The Smartphone Camera and the Material Politics of Visibility

As the smartphone camera sits at the center of modern protestmovements, the following essay explores the power relationships thatextend from the device’s circuitry and drive its cultural deployment.

THE SMARTPHONE CAMERA AND THE MATERIALPOLITICS OF VISIBILITY

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May 14, 2015

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Amid the social and political upheavals of recent years, the smartphone

camera has gained a particular kind of social agency. During the Arab

Spring protests of 2011, commentators in academia and the mainstream

media argued that these devices offered a new form of social organization

that presaged democratic mobilization and governance. Elsewhere,

encamped in public parks, Occupy Wall Street protesters documented their

movement and its politics, as well as key moments of conflict between the

police and protesters.

However, as time passed and revelations about the U.S. government’s

surveillance across mobile devices were revealed, popular commentary

began to frame the smartphone as having compromised potential. And as

protests have rolled from Ferguson to Baltimore in recent months, there is a

renewed vigor behind the idea that the smartphone—by allowing individuals

to document previously unseen realities—has created a new politics of

visibility.

The shifting celebrations of the smartphone as a completely emancipatory

device reveal a key problem often encountered in the analysis of

communication devices: they are either seen as overdetermining forces or

beacons of possibility. In order to escape this division of techno-optimism

and pessimism, it is more useful to consider the smartphone as a tool of

contemporary social relations.

In this brief space, I’d like to explore the ways the smartphone camera’s

possible social and cultural agency emerge from the relationship between

technology and the broader cultural contexts in which smartphone images

and videos exist. By exploring the relationship between the technological

and social conditions that surround the smartphone, we may recover the

device’s potential power.


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Andrea Cattaneo. NYPD at Millions March NYC 2014 protests around grand jury decisions not to indict the police

officers involved in the killing of Eric Garner and Michael Brown.

Material conditions: Image Production andDistribution

The smartphone’s image manipulation and production capabilities, as well

as its access to online distribution networks, omit and obscure highly

technical processes in a simple interface. Like lens focal length and

traditional photography, the devices’ specific technical capabilities offer a

means for producing images that not are not only acts of photography, but

may circulate across the political and cultural spheres as communication

objects.

The technical dimensions of the smartphone vary radically from traditional

cameras. For instance, since lenses are condensed into a far smaller space,

the physics of a smartphone camera’s focal length keep it from achieving


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has offered researchers, designers, and manufacturers opportunities to

improve the quality of smartphone cameras, but due to the physics of the

compressed lens, and to a lesser extent, the reduced light-sensing

capabilities of the light chip, there will always be limits to the types of

images a smartphone camera can capture.

Problems with overexposure, auto-focus distortion, and shadow, for

example, are common areas that designers and manufacturers respond to

in order to improve the cameras. Still, the manufacturing process of

smartphones offers strict parameters, as issues of production scale,

material cost, and market estimations in many cases prevent the

development of technological advancements that outpace desired

affordability.

The limited capabilities of the smartphone are positive as they grant a

certain range of aesthetics and forms to images. Apps like Hipstamatic and

Instagram also obscure complex data translation and image manipulation

processes beneath a simple interface that allows the individual to produce

powerful images without understanding the technical intricacies.

The agency of the smartphone camera lies not just in its ability to easily

produce an image, but also to grant the power of image distribution to the

individual user. The smartphone puts the political, economic, and cultural

forces shaping the Internet within the user’s control. The shifting of digital

activity away from desktops and onto mobile devices means individuals

can mobilize their connections as nodes amid a vast network. And, by being

realized in code and shared across broad commercial platforms such as

YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, and Twitter, these images can become a part of

news reports, giving users the ability to tap into journalism’s power to set

agendas and amplify circulation.

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Moth Dust. A woman yells and stands in front of a moped after a policeman tries to push forward and drive

through part of the Eric Garner protest. NYC, December 4th, 2014.

Image capture as a cultural practice: Ubiquity andgranularity

There is a long history to the relationship between images and social

protest, as succinctly documented in the scholarship of Kevin Deluca,

among many others. As Deluca notes, by utilizing the affective character of

photography to document protest events, activists engage with cultural

politics that assume images have the ability to reveal an unseen balance of

power.

Tapping into these cultural politics, though, requires an understanding of

photography’s logistics. The structure of distribution networks and the

technical restrictions of mobile image production provide material limits,

but certain social limits also emerge from the smartphone’s broad uptake

as a consumer device.

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capable camera users in a wide range of situations—becomes a

persistent social condition.

By understanding ubiquity and granularity–i.e. the volume of images that

record detailed moments of reality–as specific phenomena related to

smartphones, we can see how the device has the potential to reorder power

relations. As an example of these as strategic concerns, the U.S.

Department of Defense has released reports analyzing the ubiquity of

cameras, often noting that military groups must take into account that their

movements, images, and words can now be easily documented and

shared.

Even in the more mundane routines of daily journalism, camera ubiquity

must be managed and strategically engaged, as captured in the words of

Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Stanley Forman:

The problem was and is that as a long-time news photographer I cannot

beat the competition anymore. The competition is anyone who has a cell

phone, smart phone, or any other portable device that takes stills of video.

The other problem is that practically everyone has the technology and

knows how to use it.

Underlying Forman’s quote is an understanding that the act of capturing an

image has become so easy that it is divorced from the technical workings

of the device itself.

Inherent in the smartphone camera’s ubiquity and granularity is the

understanding that it can capture images that matter.

This fits within a cultural history of amateur images that provide

perspectives not often present in broader culture and important because of

the events they capture. Comparing digital images of Saddam Hussein’s

execution with the Zapruder film recordings of President Kennedy’s

assassination, Michael Agger writes, “they both testify to the power of first-

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worst of things, we'll see everything.”

Stuart Allen carries this notion of witnessing further, noting that the

aggregate seeing of things—or at least, potentially significant events and

moments—allows for the creation of a digitally accessible record that can

lend documentary weight to any individual or group seeking to challenge

notions of “what really happened.”

As more cameras exist in more places, a better understanding of social

reality may be discerned from the aggregate circulation, archiving, and

ordering of the images and videos these cameras produce, much like what

is being done by Lev Manovich and the folks at the Software Studies Lab.

But it is also worth paying attention to the ways these images work as

individual expressions of power. With smartphones acting as mediators in

small-scale interactions, they are able to record and reveal the details of

these interactions in ways that have effects on the performance of power.

Making sense of the differences in access to power between police and

protester, Caleb Crain writes in the New Yorker, “Smart phones have

cameras, and almost everyone has a smart phone. A court is therefore less

likely to be ignorant of what actually occurred between the policeman and

me. The policeman and I may have videotaped it. Bystanders might have,

too.”

Crain’s statement is significant because, as a form of journalistic analysis

appearing in a popular forum, it reveals a rationality that takes it as a given

that the smartphone camera is important not just because it is everywhere,

but by being everywhere, it can record in detail. When these details appear

as legitimate documents amid institutional practices, such as journalism,

politics, and law, we can begin to see their potential to reconfigure relations

of power.

This reconfiguring has been experimented with and made effective in a

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activity as in the Occupy movement, or the expression of solidarity as in

#BlackLivesMatter, the smartphone grants access to myriad technical

processes and hides them beneath the image or video as an easily shared

representation, just when such representations are needed most.

Shih-Chieh Wei. New Yorkers during Millions March NYC 2014 protests around grand jury decisions not to indict

the police officers involved in the killing of Eric Garner and Michael Brown.

The limits of smartphone power

It is important to note that the practices of image capture outlined above

also limit their power. In the case of Eric Garner, the Staten Island man

whose death at the hand of police officers was recorded on the phone of a

passing witness, the ensuing video did not constitute enough evidence to


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During the Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring movements, when the

popular press lauded the power of digital images to shift politics on an

unforeseen scale, traditional institutions moved to constrain the effects of

these movements. From a Foucaultian perspective, these images and

videos broach the limits of power as embodied in dispersed audiences and

individual actors. Other rules of meaning production determine the power

they bear, such as the rules of evidence in a legal preceding.

Still, by masking complex image production and distribution practices, the

smartphone has allowed for granular forms of image capture to gain

cultural power, for, as Daryn Cambridge has counseled activists, “camera

phone videos also enable us to see that which was often intended to remain

veiled or hidden.” By looking at the smartphone camera as an apparatus

embedded in broader relations of power, observers may begin to

understand visual truth as a political act. Smartphones, then, fit into a

genealogy of photographic technologies that allow individuals to engage in

forms of social documentation and representation that challenges relations

of power by expanding the intelligibility of certain events, phenomena, or

issues.

In keeping with Jack Bratich’s admonition that devices open up possibilities

for subjugation as well as emancipation, I’d like to conclude by noting that

the valences of power move both ways through the smartphone, as the

technology also allows surveillance practices like geo-location and IP

tracking to further monitor individuals.

The power that moves through the smart phone can be instrumentally

conceptualized and strategically deployed, accounted for, and resisted. To

that end, if scholars, activists, and commentators are to contend with the

political potential of devices such as the smartphone camera, then it is

imperative to account for the simultaneous processes embodied in its

mechanics alongside the cultural and social conditions these devices are

often celebrated for disrupting.

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journalism studies, and the relationship between new technologies and the

relations of power. Follow Brian on Twitter @bcreech.

References:

1. Reza Safee-Rad and Millivoje Aleksic, “Depth map from focus for cell-phone

cameras,” Digital Photography IV, eds. Jeffrey M. DiCarlo and Brian G. Rodrick. (New

York, NY: SPIE International Society for Optics and Photonics, 2008). http://spie.org

/x648.html?product_id=764866

2. Donald Baxter, Sergio R. Goma, Milivoje Aleksic, “Applying image quality in cell

phone cameras: lens distortion,” Image Quality and System Performance IV, eds.

Jeffrey M. DiCarlo and Brian G. Rodrick (New York, NY: SPIE International Society for

Optics and Photonics, 2009). http://spie.org/x648.html?product_id=805814

3. James P. McGuire, Jr. “Manufacturable mobile phone optics: Higher order aspheres

are not always better,” Technical paper, Pasadena, CA: Optical Society of America,

2010. .: http://www.cybernet.co.jp/codev/example/developer

/2010ManufacturableMobilePhoneOptics.pdf

4. Kevin Deluca, Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Politics, (New

York: Routledge).

5. Robert E. Barnsby, Social media and the Arab Spring: How Facebook, Twitter, and

camera phones changed the Egyptian Army’s response to revolution (Fort

Leavenworth, KS: US Army Command and General Staff College, Combined Arms

Research Digital Library, 2012). http://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/singleitem

/collection/p4013coll2/id/2877/rec/6

6. Stanley J. Forman, “The best aftermath wins!” News Photographer, November 2011,

p. 36.

7. Stuart Allan, Citizen Witnessing: Revisioning Journalism in Times of Crisis. (Malden,

MA: Polity, 2013): 55.

8. Gaby David, “Camera phone images, videos and live streaming: A contemporary

visual trend,” Visual Studies 25, no. 1, (2010), 89-98.


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The Smartphone Camera and the Material Politics of Visibility

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