Social Photography VIII

Carriage Trade

New York | USA

05 Aug, 2020 - 10 Oct, 2020

Carriage Trade is pleased to present "Social Photography VIII", the eighth installment of carriage trade鈥檚 cell phone photography show. While Social Photography is not guided by an all-encompassing theme, each year鈥檚 collection of pictures becomes an informal archive reflecting a range of recent social experience. Taking place in the midst of significant societal vulnerability and political conflict across the U.S., this year鈥檚 show presents an opportunity to recognize the importance of the ordinary or everyday in the face of the extraordinary, while also perhaps indicating a certain amount of resilience among the contributors, given the practical and emotional demands of a very uncertain moment.

Cell phones have become a kind of appendage for many, offering the ability to communicate, track, record, and archive every experience, then routinely feed the results into a social media stream. With its scrolling, "bottomless" format encouraging impulsive interaction, a perplexing mix of the anecdotal, the self-promotional, and the politically urgent coexist without perceptible context. Largely indifferent to codes of ethics or aesthetics, all content is subjected to peer rating systems and shifting algorithms that target the user based on their "stimulus patterns", while the split second experience of the social media image guarantees a short shelf life as it perpetually fuels the insatiable appetite of the attention economy.

As an eight plus year project, "Social Photography" has evolved with cell phone technology and in parallel with the development of social media. What began as an investigation of a novelty medium which simultaneously offered an alternative to the conventional non-profit benefit exhibition has become a kind of tradition, as it sustains and expands carriage trade鈥檚 community through its many participants, while helping support upcoming projects. While cell phone images are generally "unstable" through their constant movement within digital platforms, "Social Photography" links the cell phone picture鈥檚 virtual origins to an in-person gallery experience.