alice> In 1927, the cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer described his age in ways that speak uncannily to our own: “The world has taken on a photographic face,” he wrote. Everyday life was now subsumed beneath a “blizzard of photographs.”
> Kracauer was worried that the visual culture of modern had (paradoxically) hidden the world from us. For him, the blizzard of photographs clouds our view, preventing us from seeing the social and historical realities behind the world’s photographic face.
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> Perhaps the exemplar of this phenomenon is the Instagram influencer, usually, a young, thin, white woman employed by advertisers to hawk fashion or other products online—but always with a mask of authenticity, the crucial currency in the social media economy. The Instagram influencer—along with all selfie-snapping millennials—is the object of much of our culture’s anxieties about Internet-age narcissism and homogeneity.
> Indeed, there’s no doubt that social media provides a context for the assertion and maintenance of gendered social norms. It’s hardly a coincidence that Instagram influencers tend to replicate the same conventionalized standards of beauty that Naomi Wolf railed against in The Beauty Myth almost thirty years ago.
From #earlyphotography to the #Instagramage
https://blog.oup.com/2018/04/women-early-photography-instagram/
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