The Nostalgic Selfie: The shortcomings of the Dear Photograph project

The Dear Photograph Instagram project provokes social media users’ nostalgic memories. This project asks users to dig into their family photographs, to re-photograph them at the original location, to comment on them and to share these personal entries. The analogue image, then, becomes a digitized, nostalgic version of oneself, a kind of nostalgic selfie, offered on Instagram as both a representation and memorialization of the past but also as communicating the experience of that past as viewed in the present. The project utilizes the technique of re-photography and the affordances of the Instagram platform, but to what end? What are the “unconscious optics” (Benjamin qtd in Hirsch 117) within this project? What are the effects of this project to participants’ construction of self