Manuela Salazar
Research Associate (Media and Film)

Research

Current research

Working title: Through vernacular eyes: photography and the portrayal of material intimacy

Research Outline: I plan to research how the practice of systematically taking pictures of domestic objects could be shifting the ways in which we interact with our own domestic objects. I am looking to find ways with which to understand and analyse this shift throughout photography’s history. I am mainly wondering what do the domestic objects in photographs on Instagram mean? How does their meaning relate to the meaning of objects in previous periods of photography’s history? And finally what could be possible methodological approaches to gathering, analysing, discussing and producing knowledge about how material intimacy has been seen through vernacular eyes? I will thus be gathering inspiration from various fields of analysis - art history, psychology, anthropology, ethnography, computer science, design, geography, cultural studies, sociology, and media studies – to develop and experiment with different methodological approaches to the main research questions.

Keywords: Instagram, vernacular photography, objects, everyday aesthetics, material intimacy
Variations: Visual media, ordinary, quotidian, things, stuff, props, domesticity,
Related: Still life, aestheticization

Supervisors: Prof. Ben Highmore and Dr Ben Burbridge