Facebook: Keeping the Image Alive?

Eleven days prior to being asked to write a piece on the theme of photographs, my dog of thirteen years died. Being the sole member of my family living away from home on a continual basis – home being Dungarvan, a relatively small harbour town on the south coast of Ireland – I found my connection to him in the final three months of his life both affecting and peculiar. I say this because during the post-Christmas period in which I was physically absent from him, I harnessed a new kind of relationship through fraternising with a Facebook profile created on his behalf. This profile was maintained collectively by my mother and two younger sisters, and it was here that they, or “Bruno”, would regularly post status updates and contribute reflections on various issues, images or videos, all the while invoking an endearing doggie persona, and in the process accumulating upwards of three hundred online acquaintances. For one not accustomed to the potential vehemence of family-pet relations, or to the routinely lighthearted nature of online social networking, I acknowledge how such behaviour might appear as somewhat trivial. My assertion, however, is that, at the root of any amusement or emotional sustenance that arose in me on account of these online exchanges, was undoubtedly the investment that I placed – that which I continue to place – in the integrity of photographs and images, or, more specifically, in their capacity to provide durable and majestic testaments to one’s identity (or identities), irrespective of whether the creature being represented is human or non-human. Therefore, the idea that my mother and sisters were the individuals behind the text-based aspects of Bruno’s online persona was less significant than the potency enacted through the various visual incarnations of the boy himself as made public through his Facebook profile.

It is tempting to say something more on this notion of the public as it relates to photography, for “public” and “private”, as joint concepts, are usually paramount to any discussion that touches upon the social function of the internet, and that of social media, in particular. As already suggested, Bruno’s presence online came only towards the very end of his life (the timing was largely incidental, and was not deliberate), meaning that it was not until then that his image became known and disseminated to a much wider community of people beyond our immediate network of family and friends. Hence, if most of his existence was lived as per usual, conducted exclusively in the “real” world of domestic normality, well beyond the awareness of distant others, his last few months – for those of us who were close to him, at least – was marked by a definite sense of public disclosure, even celebration. An important outcome of this was that, with the establishment of his Facebook account, there came a greater impetus among members of my family to capture his image, with the intention of sharing photographs with his mass of online companions. For instance, when the snow fell at home in December, shortly before I was due to arrive back for the Christmas holidays, my sisters accompanied Bruno to the garden, where they carried out a veritable photo shoot with him as the primary subject, thus producing a number of distinctive images that became amongst the most prominently visible online. One could interpret this as the social function of the internet essentially informing and transforming the means by which we ourselves value our regular lived experience. The potential of sharing with outsiders what might otherwise be regarded as a private occurrence therefore initiates a change in how some of us approach our day-to-day existence. Hence, while I accept that these arguments are not limited to the mere consideration of visual imagery, the act of taking and uploading photographs is clearly a dominant component in this cultural ritual of sharing.

The final point that needs addressing is that of memory. Bruno’s sudden decline in health and subsequent passing meant that, for myself, stranded away from home, self-immersion in photographs and the recollections evoked in them became a crucial part of the grieving process. Turning my disquiet not only to images already on Facebook, I also began frantically to scour a number of external USB devices in the possibility of uncovering any older photos of Bruno that had long since evaded my consciousness. As turbulent as these moments were emotionally, the search not only helped in keeping my mind occupied, but also allowed me to advance a visual testament of his life, underlining once more my trust in the sustaining qualities of the image. Of course, what one finds is that digital files – at least in my case, as I imagine in those of many others – offer only a partial representation of a known visual history, and further time is always needed to attempt a more wholesome restoration. The conversion of “real” photographs – those ones you can touch – to esoteric computerised pixels, together with the increased public dissemination guaranteed by this evolution, might well be a means of immortalising the image, even if Walter Benjamin argues that the uniqueness of the image, its aura, therefore comes into jeopardy. Similarly, I cannot help but feel that the ubiquity of the image poses no barrier to the memories hovering beneath. In an exchange with “Bruno” in February, just less than two months before his death, I approached him with a quotation from Daniel Herwitz’s book, The Star as Icon: Celebrity in the Age of Mass Consumption (2008), where I stated: “It becomes a task of art, journalism, culture to keep the power in the image alive, the aura profound. Otherwise the image loses its force, fading like a worn cloth.” Bruno’s reply – “liked” by four fellow Facebook users – came as follows: “I will never fade. My profound image will be remembered in the hearts and minds of all that know me.”