Calling for an Analogue Revolution: Lomography and its Politics of Consumption and Brand Community Practices
Michal Šimůnek  1@  
1 : University of Economics, Prague  (VŠE)  -  Website
Faculty of Management University of Economics Prague Jarošovská 1117/II, 377 01 Jindřichův Hradec -  Czech Republic

In contemporary digital and online photo-culture in which most of us take our photographs with smartphones and majority of images never escape their digital mode of existence, doing analogue photography can be considered as a peripheral and obsolete photographic practice. However, this does not seem to apply to Lomography as it has evolved from the 1990's artistic endeavour of a few Vienna based artists into commercially very successful enterprise. Although there are several reasons for contemporary revival of analogue photography, the present paper focuses particularly on the politics of consumption and brand community practices orchestrated by Lomographic Society International. Drawing from the results of an ongoing ethnographic and nethnographic research the paper describes Lomography as a set of ambivalent meanings and liminal practices that tentatively oscillates between analogue and digital, old and new, offline and online, artistic and vernacular, subversive and commercialised, authentic and commodified, creative and conventional, community-based and individualised. The success of Lomography, I argue, is given exactly by these ambivalencies and liminalities, because these are able to solicit wide range of consumers by letting them enjoy the freedom of becoming themselves and by offering them an illusion of becoming an artist of one's life. As such, Lomography is rather about a branding revolution than about an analogue revolution, as it brilliantly capitalises on both the nebulous identity of photography and the ethos of contemporary liquid consumerism.


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