Still Searching…

The conditions governing the digital world have led to a radical diversification not only in photography but also in the theory that underpins it and the history that is written about it. Photographic media and forms are incorporated into complex tech technological, capitalist and ideological networks; the experts who are conducting scholarly research into the role of photographic images thus come from very different disciplines. The expansion of the discourse surrounding these images is also reflected in Still Searching…, the blog on photographic theory that was initiated by Fotomuseum Winterthur in 2012 and which subjects all aspects of photography and its role in visual culture to interdisciplinary scrutiny. The bloggers invited to the online format operate at the forefront of research and enhance our awareness of current issues that are relevant to photography.

Blog series: Screens Shot

Jacob Gaboury | 29.05. – 15.07.2019
Screens Shot

Until mid-July, Jacob Gaboury’s blog series will engage the screenshot as a contemporary photographic object and vernacular practice for the documentation and preservation of computational interaction. Screenshots are one of the most pervasive forms of computational photography today, but their application is wildly variable and largely dependent on the cultures of use in which they are situated. To understand the screenshot as a unified technique for the mediation of computational systems, this series traces the multiple and competing histories of the screenshot and its evolution alongside the graphical computer throughout the 20th century. Ultimately these posts examine the screenshot as a window into the mundane and vernacular cultures of everyday computing.

Techniques for Secondary Mediation

Wednesday, 29.05.2019

<p>Screenshots are the snapshots of our computers. They capture the movement and forms of everyday life as it is lived through the interface of a computational device. Given the trend, since at least the 1970s, toward media convergence, in which existing media forms are subsumed and transformed by digitization, today most any medium or practice that can be displayed on a computer screen may therefore be captured as a screenshot.</p>

Picturing Computation

Monday, 10.06.2019

<p>In <a href="https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/still-searching/articles/156214_techniques_for_secondary_mediation" target="_blank" rel="noopener">my last post </a>I suggested the screenshot exemplified the latest iteration of a much broader technique for the secondary mediation of an existing visual medium, one which has risen to prominence over the past forty years as part of the convergence of all visual media with the screens of modern computational devices. In this post I want to move away from broad generalizations and ask what the screenshot <em>is</em> as a material practice tied to computation as a distinct technical form.</p>

What You See Is What You Get

Friday, 21.06.2019

<p>Having described some of the technical means by which screenshots were produced prior to the development of the modern computer screen, it seems important to note that my use of this term – screenshot – has been almost entirely anachronistic. In practice the term does not appear until the 1980s, and is used primarily to describe the practice of photographing the graphical displays of early computer screens for use in early gaming and PC magazines, as well as in visual fields like graphic design.</p>

Screen Selfies and High Scores

Friday, 05.07.2019

<p>This week I’d like to return to a question that will only become more important as we move closer to the present: what exactly does a screenshot capture? What forms of life are made visible in the documentation of our interaction with computational screens? What cultures of use arise from or are premised on the ability to share the often intimate ways we use computational technologies?</p>

Screenshot or It Didn’t Happen

Monday, 15.07.2019

<p>I now find myself with the dangerous task of speaking to the present, and addressing how the seventy-year history of this complex and overburdened practice has been refigured, repurposed, and reimagined. Perhaps unsurprisingly there is no single answer, as the screenshot has become altogether diffuse in contemporary digital culture, and is used for any number of everyday tasks.</p>