Social Photography V at Carriage Trade

Where: Carriage Trade  NEW YORK | USA
When: JULY 11, 2017-AUGUST 12, 2017
First presented in 2011 and now in its fifth iteration, Carriage Trade’s Social Photography exhibitions have catalogued the rapid transformation of cell phone photography over the last several years. From a novelty medium existing between the (then) more important voice and text functions of mobile phones, to the engine behind the gargantuan image processing mills of Instagram and Facebook, cell phone camera images have become a ubiquitous presence in our lives.
Functioning as a benefit exhibition to help support upcoming programming at carriage trade, there is no particular theme guiding Social Photography V apart from how the cell phone camera is most often used. Both artists and non-artists email images from their phones to carriage trade which are then formatted, printed on 5” x 7” paper and sold online and in the gallery during the exhibition (list of contributors and details below).
With many cell phones awash in a constant stream of social media imagery, the opportunity to pause and reflect on any given image is in short supply. Providing a physical alternative to the perpetually vanishing images on Instagram, Social Photography pictures “stay put”, existing as a contemporary image archive of roughly 200 cell phone camera subjects and preoccupations during the exhibition as well as individual prints that can purchased and taken home.

Less a sanctioning of a new medium than a hybrid of a traditional exhibition format and the wider net of social media Social Photography V also functions as a means to sustain and expand carriage trade’s community, which exists in the combined spheres of online experience and the irreplace- able physicality of the exhibition space itself.

Post a Comment

0 Comments