What Does the Photoblog Want

What does the photoblog want? This is a provocation and a puzzle: while social and technical possibilities for photography multiply wildly, there has been a seizure in the critical writing which addresses photography. There are analogue cameras and digital cameras, phones with cameras, cult cameras (Lomo, L’espion), there are websites and chat groups for photography, there is software for the manipulation of photography, printers for digital cameras, services that will print uploaded digital photographs on photo-quality paper, there are websites to which you can send your digital photos directly from your phone – and this is only a small list, a sense of the possibilities. In the writing about photography, however, what you often get are versions of a debate which never fails, somehow, to centre on the status of the Real in relation to photography, although the value-encoded terms used to articu-late this debate can differ: reality or confection, evidence or artistry, document or statement. But despite these consistencies in the literature, a photograph’s uncertain connection to the real life in which it is made renders it a paradox at the level of being (what it is), and equivocal at the level of its expressive content (what it means, or knows). What do we see when we look at a photograph? And what does this have to do with what we feel about them? These questions have been often asked. While there is no apparent agreement about the extent that the Real inhabits the photograph, or to what counteracting degree subjectivity asserts itself, there does seem to be almost unanimous (though unacknowledged) agreement subtending these debates that the Real is the real issue. I think Sarah Kember (2003: 203) i