Black Screens: A Visual Essay on Mobile Screens in the City

Abstract

This visual essay, along with the Black Screens photographic series upon which it is based, has two aims. On the one hand, it is intended as a visual exploration of the increasingly central role that mobile phones have in our everyday lives. In a time when digital technologies are ubiquitous in urban settings of developed countries, the images reflect, visually, on what this pervasiveness looks like. The other aim is to present suggestions of how methods borrowed and/or inspired by art and street photography could potentially expand the toolkit of ethnographic inquiry.

Keywords

black and white photography digital ethnography mobile phones street photography visual essay

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Abbot

(1997) Changing New York. New York: The Museum of the City of New York.

Arora

(2019) The Next Billion Users: Digital Life beyond the West. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Atget

(2008) Paris. London: Taschen.

Balet

(2012) Strangers in the Light. Göttingen: Steidl. Available at: https://www.catherinebalet.com/strangers-in-the-light (accessed 15 June 2019).

Becher

(2004) Typologies of Industrial Buildings. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Berger

Mohr

(2010) A Seventh Man. London: Verso.

Berry

Schleser

(eds) (2014) Mobile Media Making in an Age of Smartphones. New York: Springer.

Cartier-Bresson

(1999) The Mind’s Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers. New York: Aperture.

Chun

WHK

(2016) Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

10.

David

(2010) Camera phone images, videos and live streaming: A contemporary visual trend. Visual Studies 25(1): 89–98.

11.

De Souza e Silva

Frith

(2012) Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces: Locational Privacy, Control, and Urban Sociability. London: Routledge.

12.

Edwards

(2012) The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination, 1885–1918. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

13.

Eijkelboom

(2014) People of the Twenty-First Century. London: Phaidon.

14.

Evans

(2004) Many Are Called. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

15.

Felton

(2016) Photoviz: Visualizing Information through Photography. Berlin: Gestalten.

16.

Frosh

(2015) Selfies| The gestural image: The selfie, photography theory, and kinesthetic sociability. International Journal of Communication 9: 22.

17.

Funch

(2006–2011) Babel Tales. Available at: http://www.peterfunch.com/babel-tales/ (accessed 15 June 2019).

18.

Global System for Mobile Communications Association (GSMA, 2019) Available at: https://www.gsma.com/ (accessed 15 June 2019).

19.

Goffman

(1978) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

20.

Gómez Cruz

(2016a) Trajectories: Digital/visual data on the move. Visual Studies 31: 335–343.

21.

Gómez Cruz

(2016b) Photo-genic assemblages: Photography as a connective interface. In: Gómez Cruz

Lehmuskallio

(eds) Digital Photography and Everyday Life: Empirical Studies on Material Visual Practices. London: Routledge, 228–242.

22.

Gómez Cruz

(2017) Immersive reflexivity: Using 360° cameras in ethnographic fieldwork. In: Gómez Cruz

et al. (eds) Refiguring Techniques in Digital Visual Research. New York: Springer, 25–38.

23.

Gye

(2007) Picture this: The impact of mobile camera phones on personal photographic practices. Continuum 21(2): 279–288.

24.

Haddon

(2013) Mobile media and children. Mobile Media & Communication 1: 89–95.

25.

Haddon

(2017) Domestication and mobile telephony. In: Katz

(ed.) Machines that Become Us. London: Routledge, 43–55.

26.

Higgins

Kozloff

(2014) The World Atlas of Street Photography. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

27.

Hjorth

Burgess

Richardson

(2012) Studying Mobile Media: Cultural Technologies, Mobile Communication, and the iPhone. London: Routledge.

28.

Horst

Miller

(2006) The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication. Oxford: Berg.

29.

Ingold

(2013) Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London: Routledge.

30.

Ito

Okabe

Matsuda (2005) Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

31.

Ling

Horst

(2011) Mobile Communication in the Global South. London: Sage.

32.

Luvaas

. (2016) Street Style: An Ethnography of Fashion Blogging. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

33.

Maynard

(2000) The Engine of Visualization: Thinking through Photography. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

34.

Metzker

(1999) City Stills. London: Prestel Publishers.

35.

Miller

(2014) The fourth screen: Mediatization and the smartphone. Mobile Media & Communication 2: 209–226.

36.

Mirzoeff

(2016) How to See the World: An Introduction to Images, from Self-Portraits to Selfies, Maps to Movies, and More. New York: Basic Books.

37.

Muybridge

(1955[1901]) The Human Figure in Motion. New York: Dover Publications.

38.

Nightingale

(2007) The cameraphone and online image sharing. Continuum 21: 289–301.

39.

Palmer

(2012) iPhone photography: Mediating visions of social space. In: Studying Mobile Media: Cultural Technologies, Mobile Communication and the iPhone. London: Routledge, 93–105.

40.

Parke

(1999) Dream/Life. Kirribilli, NSW: Hot Chilli Press.

41.

Pickersgill

(2014–) Photoseries: Removed. Available at: https://www.removed.social/series (accessed 20 August 2019).

42.

Pinney

(2011) Photography and Anthropology. London: Reaktion Books.

43.

Sander

(2013) People of the 20th Century, rev. edn. Munich: Schirmer-Mosel.

44.

Schroeder

(2010) Mobile phones and the inexorable advance of multimodal connectedness. New Media & Society 12: 75–90.

45.

Taylor

(1996) Iconophobia. Transition 69: 64–88.

46.

Turkle

(2008) Always-On/Always-On-You: The Tethered Self in Katz

James E.

(Ed.) Handbook of Mobile Communication Studies. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 121-137

47.

Turkle

(2017) Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. London: Hachette UK.

48.

Vannini

(2015) Non-Representational Methodologies: Re-Envisioning Research. London: Routledge.

49.

Webb

Norris-Webb

(2014) On Street Photography and the Poetic Image. New York: Aperture.

50.

Westerbeck

Meyerowitz

(2017) Bystander: A History of Street Photography. London: Lawrence King.

51.

Willim

(2017) Evoking imaginaries: Art probing, ethnography and more-than-academic practice. Sociological Research Online 22: 208–231.

52.

Zylinska

(2017) Nonhuman Photography. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.