Glitchy Vision

A novel exploration of popular photographic media cultures in 1930s Europe through a feminist lens—and how visual social media changes what it means to be human both then and now.

Glitchy Vision takes a feminist approach to media history to examine how photographic social media cultures change human bodies and the experience of being human. To illuminate these glitches, Greene  focuses on the inevitable distortions that arise from looking at the past through the lens of the present. Treating these distortions as tools as opposed to obstacles, Greene uncovers new ways of viewing social media cultures of the past, while also revealing parallels between historical contexts and our contemporary digital media environment.

Greene uses three “born-digital keywords”—real time, algorithmic filters, and sousveillance—to examine photographic media environments in and around 1930s Europe. Each chapter of the book places one of the keywords in dialogue with an unconventional archive of popular “feminized” cultural artifacts and technological innovations from this historical moment that have been overlooked as critical resources for media studies: Evelyn Waugh’s bestselling novel Vile Bodies (1930) and photographic reproductions for the tabloid press; Lee Miller’s war photography for British Vogue and glamourous photo-retouching techniques; and the Mass-Observation Movement’s surrealist anthropology.

Glitchy Vision provides new strategies for reading history that show how small shifts in the circuits that connect bodies and media affect what it means to be human both in the past and today.False Starts (vii)
1 Glitch: History, Photography, Feminism (1)
2 Real Time: Vile Bodies, Tabloids, Melancholia (29)
3 Algorithmic Filters: Lee Miller, Glamour, Disability (67)
4 Sousveillance: Mass-Observation, Subjective Cameras, Situated Knowledge (115)
Loose Ends (155)
Acknowledgments (173)
Notes (177)
Bibliography (191)
Index (205)“Glitchy Vision is an instructive analysis of the ways social photography can be necessarily broken and remade via a radical feminist lens.”
—Legacy Russell, Executive Director and Chief Curator, The Kitchen; author of Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto
 
“Tears, scars, cuts; a social media user who wishes she could be ‘wearing a filter right now.’ By placing war and mass photography of the 1930s in dialogue with the present, Greene has created a powerful book about the often-wounded and disabled bodies that exist, vulnerable and ordinary, beneath the seamless vision of new technology.”
—Tung-Hui Hu, author of Digital LethargyAmanda K. Greene is an interdisciplinary researcher who studies how social media interacts with individuals’ experiences of their bodies, illness, and health. Her research has been published in journals such as Body Image, Configurations, Feminist Media Studies, Feminist Theory, Qualitative Psychology, Social Media + Society, and the Journal of Health Communication.