What is the role of photography as a form of social communication?

Tom: Yeah, I think for this question it's really, really important to emphasise the need to think about photography in China in its social context. First of all, we have to bear in mind that this is still a relatively new thing. Cameras have only really become more and more common and available to people in the last 15, 20 years and smart phones, which is the last two to five years, this is the thing that actually has, for the first time, put a camera in most people's hands. Before then it just wasn't the case. So it has been a massive change and OK, photographs might come to act as a kind of memory or recording or acknowledging friendships and showcasing certain kinds of relationships but I do think we have to, when we think of photography as parts of social communication, we have to think about all the practice around it even that that doesn't necessarily seem to be communicative and there is a danger when we talk about photography as communication, we tend to see photos as symbols as something we should read meaning into, something has to be shown in the photograph but, as part of this project, I think what has really come through is this social practice that is surrounding photos, for example how people might share them or how they might take photos together as groups and all these things that actually work to build social connections and relationships too.

Gillian: The interesting about this project is how we were able to engage with the practice of photography on so many different levels. One of the interesting things about the way that photography is used in the town is that if often embodies the hopes and dreams of the represented and makes a statement not so much about the present as about ideals for the future. So it was so interesting to see how people reacted to my attempts to photography daily life, unadorned and unstaged. It wasn't that people disagreed with what I was doing but that it was sometimes difficult for them to understand why you would want to do it. The comment that I most often got on the photos was that they were ordinary or usual and that's, of course, was what I was aiming for, but that's very different than how individuals in the town tended to use photographs themselves or see the role of photography in their lives. However, although we had this difference in our way of thinking about how photos were used, this research method that I used - printing out photos, taking them to people to discuss what I saw in them and getting their reactions to the photos and my conclusions - made it much easier to connect with them and engage with them in an iterative process than many other academic research methods.

Tom: So photograph is so important and I do think it is one of the keys to understanding social media and just to understanding life in general. It doesn't matter if it's Chinese social media or Western social media it is just full of images now, full of photographs and our world is becoming fuller and fuller with more and more images made and captured and added every day. And it's got to the stage now where I myself, I cannot imagine doing anthropological research now without looking at photos, without looking at photos that the people I'm researching take and without me taking photos of people myself. Photos have become so much a part of people's lives that academics really are forced to look at it, we can't ignore it anymore and rightly so, that's the situation it should be.

Gillian: Our world is just becoming so much more visual and so much more media rich that it's hard to justify not using these tools in academic practice. I really hope that through the use of photography in this project, we can better engage with the people and issues that we are studying and also communicate the results of these investigation both to the people in this town that I was photographing in but also to a wider audience in a more innovative and engaging way. This research project is not one that tries to put forward a firm conclusion but rather to use photos as a point of discussion and to continue this discussion. I hope that you can take the time to leave your comments on the site and the answers that you have to the questions we've posed based on the evidence here and your own lived experience so that we can continue this important discussion. I hope that through photography we can further the discussion of the importance of ICTs in daily life across the world.