Pix and Clicks: Photography and the New ‘Digital’ Domesticity

In July 2012 pop-feminist blog Jezebel drew our attention to the publication of an online photography magazine aimed at a specifically female readership with the headline: ‘[f]inally, lady photojournalists get their own photo ladymag full of lady stereotypes’.¹ That new digital magazine, with its cutesy diminutive name Pix, promised ‘tips, ideas and trend reports for women in photography’ that focused on a narrow and stereotypical idea of what those women might want to read.² While the feature on photographic equipment ergonomically designed to fit women’s bodies appealed (as some respondents in the comments section agreed), the overriding focus of the magazine’s advice rankled. Combining fashion and beauty with advice on professional photographic kit, it was criticised for offering ‘smudge-proof make-up tips for long days behind the camera’; promotions for ‘seasonal flats’ to keep your feet comfortable ‘and cute’ alongside hard-wearing camera straps that are ‘stylish yet tough just like you’; and an emphasis on stereotypically feminine photographic subject matter such as ‘Photographing Newborns: A unique kind of labor’ and ‘Beauty Dish: New Jersey-based wedding photographer dishes about her camera-ready style’.

Jezebel’s post was quickly picked up in other photographic blog entries that questioned the business decisions behind the new publication. As the new title was announced via an email sent out to all subscribers of the American trade journal Photo District News (then owned by parent company Nielsen Photo Group, responsible for other professional titles such as Rangefinder) that markets itself as the ‘unparalleled source of information and education for professional photographers’, news of its launch quickly reached a professional audience.³ Some questioned the veracity of the news, believing it to be a ‘joke’, a ‘parody’, or even a ‘PR gag’. In reaction and mitigating the backlash, the publishing group appeared to backtrack, distancing Pix from any serious purpose, declaring it instead to be a ‘new, free, digital magazine edition’, aimed at ‘photo-enthusiasts’ rather than professionals, with its content ‘specifically geared toward women who enjoy photography as a hobby’.⁴

Yet this was not always the case: a far earlier pre-launch announcement from late 2011 suggested a quite different mission, promising instead ‘the first ever completely online magazine for professional and advanced amateur photographers’. This articulation of Pix promised how-to guides on the latest kit: the ‘new Pix online magazine’, publisher George Varanakis stated, ‘provides photographers with insight into fast-paced digital imaging technologies and … techniques’.⁵ Rather than tips on make-up and shooting newborns, the intended focus was on gear, technique, processing, sharing and education, and ‘all things related to a photographer’s computer’.

By shifting its emphasis from rapidly changing digital technologies to the practice of photography as a hobby — and its target reader from the professional to the amateur — the magazine effected a clear shift in the gender identity of both the photographic work and photographic producer it described. As Pix demanded, ‘[g]o forth ladies! Create beautiful work, love your craft and do it all in style.’⁶ As such, this new digital publication represents the latest in a long line of texts, that, since the late nineteenth century, have addressed women as both producers and consumers of the medium. Representing an important but marginalised space in which early debates about the ever-shifting status of photography as either art, commerce or technological tool, and the photographer as either artist, scientist or professional operator first emerged, such magazines have always contributed to the discourse of photography. Focusing on the ephemeral and unstable texts that these publications constitute, this essay considers the presence and absence of photography in the intimate pages of the woman’s magazine. Exposing the fluctuating gender identities of both the work of the photographer and the work of photography that those pages both describe and conceal, I interpret that shifting presence as a kind of discursive barometer through which wider anxieties about the identity, status and ontology of the medium itself have been historically played out.

For the Modern Photograph(her)

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Pix did not last long. Today, no trace can be found on the websites of either Rangefinder or Photo District News: no longer available to download from iTunes, all that remains is its digital footprint—‘ERROR: The requested URL could not be retrieved’. While suggestive of the company’s embarrassment over a misguided venture, the short-lived magazine’s emergence — and subsequent erasure — within contemporary digital photographic culture is interesting to consider in relation to the wider context of the so-called ‘new domesticity’ that has developed through the first decade of the twenty-first century. On the surface a social movement celebrating hand-made crafts, family and domestic life and precipitated by the desire to return to the slower pace and authenticity of pre-digital labour and experience, this domestic revival is underpinned by technology. It is built upon the networked communities brought together by the internet; by the ease of taking, manipulating and sharing photographs with camera-phones and applications; and by the Web 2.0 technology that has enabled blogging and the user-generated content through which the fantasy of a domesticity reconfigured for the digital age has been made visible and shared worldwide.

Although perhaps the most notorious example, Pix was by no means unique, just one of a number of publications similarly aimed at the female photographic hobbyist by offering woman-to-woman advice. We have Chic, ‘for women who love photography’, with covers and headlines barely distinguishable from fashion magazines; and Click magazine ‘for the modern photograp(her)’, whose pastel colours and baby cover-stars firmly place photography in the home.⁷ As well as a predictable emphasis on the surface of femininity, the frequent association of women’s photographic work with their everyday life conflates domestic and professional spaces, labour and roles in a way that displaces women’s creativity onto their environment — because, as Pix’s Editor-in-Chief pointed out, ‘if you love to snap photos, chances are you’re pretty creative and artsy about the rest of your world too’.⁸ Unlike the fetishisation of technology central to the more serious photography magazines aimed at a masculine amateur readership that we still see on the shelves of the newsagent today, here, photographic apparatus is just one part of an overall lifestyle. Subsumed within the feminised world of the decorative interior, the façade of femininity is applied not only to the woman photographer’s face and body through make-up and cute, comfortable shoes, but also the spaces and tools of her work — lanterns for her studio, accessories for her equipment, or animal-print designer covers to protect her lens and let her ‘shoot in style’.

What a Woman Can Do with a Camera

This conflation of women, photography and domesticity in the pages of the magazine — real or virtual — is nothing new. In fact, it takes us back to the late nineteenth century, when a similar relationship was contrived to ‘sell’ the relatively new practice of photography as both amateur hobby and professional endeavour to women, as increasing numbers of women were moving into the public world of work, and at a moment in which photography itself had undergone a fundamental technological change.

To meet the popular demand for albumen prints, portraits and stereocards in the 1850s and 1860s, working-class women in Western metropolitan centres of photographic production were attracted to the industry by adverts placed in the commercial press, creating what was seen as an unskilled workforce that was a source of cheap, unregulated (and ununionised) labour. But toward the end of the century, middle-class women were also interpellated as potential photographic workers and professionals, often via the space of a new type of publication: the woman’s magazine.⁹

The need for an expanded photographic workforce itself coincided with women’s increasing participation in paid work outside the home — a transgression of the era’s association of women and femininity with the domestic sphere that was difficult to accommodate fully within these magazines’ pages. On the one hand, it was important that their advice for women related new forms of work to traditional domestic skills: the emergence of urban middle-class identity in the nineteenth century depended on the concept of ‘domestic womanhood’ as the model of femininity, and magazines aimed at this readership reflected this ideal through their contents’ emphasis on home and family life.¹⁰ But as Margaret Beetham has pointed out in her study of the format’s development within the British context, it struggled to present a coherent model of femininity for women. The contemporary ideal of femininity that it was active in producing and disseminating was increasingly at odds with the reality women articulated.¹¹ As women demanded that their new magazines deal with what was considered to some the ‘problem’ of paid work for middle-class women, responses varied, with some publications dedicating space to the issue only within the reader-generated content of the letters pages.

The representation of photographic work for women in these spaces was no less fraught. From their earliest days of publication, domestic magazines in both Britain and in the US such as the Ladies’ Home Journal (first appearing in 1883) included paid adverts for re-touchers and hand-colourers in their back pages, the format’s expansion in both countries coinciding with new opportunities for women in these centres of photographic industry. While such work required some skill and innate artistic ability, women were encouraged by the apparent simplicity of the work of re-touching — a simple task, one such advert from 1893 suggested, that could be ‘thoroughly taught in 3 to 5 months’, and so was ‘especially suitable for ladies’.¹²

But while the back sections carried adverts for unskilled labour, the front sections marketed the more salubrious side of photography, as the setting up of a portrait studio was deemed a business suitable for respectable women in need of a salaried income. Perhaps most infamously, photo-journalist Frances Benjamin Johnston’s essay ‘What a woman can do with a camera’, published in an 1897 edition of the same magazine, described the profession of photography as particularly appealing to ‘energetic, ambitious’ women. Offering a ‘good-paying business’, a successful operation demanded the ‘personal qualities’ of ‘good common sense, unlimited patience to carry her through endless failures, equally unlimited tact, good taste, a quick eye, [and] a talent for detail’.¹³

While her advice advocated many aspects of the photographic business — from setting up the darkroom, making the exposures and developing the plates and prints — those aspects of professional practice were at the same time closely tied up with essential ‘personal qualities’ deemed necessary for success: in particular, a capacity for unlimited patience and the ‘judicious and proper exercise of that quality known as tact’, qualities considered innately feminine at the time.¹⁴ And as the advice pages of women’s magazines became extricated and resituated in the emerging genre of advice manuals and career guides, these domestic feminine qualities were further emphasised. In the advice aimed at ‘Women as Photographers’ included in Mrs Rayne’s celebrated What Can a Woman Do; or, Her Position in the Business and Literary World — considered by the author to be the first of its kind when published in 1893 — that need for patience and tact recurred. But this was combined with a close attention to detail via her delicate ‘nimble fingers’, as she was encouraged to apply those feminine traits onto the care of both the sitters and the spaces of the studio, while employing a man ‘to do the work.’¹⁵ Rather than engaging with artistic or aesthetic decisions or technical and chemical processes, women were instead encouraged to devote themselves to the peripheral tasks of the photographic business: applying that soothing domestic touch to the housework of the studio, caring for sitters and calming fractious children, or applying those agile little fingers to the feminised crafts of embroidering pretty cloths and covers for her male photographer’s camera equipment.¹⁶

In this domestic literature’s displacement of the newly-addressed woman photographer’s own hands from the act of taking and making photographs onto the house-keeping and decoration of the professional studio remade as a quasi-domestic space, the material actions of any photographic labour are concealed. The woman photographer disappears. As with other types of women’s magazine, the facts and lived experience of the working woman as an emerging category of late nineteenth-century white, affluent womanhood was marginalised — or relegated to the back pages and classified adverts — in order to maintain the home as the one site of true feminine labour.

Taking Advice

Thus we are faced with a methodological problem, the omission or mis-representation of working women’s experience within the magazine’s pages highlighting the genre’s pitfalls for the feminist historian in pursuit of changing conditions of domesticity and women’s work. Written and published for mass appeal, and explicitly gendered in both content and context, women’s magazines disseminate societal ideals through their by-now familiar mix of intimate modes of address, targeted advertising and emphasis on either sisterly or maternal advice. In so doing, they have naturalised a link between heteronormative femininity and consumption that Beetham argues was central to the development of the genre and its purposeful construction of both domestic femininity and woman as primary consumer.¹⁷ As Janice Winship discussed in her ground-breaking study from the 1980s, in their creation of a ‘woman’s world’ that is always part make-believe fantasy, part real-life experience, the magazine’s use as a historical document to present a ‘true and real picture of women’s lives’ at any time has been questioned.¹⁸ And as Angela McRobbie’s analysis reminds us, the media’s transmission of contemporary ideologies never works in an uncomplicated, mechanical way.¹⁹ Provoking a productive tension between established gender roles and women’s resistance to them, through the female reader’s ability to pick and choose what she does — and does not — take on board, magazines remain useful, but problematic, sources.

But while appropriating the magazine’s familiarity in its own tone and mode of address, the particular genre of women’s advice raises further issues. As design historian Grace Lees-Maffei has pointed out, the voice of dominant ideology is even more strongly articulated in its prescription of desirable feminine behaviours, so closely has it been associated with the advertising of each progressive era’s consumer goods.²⁰ Between fact and fiction, and endowed at times with both professional and amateur status, advice is ambiguous in its passive reflection and active construction of contemporary ideals and expectations: it remains difficult to ever know how that advice is acted upon by its audience, if at all.²¹

Yet there is something in the genre’s emergence and its attempt to stabilise, fix, and pin down in writing retrogressive constructions of domestic femininity in the face of change that makes it interesting. Always in flux, as particularly unstable texts that fall outside of dominant discourse, never meant to last, and thus often overlooked as serious historical ‘evidence’, it is perhaps not surprising that they are often dismissed, as the location of ‘true experience’ remains a key source in the pursuit of reliable historical fact. But, as post-structuralist historian Joan Scott argues – there is no reality of experience to find; as she puts it: ‘it is not individuals who have experience, but subjects who are constituted through experience’.²² As a result, it is experience itself that any project of critical feminism should seek to explain, in attending to those historical processes that give rise to the conditions that ‘through discourse, position subjects and produce their experiences’.²³ Rather than promising any ‘truths’ within their pages, these examples of marginal discourse in which femininity, domesticity and photography are produced are useful not for what they appear to show us, but don't show — the fragments and elisions that cannot be read in isolation, but are only glimpsed when read in parallel with other contemporary accounts with which they might, at times, intersect.

Advice for women as photographers was particularly unstable, interpellating women as both producers and consumers of the new technology, while at the same time constructing the figure of the woman with the camera as an ambivalent figure — neither fully-formed working professional nor serious artist or experimental amateur, but a kind of enduring domestic presence. In the wake of George Eastman’s commercialisation of the dry-plate process and then the gelatin film that enabled the introduction of the Kodak Camera in 1888, her application of domestic care became more important. As cameras became smaller, women’s hands began to appear in illustrated advertisements to show both their scale and simplicity. And first appearing in 1889 as an advertising device in women’s magazines, with the introduction of the ‘Kodak Girl’, photography became closely associated with her breezy New Woman iconography, camera ever-ready in her hand, concealing the medium’s increasingly industrialised factory-production through association with her modern, wholesome image.

But it was not only in women’s magazines that this ideal of feminised, domesticated photography appeared: even trade and artistic journals that contributed to fin-de-siècle photographic discourse made that link. In the pages of specialist publications such as The American Amateur Photographer, for example, one writer in 1898 entrenched those links between photography and femininity, advising that, along with the necessary attributes of cleanliness and patience, it was ultimately the ‘light, delicate touch of a woman’ that would guarantee success.²⁴

As we know, that touch had significance: as Patrizio di Bello has argued, in the heavily industrialised decades of the late nineteenth century, the soothing caress of a women’s hand was invested with a uniquely ameliorative and purifying power through which mass-produced objects obtained emotional affect as they made their way from the factory to the home.²⁵ That ‘lady’s touch’ was invested with the power to transform and domesticate mass-produced objects into gifts of love, cleansed of the alienated and alienating touch of the anonymous factory worker.²⁶

Photography was no different. But in the advice given to women — as either professional or amateur, and in varying types of publication at that time — the labour of her own hand disappears, leaving only the trace of that ameliorative touch. Tactful, soothing and caring, women’s photographic labour was reconfigured as emotional, domesticated and reproductive rather than productive or creative — in effect concealing what Beetham describes as the transgressive and ‘disruptive presence’ of women’s paid work within the era’s magazines, and at the same time hiding the act of photography itself.²⁷

Coming Home

It is in relation to the magazine’s figuration of the female photographer as both discursive presence but material absence that I return to the advice given in Pix and Click over one hundred years later — in another moment of paradigmatic change in which the medium has been technologically reconfigured once again, and in which the relationship forged between the woman-photographer and domestic femininity has returned as a similar site of productive tension, predicated upon the trace of her touch. For, while at the turn of the twentieth century photography moved out into the factory, at the turn of the twenty-first it returned home. As the adoption of digital photographic technologies expanded throughout the 1990s — initially via software applications and later through increasingly cheap and easy to use hardware — the production and consumption of photography was resituated in domestic space.²⁸

But it was men, rather than women, that became photography’s primary consumer, effecting a gender shift. As the high-price, low resolution digital cameras that first appeared on the domestic market in the early 1990s improved, catching up with and finally outselling their analogue predecessor by 2004, men replaced women as the chief consumers of camera hardware.²⁹ At the same time, digitalisation severed the link between the taking of photographs and the making, collecting and keeping of family snaps — the core of Kodak’s business, and central to women’s primary photographic role as family archivist. With photographs being processed and printed out far less frequently, women’s traditional role as sentimental image-maker seemed redundant; and in fact, so sizeable was this market downshift that in 2012 women’s perceived reluctance to engage with the new technology was blamed for Kodak’s own demise.³⁰

These gender shifts are reflected in the discourse of digital photography as it began to emerge through that decade. Men’s increased engagement with hi-tech digital photography in the home effected a reconfiguration of amateur, hobbyist practice. Domestic photography became masculinised: as Elizabeth Shove argues in her analysis of the impact of everyday technology on social life, the high-specification ‘photo-technical’ complex that replaced the cheap consumer camera had the effect of escalating amateur ambition, creating a dynamic feedback loop that provoked the newly-masculinised domestic photographer to ‘aspire to heights of photographic performance worthy of the technologies they now own’.³¹ At the same time, in professional journals like British Journal of Photography the urgent question of defining the digital photographic professional recurred in editorial reflections, the policing of the amateur/professional boundary reflecting an anxious speculation about photography itself, what it was, and what it was going to be. Digital photography was envisaged as a newly technological yet somehow domesticated ‘craft’: relocated from darkroom to domestic computer, the future photographer was more likely to be seated inside, electronically cutting and pasting at his desk, than snap-shooting in the world from behind the lens.³² Invoking the border wars from a century before, the boundaries of public and private, professional and amateur, masculine and feminine appear once again fraught.

But rather than being directed at the masculine amateur, the anxiety provoked by his increasing technical professionalism and photography’s own shifting status seemed to be displaced onto the woman photographer and, once more, her caring domestic touch. In the same trade journal, advice for women encouraged them not to fear the digital technologies that were becoming in the first decade of the twenty-first century ‘less threatening’, through the introduction of a new generation of cameras that ‘don’t appear as complicated, which used to put women off’.³³ Through a now-familiar reference to technical simplicity, women were once more encouraged to apply their domestic ‘woman’s touch’, to use their ‘emotional intelligence’, to exercise their taste in order to compliment ‘with ease’ their client’s interior décor, and above all else, convey their empathy and innate understanding of the final destination: ‘that’s the home.’³⁴

It is this ambivalent figure — half-professional, half-amateur — who was addressed as the target consumer of the short-lived Pix magazine: its own gendered advice reconfirmed her blurred identity as both photographic producer and consumer, re-inscribing both functions within domestic space — albeit reconfigured for the digital age.

New Traditions of Old Domesticity

But rather than its misguided content, it was that reader herself who attracted vitriolic criticism and derision: she was the ‘housewife who has a new, part time “photography business”. After giving up on making cupcakes, and selling things on Etsy, of course’, commented one critic. More succinctly, another suggested that they ‘should’ve named [the magazine] Mom-tographer Monthly’.³⁵

The rhetoric of cupcakes and crafting here connects this figure to the discourse of the ‘New Domesticity’ whose emergence in the first decades of the twenty-first century has prompted this special issue’s focus. Women’s photography has become part of its revocation of traditionally feminised work: she is the hobbyist, only playing at being a professional, her ‘business’ just one part of domestic work alongside crafting, cooking, housework and raising her family — all elements that are central to the recent return to the home. As Emily Matchar describes it in her pop-cultural analysis, the attraction of the so-called ‘new’ domestic turn appears on the surface to be a retrogressive ‘time machine beaming images from 1959’, but represents a ‘re-embrace of home and hearth by those who have the means to reject these things’ — such things being baking, knitting, preserving one’s own fruit — and photography — all safely within the comfort of domestic space.³⁶

Although criticised by some as a post-feminist rejection of the political progress made by second-wave feminism and its politicisation of the personal and everyday experience of women, the self-identified advocates of the new domestic life reclaim it as part of the historical lineage of women’s labour practices. The celebratory aspect of the rhetoric was first crystallised by Jean Railla in her reflection on her own discovery of the ‘fine art’ of housework in her 2001 essay, ‘A Broom of One’s Own’ which mapped her personal trajectory from independent but unhappy and unhealthy career woman to contented housewife.³⁷ Raised to thumb her nose at domestic work culturally devalued as ‘nothing but boring drudgery’, Railla decided instead to embrace it: refusing to reproduce the traditional perception of women’s work as ‘stupid, simple [and] suffocating’, she reclaims it as part of women’s history and an ‘important part of who we are’ as feminists.³⁸

Despite its potential to reconfirm the once-naturalised links between women, femininity and hearth and home, Stephen Duncombe argues that Railla’s call to domestic arms could be considered a form of feminised cultural resistance enacted in the private sphere and everyday activities of the home rather than the more usual (and more masculine) spaces of public and collective life. In fact, a similar kind of resistance had emerged earlier in the 1980s, provoked by the marketing to women of a similarly seductive return to a simpler, more fulfilling domestic life via the pages of the woman’s magazine. Purveyed then as the ‘new traditionalism’ that Susan Faludi deconstructs in her mapping of the post-feminist backlash, its coining by Jib Fowles in the New York Times in 1988 predicted a new age centred on family life that would, by the year 2000, have returned to the neo-Victorianism of the post-war nuclear ideal of ‘father working, mother at home with the children’.³⁹

Both self-identified and then self-confirmed in the media, discussed in the popular press, and most notably, made visible through the advertising campaign that appeared in Good Housekeeping in the late 1980s, the lure of domestic life was sold to women frustrated by the obstacles to achievement they were beginning to encounter in the world of work. Although there was very little evidence of any reflection in reality, the magazine’s selling of a different way of life in which traditional forms of women’s work centred on nurture and care were valued clearly appealed. What is more, the ideological message of the campaign and its photographic representation of real women in simple, homely environments were backed up by popular feminist theory. The message of new traditionalism chimed with the relational feminism that, since the late 1970s, had sought to identify and define women’s distinctive nature, advocated the specificity of women’s culture and difference, and celebrated uniquely feminine attributes such as nurturing qualities, concern for others, and a caring ethic that became entrenched throughout the next decade.⁴⁰ Particularly influential was the publication of psychologist Carol Gilligan’s In Another Voice in 1982, whose evidence-informed analysis of moral choices contrasted a masculine propensity for abstract rules, justice and the ‘ideal of perfection’ with a more feminine concern for individual context and in relation to individuals which she described as the ‘ideal of care’.⁴¹ And although Gilligan emphasised the social context in which those ‘different’ moral decisions were made, her construction of the possibility of difference was widely (mis)appropriated to shore up the decade’s ideology of newly configured separate spheres, returning women to the domestic work of caring to which she was once again deemed naturally destined. In fact, Susan Faludi suggests, so far-reaching was the influence of Gilligan’s mapping of female difference, by the end of the decade ‘feminine caring’ had become the ‘all-purpose tag to sum up the female psyche’.⁴²

With this revived correlation between women and domestic work supported by pop-feminist thought, its appropriation by advertising executives keen to target female domestic consumers through appealing to their apparently innate capacity for nurture and care is not surprising. Photography was itself central to the magazine’s effective communication of these ideals, in both form and content. Invoking Donna Haraway’s concept of ‘border wars’, Deborah Leslie argues that the campaign’s success depended on the images’ content — their deployment of nostalgic associations of home and family life ‘an effort to solidify the increasingly tenuous distinction between public/private, male/female, culture/nature, urban/rural, and work/home’ within the context of late consumer capitalism in which the image of women in retrogressive domestic roles was at odds with their increasing participation in the post-Fordist labour market.⁴³ At the same time, they played on familiar photographic codes in order to communicate their message, with the grainy quality of the black and white photographs combined with real women subjects and real-life domestic scenarios carefully chosen to connote the truth associated with documentary reportage.⁴⁴

30% Photographer, 100% Mom

But while this earlier form of neo-traditionalism used photographic images of women to sell its rhetoric of outmoded domestic femininity, its contemporary re-emergence as the ‘new domesticity’ has been in part supported by images produced by women — for themselves. The taking, sharing and discussion of photographic images combined with the giving of photographic advice is an integral component of its mediation online. While on the surface the trend for cupcake-baking, yarn-bombing and stitch’n’bitch community-building suggests a nostalgic yearning for a slower, more authentic pre-digital life, it is underpinned by the very same technology it appears to resist — in particular the opportunities for interaction and collaboration offered by Web 2.0 technology after 2004. In fact, so central are blogging, sharing photos and social networking to the circulation of its rhetoric, Matchar concluded that it is made visible in the new spaces of digital culture: through the rise of what the Technorati terms the ‘mommy blogger’, whose articulation of homely, maternal identity online is the ‘face of New Domesticity’ today.⁴⁵

Taking pictures is integral to this newly digitised domestic duty, with networks such as Instagram and Pinterest inviting the uploading of visual content through which the ideal is mediated. Advice on taking the perfect shot proliferates: Click magazine, for example, is the periodical published by the ‘women who brought you Clickin’ Moms’, rooted in the website created for friends ‘to talk photography’, a community for business networking, technical knowledge and artistic growth, but most of all the ‘home’ for ‘deeply held friendships’.⁴⁶ Inviting members to ‘ask a question, share a photo, learn pro tips’, it offers online tutorials and an advice forum, and tips on ‘moments in motherhood’, ‘things I’ve learned about photographing grandparents’, ‘your baby’s monthly photos’ and ‘10 Valentine’s day pictures you need to take’. What is more, the site’s domestic focus is reflected in the homely architecture of the site organised as a notebook that includes beginner advice, a ‘study hall’, and spaces for sharing pictures and photographer stories, products and ‘pretty things’.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this apparent almost exclusive emphasis on home and family, and traditionally female photographic subjects, has not failed to attract derision. The New Domestic woman-photographer is that ‘mom-tographer’ who attracted scorn in the reader comments’ reaction to the announcement of the hobbyist Pix. She is that part-time snapper whose professional work always takes a backseat to domestic duty, a figure of fun whose notoriety by 2007 had earned her an entry in the crowd-sourced urban dictionary of pop cultural terminology: the ‘Mom-with-a-camera’.⁴⁷ A ‘wannabe-pro’ shooting her babies, ‘undercutting pros’ while being financially supported by her husband — she is attracted to photography only because ‘everything, from click to print, is so easy to do now’.⁴⁸

But at the same time, she is often a professional, using blogging and the giving of advice to sell her business. The author of ‘Mom and Camera’, for example, uses her website to sell not only her prints, but her mentoring and advice. By combining her expertise with a blog and sharing photos from her life, she combines her domestic and professional roles, appropriating the illusion of perfect domesticity to sell her own business — something Matchar suggests is common to many Mommy Bloggers online, who present beautifully-filtered images of their domestic lives to promote their photography business — and vice versa.⁴⁹ She appropriates the business of photography to sell domesticity: in line with other women’s blogs, technical and professional skills are downplayed, her entrepreneurial identity subordinate to her primary care-giving roles as wife and as mother. Reducing her professional labour to a hobby practised in everyday life, as she put it in her ‘A Little About Me’ section, she is only 30% photographer, but always ‘100% mom’.⁵⁰

On the one hand, as techno-feminist Gina Masullo Chen argues, the adoption of the diminutive forms ‘mom’ and ‘mommy’ with which such bloggers self-identify in their own construction online conjures the prototype of the ideal caring mother, reconfirming women’s primary nurturing role.⁵¹ While undoubtedly proud and duly celebrating maternal experience, by creating what Chen describes as a ‘digital domesticity’, the self-perpetuation of this aspect of women’s identity and labour serves to re-inscribe the limited possibilities of domestic femininity within the new public-private spaces of the blogosphere.⁵² But at the same time, in the reduction of photographic work to the work of domesticity, her identity as woman photographer disappears, leaving only the trace of that caring touch.

There is value in that touch. The confessional blogs, sisterly tone, advice and discussion of women’s experience online revokes the format of the woman’s magazine, offering the hand of digital friendship, and creating online communities, in so doing fulfilling the utopian potential of the web to create vital, truly social networks. As theorist of digital culture Geert Lovink has argued, the user-generated content of Web 2.0 culture is imagined to be ‘surrounded by a lively social sphere grouped around the posting, not just through comments but also through linking in blog postings, tweeting, and the like, combined with the share and recommend buttons within social media’.⁵³ However, in reality, he concludes, ‘[r]arely do we see respondents talking to each other.’⁵⁴ But as Matchar’s analysis demonstrates, by giving advice, creating virtual clubs, and blogging about home and family, women are far more likely to post comments, link to others’ blogs, and interact with readers: they ‘swap skills, tips and recipes, give advice; offer emotional support’ through the building and maintenance of ‘Homemaker 2.0’ networks, creating a very real sense of belonging to a virtual sisterhood, that, like the printed pages of the woman’s magazine over one hundred years before, helps overcome the isolation of domestic experience still lived by women today.⁵⁵

Yet they are similarly unstable texts. In ways that echo the instability of the contrived familiarity of the advice page in the woman’s magazine, they too confuse lived reality and fiction, creating what even proponents of the New Domesticity’s mediation online recognise as an art-directed fantasy.⁵⁶ Combining what Lovink describes as a compelling but unreliable and ‘unique mix of the private (online diary) and the public (PR-management of the self), the weblogs of the early 2000s represent a newly-digitalised ‘in-between realm’, positioned between the authoritative writing of the news media and the informal dialogue of email or instant chat, through which the ‘magazineness’ of the woman’s magazine is reconfigured online.⁵⁷

Chatting for Free

In this in-between space — between amateur and professional, and domestic and digital — by foregrounding advice, emotional support, empathy and sympathy online, the Mom-with-a-Camera’s work appears not to be photography at all, but instead the production of virtual care. Through the digitalisation of what relational feminism described as ‘affective labour’, such women’s domestic role takes precedence, in a sleight of hand in which the work of photography itself disappears. Just like the Kodak Girl before her — who at the turn of the twentieth century Nancy West argues grew up, got married, and settled down to have a family — today’s New Domestic photographer is a similar kind of ‘memory keeper’, the same family archivist through whom heteronormative familial ideologies are maintained via her caring but abstracted photographic touch.⁵⁸ Reduced to an innate capacity for ‘feminine caring’ that Faludi identified nearly twenty years before, photography, femininity and domestic care have been reconnected for a new digital age.

But in the contemporary manifestation of the feminine sphere of the home online, the legacies of relational feminism’s theorisation of women’s affective labour come into tension with those new forms of labour produced in the very same digital conditions of the early twenty-first century in which the New Domesticity is visibly reproduced. Born of Web 2.0 technology, its reliance on user-generated domestic work exemplifies what philosopher Mario Lazzarato has identified as the ‘immaterial labour’ of the digital age — new forms of work dependent upon certain digital skills and interaction that produces the ‘cultural content’ of the web through types of activity that ‘are not normally recognized as ‘‘work’’, but include activities instrumental in ‘defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public opinion’.⁵⁹ Often unpaid, invisible or at best overlooked, yet essential to the maintenance and reproduction of societal norms and cultural convention, such work reminds us of the feminised work of care. Feminised aspects of contemporary free labour that Tiziana Terranova describes as ‘cumulative hours of accessing the site (thus generating advertising), writing messages, [and] participating in conversations’ that are frequently ignored, symptomatic of the ‘masculine bias’ that pays more attention to the work of more technical open-source programming than the other, more everyday and domestic interactions on which the web depends.⁶⁰ Invoking the clicking and linking, gossip, advice and sisterly conversation of the call-and-response dynamic of women’s domestic blogging, such hidden care work thus contests what Terranova sees as the prioritisation of masculine understanding of labour in the digital economy, in which the writing of an operating system is still more worthy of attention than the seemingly less important activity of ‘chatting for free’.⁶¹

Free, immaterial, and invisible, the reduction of the female photographer’s labour to the work of virtual care constitutes her as a key worker in the facilitation of digital sociality, in so doing eradicating the material facts of her photographic labour — for as Joan Williams has argued in her analysis of the gendering of affective labour, ‘where there is ‘care’, there is no ‘work’.⁶² But more than this, by leaving only the trace of her touch suspended in the web of connection, community, advice and sisterly chat, she endures. Like the Kodak Girl with her camera in her hand, held up against the tide of photographic change, today’s figure of the woman with a camera is similarly constant. She is a soothing and ameliorative presence, her relocation of photography in domestic life and work upholding traditional values, norms, tastes and gender constructions at a similar moment of change. Just as the examples of nineteenth-century advice tell us little about the reality of women’s work in the field of photography, the contemporary (self)construction of the domestic female amateur photographer can only tell us about the conditions — of gender, labour and of photography — in which that reality was produced.

But by accepting as rich, if unstable, the popular but marginal texts in which today’s feminised discourse of re-domesticated photography is emerging in parallel with those in which photography’s emergent digital discourse is being written, the operation of sexual difference itself begins to emerge. Following Joan Scott’s critical method of what she calls ‘speaking back’ to dominant historiographies, those points of friction in which difference comes briefly into focus reveal not the experience of women in photography, but instead how the categories of woman, femininity and domestic work are deployed in the fluctuating characterisation of photography itself.⁶³ For, photography, we are told, is in crisis. In today’s post-photographic era its very ontology is reconfigured: photography as we knew it has disappeared. It is variously described as trivial, faddy, and insubstantial — a fragmented and unreliable ‘picture mix’, that is devoid of both authenticity and authorship, becoming a kind of newly-domesticated craft — that, like all digital media, Lev Manovich argues, is defined only by a capacity for endless ‘manipulation’.⁶⁴ Revoking an older but equally feminised language of photography once again dependent upon crafty nimble fingers and a delicate touch both real and metaphorical, in this parallel discourse those points of intersection emerge. Doing the housework of the web, the lingering traces of her caring photographic touch ‘speak back’. As both ameliorative and nostalgic symbol of the medium’s past and a disruptive presence which highlights the anxious operation of difference in its discursive production today, under her soothing touch, photography has, once again, come home.