Photography After Capitalism

- Blurb -

A polemical analysis of the politics and economics of today' s vernacular photographic cultures. In Photography After Capitalism, Benedict Burbridge makes the case for a radically expanded conception of photography, encompassing the types of labor too often obscured by black-boxed technologies, slick platform interfaces, and the compulsion to display lives to others. His lively and polemical analysis of today' s vernacular photographic cultures shines new light on the hidden work of smartphone assembly teams, digital content moderators, Street View car drivers, Google "Scan-Ops,"low-paid gallery interns, homeless participant photographers, and the photo-sharing masses. Bringing together cultural criticism, social history, and political philosophy, Burbridge examines how representations of our photographic lives--in advertising, journalism, scholarship and, particularly, contemporary art--shape a sense of what photography is and the social relations that comprise it. More precisely, he focuses on how different critical and creative strategies--from the appropriation of social media imagery to performative traversals of the network, from documentaries about secretive manual labor to science fiction fantasies of future sabotage--affect our understanding of photography' s interactions with political and economic systems. Drawing insight and inspiration from recent analyses of digital labour, community economies and post-capitalism, Burbridge harnesses the ubiquity of photography to cognitively map contemporary capitalism in search of its weak spots and levers, sites of resistance, and opportunities to build better worlds.