On Friendship, Boobs and the Logic of the Catalogue

Mobile photography and the emergence of lay self-portraiture are often interpreted as emancipatory processes of increasing agency and self-revelation. This article challenges this view by examining photos published in online albums and social network sites (SNSs). Bourdieuvian field analysis is utilized to reveal the local forms of capital that characterize those sites as fields of cultural production. Special attention is given to the enabling function of photos in the exchange between cultural, corporeal and social capital. Unlike both ‘home mode’ photos aimed for family and friends and professional photos aimed for strangers, photos in SNSs are an instrument aimed at making strangers into friends through their incorporation in a consumerist visual representation of society as a catalogue. Rather than an expression of a reflexively chosen identity, the photos produced by different actors are explained by their corresponding position in the field and composition of capital, as well as by the photos’ functionality.