How digital photography remade our world

The selfie, the faux-vintage photo, the self-destructing image, the food photo-these new visual forms and the devices and platforms that facilitate them have fomented a cultural revolution. Not only has the art of photography and the industry around it been transformed, but the way we under-stand ourselves has changed. The Social Photo provides a language and conceptual framework to comprehend photography in the age of social media. This updated edition includes a new preface contemplating the fate of the social photo in the era of AI-generated images.

"Like Susan Sontag's On Photography to which it self-consciously responds, The Social Photo is slim, hard-bitten and picture-free. For if the average photo is ever dumber, photography matters even more; the social photo, in Mr. Jurgenson's phrase, has effected a "fusion of media and bodies" that has made every gallerygoer a cyborg." - New York Times (Top Art Books of 2019)

"Jurgenson is a good guide to our times" - TLS

"Jurgenson puts forth the useful proposition that most online photos are about sharing experiences, not creating memories.units of communication, more emojis or hieroglyphics than portraits; they have little context, aren't discernibly located anywhere, and typically come in the aggregate. For the most part, it wouldn't really matter if they existed in twenty years." - New Yorker

"Timely...Jurgenson puts the social photo in a broader context of photographic history in a way that should appeal to even the sniffiest critic" - Economist

"[in The Social Photo], Jurgenson suggests that in today's ocean of images, the traditional way we have looked at pictures is outdated. He suggests a new way to understand them, one that is "less art historical and more social theoretical"." - artnet News

"Jurgenson beautifully connects the newfound social documentary style with the history of photography and paints a picture of the similarities and differences of traditional photography and what he deems the new 'social photos.'" - Communication Booknotes Quarterly

"A lively and provocative read." - Los Angeles Times

"A refreshing respite from most of the commentary streaming from our devices today" - Financial Times