What does the photoblog want?

Abstract

Theoretical accounts of photography have persistently emphasized, departed from and returned to the issue of the Real, thereby positioning the Real behind or at the heart of what photography purportedly is and does. But these familiar and familiarizing consistencies in the writing about photography do not make photographs less of a paradox at the level of being (what they are), or less equivocal at the level of their expressive content (what they mean or know). Digital photography problematizes the issues yet further even while writing about photography reasserts the familiar pieties. This article presents the results of an ethnographic study of photoblogs as a way of addresssing impasses in the literature on photography and digital photography. Blogs have become popular in the last three years as an internet-based technology for writing the self. Photoblogs are a type of blog that adds photographs to text and hyperlinks in the telling of stories. In this article, I argue that photoblogs are (1) entities that identify the repetitions which paralyse writing about photography and (2) entities that want to position photographs as something more than an outcome, photobloggers as something more than selves (or authors) and the photoblog as something more than technology.