The word ‘digital’ points directly to a body part; a finger. It also points from here numerically; a digit, a number, a binary. Cameras as we knew them also pointed to a finger. Their design focused on that resting point. Holding a traditional camera in your hand and not resting your finger gently on the tense gloss of the shutter button is an act of ergonomic protest. The camera hugs our hand, gently cradling it onto the point of tension and release. Finger mounted our eye is coaxed and drawn towards the window of the viewfinder and into the mirror of the SLR. 

Fingers, now unmounted, have moved into the smartphone. They too are our way of entering digital space; we scroll, flick, pinch, and caress our screens. Fingerprints give us access, identity, security, and a reaffirmation of a sound relationship between the physical and the digital. In the camera app, however, the finger is a crossover from an older time. Shutter buttons sit awkwardly at the base of frames so that the phone has either to be held in one hand and pressed with the other or very delicately caressed, so as to maintain an equilibrium of balance, as we tentatively reach a thumb across the screen to make an image.

Cameras are now apps, and as such, camera apps should be read just like the Mavica. Snapchat, a hazy realm seriously adopted by digital-first young millennials and Gen Zs, is one of those apps.(2) Snapchat is primarily an image based messaging platform. In Snapchat, to capture an image you have to caress the image itself. The shutter button sits on top of the image, closing and opening ontological gaps. To capture an image in Snapchat is to touch it directly. Once it is captured, touch it more and more, adjusting and drawing on it, save and ‘add to memories’ and ‘add to story’. Here, in a front or back facing camera, the shutter button has become not only a place the finger is coaxed toward to materialise an image but part of the fabric and continuation of the image itself. We photograph on the screen, like the FD Mavica, at a distance from the eye. But with smartphones we are reasserted, seeing our finger on top of or directly below images. This removes an abstract process that previously signalled the act of photographing. Now pressing the shutter doesn't ‘capture’ or ‘steal’ a moment. The shutter sits inside a live camera feed in a continuum with the moment itself. A state that is echoed in the naming of photographs new homes that allude to continuum, to infinite movement, ‘the feed’, ‘the roll’, ‘the scroll’. 

In the early days of the smartphone, skeuomorphism ran rampant as users and designers tentatively tried to establish how to interact tactilely and digitally in the same breath.(3) The early smartphone camera desperately performed the analogue camera. After the smartphone's mass proliferation (specifically the smartphone connected to a proper internet network like 3G) images existing in a networked context became the norm. In response to this new truth, the image desperately attempted to align itself to an easier to believe regularity, modernism, and indexicality of film photography, attempting to appear as something we can hold, as something that decays. In simulating analogue photography the digital image attempted to recover from the network and from the digital something that lives underneath the bed in a shoebox, that can be held in relation to a body, that can be rationalised, and that can be singular.