Home > Research > Publications & Outputs > Visual meditations, affordances and social capital
View graph of relations

Visual meditations, affordances and social capital

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>2018
<mark>Journal</mark>Membrana Journal of Photography
Issue number1
Volume3
Publication StatusPublished
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

Spatial dislocation of migrants is a catalyst for early, heavy and informed media use (Ponzanesi & Leurs 2014); as well as a motif for transnational families to form families of choice (Beck-Gernsheim 1998; Weston 1997). This text reports on how Irish-Spanish families living in Ireland manage this situation. It argues that (digital) photographic exchanges give rise to mediated third places (Oldenburg, 1989), where (dis)affect and belonging are negotiated. Transnational families visually mediate their domestic spaces regularly. The double visual mediation of presence and space forms part of their everyday. This, in turn, outlines current developments in how (digital) photography is used to mediate actions and emotions. In accounting for and reflecting about how (dis)affective communities of place activate affordances of media, photography emerges as a multi-dimensional site of image production, distribution and storage, in short, as a practice that is both unique to the socio-cultural moment in which it is embedded, and general enough to be recognized as such across cultures and societies.