The Social Photo

“Like Susan Sontag’s On Photography to which it self-consciously responds, The Social Photo is slim, hard-bitten and picture-free. For if the average photo is ever dumber, photography matters even more; the social photo, in Mr. Jurgenson’s phrase, has effected a “fusion of media and bodies” that has made every gallerygoer a cyborg.”
—Jason Farago, New York Times (Top Art Books of 2019)

“Jurgenson is a good guide to our times”
—TLS

“Jurgenson puts forth the useful proposition that most online photos are about sharing experiences, not creating memories…units of communication, more emojis or hieroglyphics than portraits; they have little context, aren’t discernibly located anywhere, and typically come in the aggregate. For the most part, it wouldn’t really matter if they existed in twenty years.”
—New Yorker

“Social photos are not primarily about making media but about sharing eyes,’ Nathan Jurgenson writes in this important and timely book. Grappling with the significance of the billions of largely ephemeral images that inhabit social media, he persuasively delineates many of the key boundaries between what was previously understood to be photography and the contemporary image environment.”
—Fred Ritchin, author of Bending the Frame: Photojournalism, Documentary, and the Citizen

“Timely…Jurgenson puts the social photo in a broader context of photographic history in a way that should appeal to even the sniffiest critic”
—Economist

“[in The Social Photo], Jurgenson suggests that in today’s ocean of images, the traditional way we have looked at pictures is outdated. He suggests a new way to understand them, one that is “less art historical and more social theoretical”.”
—Taylor Dafoe, artnet News

“Jurgenson beautifully connects the newfound social documentary style with the history of photography and paints a picture of the similarities and differences of traditional photography and what he deems the new ‘social photos.'”
—Lauren Capraro, Communication Booknotes Quarterly

“A lively and provocative read.”
—Los Angeles Times

“A refreshing respite from most of the commentary streaming from our devices today”
—Financial Times