Dominant Participants and Active Producers: Popular Photographic Cultures in Photography Studies

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, and for the first time in history, virtually all disciplines within the arts, humanities and social sciences have their own photography scholars. Historiographical at its core, in this paper I surveyed the development of photographic scholarship from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. I showed how the study of photography has gradually moved from exclusive examinations of photographic visual content to investigations of the social and cultural work photographs do in public and intimate environments alike. Through analyses of influential studies, I identified the origin of this transition in the prominent interest scholars took during the 1990s in popular practices of photographic production, uses and consumption. I argued that following their engagement with popular photographic cultures, photographic scholarship of the last two decades recognises photographs as underrated research resources. Photography studies have consequently began considering their contribution to the elaboration of historical, cultural and social studies through explorations of the visual, material and affective significance of photographs within professional, creative, and other everyday frameworks. In the twenty-first century, the popularisation of photographic practice through the incorporation of cameras into smart technologies makes it more difficult to imagine what the personal and collective experience of everyday life could be without photography. This reality turns photographs into organising forces of everyday lived experience, further accelerating scholarly interest in photographic mass production, and cementing the status of photographs as dominant participants in popular culture as well as its active producers.