Kris Cohen, needs some airplay here, I recently had the fortune to hear a talk Kris gave, marking the end of his work with INCITE group at University of Surrey, UK (where I’ll soon be a visiting researcher, more on that later) - There is now a podcast out on the talk, and I command you to listen to it. It’s a good 1,5 hours of elegantly elaboration of what Kris has found in his interviews with some 60 people using photosharing specifically flickr.com and lot’s of tasty sociological, cultural and art theoretical topings to go with it! Nutritious!

Here’s some background to the talk:

“Photos Leave Home”
I’m at the end of a one-year ESRC study of personal (aka snapshot, aka amateur) photography and its newly massive presence on the internet. The questions I was asking were less about why anyone would want to put their personal photographs online in the first place (although I have a little bit to say about the popularity and prevalence‹the apparent irresistability‹of that particular question) and more about the effects that this efflorescence of (a certain kind of) photography might be having on our ideas about what photography is and does. I’m in the process of writing a series of three papers, one of which addresses popular reactions to this ourpouring of heretofore sequestered (or privatised) photography, one of which addresses itself to the previous sociological literature on photography, and the last of which discusses these phenomena within a history and theory of images. Here, I’ll be primarily focused on the second of these papers, which considers photographs as “public” rather than social entities.

Get the cast by subscribing to this xml thingy through your Aggregator or iTunes: http://profiles.blipmedia.org/INCITE/podcast.xml

Kudos to Gerard for recording this!