Work by Gaby David, Social Sciences, L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2016 Rieger Dissertation Award, shared on . Posted in Rieger: past winners

Processes of Legitimation: 10 Years of Mobile Images

Gaby David received the Rieger Dissertation Award 2016 for “Processes of Legitimation: 10 Years of Mobile Images”, defended in 2015 at L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales (France). In this interdisciplinary thesis, Dr. David analyzes and explains how the the cultural industries apparatus enforced the normatization, creation, circulation, and sharing of mobile images. From being rare, to even becoming a compulsive practice, how did the evolution from a search for cultural validation, to later exposed intimacy, to a habitual reflex and ultimately the selfie moment happen?

“Processes of Legitimation: 10 Years of Mobile Images” examines the cultural legitimation and validation processes that vernacular mobile images underwent between the years 2005 and 2015. At the crossroads of media studies and sociology of culture, and anchored in visual culture and mobile studies, Dr. Gaby David’s Ph.D. thesis answers questions such as: How did the production and consumption of private everyday mobile images become a global visual phenomenon? With an increase in the use of mobile images in everyday life, how have its socio-cultural and visual effects been perceived, and in what spaces has this happened?

The four different fieldworks are gathered in two volumes.

  1. An ethnographic analysis of the Pocket Films Festival in Paris
  2. A global journalistic timeline of the mediatization that smartphone images had within the hard news creation and the many other uses of these mediatic images in the mainstream media.
  3. An exploration of peer-centred validations through communities of practice, in Instagram and Snapchat
  4. A reflexive a posteriori auto-ethnography of the author’s practices showing the rise of communicating mobile images per se, all to analyse the significance the implied has in strong tie image sharing.

This thesis is an endeavour to understand the evolving use of mobile images to convey complex communicative and multifaceted emotionally private and/or intimate meanings. Written in an accessible style, it can be of use to a wide readership, including undergraduate students and specialised readers.

Gaby’s profile on academia.edu

Gaby David
 

1 - David, G. (June 2007). Spectators viewing from the phone trees at the Pocket Films Festival third edition, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Personal collection

1 – David, G. (June 2007). Spectators viewing from the phone trees at the Pocket Films Festival third edition, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Personal collection

2 - Verrier, A. (2007). Porte de Choisy [Pocket film, V600 Sony Ericsson]. Screenshot pcollection. The complete film is available here: https://vimeo.com/36400715

2 – Verrier, A. (2007). Porte de Choisy [Pocket film, V600 Sony Ericsson]. Screenshot pcollection. The complete film is available here.

3 - David, G. (2010). Benchmark cameraphone images that appeared in the mainstream media news and were considered as being hard news. [Timeline].

3 – David, G. (2010). Benchmark cameraphone images that appeared in the mainstream media news and were considered as being hard news. [Timeline].

4 - David, G. (September 4, 2011). Facebook profile picture update. Screenshot personal collection detail.

4 – David, G. (September 4, 2011). Facebook profile picture update. Screenshot personal collection detail.

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  •  

    One advantage of photography is that it’s visual and can transcend language.

    Lisa Kristine

  • We never really know what’s around the corner when we’re filming – what turn a story will take, what a character will do or say to surprise us, how the events in the world will impact our story.

    Barbara Kopple

  • Photographers learn to interpret photographs in that technical way because they want to understand and use that ‘language’ themselves (just as musicians learn a more technical musical language than the layman needs). Social scientists who want to work with visual materials will have to learn to approach them in this more studious and time-consuming way

    Howard Becker

  •  

    Every photograph promises more than it delivers and delivers more than it intended.

    Steve Harp

  •  

    Visual culture is now the study of how to understand change in a world too enormous to see but vital to imagine.

    Nicholas Mirzoeff

  • Watching a documentary with people hacking their way through some polar wasteland is merely a visual. Actually trying to deal with cold that can literally kill you is quite a different thing.

    Henry Rollins

  • Give us adequate images. We lack adequate images. Our civilization does not have adequate images. And I think a civilization is doomed or is going to die out like dinosaurs if it doesn’t develop an adequate language for adequate images.

    Werner Herzog

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    The task for sociology is to come to the help of the individual. We have to be in service of freedom. It is something we have lost sight of.

    Zygmunt Bauman

  • Before I became a film major, I was very heavily into social science, I had done a lot of sociology, anthropology, and I was playing in what I call social psychology, which is sort of an offshoot of anthropology/sociology – looking at a culture as a living organism, why it does what it does.

    George Lucas

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    If it’s far away, it’s news, but if it’s close at home, it’s sociology.

    James Reston

  • So it is my firm belief, that if you want nowadays, to have a clear and distinct communication of your concepts, you have to use synthetic images, no longer words.

    Vilém Flusser

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    The function of sociology, as of every science, is to reveal that which is hidden.

    Pierre Bourdieu

  • I believe that we face incredible obstacles in our attempts to see the world. Everything in our nature tries to deny the world around us; to refabricate it in our own image; to reinvent it for our own benefit. And so, it becomes something of a challenge, a task, to recover (or at least attempt to recover) the real world despite all the impediments to that end.

    Errol Morris

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    Sometimes one picture is equal to 30 pages of discourse, just as there are things images are completely incapable of communicating.

    William S. Burroughs

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    There are dignified stupidities, and there are heroic stupidities, and there is such a thing as stupid stupidities, and that would be a stupid stupidity not to have a camera on board.

    Werner Herzog

  • If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you’ve got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you’re dumb and blind.

    Salman Rushdie

  •  

    For any picture, ask yourself what question or questions it might be answering. Since the picture could answer many, questions, we can decide what question we are interested in.

    Howard Becker

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    Reality changes; in order to represent it, modes of representation must change.

    Bertolt Brecht

  • You try your hardest to give people their space, but at moments you know you’re capturing their image in ways they may or may not be okay with. It’s that rocking back and forth between respect and betrayal that I feel like is at the heart of the film.

    Kirsten Johnson

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