Social media and smartphones act as this book’s second text. The visual text of Abu Ghraib is modernised and layered here with essays using photographs ripped from the contemporary social media pages of some of the soldiers at Abu Ghraib. In general, many texts on the ‘networked image’, the smartphone, or the digital image, laboriously define photographs made with smartphones as something separate from another ‘Photography’. These easily delineated and outdated feverous fetishised visions of men walking to important scenes with cameras and taking ‘Photographs’ still animate thinking around photography. 

 

In reality, the smartphone eclipses all past and present photographing. Never before have so many people had access to, used, and made images with cameras. This is the photography, the largest, most significant, and most complete iteration of photography; accessible, universal, and ubiquitous in the trillions. When talking about the smartphone I am not so much talking about a specific instance of photography but how photographs operate today; how photographs exist and are made in any practical or statistically significant way, a rejection of photographic mythos. 

 

Unimaginable ubiquity is not the only thing that makes the smartphone unique. These smart-‘Cameraphones’ (to use that strangely outdated term) are just that, ‘cameras’ but also ‘phones’, which means they are always connected to a network. A network that became 3G and 4 and then 5G and allows for the seamless integration of the internet and the photograph. The image now exists as part of a network, as an infinite and interconnected piece of information that moves instantaneously to nowhere. 

 

The networked image has become an absolute truth, formally and ideologically, and bleeds into all lives of the image, changing the kinds of pictures people take before they even open the camera app. Images are now always linked directly to an implicit or ethereal audience. Images in the act of capture are immediately situated and imagined as parts of a network, a dataset, a bursting culture of other images. This is not an interesting augmentation to an otherwise analogue image.(1) The networked image is a paradigm shift that completely severs digital and analogue photography.

​

Here, in the feed, the scroll, the roll; images, individuals, and individual narratives become intermeshed. Cameras invade our life more completely, taking over our eyes both in limiting our sight and in their literal ubiquity.