The Nostalgic Selfie: The shortcomings of the Dear Photograph project

Location

Sheridan College, Session A: Room H114

Start Date

24-10-2018 11:00 AM

End Date

24-10-2018 12:00 PM

Description

The Dear Photograph Instagram project provokes social media users’ nostalgic memories. This project asks users to dig into their family photographs, to re-photograph them at the original location, to comment on them and to share these personal entries. The analogue image, then, becomes a digitized, nostalgic version of oneself, a kind of nostalgic selfie, offered on Instagram as both a representation and memorialization of the past but also as communicating the experience of that past as viewed in the present. The project utilizes the technique of re-photography and the affordances of the Instagram platform, but to what end? What are the “unconscious optics” (Benjamin qtd in Hirsch 117) within this project? What are the effects of this project to participants’ construction of self?

Share

COinS
GOAL 4: Quality Education

click icon to learn more

 
Oct 24th, 11:00 AM Oct 24th, 12:00 PM

The Nostalgic Selfie: The shortcomings of the Dear Photograph project

Sheridan College, Session A: Room H114

The Dear Photograph Instagram project provokes social media users’ nostalgic memories. This project asks users to dig into their family photographs, to re-photograph them at the original location, to comment on them and to share these personal entries. The analogue image, then, becomes a digitized, nostalgic version of oneself, a kind of nostalgic selfie, offered on Instagram as both a representation and memorialization of the past but also as communicating the experience of that past as viewed in the present. The project utilizes the technique of re-photography and the affordances of the Instagram platform, but to what end? What are the “unconscious optics” (Benjamin qtd in Hirsch 117) within this project? What are the effects of this project to participants’ construction of self?