headquarters for this activity. Many photographs are taken in the home of people who live or visit there. People go abroad and take photographs, then return home to view, show, share, and store the captured pictures. The cameras, photo albums, prints, printers, computers, mobile phones, television sets, and other photographic technologies can be taken out of the home space, but they do ‘live’ at home as much as the owners of these technologies. Their resting place is at home. The ordinary activities performed with cameras and photographs are also related to the people living in the home. Traditionally this has been the family unit. The connection between photography and the family has been so strong in the past that family photography has become almost synonymous with domestic photography. It has often been the members of the family who are photographed and who do most of the photographing. It is through family relations and the home that photography is introduced to babies and small children. The home is the place and the family is the social context inherent in the photographic practices we are all so familiar with. Also, the concept of family photography hints at the family-centric values that are often present in domestic photography: depicting the stereotypical father–mother– two-children nuclear family as a single coherent happy unit with no domestic problems or friction between familial relationships. Nevertheless, in our use of the term, domestic photography does not assume a family – even a person living alone without a partner or children can participate in domestic photography. A third term, again used synonymously with the concepts of domestic and family photography, is snapshot photography. Although this is a common term today, its Chapter 2 Domestic Photography and Technological Paths