Text "Internet Photography" - Paolo CIRIO Artist

Photography on the Internet extends to unprecedented social fields. It challenges the conventions of photography to inquire into the cultural, economic, legal, and ethical structures of photos circulating within the Internet.

Capturing the Internet photographically means to position the camera inside its databases, algorithms, screens, feeds, and networks. Addressing the photography of the Internet means questioning the languages, cultures, and semiotics of online photos. Working with the Internet’s photos means engaging with the legislations, economies, and ethics of online images.

Internet Photography is not about the production of new photographs, instead it interrogates the renewed role of the photographic medium and how it impacts both personal and social reality. Today, photography needs to explore the vast amount of photos on the Internet with broad social, personal, legal, political, and economic consequences. Internet Photography therefore addresses privacy violation, social control, free speech, economic inequalities, political spin, misleading fabrications, negative self-image, and self-expression.

These social implications re-position photography itself at the center of visual culture through artistic strategies such as figuration and abstraction, recontextualization and appropriation, image juxtaposition and deconstruction, as well as documentary and social reporting. The ethics of photography, the aesthetics of photos, and the social and political capability of photography are all redefined by the Internet.

As a society and as individuals, we face the new power of photography and its potential to affect what we accept and perceive as aesthetic, ethical, and social norms. It is the duty of art to explore all potentials, dangers, and contradictions of this new state of the photographic medium on the Internet.

Text and Manifesto
by Paolo Cirio.
2016-2019.