ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the history of both photography and popular culture, the 1900 release of the relatively cheap, easy-to-use Kodak Brownie camera changed this reality. The Brownie transformed photography from a practice almost exclusively saved for financially secure individuals and photography quasi-specialists into a popular activity that virtually anyone could partake in. The commercialisation of digital photography and the growing manufacturing of automatic as well as point-and-shoot digital cameras in the late twentieth century cemented and accelerated this process. It could be argued therefore that the ratio between photographic production and consumption constantly increased throughout the twentieth century. The criteria that Newhall's history of photography established to determine what and whose photographs could join his narrative mainly orbited around the abstract idea of straight optical vision. The socio-anthropological photographic scholarship of the early twenty-first century framed photography as a dynamic process that operates through representational, material, discursive and performative platforms enmeshed in complex sets of interpersonal connections.
