Mass Photography

Collective Histories of Everyday Life

Annebella Pollen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000213416
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia social

With increasingly accessible camera technology, crowdsourced public media projects abound like never before. Such projects often seek to secure a snapshot of a single day in order to establish communities and create visual time capsules for the future. Mass Photography: Collective Histories of Everyday Life assesses the potential of these popular moment-in-time projects by examining their current day prevalence and their historical predecessors. Through archival research and interviews with organisers and participants, it examines, for the first time, the vast photographic collections resulting from such projects, analysing their structures and systems, their aims and objectives, and their claims and promises. The central case study is the 55, 000 photographs submitted to One Day for Life in 1987, which aimed, in its own time, to be 'the biggest photographic event the world had ever seen'.

1
Days in the Life

From Mass Observation to Crowdsourcing

In the last decade, the range of temporally specific photographic projects that have attempted to harness the power of the networked amateur for various historical, sociological, charitable or simply "fun" collective purposes is extraordinary Their popularity is testament to a palpable hunger for participatory media projects in contemporary culture. While some projects work on a local level, corralling community identities around geographical locations, others operate nationally or even globally

With ever-wider camera ownership and ever-increasing internet connectivity, many digital photographic projects now focus on a specific time as well as a specific day, such as the two attempts at A Minute in the Life at 2pm GMT, 2 June 2007 and 20 March 2010, and the rather larger New York Times-organised A Moment in Time, which took place at 3pm GMT, 2 May 2009. In 2011, the Picturing the Seven Billion photography project, again organised by The New York Times, aimed to generate a time capsule of photographs, ostensibly taken to mark the symbolic moment that the seven billionth child was born, in order to offer them a view of the world to lookback on in twenty years' time. At 11.11am on 11.11.11, World Wide Moment was launched, and this invested minute in time also marked the second attempt at One Day on Earth. The latter project was an example of another closely associated body of projects utilising the increasing availability of networked technologies and media forums such as YouTube, that collate moving image submissions from around the world, either for purposes of active citizenship, consciousness or fundraising. As mentioned in the Introduction, this includes Life in a Day, Britain in a Day and, by the same team, the narrower Christmas in a Day, launched in 2012, sponsored by Sainsbury's supermarket, and shown in the form of an advertisement during the festive season of 2013. These moving image projects follow the lead of their photographic precursors but capitalise on the increasingly widespread availability of moving image technologies.

At the time of writing yet more temporally clustered photographic events are planned; despite their plenitude and the huge number of submissions they aspire to - and sometimes achieve - the desire to repeat new variations is not yet exhausted. Each project may feature slightly different names, aims, organisers, sponsors and formal outcomes but each are underpinned by the same impetus: to harness and focus the potential of large masses of photographers towards a collective vision of everyday life.

From Life in a Day to A Day in the World: recent mass-participation projects

The role of the internet as "participatory media" has been the driving force for many collective projects, both photographic and otherwise. As the director of Life in a Day stated, for example: "the Internet is a great metaphor for and a creator of connectedness" ("Life in a Day: About the Production", 2011). The potential of the internet for apparently democratic communication and mass-collaborative action has been written about under a number of different neologisms in the last decade. Concepts such as social networking, citizen journalism and crowdsourcing are becoming familiar terms to describe the user-generated content of interactive new media forms. Variously heralded in popular publications as a new democratic opportunity for emancipatory communication and creativity, or as an unregulated space where "the cult of the amateur" threatens expertise, quality control and professionalism, a burgeoning range of popular texts, from Here Comes Everybody (Shirky, 2009) to We-Think (Leadbeater, 2009), debate such changes.

Photography in the context of the internet has been celebrated as "The Age of the Amateur" (Rusbridger, 2007). The way that digital technologies appear to have fundamentally altered amateur photographic practice - in terms of photographic access, multiplicity and ubiquity, their ease of capture, circulation, sharing and disposal, for example - has been the subject of significant enquiry, much of which has trumpeted the changes as "epochal" (for just two examples, predicting and reviewing the changes, see Rubenstein & Sluis, 2008; Slater, 1999). Despite these grand claims, there is an emerging scholarly consensus that some of the early excitement about digital technology's transformative effects on traditional media was somewhat overstated, and several critics persuasively argue that continuity and intensification of practice is rather more prevalent than revolution (Hand, 2012; G. Rose, 2010). Nonetheless, it is undeniable that new technological opportunities for mass-participation via networked photography have been enabled through the growth of innovative photo sharing websites such as Flickr, and latterly through Instagram and Facebook. Yet while these sites offer platforms for uploading and exchange at ever-increasing volumes, new digital mass-participation projects tend to aim for a narrow incision or cross-section of mass photographic practice; as the organisers of one put it, "With this project we aim to challenge the random presence of images on the web. By adding direction, structure and context this project will produce photographs that are relevant and comparable" ("Picture Today for Tomorrow: A Day in the World", 2011). Without a temporally restricted shape, frame or focus, mass photographic practice in its full multitude may be too broad to be digested or even seen.

Across many of the projects, images included in promotional material - even in advance of any submissions - and the projects' rationale indicate shared desires and patterns for both aesthetics and subjects. Talk of "intimacy and variety", "ordinary people" and "real life" punctuates the press releases, while images show daily life, especially at leisure, alongside peak moments and simple pleasures. This was certainly the tone of and the themes evident in the completed 2011 film, Life in a Day [Figure 1.1, colour section]. In a midnight-to-midnight format, juxtaposed extremes of experience across the globe - with poverty next to wealth and beauty next to horror - abutted montage sequences all about similarity: walking, eating and sleeping as universal patterns to a day. An "all life is here" approach linked disparate social groups and nations, and a narrative structure with central characters and stories and an overarching, emotive instrumental soundtrack, brought the diversity of banality and spectacle, agony and ecstasy, into coherence.

Reception of the film was mixed. As a snapshot of public appraisal, reviewers of the DVD on Amazon.com seem largely split between extremes, with viewers celebrating, on the one hand, the film's unique capacity to capture and celebrate what it means to be human, and one the other, the film's overwhelming level of banal detail. Press appraisals tended towards the cynical, with one negative review saying "Imagine if all the world's people were patches on a giant quilt of humanity, and the weight of that quilt was slowly suffocating you: that's the experience of Life in a Day in a nutshell" (Brunick, 2011, p. 43). It is certainly true that there are times when the films in Macdonald's ... in a Day series come very close to the manufactured euphoria of an insurance advert, with pure-faced children laughing in close-up, generic heart-warming scenes of candle lanterns being released, clouds scudding spectacularly across skylines and dandelion clocks being blown in hazy sunshine, for example. Yet, as another critic noted, we should, perhaps, not have expected otherwise: "the radical nature of the film's construction does not necessarily make for radical content" (Pulver, 2013). The series has as many touches of candid-camera comedies as art house cinema-stylings, and while the films conspicuously (and rather surprisingly) do not feature any sex, they also do not shy away from confrontation, with powerful scenes in abattoirs and coverage of human disasters (for example, in the inclusion of deaths at Berlin's Love Parade in Life in a Day).

Life in a Day's mixed reception and its adaptability to a range of readings is shaped by the diverse nature of its contents; its bittersweet character is achieved through accumulated, juxtaposed fragments, and its emotional impact is enhanced by an emotive soundtrack. The particular affective quality of the film's "real life" and "people-like-us" humanist aspect is undoubtedly what led Sainsbury's supermarket to sponsor an iteration of the concept for its 2013 Christmas advert. Competition between high-street chains for innovative, big-budget and ultimately sentimental advertising has become a staple of the festive season and the final commercial edit of the hour-long Christmas in a Day film certainly contained the comedy and tragedy of laughter and tears in its three-minute montage of familiar and familial moments.

As a film which claimed to be the "first social media movie" (Benigno, 2011), the production methods of Life in a Day understandably came under as much scrutiny as its contents. In particular, the collective authorship of the film was perceived as an innovation - all participants whose film clips were selected from the 85,000 submissions were listed as co-directors. For some, however, the collective authorship of the project only reached as far as the submission pool; decisions about selections and editorial structure took place through a stratified process, whereby film students made the first major editorial eliminations, primed by the directors vision, and latterly the director and editor pieced together a narrative structure from this pre-selection, which owes as much to their own preferences as to the material submitted.

For those in pursuit of a crowdsourced project in the original sense of the term, as coined by Jeff Howe (2009), where all aspects of a problem are solved through the creative collaboration of disparate decision-makers, only some elements of the film were truly crowdsourced. Notably, the content was publicly authored but not the decision-making about the frame, structure, narrative, promotion, distribution and so forth. This process - whereby creative product is freely given in exchange for potential self-promotion, at the expense of any participation in its creative development - has led some to describe the project as exploitative and as part of the precarious labour exchanges of the twenty-first-century economy rather than the spontaneous gathering of inspired amateurs around a creative opportunity (Moner, 2011). Certainly, as Daren Brabham has argued, if Life in a Day followed the form of other collective, so-called crowdsourced media projects, its content may well be made up of underpaid or unpaid contributions by outsourced skilled and trained professionals or aspiring professionals rather than the romantic raw material of amateurs with so-called innocent eyes (Brabham, 2011).

The same critics also note the financial asymmetries of such productions. As William Moner (2011) puts it, "July 24, 2011, will be payday for the filmmakers. For the sources comprising the undefined crowd', it will be just another day in the life." While most mass-participation projects are free to enter, with costs underwritten by the large bodies of high-profile sponsors that typically accompany the most ambitious endeavours, they usually feature a competitive aspect where "the best" or "most evocative" images are selected for publication, exhibition or broadcast. While the projects are largely framed as democratic documentary experiments open to all, they can result in pay-to-view films, expensive hardback books and, in all cases, free advertising for the organising companies and their sponsors. Some mass-participation projects - such as One Day for Life, which will be discussed in detail in later chapters - use their projects as a means to generate charitable donations, albeit within the commercial partnership structures of the professional charitable industry. Others have more nebulous aims "to raise awareness" rather than money for environmental or humanitarian issues.

The 2012 global photographic project A Day in the World certainly foregroun-ded the compassionate aspect of its activity, as broadly community-building, educational and life-enhancing. From Archbishop Desmond Tutu's foreword to the book, to the opening of the exhibition by the Deputy Secretary-General of the UN, the potential of the project as a global force for peace and understanding was emphasised:

This project vividly brings to life a truth we all instinctively understand - the truth of our fundamental equality. ... These images remind me of Article One of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.

The Deputy Secretary-General continued, "This powerful exhibition, A Day in the World, reminds us that we should cherish every moment - and that we should treasure each other and our planet" (Eliasson, 2013). Although the project did not deliberately seek to raise money for a cause, or highlight a specific social issue, the conceptual leap from humanism to humanitarianism is a short one.

This was in part shaped by the nature of the photos submitted. As the organis-ers claimed, "The photos express love and care for those around us"; it was also noted that, among the submissions, "there were almost no photos of conflict and anger" ("A Recollection of May 15" 2012). Some critics have argued that the lack of individual vision in mass-participation projects tends to create warm and fuzzy overviews. As journalist Andrew Pulver (2013) has suggested, "the hive mind produces a cheery consensus". He goes on to observe that collective projects are marred by their mass structure, arguing "you still need an individual with a contrary, risk-taking intelligence to dig out something different." It may well be that it is the celebratory frame of many mass-participation projects that invites a certain kind of subject matter; although, as will be discussed, the swingeing edits that eliminate the vast majority of submissions from the final editorial view also have a powerful shaping effect on the resulting tone. Even if 1000 photographs or 1000 film clips are included in the final selection (in the case of A Day in the World and Life in a Day respectively), that still means that around 99 per cent of the total pool are cast aside.

A Day in the World, shared many qualities with Life in a Day, even though its thousand-long final selection comprised photographs rather than film clips, and its final outcome was a heavyweight hardback book and an outdoor exhibition using public display technologies in a range of global cities rather than a feature film [Figure 1.2, colour section]. Similarly underwritten by massive financial sponsorship by major companies (in this case Eriksson and Fotolog rather than LG, National Geographic and YouTube), A Day in the World also aimed for diversity in detail, the juxtaposition of exceptional spectacle with daily drudgery, and the abuttal of poverty and privilege in provocative contrast. Like Life in a Day, the editorial sequencing of the global submissions set up visual patterns of dissonance and similarity, with double-page montage spreads of dwellings and meals, for example, as shared necessities differing only in location.

As with many, indeed most, mass-participation projects, the scale of the massing in A Day in the World was emphasised throughout. More than 60,000 people in 190 countries participated and 100,000 pictures were submitted. As organisers described it, "the initiative became the most comprehensive documentation of a single day in human history through digital photography." A Day in the World was billed as "the largest global photography exhibition ever staged", as the digital displays numbered 85,000 across twenty-two countries; the estimated worldwide audience for these was expected to be 46 million ("A Day In The World: 22 Countries Take Part In Largest Simultaneous Photo Exhibition Ever", 2012). The superlatives continued with the web resources for submissions being described as the "biggest searchable online picture archive of its type" (Gallery, 2012). Mass-participation media projects' meaning is in the mass. Each attempts to outstrip the last in reach, submissions, outcomes or effect in an attempt to claim optimal significance.

One of the most striking aspects of A Day in the World is its advance sense of historical value. While many, if not all, mass-participation media projects use the language of historical chronicles, time capsules and collective memory in their promotion or appraisal, not all have clear strategies for preservation. Exactly how (or if) the material of these new media projects - either in their full or edited formats - will be preserved is rarely addressed. Some projects note that there will be an online resource, yet we know that technologies change so fast that digital storage is profoundly unstable. Indeed, with some of the projects mentioned, even the technology for uploading and viewing visual material during the live period of the project was unsatisfactory for the purpose; the notion of a public archive or a time capsule is perhaps more of a notional draw, and a means of conferring significance, than a reality. A Day in the World, however, explicitly sought to "picture today for tomorrow" in its publicity, and preservation of the resulting images "for eternity" was noted as "an integral purpose" (The Time Capsule, 2012). This aim was borne out in the specialist preservation methods applied by the organisers to the submitted material. In March 2013, a purpose-built time capsule containing a computer with all submitted photos, photographic prints of a selection of the submitted pictures and the A Day in the World book was ceremonially sealed, underground, inside an eighteenth-century copper mine at Falun World Heritage site in Sweden [Figure 1.3]. The attention to detail - including using a special stainless steel alloy for the construction of the capsule, and injecting it with argon gas to ensure a "reaction-free environment" - indicated the seriousness with which the organ-isation viewed its prec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Approaching Mass Photography: Methods, Models and Debates
• Chapter 1 Days in the Life: from Mass Observation to Crowdsourcing
• Chapter 2 One Day for Life: Charity, Competition, Archive
• Chapter 3 Everyday Life and Ordinary Photography: Documentary Hopes and Expectations
• Chapter 4 Scale and Monumentality: Collective Identity and Imagined Community
• Chapter 5 Humanism and Compassion: Photographic Democracy and Emotional Affect
• Chapter 6 Competitive Aesthetics: Art, Amateurism and Ambition
• Chapter 7 Visual Time Capsules: Photographic Memory and Historical Desire
• Chapter 8 Conclusion: Legacies, Promises and Potential
• Appendix: Research Methods
• Bibliography
• Index