ABSTRACT
The theoretical understanding and handling of photographs as objects is fundamental in the fields of anthropology and photography. In the digital context, then, materiality and ‘objectness’ remains a core framework for understanding digital photographs/photography in social terms, which will be subsequently developed in theorising the place-object. Exploring how place is linked with object through digital photography requires reviewing how ‘place’ has been defined in material culture anthropology and related disciplines. A significant part of the digital photograph’s affordance as a contemporary object is how, once embedded within wider digital infrastructures such as social media platforms and their associated software/affordances, the digital photo-object is able to evidence links to actual physical locations. The place-object constructs its own field site via its trails and ‘traces’ by which one can ‘follow the thing’ within and across a range of social and spatial configurations.
