To mark the release of his Verso book The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media, social theorist Nathan Jurgenson is joined by author, curator and lecturer Annebella Pollen to reflect on how smart phones and social media infiltrate nearly every aspect of our social lives.
The Social Photo develops bold new ways of understanding the transformations these image-making and sharing technologies have ushered in: the selfie, the faux-vintage photo, the self-destructing image, the food photo. Thinking about photography has been slow to catch up with these major fixtures of everyday experience and is still often treated only in terms of art or journalism. In his book Jurgenson shows how these devices and platforms have remade the world and our understanding of ourselves within it.