ABSTRACT
This chapter engages with visual studies, feminist science and technology studies, and performance studies to put into historical perspective the popular phenomenon of the small viewfinderless action camera. Our aim here is to take the camera apart and discuss its absent viewfinder in relationship to its lens. We are interested in the respective roles of the lens and the viewfinder (and its absence) in action imaging of the self in everyday life. Our proposition is that the viewfinderless camera delinks point of view from the eye, rendering seeing as a partial and distributed negotiation of subjectivity, and that this delinking dates back to early experiments with plate photography and market-oriented camera designs such as the Brownie. The viewfinderless camera makes obvious the distributed activity—the moving limbs, the engagement of the full body and not just the eyes—that camerawork and seeing entail. Here, we identify photographic objects, practices, and research artifacts that suggest an expansive genealogy of risk-taking, movement, and fragmented self-documentation with viewfinderless cameras and camera-like equipment. Specifically, we place into conversation the 1839 materials science research artifact now identified as the first daguerreotype selfie, a Victorian-era self-portrait taken with a Box Brownie, the mid-twentieth-century Somascope, 1960s and 1970s portapak-inspired video and performance art by Vito Acconci and VALIE EXPORT, and post-2000 uses of the GoPro action camera in surf culture and the video-performance work of Xiaowen Zhu.
