ABSTRACT

Photography is intimately bound up with domesticity and the private world, and has been since its inception. This is evident in family photographs – portraits and snapshots, images of familial rites of passage such as weddings – in which the seemingly existential relation between photographs and memory folds individual and collective identities into familial narrative time. Less evidently perhaps, amateur photography is one of a range of consumerist hobbies which structure private (especially male) leisure time. Third, photography has been bound up with private life in the form of 'home entertainment' – photographic amusements stretching fairly continuously from Victorian stereoscopes through video and computer games. Finally, operating through a range of mass media from press to posters, photography – like any mass medium – mediates between private and public spheres: public images, as they enter the home, domesticate the public, and give public significance to the private (Thompson 1990).