The role of photography in social media

In 2008 I photographed so called traceurs, people that practice really physical sport or discipline of parkour. I really tried my best to make something special out of it. While focusing on their relationship with their practicing environment I came up with a series of pictures that made me quite proud at the moment. The proportions in the images really show how these running and jumping people were tiny compared to their strange urban environment.

After some thorough selecting and post-processing I showed them my final product. Their replies?  “Cool, I’m in 3 pictures.” To some people photography is a way to express themselves, an exploration of techniques or a quest in communication. To most people however, it is just a fancy way of saying: “Look, I was there!”

The last two weeks I have been busy at the Kolabo Summerlab where Omnipresent Social Technology is the subject. You can also call it ubiquitous computing, ubicomp or the internet of things. To me, it is the idea that we’ve been working on all this computing technology for years. We even dare to call the internet social. But so far, all this technology has been moving us away from other people. And now it is time to turn that all around. Ubiquitous computing is about putting the computer back where it should be, in service of man and supporting our social life in a non-intrusive way.

On Friday there is a small exhibition and some drinks to conclude the summerlab. Discussing all the other projects made me wonder. Where is photography in all this? Could I add something of a photographic nature to this exhibition?

Right now, when you look at so called social media like Facebook, photography forms the link between real life events and the way they are experienced and remembered digitally. If photography is nothing more than a “look, I was there” or “yes, this event really happened” to most, then it is a real challenge to use this medium to enhance the physical, and not just the digital experience. Some of the options I have so far:

Sticking to the essence and show them what it really is. Take pictures of people holding signs. “I am at the Kolabo Summerlab Exhibition.”


Flipping it all around. Let the background or the sign be the opposite of the truth. Place them on a virtual beach for example.

Take no pictures. Let the visitors find out for themselves how they are going to prove their attendance. This might even give the event a more exclusive or obscure feeling afterward for the people that missed it.

Inverse photography. Don’t take pictures but project pictures of other locations, events or things taking place on the social web at that moment.

So as you can see, it is quite a thing to tackle here. Essentially, photography and social media share a lot of characteristics. I’ve got some work to do here. Leave a comment if you have any helpful additions, links or suggestions.

-Erik Kroes