ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the phenomenon of smartphone photography in the context of museum visits. Based on analysis of a corpus of social media posts collected as part of an ethnographic study at a natural history museum, the authors show how, alongside the museum’s own curatorial processes, visitors increasingly use content provided by the museum for their own photographic explorations. Focusing particularly on Instagram, it is argued that visitors re-categorize and re-configure museum exhibitions in their presentations on social media. The relationship between this photographic practice and those of the hunters and taxidermists who contributed specimens to museums is explored, and the implications for our understanding of snapshot photography are discussed.
