Ramón Reichert

Amanda Wasielewski

Anna Dahlgren

Karin Hansson

The design and use of metadata is always culturally, socially, and ideologically inflected. The actors, whether these are institutions (museums, archives, libraries, corporate image suppliers) or individuals (image producers, social media agents, researchers), as well as their agendas and interests, affect the character of metadata. There is a politics of metadata. This issue of Digital Culture & Society addresses the ideological and political aspects of metadata practices within image collections from an interdisciplinary perspective. The overall aim is to consider the implications, tensions, and challenges involved in the creation of metadata in terms of content, structure, searchability, and diversity.

Vol. 6, Issue 2/2020 - The Politics of Metadata

Digital Culture & Society (DCS)

Dag Petersson

Nina Lager Vestberg

Since its inception in the 19th century, photography has brought to light a vast array of represented subjects. Always situated in some spatial order, photographic representations have been operatively underpinned by social, technical, and institutional mechanisms. Geographically, bodily, and geometrically, the camera has positioned its subjects in social structures and hierarchies, in recognisable localities, and in iconic depth constructions which, although they show remarkable variation, nevertheless belong specifically to the enterprises of the medium. This is the subject of Representational Machines: How photography enlists the workings of institutional technologies in search of establishing new iconic and social spaces. Together, the contributions to this edited volume span historical epochs, social environments, technological possibilities, and genre distinctions. Presenting several distinct ways of producing space photographically, this book opens a new and important field of inquiry for photography research.

Photography and the Production of Space

Representational Machines

This book critically examines images in the borderlands of the art world, investigating relations between visual art and vernacular visual culture within different images communities from the 1870s to the present day. It concentrates on the mechanisms of such processes and their implications for the understanding of art and art-historical narratives. Merging perspectives from art history and visual culture studies with media studies, it fills a gap in the field of visual studies through its use of a diversity of images as prime sources. Where textual statements are scarce the book maps visual statements instead, demonstrating the potential of image studies. Consequently, it will be of great relevance to those interested in art and visual culture in modernity, as well as discourses of the notion of art and art history writing.

Looking across the borderlands of art, media and visual culture

Travelling images

Fashioned in the North showcases stories of images, photographers, publications and institutions that have attracted minimal attention outside the local Nordic academic community. The authors of the book examine the reasons for, and implications of this under­exposure – to use a photographic metaphor. The domain of fashion photography studies is widened here and the texts chal­lenge often taken ­for ­granted ideas of centre and peri­phery in the discipline. The hybridity of this approach adds new nuances that enrich the knowledge in the field. The contributors discuss fashion photography as a trans­ national phenomenon, a material object, as medium and part of a media system, and as the result of archival systems and history writings. They show how in depth studies of this kind can offer so much more than focusing on but a few agents, iconic images, individual or periodic style. Indeed, case studies like these serve as a prism through which we can reveal cultural, social, economic and ideological aspects of society as these are reflected in fashion photography.

Anna Dahlgren

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