Visual Communication

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Digital photography: communication, identity, memory

José van Dijck
Visual Communication 2008; 7; 57
DOI: 10.1177/1470357207084865

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 visual communication

ARTICLE

Digital photography: communication,

identity, memory

JOSÉ VAN DIJCK

University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

ABSTRACT
Taking photographs seems no longer primarily an act of memory intended
to safeguard a family’s pictorial heritage, but is increasingly becoming a
tool for an individual’s identity formation and communication. Digital
cameras, cameraphones, photoblogs and other multipurpose devices are
used to promote the use of images as the preferred idiom of a new
generation of users. The aim of this article is to explore how technical
changes (digitization) combined with growing insights in cognitive science
and socio-cultural transformations have affected personal photography.
The increased manipulation of photographic images may suit the individ-
ual’s need for continuous self-remodelling and instant communication and
bonding. However, that same manipulability may also lessen our grip on our
images’ future repurposing and reframing. Memory is not eradicated from
digital multipurpose tools. Instead, the function of memory reappears in the
networked, distributed nature of digital photographs, as most images are
sent over the internet and stored in virtual space.

KEY WORDS
Abu Ghraib pictures • digital technology • identity formation • memory •
photography • visual culture

INTRODUCTION
A student recently told me about an interesting experience. She and four
friends had been hanging out in her dormitory room, telling jokes and
having fun. Her roommate had picked up her friend’s camera phone and
taken pictures of the group lying in various relaxed positions on the couch.
That same evening, the student had posted the picture on her photoblog – a
blog she regularly updated to keep friends and family informed about her

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 daily life in college. The next day she received an email from her roommate;
on opening the attached jpg-file she found the same picture of herself and
her friends on the couch, but now they were portrayed with dozens of empty
beer cans and wine bottles piled up on the coffee table in front of them. Her
dismay caused by this unauthorized act of Photoshopping was further
aggravated when she noticed the doctored picture had been emailed to a long
list of their peers, including some people she had never met or only vaguely
knew. When confronting her roommate with the potential consequences of
her action, they got engaged in a heated discussion about the innocence of
manipulating pictures and circulating them: ‘everybody will see this is a joke’
was the roommate’s defence against the charge of the incriminating potential
of the photographs, whereas the student claimed that ‘not everyone may
recognize the manipulation’ and ‘these pictures may show up endlessly’ with
their impact being less transitory than the roommate might have thought.
In recent years, the role and function of western digital photography
seem to have changed substantially.1 In the analogue age, personal photogra-
phy2 was first and foremost a means for autobiographical remembering, and
photographs usually ended up as keepsakes in someone’s (family) album or
shoebox. They were typically regarded to be a person’s most reliable aid for
recall and for verifying ‘life as it was’, even if we know that imagination,
projection and remembrance are inextricably bound up in the process of
remembering (Stuhlmiller, 1996). Photography’s functions as a tool for iden-
tity formation and as a means for communication were duly acknowledged,
but were always rated secondary to its prime purpose of memory (Barthes,
1981[1980]; Sontag, 1973). Recent research by anthropologists, sociologists
and psychologists seems to suggest that the increased deployment of digital
cameras – including cameras integrated in other communication devices –
favours the functions of communication and identity formation at the
expense of photography’s use as a tool for remembering (Garry and Gerrie,
2005; Harrison, 2002; Schiano et al., 2002). Although it is undeniable that the
functions of photography as communication and identity formation have
gained importance, I will argue in this article that photography’s function as
a memory tool is still equally vibrant, even if its manifestation is changing in
the digital era.
Before starting this argument, it is necessary to point out a few
misguided assumptions we often encounter when tackling this subject. First,
communication and identity formation are not novel uses but have always
been intrinsic functions of photography, even in the analogue days. Indeed, a
younger generation seems to increasingly use digital cameras for ‘live’
communication instead of storing pictures of ‘life’. Easy distribution of
images over the internet and quick dissemination via personal handheld
devices promote pictures as the preferred idiom in mediated communication
practices. But what are the implications of this transformed use of
photography as a memory tool? Second, personal photography has not
changed as a result of digital technologies; the changing function of

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photography is part of a complex technological, social and cultural
transformation. As the student’s anecdote illustrates, digitization is often
considered the culprit of photography’s growing unreliability as a tool for
remembrance but, in fact, the camera has never been a dependable aid for
storing memories, and photographs have always been twitched and tweaked
in the process of recollection. Digital photography raises several intriguing
questions concerning manipulation and cognitive editing: what is the power
of digital tools in sculpting identity? How do we gauge new features that help
us brush up our pictures and make our memories picture perfect? It is simply
not true that digital photography has eradicated the camera’s function as a
tool for memory. Instead, the function of memory reappears in the
networked, distributed nature of digital photographs as most images are sent
over the wires and end up somewhere in virtual space.
The aim of this article, then, is to show how technical changes,
combined with growing insights in cognitive science and socio-cultural
transformations, have affected personal photography’s role in communica-
tion, the shaping of identity and memory. Underlying this argument is the
recurring issue of control versus a lack of control. Part of the digital camera’s
popularity can be explained by an increased command over the outcome of
pictures now that electronic processes allow for greater manipulability, and
yet the flipside is that pictures can also be easily manipulated by anyone who
has access to the appropriate toolbox. A similar paradox can be noticed in
regard to the distribution of personal pictures. While the internet allows for
quick and easy sharing of private snapshots, that same tool also renders them
vulnerable to unauthorized distribution. Ironically, the picture taken by the
roommate as a token of instant and ephemeral communication may have an
extended life on the internet, turning up in unexpected contexts many years
from now. As argued earlier, the increased manipulability of photographic
images may suit the individual’s need for continuous self-remodelling, but
that same flexibility may also lessen our grip on our images’ future
repurposing and reframing, forcing us to acknowledge the way pictorial
memory might be changed by ease of distribution.

LIVE PICTURES: PERSONAL PHOTOGRAPHY AS

TOOLS FOR COMMUNICATION AND EXPERIENCE
When personal photography came of age in the 19th and 20th centuries, it
gradually emerged as a social practice that revolved around families wanting
to save their memories of past experiences in material pictorial form for
future reference or communal reminiscing. Yet from the early days of
photography, we can already distinguish social uses complementary to its
primary function. Photography always also served as an instrument of
communication and as a means of sharing experience. As Susan Sontag
argued in 1973, the tourist’s compulsion to take snapshots of foreign places
reveals how taking pictures can become paramount to experiencing an event;

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 at the same time, communicating experiences with the help of photographs
is an integral part of tourist photography. Notwithstanding the dominance of
photography as a family tool for remembrance and reminiscence, the other
functions were immanent to photography from the moment it became
popular as a domestic technology. In recent years, we have seen profound
shifts in the balance between these various social uses: from family to
individual use, from memory tools to communication devices and from
sharing (memory) objects to sharing experiences. I will now elucidate each of
these profound shifts.
The social significance and cultural impact of personal photography
grew exponentially in the past century: by the early 1970s, almost every
American and western European household owned a photo camera. By the
time sociologists and anthropologists began to acknowledge the significance
of photography as a cultural rite of family life, Susan Sontag (1973) took on
the ethnographer’s cloak and described its meaning as a tool for recording
family life: ‘Through photographs, each family constructs a portrait chron-
icle of itself – a portable kit of images that bears witness to its connectedness’
(p. 8). Through taking and organizing pictures, individuals articulate their
connections to, and initiation into, clans and groups, emphasizing ritualized
moments of aging and of coming of age. Cameras are an integral part of
family life, Sontag observed: households with children are twice as likely to
have at least one camera than households in which there are no children.
Photography not simply reflected but also constituted family life and
structured an individual’s notion of belonging. Quite a number of socio-
logical and anthropological studies have scrutinized the relationship between
picture taking, organizing and presenting photographs on the one hand, and
the construction of family, heritage and kinship on the other (Chalfen, 1987;
Chambers, 2001; Hirsch, 1997; Holland, 1991; Slater, 1995).
Over the past two decades, the individual has gradually become the
nucleus of pictorial life. In her ethnographic study of how people connect
personal photographs to memory and narration, anthropologist Barbara
Harrison (2002: 107) observes that self-presentation – rather than family re-
presentation – is now a major function of photographs. Harrison’s field
study reveals a significant shift from personal photography being bound up
with memory and commemoration towards pictures as a form of identity
formation; cameras are used less for the remembrance of family life and
more for the affirmation of personhood and personal bonds. Since the 1990s,
particularly since the beginning of the new millennium, cameras have
increasingly served as tools for mediating everyday experiences other than
rituals or ceremonial moments. Partly a technological evolution dictated by
market forces, the social and cultural stakes in this transformation cannot be
underestimated. When looking at current generations of users, researchers
observe a watershed between adult users, large numbers of whom are now
switching from analogue to digital cameras, and teenagers and young adults,
who are growing up with a number of new digital multifunctional

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communication and media devices (Liechti and Ichikawa, 2000; Schiano et
al., 2002). The older group generally adheres to the primacy of photography
as a memory tool, particularly in the construction of family life, whereas
teenagers and young adults use camera-like tools for conversation and peer-
group building.
This distinctive swing in the use of photography also shows up in
ethnographic observations of patterns revealing how teenagers take and
manage pictures. One American study focusing on a group of teenagers
between 14 and 19 found a remarkable disparity between what teenagers say
they value in photography and how they behave: while most of them describe
photos as permanent records of their lives, their behaviour reveals a
preference for photography as social communication (Schiano et al., 2002).
Showing pictures as part of conversation or reviewing pictures to confirm
social bonds between friends appears more important than organizing
photos in albums and looking at them – an activity they consider their
parents’ domain. Photos are shared less in the context of family and home
and more in peer-group environments: schools, clubs, friends’ houses. Other
studies note how teenagers regard pictures as circulating messages, an
interactive exchange in which personal photographs casually mix public
images, such as magazine pictures, drawings and text (Liechti and Ichikawa,
2000).
Part of this change is reflected in the popularity of new technologies.
In terms of hardware, the single-purpose camera for taking still pictures gives
way to multifunctional appliances, combining the camera function with the
personal digital assistant (PDA), the mobile phone, MP3 players and global
positioning devices. These emerging digital tools substantially affect the way
people socialize and interact and, by extension, the way they maintain and
consolidate relationships. The so-called cameraphone permits entirely new
performative rituals, such as shooting a picture at a live concert and instantly
mailing these images to a friend. But we also see this change reflected in
terms of software.3 In the past three years, photoblogs have become popular
as an internet-based technology – a type of blog that adds photographs to
text and hyperlinks in the telling of stories. A photoblog, rather than being a
digital album, elicits entirely different presentational uses: college students
use it to keep their distant loved ones updated about their daily life but
individuals may also use a photoblog to start their own online photo gallery.
Photobloggers prefer to profile themselves in images rather than words
(Cohen, 2005).
Whereas their parents invested considerable time and effort in
building up material collections of pictures for future reference, youngsters
appear to take less interest in sharing photographs as objects than in sharing
them as experiences (Kindberg et al., 2005). The rapidly increasing popularity
in the use of cameraphones supports and propels this new communicative
deployment of personal photography. Pictures circulated via a cameraphone
are used to convey a brief message, or merely to show affect. ‘Connecting’ or

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 ‘getting in touch’, rather than ‘reality capturing’ or ‘memory preservation’, are
the social meanings transferred onto this type of photography. Whereas
parents and/or children used to sit on the couch together flipping through
photo albums, most teenagers consider their pictures to be temporary
reminders rather than permanent keepsakes. Cameraphone photography
gives rise to a cultural form reminiscent of the old-fashioned postcard:
snapshots with a few words attached that are mostly valued as ritual signs of
(re)connection (Lehtonen et al., 2002). Like postcards, cameraphone pictures
are meant to be thrown away after they are received.
In this way, the cameraphone merges oral and visual modalities – the
latter seemingly adapting to the former. Pictures become more like spoken
language as photographs are turning into the new currency for social inter-
action. Pixellated images, like spoken words, circulate between individuals
and groups to establish and reconfirm bonds. Sometimes pictures are
accompanied by captions that form the ‘missing voice’ explaining the picture.
For instance, a fan at a concert of her favourite band takes a picture of the
band’s performance, adds the word ‘awesome’ and immediately sends off the
message to her friends back home. Cameraphone pictures are a way of
touching base: ‘Picture this, here! Picture me, now!’ The main difference
between cameraphones and the single-purpose camera is the medium’s
‘verbosity’ – the inflation of images inscribed in the apparatus’s script. When
pictures become a visual language conveyed through the channel of a
communication medium, the value of individual pictures decreases while the
general significance of visual communication increases. A thousand pictures
sent over the phone may now be worth a single word: ‘see!’ Taking, sending
and receiving photographs is a real-time experience and, like spoken words,
image exchanges are not meant to be archived (Van House et al., 2005).
Because of their abundance, these photographs gain value as ‘moments’,
while losing value as mementoes.
Clearly, we are witnessing a shift, especially among the younger
generation, towards using photography as an instrument for peer bonding
and interaction. Digitization is not the cause of this trend; instead, the
tendency to fuse photography with daily experience and communication is
part of a broader cultural transformation that involves individualization and
intensification of experience. The emphasis on individualism and person-
hood at the expense of family is a social pattern with roots that can be traced
back as far as the late 1960s and early 1970s. The intensification of experience
as a turn-of-the-millennium economic and social force has been theorized
most accurately by American economists Pine and Gilmore (1999);
commercial products are increasingly marketed as memorable experiences
engaging all five senses – sight, sound, touch, taste, smell – and packaged in
snappy themes so that they prolong the contact zone between product and
consumers (Pine and Gilmore, 1999). Digital photography is part of this
larger transformation in which the self becomes the centre of a virtual
universe made up of informational and spatial flows; individuals articulate

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their identity as social beings not only by taking and storing photographs to
document their lives, but by participating in communal photographic
exchanges that mark their identity as interactive producers and consumers of
culture.

PICTURES OF LIFE: PERSONAL PHOTOGRAPHY AS

A TOOL FOR IDENTITY FORMATION
In addition to their growing usage as tools for communication and
experience, digital photo cameras have been touted as novel instruments of
identity formation, particularly as they allow users to manipulate their own
images. However, it should be noted that photo cameras have always been
important instruments for the shaping of self-identity. Some theorists have
claimed that personal pictures are the equivalent of identities (‘our pictures
are us’) but this claim appears to understate the intricate cognitive, mental,
social and cultural processes at work in identity formation (Chalfen, 2002).
Roland Barthes (1981[1980]: 80) emphasized the close interconnection, in
the late 1970s, between identity formation and memory: pictures of family
and friends are visible reminders of former appearances, inviting us to reflect
on ‘what has been’ but, by the same token, they tell us how we should
remember our selves as younger persons. We remodel our self-image to fit
the pictures taken at previous moments in time. Memories are created just as
much as they are recalled from photographs; our recollections never remain
the same, even if the photograph appears to represent a fixed image of the
past. And yet, we use these pictures not to ‘fix’ memory but to constantly
reassess our past lives and reflect on what has been as well as what is and
what will be. Recollecting is not simply a revisionist project; anticipations of
future selves inform retrograde projections and these mental image maps,
in turn, feed a desire to have an impact on ‘external’ (camera) visions of
ourselves (Rose, 1992).
The role photographs play in the complex construction of one’s
identity has been reflected upon in cognitive theory as well as in cultural
theory, particularly semiotics. Cognitive psychologists have investigated the
intriguing question of how photographs can influence our personal
memories (Strange et al., 2005). The human mind actively produces visual
autobiographical evidence through photographs, but also modifies it through
pictures – cutting off estranged spouses or throwing away depressing images
of oneself when seriously overweight. Research has shown that people are
also easily seduced into creating false memories of their pasts on the basis of
unaltered and doctored pictures. In the early 1990s, researchers from
America and New Zealand persuaded experimental subjects to believe false
narratives about their childhood, written or told by family members and
substantiated by ‘true’ photographs.4 Over the next decade, these findings
were corroborated by experiments in which doctored pictures were used;
more than 50 percent of all subjects constructed false memories out of old

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 personal photographs that were carefully retouched to depict a scene that
had never happened in that person’s life.5 There is a continuing debate
whether it is narratives or photographs (or a combination of both) that
triggers most false memories, but the conclusion that people’s autobio-
graphical memories are prone to either self-induced intervention or secret
manipulation is well established (Garry and Wade, 2005).6
The close interweaving of memory, imagination and desire in creating
a picture of one’s past life has also been subject to theoretical probing by
cultural theorists, most notably Roland Barthes. When exploring the
intricacies of the camera lucida, Barthes (1981[1980]) testifies to this
complex loop of images–pictures informing desire–memory when describing
the discomfort he feels the moment he succumbs to being the camera’s
object. Having one’s photograph taken, as Barthes observes, is a closed field
of forces where four image-repertoires intersect: ‘the one that I think I am’
(the mental self-image); ‘the one I want others to think I am’ (the idealized
self-image); ‘the one the photographer thinks I am’ (the photographed self-
image); and ‘the one the photographer makes use of when exhibiting his art’
(the public self-image or imago) (p. 13). Whereas the first two levels
represent the stages of mental, internal image processing, the third and
fourth level refer to the external process of picture taking and presentation –
the photographer’s frame of reference and cultural perspective. In contrast to
psychological theory, Barthes’ semiotic perspective emphasizes that cognition
does not necessarily reside inside our brains, but extends into the social and
cultural realm.
Barthes’ exploration of analogue photography elucidates how the four
image-repertoires of self intersect and yet never match up. They collide at
various moments: at the instant of capturing, when ‘evaluating’ the outcome
or photographed object, or while reminiscing at a later point in time, re-
viewing the picture. When a picture is taken, we want those photographs to
match our idealized self-image – flattering, without pimples, happy,
attractive – so we attempt to influence the process by posing, smiling, or
giving instructions to the photographer. At a later stage, we can try to
encroach on the outcome by selecting, refusing, or destroying the actual
print. A photographed person exerts only limited control over the resulting
picture. The photographer’s choice of frame and angle defines the por-
traiture while the referent can still be further modified at the stage of
development by applying retouching techniques. Roland Barthes obviously
feels powerless in the face of the photographer’s decisions, lacking control
over the image which he wants to equal his idealized self. Its fate is in the
hands of the photographer who is taking the picture and of the chemical,
mechanical and publishing forces involved in its ultimate materialization.
Barthes’ discomfort signals a fundamental resentment about his inability to
fashion pictures ‘in his own image’. Since the four levels never coincide,
photographs that depict oneself are profoundly alienating, even to the extent
of giving the French philosopher a sense of being an impostor.

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 Paradoxically, Barthes perceives a lack of control over his
photographed image and imago and yet he feels confident he can exert
power over the mental and idealized images entering his mind. Although the
experienced powerlessness over the photographer’s perspective and the ‘black
box’ of the camera vis-à-vis the assumed autonomy over his mental images
and memories appears entirely plausible, neither perception can go
undisputed. The photographed image – the desire to manipulate the public
imago – has never been outside the subject’s reach; on the contrary. Since the
late 1840s, commercial portrait photographers succumbed to their patron’s
desire for idealized self-images the way painters did before the advent of
photography: by adopting flattering perspectives and applying chemical
magic. In contrast, the subject’s power over images entering the mind may
not be as manageable as it appears. Cultural ideals of physical appearance,
displayed through photographs and evolving over time, often unconsciously
influence the mind’s (idealized) images of self (Lury, 2002). Control over
photographic images is hence not inscribed in the machine’s ontology, nor
does the mind have full sovereignty over the (cultural) images it allows to
enter memory. Instead, control over one’s ‘self-portrait’ is a subtle choreog-
raphy of the four image-repertoires, a balancing act in which photographic
images ‘enculturate’ personal identity.
Now, if we replace the analogue camera with a digital one, and
laminated photos with pixellated shots, how would this affect the inter-
twining of mental–cognitive and cultural–material image processes in
photography? In seeking to answer this question, we are confronted with the
conspicuous absence of interdisciplinary research in this area. None of the
cognitive studies discussed earlier pay attention to the ways in which
individuals use digital photography to manipulate their own personal
pictures and memory; the cultural, material and technological aspects of
memory morphing appear strikingly irrelevant to cognitive science. ‘Striking’
because scientists often mention how their academic interest in manipulated
pictures gains relevance in the face of a growing ubiquitous use of digital
photography and its endless potential to reconstruct and retouch one’s
childhood memories; skills once monopolized by Hollywood studios and
advertising agencies are now within the reach of every individual who owns a
‘digital camera, image editing software computer, and the capacity to follow
instructions’ (Gary and Gerrie, 2005: 321).7 Mutatis mutandis, when turning
to cultural theorists for enlightenment, their disregard of psychological and
cognitive studies in this area is rather remarkable; semioticians and con-
structivists typically analyze the intricacies of technological devices to
connect them to social and cultural agency.8 Yet without acknowledging the
profound interlacing of mental, technical and cultural levels involved in
digital photography, we may never understand the intricate connection
between identity formation and photography.
It may be instructive to spell out a few significant differences between
analogue and digital photography in terms of their (cognitive and technical)

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 mechanisms. At first sight, digital photography provides more access to the
imaging process between the stages of taking the picture and looking at its
printed result. Only seconds after its taking, the picture allows a ‘sneak
preview’ via the camera’s small screen. The display shows a tentative result,
an image that can be deleted or stored. Since a sneak preview allows the
photographer to instantly share the results with the photographed subject,
there is room for negotiation: the subject’s evaluation of his or her self-image
may influence the next posture. A second moment of re-viewing takes place
at the computer, in which images, stored as digital code, are susceptible to
editing and manipulation. Besides selecting or erasing pictures, photo-paint
software permits endless retouching of images – everything from cropping
and colour adjustment to brushing out red eyes and pimples. Beyond the
superficial level, one can remove entire objects from the picture, such as
unwanted decorations, or add desirable features, such as sharper cheekbones
or a background of palm trees.
Let’s be straight about one thing: digitization never caused manipu-
lability or artificiality. Although some theorists of visual culture have singled
out manipulability as the feature that distinguishes digital photography from
its analogue precursors, history proves the opposite (Mitchell, 1992).
Retouching and manipulation have always been inherent in the dynamics of
photography (Manovich, 2001; Ritchin, 1999; Wells, 1996). What is new in
digital photography is the increased number of possibilities for reviewing
and retouching one’s own pictures, first on a small camera screen and later
on the screen of a computer. When pictures are taken by a digital camera, the
subject may feel empowered to manipulate its outcome (the photographed
or public image) because he or she may have access to stages formerly ‘black
boxed’ by cameras, film roles and chemical labs. Previews and reviews of the
pixellated image, combined with easy-to-use Photoshop software, undoubt-
edly seduce viewers into pictorial enhancement. But does this increased
flexibility cause the processes of photographic imaging and mental (or
cognitive) editing to become further entwined in the construction of
identity? In other words, does image doctoring become an integral element
of autobiographical remembering?
Of course, we have already become used to the prevalent use of the
‘camera pictura’ with regards to the creation of public images. Since the
1990s, people no longer expect indexical fidelity to an external person when
looking at photographic portraits, particularly those in advertising; almost
by default, pictures in magazines, billboards and many other public sources
are retouched or enhanced. Digital ‘stock photography’ uses public images as
resources or ‘input’ to be worked on by anyone who pays for their
exploitation (Frosh, 2003). Companies like Microsoft and Getty have
anticipated the consequence of this evolution by buying up large stocks of
public images and selling them back to the public domain by licensing their
‘re-creation’. From the culturally accepted modifiability of public images, it is
only a small step to accepting your own personal pictures as mere ‘stock’ in

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the ongoing remodelling project of life’s pictorial heritage. The impact of
editing software on the profiling of one’s personal identity is evident from
many photoblogs and personal picture galleries on the internet. Enhancing
colour and beautifying faces is no longer the department of beauty
magazines: individuals may now purchase Photoshop software to brush up
their cherished images. A large number of software packages allow users to
restore their old, damaged and faded family pictures; in one and the same
breath, they offer to upgrade your self-image. For instance, VisionQuest
Images advertises its packages as technical aids to create a ‘digital masterpiece
to your specification’; computer programs let you change everything in your
personal appearance, from lip size to skin tint.9 There are numerous
examples of individuals who use these programs on the internet.10 These
instances reveal that the acceptability of photographic manipulation of
someone’s personal photographs can hardly be separated from the normal-
ized use of enhanced idealized images. Digital doctoring of private snapshots
is just another stage in the eternal choreography of the (mental and cultural)
image repertoires once identified by Roland Barthes.
The endless potential of digital photography to manipulate one’s self-
image seems to make it the ultimate tool for identity formation. Whereas
analogue photographs were often erroneously viewed as the ‘still’ input for
‘static’ images, digital pictures more explicitly serve as visual resources in a
life-long project to reinvent one’s self-appearance. Software packages
supporting the processing of personal photographs often bear witness to the
digital image’s status as a liminal object; pixellated photographs are touted as
bricks of memory construction, as software is architecturally designed with
future remodelling in mind. As Canadian design scholar, Ron Burnett
(2004), eloquently writes:

The shift to the digital has shown that photographs are simply raw
material for an endless series of digressions . . . As images, photo-
graphs encourage viewers to move beyond the physical world even as
they assert the value of memory, place, and original moments. (p. 28)

I am not saying, though, that with the advent of digital photography, people
suddenly feel more inclined to Photoshop their personal pictures stored on
their computers. Nor am I arguing that mental imaging processes change as a
result of having more access to intermediate layers of photographic imaging.
My point is that the condition of modifiability, plasticity and ongoing
remodelling equally informs – or should I say ‘enculturates’ – all four image-
repertoires involved in the construction of personal memory.
The condition of plasticity and modifiability, far from being exclusive
to personal photography, has a resonance in diverging cultural, medical and
technological self-remodelling projects. Ultrasound images of foetuses –
sneak previews inside the womb – stimulate intervention in the biological
fabric, turning the foetus into an object to be worked on (Van Dijck, 1995).

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 Cosmetic surgery configures the human body as a physical resource
amenable to extreme makeovers; before-and-after pictures structure not only
subjective self-consciousness but, upon entering the public image repertoire,
they concurrently ‘normalize’ intervention in physical appearance. The most
remarkable thing about the before-and-after pictures that are in abundance
on the internet and on television these days is that they do not promote
perpetual modification of our pictures to portray a better self, but advertise
the potential to modify our bodies to match our idealized mental images.
Contemporary notions of body, mind, appearance, identity and memory
seem to be equally informed by the cultural condition of perpetual modi-
fication; our new tools are only in tune with the current mental flexibility for
refashioning self-identity and morphing corporeality. The question as to
whether changing concepts of identity have followed from evolving
technologies or the other way around is beside the point. What is more
important is to address how the new choreography of image-repertoires
operates in a social and cultural climate that increasingly values modifiability
and flexibility, and whether this climate really does allow more individual
control over one’s own image.

PICTURES FOR LIFE? MEMORY AND PHOTOGRAPHY

I N T H E D I G I TA L A G E
From these observations we are tempted to draw the conclusion that digital
cameras are becoming tools for communication, experience and identity
formation, moving away from their former prime functions as memory
tools. But even if we accept that photography is increasingly regarded as an
instrument for identity construction, rather than one for recollection or
reflection, this new role does not annihilate photography’s traditional
commemorative function. Indeed, digital cameras give rise to new social
practices in which pictures are considered visual resources in the ‘micro-
cultures’ of everyday life (Burnett, 2004: 62). Yet in these microcultures,
memory does not so much disappear from the spectrum of social use as take
on a different form. In the networked reality of people’s everyday life, the
default mode of personal photography becomes ‘sharing’. Few people realize
that sharing experience by means of exchanging digital images almost by
definition implies distributed storage: personal ‘live’ pictures distributed via
the internet may remain there for life, turning up in unforeseen contexts,
reframed and repurposed. A well-known example may clarify the meaning of
distributed memory and demonstrate the intertwined meanings of personal
and collective cultural memory: the Abu Ghraib pictures.
In May 2004, a series of most horrific, graphic scenes of torture and
violence against Iraqi detainees perpetrated by American guards stationed at
the Abu Ghraib prison appeared in the press, and were subsequently
disseminated through the internet.11 Most photos were taken by prison
guards and frequently featured two lower ranked members of the armed

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forces, Charles Graner and Lyndie England; they often posed thumbs up in
front of individual or piled-up prisoners who invariably showed signs of
torture or sexual assault. The hundreds of pictures of detainees taken by
prison guards communicate a distinctly casual attitude to the act of
photographing. Clearly, these pictures were taken by digital cameras (or
cameraphones) deployed by army personnel casually while on duty –
perfectly in tune with the popular function of photography as a ritual of
everyday communication. As Susan Sontag (2004: 26) poignantly describes
in her essay on the case:

The pictures taken by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib reflect a

recent shift in the use made of pictures – less objects to be saved than
messages to be disseminated, circulated. A digital camera is a
common possession among soldiers. Where once photographing war
was the province of photojournalists, now the soldiers themselves are
all photographers – recording their war, their fun, their observations
of what they find picturesque, their atrocities – and swapping images
among themselves and e-mailing them around the globe.

Intentionally taken to be sent back home as triumphant trophies or to be

emailed to colleagues, the pictures were a social gesture of bonding and
poaching. Some pictures allegedly served as screensavers on prison guards’
desktops, another sign of their function as ‘office jokes’ to be understood by
insiders only. The casualness and look-at-me-here enunciation of the Abu
Ghraib photographs, conveyed by the uniformed men and women whose
posture betrayed pride as if they had just caught a big fish, connotes the
function of these pictures as symbolic resources for communication. The last
thing their makers expected these pictures to be were objects of lasting
memory.
And yet, this is exactly how they ended up in the collective memory of
the American people. Once they had been intercepted and published in
newspapers and on television worldwide, they were reframed as evidence of
the army’s abhorrent behaviour as torturers posing triumphantly over their
helpless captives. The Abu Ghraib pictures became evidence in a military
trial that incriminated the perpetrators responsible for the abuse shown in
the pictures, but acquitted the invisible chain of command that obviously
condoned such behaviour. Perhaps most telling was the military’s response to
the Abu Ghraib debacle. Rather than condemning the practice depicted by
the images, the military subsequently banned personal photography from the
work floor; pictures made for private use could no longer be distributed
outside penitentiaries. The ‘incident’ resulted in stricter communication
regulations as well as a prohibition against taking and distributing personal
photographs on military premises.
Ironically, pictures that were casually mailed out as ephemeral ‘post-
cards’, meant to be thrown away after reading the message, became

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 permanently engraved on the consciousness of a generation; pictures sent
with a communicative intent ended up in America’s collective cultural
memory as painful visual evidence of its military’s hubris. The awareness that
any picture let loose on the internet can be endlessly recycled may lead to a
new attitude in taking pictures: anticipating future reuse, photographs are no
longer innocent personal keepsakes, but potential liabilities in someone’s
personal life or professional career. The lesson learned from the Abu Ghraib
pictures – beyond their horrendous political message – is that personal
digital photography can hardly be confined to private ‘grounds’; embedded
in networked systems, pictorial memory is forever distributed, perpetually
stored in the endless maze of virtual life.

CONCLUSION
The digital evolution that has shaped personal photography is anything but
an exclusive technological transformation. Rather, the shift in use and
function of the camera seems to suit a more general cultural condition that
may be characterized by terms such as manipulability, individuality,
communicability, versatility and ease of distribution. This cultural condition
has definitely affected the nature and status of photographs as building
blocks for personal identity. Even if the functions of capturing memory,
communicative experience and identity formation continue to coexist in
current uses of personal photography, their rebalanced significance
reverberates in crucial changes in our contemporary cultural condition.
Returning to the issue of power, it is difficult to conclude whether digital
photography has led to more or less control over our personal images,
pictures and memories. The interaction of image repertoires, blending
mental and cultural imaging processes, not only seems to reset our control
over ‘pictorial memory’ but implies a profound redefinition of the very term.
Photographs could never be qualified as truthful sources of personal
memory; yet, since the emergence of digital photography, pictorial manip-
ulation seems to be a default mode rather than an option. To some extent,
the camera allows more control over our memories, giving us the tools for
‘brushing up’ and reinvigorating remembrances of things past. In this day
and age, (digital) photographs allow subjects some measure of control over
their photographed appearance, inviting them to tweak and reshape their
public and private identities. As stated earlier, digital photography is not
the cause of the transformation of memory; the digital camera derives its
revamped application as a memory tool from a culture in which manip-
ulability and morphing are commonly accepted conditions for shaping
personhood. Flexibility and morphing do not apply exclusively to pictures as
shaping tools for personal memory, but more generally to bodies and things.
Memory, like photographs and bodies, can now be made picture perfect;
memory and photography change in conjunction with each other, adapting
to contemporary expectations and prevailing norms. Our photographs tell us

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who we want to be and how we want to remember; it is hard to imagine how
the wide availability of editing tools will not affect our desire to brush up our
past selves. Personal photography may become a lifelong exercise in revising
past desires and adjusting them to new expectations. Even if it still serves a
purpose as a memory tool, the digital camera is now seen as an instrument for
identity construction, with more power to shape autobiographical memories.
And yet, this same manipulative potential that empowers people to
shape their identity and memory may also be used by others to reshape that
image. The consequence of digital technology is that personal pictures can be
retouched without leaving traces and can be manipulated regardless of
ownership or intent of the ‘original’ picture, evidenced by the anecdote at the
beginning of this article about the student who was unpleasantly surprised to
find a doctored picture of herself mailed around to (anonymous) recipients.
Personal photographs are increasingly pulled out of the shoebox to be used
as public signifiers. Pictures once intended to remain in personal archives
increasingly enter the public domain, where they are invariably brushed up
or retouched to (retro)fit contemporary narratives. It is quite plausible that
personal pictures might emerge in entirely different public contexts, either as
testimony to a criminal on the run, as a memorial to a soldier who died in
the war, or as evidence of a politician’s excessive alcohol use in college
(Sturken, 1999). Like the pictures shown to subjects in psychologists’
experiments, we have no way of deciding whether they are true or false: is it
memory that manipulates pictures, or do we use pictures to create or adjust
memory? The digital age will set new standards for remembrance and recall:
the terms ‘true’ and ‘doctored’ will no longer apply to pictures, nor will we be
able to speak of ‘true’ and ‘false’ memories.
As shown in this article, the function of personal photography as an
act of memory is increasingly giving way to its formative, communicative
and experiential uses. Pictures taken by a cameraphone, meant to be expen-
dable souvenirs shared with co-workers, have a distinctly different discursive
power from that of our wall-mounted and framed black-and-white
photographs of our ancestors. We may now take pictures and distribute them
to a number of known and anonymous recipients. Networked systems define
new presentational contexts of personal pictures as sharing pictures becomes
the default mode of this cultural practice. In many ways, digital tools and
connective systems increase control over individuals’ image exposure,
granting them more power to present and shape themselves in public.
However, the flipside of this increased manipulability is a loss of
control over a picture’s framed meaning: pictures that are amenable to
effortless distribution over the internet are equally prone to unintended
repurposing. But since the framing of a picture is never fixed once and for all,
each re-materialization comes with its own illocutionary meaning attached,
and each reframing may render the ‘original’ purpose unrecognizable. So,
even if taken with a communicative use in mind, a picture may end up as a
perpetual object of (collective) cultural memory – as evidenced by the Abu

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 Ghraib pictures. The consequences of reframing and repurposing are
particularly poignant when pictures move seamlessly between private and
public contexts. Of course, this risk is never the direct implication of
photography’s digital technology, but it cannot be denied that digital media
have made reframing much easier and smoother. Distributing personal
pictures over the internet or by cameraphone, which is now a common way
of communication, intrinsically turns private pictures into public property
and therefore diminishes one’s power over their presentational context.
Anxiety over an individual’s ability to control his or her self-image
and public imago has not abated since the analogue days of personal
photography. On the contrary, image control is still a pressing concern in the
debates over personal photography in the digital age even if the parameters
for this concern have substantially shifted, adapting to new technological,
social and cultural conditions. We may hail the increased manipulability of
our self-image made easier by digital photography while at the same time
resenting our loss of power over how these images are framed in public
contexts. The enhanced versatility and multi-purposing of digital pictures
facilitate the promotion of one’s public image, whilst diminishing control
over what happens once a picture becomes part of a networked environment,
which changes its performative function each time the picture is accessed.
Due to this networking environment, the definition of personal memory is
gravitating towards distributed presence. Our ‘live pictures’ and ‘pictures of
life’ may become ‘pictures for life’ – even if unintentionally.

NOTES
1. This article deals with current socio-cultural practices of western
photography. Although the different uses of (digital) photography
in various parts of the world would be an interesting topic of
comparison, this is beyond the scope of this article. See, for
instance, Wright (2004) and Chalfen and Murui (2001).
2. I prefer the term ‘personal photography’ over commonly used terms
such as ‘amateur photography’ or ‘family photography’. The word
‘personal’ is used to distinguish it from professional photography,
but also avoids the troubling connotation of ‘amateurish’ in relation
to camera use. Family photography mistakenly presupposes the
presence of a familial context, whereas photography has always
been, and is increasingly, used for personal identity formation. For
an extensive discussion on ‘personal photography’, see Wells (1996)
and Lury (2002)
3. Software engineers are becoming more aware that the design of
picture management systems requires a profound understanding of
why and how users interact with their pictures: storing pictures in a
shoebox or sticking them into albums cannot simply be transposed
onto digital platforms (Rodden and Wood, 2003).

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 4. There is a large number of research groups reporting on the issue of
false memory in the case of both narrative and visual evidence. For
example, see Intraub and Hoffman (1992); Lindsay et al. (2004).
5. Research by cognitive psychologists focusing particularly on the role of
doctored photographs in relation to false memory is also widely avail-
able. See, for example, Garry and Gerrie (2005); Wade et al. (2002).
6. Not surprisingly, these scientific insights are gratefully deployed in
marketing and advertising departments in order to advance sales by
manipulating customers’ memories about their pasts and thus
influencing their future (buying) behaviour. What customers recall
about prior product or shopping experiences will differ from their
actual experiences if marketing campaigns refer to those past
experiences in positive ways (Zaltman, 2003).
7. Indeed, without digital photo enhancement equipment, cognitive
psychologists would have a hard time conducting their research on
manipulated autobiographical memory in the first place; only with
the help of computer paintbrush programs can they make doctored
photographs look immaculate.
8. In recent years, there has been an explosion of theory on the
semiotics and ontology of the digital image but it is beyond the
scope of this chapter to review the literature in this area. As a
general introduction to the digitization of visual culture in general
and photography in particular, see Lister (1995) and Mules (2000).
A more philosophical introduction to ontology of the image can be
found in Rodowick (2001).
9. See, for example, the software offered by VisionQuest Images at
http://www.visionquestimages.com/index.htm (consulted 8 April
2006). A package called Picture Yourself Graphics [www.pygraphics.
com] encourages playful collages and manipulation of personal
pictures.
10. Asian-American student Chris Lin, for instance, admits in his
photoblog that he likes to picture himself with brown hair; he also
re-colours the faces of his friends’ images to see if it enhances their
appearance. See Chris Lin’s photoblog at http://a.trendyname.org/
archives/category/personal/ (consulted 8 April 2006). Nancy Burson,
New York-based artist and a pioneer in morphing technology,
attracted a lot of media attention with her design of a so-called
Human Race Machine, a digital method that effortlessly morphs
racial features and skin colours in pictures of people’s faces. For more
details on the work of Nancy Burson, see http://www.nancyburson.
com/human_fr.html (consulted 8 April 2006). Her Human Race
Machine featured in many magazines and television programs in
the spring of 2006, most notably in the Oprah Winfrey show
11. The pictures were first made public in the press by journalist
Seymour Hersh (2004).

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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
JOSÉ VAN DIJCK is a Professor of Media and Culture at the University of
Amsterdam (The Netherlands) and is currently Dean of Humanities. She is
the author of Manufacturing Babies and Public Consent: Debating the New
Reproductive Technologies (New York University Press, 1995) and
ImagEnation: Popular Images of Genetics (New York University Press, 1998).
Her latest book is entitled The Transparent Body: A Cultural Analysis of
Medical Imaging (University of Washington Press, 2005). Her research areas
include media and science, (digital) media technologies, and television and
culture. This article is part of a book entitled Mediated Memories in the
Digital Age (Stanford University Press, forthcoming).

Address: University of Amsterdam, Department of Media Studies,

Turfdraagsterpad g, 1012 XT Amsterdam, The Netherlands. [email:
J.F.T.M.vanDijck@uva.nl]

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