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Review: The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media, by Nathan Jurgenson

The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media , by Nathan Jurgenson. Verso, 2019. 144 pp./$19.95 (sb).



Snapchat sociologist Nathan Jurgenson's new book, The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media , is a sprawling consideration of social media as a new photographic ecosystem. Jurgenson crystallizes a working definition of the “social photo” that works against the widespread dismissal of contemporary media culture as socially invalid and inauthentic. It also delineates the replacement of photographic nostalgia with ephemerality and reconsiders documentary vision in light of the social media feed. Jurgenson states that he aims “to sensitize more than convince,” and The Social Photo does ultimately fall short of any unified theory of social media photography (11). It skirts both the social-scientific evidence and theoretical depth that could have made a more meaningful contribution to the literature, but it seeds a rethinking of mass photography and does so fashionably.

Jurgenson ascribes three primary qualities to social photography, which he describes as “a type of photography made ubiquitous by networked, digital sharing” (8). It prioritizes communication over aesthetics; its images are properly understood in streams, rather than singly; and its ephemerality is key. Social photography encompasses cultural practices that surpass art history and artworld criticism, and Jurgenson makes a useful case that the presuppositions of aesthetic supremacy, technical importance, and visual originality are not productive measures of …