This paper looks at the aesthetics of digital portraiture in contemporary Egypt, with a specific focus on martyrologies of the January 25th Revolution. Among the many effects of the passage from analog to digital photography is the blurring of boundaries between “professional/studio” and “amateur/candid” photography. I will be looking at digital portraiture and especially post-production photo manipulation regardless of whether it is produced by a studio or by a skillful “amateur”. I examine the visual language that “photoshopping” encourages as well as the subsequent circulation and creative re-manipulation of private portraits in public, in both actual (homes, shops, streets) and virtual spheres. The first part of my paper examines digital portraiture as a genre, analyzing its visual language and cultural codes (backgrounds, poses, props). I will discuss ways in which particular aesthetic choices encode class identity, especially through competing visions of masculinity; and how they construct a professional hierarchy of high, low and middle-brow within the commercial digital market. The second part of my paper focuses on the digital afterlives of one particular group of portraits, namely young male martyrs of the January 25th Revolution. I will explore three distinct instances of their “afterlives”, embedded in different social contexts and addressing different audiences. One is stencilization which erases the earlier mentioned class-inflected masculinity in favor of universalized images of “young martyrs,” eliciting affect but emphatically denying class; another is “artification” or sublimation through high art as evident particularly in street art, where I will look at distinct elements of martyr grafitti as consisting of both “photographic” and “painterly” elements, and different audience responses to both. Thirdly, I will look at martyrs’ portraits framed and hung on walls in their own homes, becoming part of private mourning sanctuaries. Here, they must be substantially digitally re-manipulated again, in order to fit into long-established conventions of wall portraits of patriarchs and other images (with whom they often hang side-by-side) that encode social and/or religious authority. This paper is based on long-term fieldwork in Cairo and online. Methodologically, it is grounded in photographic history and theories of photographic vernacularity. It looks at how local vernacularity is produced historically, how it evolves over time under the impact of social, cultural and technological change, and how the accessibility of creative digital manipulation (too often glossed as a “global” phenomenon) produces a surplus of meaning that in turn requires more “deep local history.”

Fake and manipulated photographs have been circulating since the invention of photography. Before digital technology, the manipulation of chemically produced photographs was achieved by retouching with ink and paint, using techniques of double-exposure, or combining negatives together in the darkroom. Such composite and retouched photography also found a place in the mourning rituals of the Victorian era in North America and Western Europe. With the introduction of new digital technologies the appropriation of the image of the deceased has changed. In Turkey, in the era of post-photography, it is not common to find images marked as “mourning photographs” as a part of mourning rituals, but alternative practices do revolve around the image of the deceased which are curiously not that different from earlier examples of manipulated photographs dating back to the 19th century. The practice of taking analogue images of a recently deceased family member to the photography studio for the sake of rescuing them can be observed in Turkey. The motivation to digitize and restore the photographs of the deceased can be considered a way of emphasizing the presence of the dead and as a way to secure his/her place in the family. Rather than acknowledging their absence, they attempt to bring the dead closer. Such manipulated photographs of the deceased can be regarded as types of mourning photographs from a perspective of contemporary grief theories, which are based on the idea of maintaining relations with the departed. This research tracks contemporary efforts to cope with the absence of the deceased through types of digital photographic modification practiced by commercial photography studios in Turkey by subjects belonging to a particular socio-cultural group. Online interviews with commercial photo-modification artists were completed in order to gain insight into this practice and to understand how this specific phenomenon resonates with particular users and finds a place in daily life practices in relation to mourning. Various examples of death-related modified photographs have been gathered through these contacts and visits. The description of the service of modification and the advertising slogans found in publicity materials and websites belonging to the commercial photographers present rich data regarding the discourses formed around these images. Following the critical literature on photography and contemporary mourning theories, this research tries to make sense of a peculiar type of modified photographs of the deceased.

The diffusion of social media and smartphones has been changing the way photography is produced, circulated and consumed in south-east Turkey. Camera phones and sharing platforms are ubiquitous, and the practice of snapping and sharing pictures has become the norm. This article presents the results of a traditional ethnographic research project focused on the use of social media by ordinary people in a medium-sized town in south-east Turkey, inhabited by a Kurdish and Arab majority. The paper argues that the public display of photographic images reproduces enduring social norms based on traditional values of honor. I consider Facebook photography as a public display through which men and women compete for social recognition, and at the same time constantly attempt to defend their individual and family honor and reputation. I draw from Daniel Miller's (2011) argument that Facebook is a conservative media because it brings back values that have disappeared in the changing offline worlds. In fact, social media platforms reconstruct family relationships and help users to return to the kind of involvement previously experienced in traditional social networks (Miller 2011). Due to the recent migrations from villages, my field-site is inhabited by both rural and urban people. Although the differences existing in real life amongst them are evident, their Facebook visual materials look quite similar. Traditional values are overtly represented on the Facebook wall. Photography emerges as a space where the most conservative and traditional aspects of the self are projected to others. On the other hand, the practices of one to one photo sharing via smartphone applications like WhatsApp create and shape new forms of intimacy. Photo sharing on mobile phones has become a constituent element of intimate relationships amongst young people. Young adults send private messages and photos to friends and prohibited lovers many times a day. Private photographic images create new forms of interpersonal communication and at the same time break traditional aesthetic codes: informality and creativity are important features in one to one photo sharing. Social media photography is having a double effect: public visual material reinforces traditional long-held social norms and values, but one to one photo sharing introduces new and original aesthetics, while creating new types of intimate relationships.

This paper explores the genre of popular photography in Iran in one of its current, online manifestations: photo - blogs (photography - based blog sites of ‘amateur’ photographers). It demonstrates how photo - blogs, as digital - visual diaries, constitute discursive sites of aesthetic play for Iranian popular photographers, serving as extensions of the private self and public sphere. Photo - blogs exhibit vernacular, ‘bottom - up’ photographs depicting ‘life as lived’ in Iran, which speak to an embattled visual legacy of twentieth - century representations of the country. At the same time, viewers from across the world uphold the social life and life - span of photo - blogs in diverse ways - as points of diasporic connection, alternative news sources and simulated forms of virtual tourism. They engage in a shared ‘experiencing’ of Iran through imaginative, sensorial and phenomenological social praxes. An enchantment with digital technologies can be said to explain much of the way the Internet, when combined with the democratic lenses of digital cameras and camera phones and a strong socio - cultural imperative, acquires a particular status as purveyor of ‘truth’ and ‘justice’. For producers and viewers of photo - blogs, this reflects a perceived ability of the camera to render visible to the world previously ‘invisible’ aspects of Iranian social and cultural life. Moving beyond an analytical preoccupation with photographic realism, or the truthfulness or falsity of the digital image, the paper explores the nature of its social life, including the production, consumption and circulation, which constitute its agency and utility as a cultural artefact and object of enchantment. It weaves together theoretical aspects in digital and visual anthropology, including material culture, art and aesthetics and applies established principles in photographic theory to the digital context of Iranian online social networks. Drawing on long - term ethnographic research undertaken in Iran and online within the Iranian ‘photo - blogosphere’, and with reference to specific case studied photo - blogs, photo - bloggers and images, the paper critically reflects upon this photography - specific facet of the Iranian blogosphere hitherto unconsidered in scholarly literature on Iranian blogs. The paper concludes by suggesting that photo - blogs constitute a salient form of Iranian techno - aesthetic agency, which belongs to a broader on - going transnational project of negotiating the image of Iran in a digital age, between contested ‘local’ and ‘global’ imaginaries.