1The concept of sociophotography emerged during the creative experiment of the workshop-laboratory built and developed over a seven-year period in collaboration with researcher and lecturer Véronique Figini. The workshop, which became “A Sociophotographic Survey on the Digital Transition,” was supported by the ArTeC Research University School. It was based on a collaboration between the École Nationale Supérieure (ENS) Louis-Lumière and its photography master’s program, and Paris 8 University and its cultural industries master’s. In a context freed from many administrative constraints, we were able to develop a program of pedagogical innovation and initiation to research, according to a research-creation methodology.
2The researchers and professors who have adopted these methods have very high expectations: research-creation could “contribute to significantly regenerating the dynamics of university research” and “accelerate the emergence of new adhoc paradigms” to better understand the contemporary world and its disorders, as Yves Citton proposes (2023). Citton actively participated in the construction of the EUR ArTeC “creative” university project, which he managed for four years. This is the utopian horizon beneath which we worked during this period. I would like to show here the breadth and heuristic power of the approach. Several definitions proposed in Canadian research emphasize the possibility of the production of knowledge through the “combination” of “creative practices and university research […] via artistic expression, scientific analysis, and experimentation;”2 the Fonds de recherche du Québec proposes “the problematization of artistic practice”3 as a condition of research-creation. Our research-creation approach is part of a problematization of social science inquiry which permeates and is permeated by creative and experimental methods in photography.
3Organizing interdisciplinarity, both in terms of students and of speakers, requires a long period of development and consideration, and a good understanding of the objectives of each discipline. In practical terms, the workshop-laboratory took place over fifteen days which were spread over three months, and involved public presentations at various stages. Such an approach goes far beyond the ordinary frameworks of university education and requires specific funding from the institution. As Sabine Quiriconi (2022) explains in reference to a workshop-laboratory on theatre research supported by EUR ArTeC which she co-directed:
Multidisciplinary programs of this kind that are dedicated to research-creation in the humanities via new technologies require close cooperation between research, pedagogy, and artistic expression; they thereby force us to rethink the act of transmission and the relationship framework with students, and they encourage us to consider… all forms of temporal framework.
4The interdisciplinarity at the heart of this project invites students from two different disciplines, Information and Communication Sciences (ICS) and photography, to collaborate. And it requires consideration of the pedagogical, professional, and scientific issues that correspond to each. Students from both courses are given space for reflexivity on how the development of our digital activities infiltrates all our activities: with friends; romantic; educational; informational; and professional; and to explore the ethical questions and dilemmas that this generates regarding the functioning of platforms and their governance, but also regarding the individual and collective responsibilities that result from them. This reflexivity, informed by an interview-based survey, may result in a documented creation, an article, a photography series, or a visual or sound production, which serve to mould and shape contemporary research issues on the social uses of digital media, giving them visual or audio materiality. Students are given a logbook in which to record the different stages and creative possibilities.
5Current research trends around digital media highlight the contribution of the arts and creative experiences in particular to the understanding of digital environments (Renucci & Reol, 2015) and the relevance of research-creation methods. The investigative approach that is at the heart of the project is particularly appropriate for organizing this interdisciplinary collaboration, in a context in which the influence of new documentary photography is increasing throughout the field of the survey, drawing more or less freely from social science methods (Méaux, 2019).
6The feedback on the productions made during the workshop, which is set out in this article, is an opportunity to formalize the contributions of the collaboration between ICS and photography, and to explore the range of methods which have been adopted, invented, or in some cases reinvented by the students. The quality of the creations owes much to that of the support they received: first and foremost from Nadège Abadie, photographer and director, and Stéphanie Solinas, visual artist and photographer, who inspired, supported, and discussed the visual productions in detail, and from Pascale Colisson, doctor and teacher of journalism, who played the role of critical editor and who galvanized the stages of logical reasoning and account writing.
7We define sociophotography as the intersection of perspectives on a social fact between photographer and ICS researcher by means of a critical interrogation based on ICS research, resulting, after investigation, in a presentation of the results which include sensory creative expression. We understand criticism here as being likely to foster a distancing from ordinary representations and ideologies that are embedded in digital industry marketing and interfaces—representations and ideologies that can also permeate political discourse (Jehel & Saemmer, 2020). The teams in the workshop were required to comprise students from each discipline, photographers and ICS students, who participated in each of the related conferences.
- 4 “Design friction” is a method developed in management science and also in art and design (Bleecker, (...)
8The survey stage was based on the collection of documents, evidence, field observations, and interviews of a sociological nature. Focusing on the digital transition, the field also contained digital spaces in which the design of the interface, the functionalities offered to users, the recommended content, and communication exchanges that take place there could be observed. The productions created as part of the workshop (presented below) are the result of this dual visual and social science approach to the survey. The creators chose the form and tone of each work: documentary in the strict sense, understood as a series of verismo or indexical images; or, more often, resorting to the canons of visual art or even fiction by proposing scripted models, in the domain of mimesis (Schaeffer, 1999; Fournout, 2015) or critical utopian perspectives in the domain of “counter-mimesis,” in the manner of “design-friction.”4
9Introducing student photographers to social science in a teaching institution in which pedagogy is based mainly on practice, enriches their training. It was the survey methodology classes included within the workshop-laboratory that were first perceived by ENS Louis-Lumière as an asset for its students. The survey approach can indeed be particularly useful for their photography work. It has become a strong trend in the arts (Méaux, 2022, p. 14-15). However, it is not easy for these students. It presupposes their departure from several preconceived ideas or prenotions, particularly in their approach to the world, the social order, and its representation. It also forces them to leave solipsistic approaches and work with someone who does not have the same educational background or the same approach to digital communication and who may also have different convictions about the same subject. And it is precisely this “constraint” that is considered formative by professional photographers associated with ENS Louis-Lumière, as Samuel Bollendorff, Stéphanie Solinas, and Nadège Abadie have confirmed.
10Exploring uses of digital media intersects several interests for photographers. Digital technologies have transformed their work in terms of their practice, even if the fundamentals remain unchanged. André Gunthert (2008) identified four major changes: price reduction; internet dissemination; technological rationalization and simplification; and the “gadgetization” of cameras and their inclusion in smartphones. Photographers are also affected by strategies of systemic digital platforms, which exercise censorship on their creative work through moderation of their posts, and considerable constraints in terms of format, while offering their productions a visibility that is difficult to circumvent, as evidenced by the investigation carried out by Vanessa Arias, Katia Zhdanovam and Kankou Sambakessi (2022).
11For ICS students, the main benefit of the workshop is that it allows them to break free from a utilitarian culture of the image, commonplace on digital platforms, and discover the richness of visual culture as well as the questions, criteria, and requirements of photographers, and to co-construct sensory creative work. The collaboration between photographers and ICS fostered during this workshop-laboratory set out to decrypt the algorithmic scripts that classify and sort digital image walls and to promote the production of images that demand the intelligence of the viewer, increase understanding of the social issues posed by digital media, and contribute to building a critical collective vision or “imaginaire” of the internet.
12The visual representations of digital technologies are still quite poor today. The images offered by the Google search engine to illustrate the Tech Giants5 are reduced to arrangements of company logos and growth charts. In other words: marketing material. The lack of adequate representation of digital technologies is an observation shared by Michel Slomka, photographer at MYOP agency,6 who spoke about his irritation at ordinary media illustrations of cyberwar: “We see a guy with an Anonymous mask in a hood, just lit by his screen where he’s tapping away. Honestly, I find that ridiculous. It’s as if, as photographers, we’re incapable of saying anything.” The photographer’s work consists precisely in making visible and therefore comprehensible to the greatest number of people the most complex dimensions of uses of digital technologies, such as satellite images, or the most personal, such as the ethical dilemmas experienced by users, or portraying the impact of extractive technology on forms of representation.
13The sociophotographic workshop aims to propose new representations of digital technologies to help build an imaginaire of the internet, that is to say something that is removed from sites’ brand messaging. The imaginaire has played a decisive role in the adoption and normalization of internet use, as has been the case for other communication technologies (Flichy, 2001; Turner, 2012). In Californian counterculture, the birthplace of Big Tech, the internet is presented as a technology that streamlines communication and makes the collective “more creative, more inventive, more efficient” (Flichy, 2001). Early digital network experiments (such as “the Well” in the late 1980s) nurtured the concept of the “virtual community” which would be developed by Howard Rheingold (1987). The notion of virtuality designates the reality of distance communication—it connotes the possibility of an “acorporeal life” social life (Flichy, 2007)—which is at a distance not only from others, but also from one’s own body. The “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” published by John Perry Barlow (1996), founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, aims to inscribe the imaginaire of the internet in a reality which escapes statist logic.
14The content of this internet imaginaire, conveyed by experts, activists, companies, and politicians but also by the media, is diffused through images and even more by discourse, words, and metaphors that alter the perception of its reality. The development of information technologies has been presented by governments since the early 2000s as a key means of maintaining economic growth and employment in European countries.7 AI and its robotic representations have revived this imaginaire and its illusions in the 2020s; it has been the subject of much deciphering and criticism relating to extreme rationalization (Wilhelm, 2021), solutionism (Morozov, 2013), and magic (Desbois, 2015; Turner, 2012). Far from simply introducing fluidity, the digital transition excludes many and makes social work more difficult, as shown by Mai Linh Pham-Jumontier and Lola Gadea through their survey “La numérisation des démarches administratives: un nouveau front pour les travailleurs sociaux,” 2024 (he digitization of administrative procedures: a new front for social workers).8 The notion of virtual community is one of the most discussed in ICS (Casilli, 2010). Far from being libertarian and autonomous, the development of the Tech Giants has been supported by the US federal government, and the revelations of Edward Snowden in 2013 showed how these commercial companies participate in state control of citizens around the world and develop surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2020).
15Flichy, drawing on Ricoeur (1997) more than Castoriadis, places the imaginaire between two dialectical poles: “utopia and ideology are the two poles of the social imaginaire, one trying to maintain social order and the other trying to disrupt it. Hence, there is constant tension between stability and change” (Flichy, 2007, p. 8). I gladly take up this definition of the ideology of digital media as a discourse aimed mainly at legitimizing the power of technology and those who implement it, while creating social adhesion around this technology. A utopia may critique or, on the contrary, intensify digital media.
16Our workshop-laboratory participated in a critical exploration of the ideology of the digital transition and its accompanying discourse as expressed by politicians as well as by companies, by bringing into play representations which interpret the gap between the promises and assertions of this ideological discourse and the reality of the field, or even representations which portray a utopia when describing new uses of digital media either seriously or ironically. It would take a while to detail all themes explored. They were created based on words denoting professional sectors (publishing, fashion, maritime); action verbs or nouns describing the functioning of digital industries or relating to users on platforms (time-saving, liking, using, surveillance, emotion); and social issues affected by digital media (work, leisure, disability, democracy, memory, privacy, violence). Starting from these words or phrases and an initial stage of reflection that I offered the students based on ICS, the teams developed research configurations that addressed—by projecting their personal and shared interests—many other professional sectors (musicians, photographers, animators, graphic artists, and social workers); issues (inclusion through or without digital media, resistance to the power of Big Tech, mental health, (de)politicization of aesthetic discourses, and social networks); and envisaged a wide range of expressions across digital and offline activities.
17Over seven years, we have welcomed 180 students who have produced 72 surveys published on numerique-investigation.org. This sample is sufficiently large to allow us to develop a typology of what sociophotography can bring to ICS research. I will set out the visual documentation survey methods and present them beginning with those that were involved in the production of the survey results.
18The stage of the social science survey included two or three sociological interviews. The low number was related to the timing of the workshop. Students could bolster this stage of the survey by providing a supporting visual survey. I will identify five methods for using photography in the survey phase, according to the degree of critical intentionality of the collection of evidence and to the nature of interviewee participation in the visual work.
19I will describe the first method of observation photography as “ethnographic,” inspired by the collection of images taken by ethnologists. This method was used in famous ethnographic surveys (Bateson & Mead, 1942) to photograph Balinese populations in order to record their behaviors. Through their observations, Mead and Bateson were thus able in their final work to comment on each photograph and interpret the attitudes and postures of the people they were surveying.
20Observational photography was used more extensively in the early years of the workshop. It illustrated, for example, the erasure of privacy boundaries for self-employed people working from home (“Travail et vie privée: les nouvelles normes de l’ère numérique” [Work and private life: the new norms of the digital era], Wallon & M’Bo, 2019). And, combined with interviews, it helped situate the extent of digital mediation work at Emmaüs Connect for people who do not have a computer (“Exclus du numérique: le combat d’Emmaüs Connect à Saint-Denis” [Excluded from digital technology: Emmaüs Connect’s battle in Saint-Denis] by Fofana & Sellem, 2019).
21The history of documentary photography has demonstrated the effectiveness of the power of the image in denouncing injustice and supporting political social reform programs. This was Lewis Hine’s role in denouncing child labor in textile factories in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century by placing a tiny little girl in front of disproportionately large and very dangerous machines.9 Mary Beth Meehan (2018) uncovered the reality of Silicon Valley employees surviving in squalid conditions on the outskirts of the sites of the most powerful industries of our time.
22In the sociophotographic workshop, some surveys responded to the double requirement of critical documentary photography defended by Philippe Bazin (2017), to denounce injustices while paying attention to form through framing, lighting, and color. To denounce the difficulty of access to digital public services in some popular neighborhoods, the survey “Le numérique public aux Courtillières: un accès fait de distances”[public digital technology in Courtillières: long-distance access] by Chabanne Terchi and Louis Dewynter (2019) magnified the beauty of the housing estate and its wooded surrounds and played with transparency and light to evoke the solitude of the inhabitants who no longer had access to a public digital space for cost-saving reasons.
23In ICS, investigating social uses of digital media necessarily includes analysis of platforms, their design, and the information shared there (Barats, 2016). Matthias Legrand and Hugo Gester (“Polluer Instagram pour faire chavirer l’image de la plage” [polluting Instagram to capsize the image of the beach] 2024) shed light on ecologist accounts that aim to use the driving force of algorithms to counter stereotypes that deny the Anthropocene and to upend the image of the beach paradise on Instagram. Using images of these ecologist’s posts accompanied by interviews with their authors, the researchers showed how posting photos of waste collected on beaches had gradually turned into art, resulting in the exhibition of their collages at a gallery. Document capture reveals the aesthetic bias of the platform and the need for those who wish to express themselves there to submit to it. To denounce the gender-based violence to which young women are exposed on platforms (“S’exprimer en tant que femme sur les réseaux: un combat imposé?” [speaking up as a woman on networks: An enforced battle?] 2024), Alice Bohin and Emma Lopez captured and published text messages received by the victims they surveyed. Manal Lyna El Euldj and Ambre Marionneau (“‘Expose-toi et tais-toi’: les femmes, premières victimes des réseaux sociaux” [expose yourself and shut up: women, the primary victims of social networks] 2021) had already used this process to raise public awareness of the scandal of verbal insults suffered by young women on social networks.
- 10 In which photography is used to provoke interpretations and discussion.
- 11 A form of “live online audiovisual broadcast in which a creator or host eats large amounts of food” (...)
24Other uses of photography during the survey relate to photo elicitation,10 a practice used to prompt the interviewee to speak using a display of images selected by the researcher. Albertina Pretto (2015) thus differentiates: 1) photos chosen by a researcher and presented during an interview in order to compare her interpretation of a reality with that of her participants; from 2) photos shared by the participants’ themselves. Abdalla and Rida Choubai (“Se goinfrer en direct: le phénomène mukbang fait saliver les foules” [stuffing your face live: The Mukbang phenomenon makes crowds salivate] 2023) used photo elicitation by exposing two other students to a mukbang11 video montage to gather (and film via a second film) their reactions. In the second film they highlighted, through the eyes of their colleagues, the discomfort and ethical questioning aroused by watching people destroy themselves by eating “more” and “worse” to increase their visibility, popularity, and their bank account to the detriment of their health, but to the benefit of that of the YouTube platform.
- 12 As part of the Adoprivacy project, a significant proportion of the research and creation work was c (...)
25I wish to distinguish between photo elicitation and the practice of using photographs taken by the interviewee, which I will call participatory photography, whether taken before the interview but presented during, or taken during the interview.12 Some sociologists also call this “subjective image production” or “native image making” (Losacco, 2007). This is the method established by Margot Fuchs and Anna Vertraete (“Photographie et numérique, quel avenir pour nos souvenirs?” [Photography and digital technology, what does the future hold for our memories?] 2020) to compare family memory-making practices between generations, those using a physical album, and those using a digital album of photos taken using a phone and posted on a Facebook account.
26The visual methods deployed in the documentation work of the survey, listed here, cover known practices within visual sociology (La Rocca, 2007). The visual productions resulting from the workshop illustrate the relevance of these methods for ICS in terms of raising awareness of the challenges of digital media use. These collections of images or marks data contribute to a materialization of the ambivalentuses of digital media. Although part of the documentation phase, they often contribute to rebuilding the internet imaginaire, either by putting new uses into perspective, by illustrating the risks, or by drawing attention to little-known uses.
27The students’ inventiveness was even greater in the methods and forms of visual representation that they used to present the results of their investigations. I will distinguish five main forms.
28The first method I wish to discuss is producing documentary photography: presenting observations made during the survey stage leads to the construction of a scenography, layout, and serialization of photographs or screenshots, which constitutes both documentation of the observed social fact and a visual narration of the survey. This is the most common and often most effective method of sharing a survey. Among the photographer collaborators in the workshop, Samuel Bollendorff uses this method to document “Les morts de la rue” [The dead of the street],13 accompanying each photograph with an epitaph and testimony; Nadège Abadie uses this method in her series “Le choix à Bérengère” [Bérengère’s choice],14 which pays tribute to a young farmer by constructing a visual narration that magnifies the acts and positions of young professionals at different moments of their activity, struggling against the elements, with the animals, their colleagues, and so on. This method requires deep immersion in the subject and places of the survey. To our surprise, it was not the method most frequently adopted in the workshop. Juliette Paulet (“Jeux de connexion: une nouvelle approche de la médiation numérique” [Connecting games: a new approach to digital mediation], 2019) presents a glowing portrait of digital mediator Nordine Djabouabdallah, who uses his self-taught gaming skills to support digital inclusion and provide mediation. Through action portraits in “‘Mamie, arrête de rester en ligne!’ Des seniors artistes dynamisent leurs vies sociales sur Facebook” [Grandma, you’re always online! Older artists energize their social lives on Facebook], Octave Pineau-Furet heightens his grandmother’s passion for her Facebook account and digital connections, the strength of which he had not grasped before he conducted the survey.
29The audio survey of Instagram witches (“Instagram, le réseau bien-aimé des sorcières” [Instagram, the beloved network of witches] 2023) by Iris Guazzini, Nolwenn Caruso, and Antonia Le Paih, was one of the most successful documentary productions. The three-part podcast brilliantly stages the testimonies of Instagram witches collected by the team, which are introduced by and commented on by the researchers over a musical background that immerses the audience in a mysterious universe. The documentary character is thus integrated into a form of mimesis and shows the possibility of linking the two methods.
30The surveys carried out often, in one way or another, reveal little explored or poorly represented digital uses based on feedback about personal experiences, or via a form of self-analysis. This may refer to the reflexive-critical position often attributed to the artist-researcher (Caillet, 2019, p. 17). Several can be linked to this method of investigation.
- 15 Digipulation is a term invented by Inès Garmon (2023) to refer to a small gesture performed with a (...)
31Zoé Destrez and Axelle Badet (“Le récit de soi sur les applications de rencontre: un portrait de Tinder” [Self-narrative on dating applications: a portrait of Tinder] 2023) explored self-editing in the construction of identity profiles. They examined practices that they had observed in their immediate circle during the Covid-19 lockdown period. The experience of isolation at home inspired them to interview people in their twenties about their Tinder practices. The application induces intense and rapid profile selection practices by digipulation15 among users. There are two opposing theories. Based on the work of Eva Illouz (2019), this type of application can be interpreted as an explicit form of the “commodification of emotions,” which has a tendency to abolish the authentic relationship to the self and the feeling of love. However, Marie Bergström (2019) shows that the sociological rules of social matching and homophily remain relevant. The investigators tested these contradictory hypotheses. How to describe oneself on such a restrictive and competitive platform? Each user must script their identity in a way which allows them to reap the expected “ego boost.” The two hypotheses can be to some extent reconciled. While the social norms governing relationship scripts remain very powerful on the platform, the experience of editing oneself to find a match can provoke quasi addictive practices. The partly interactive series of images created by Axelle Badet features self-editing. Eyebrows, piercings, lipstick—each facial element becomes a card to play in the challenge of seduction and a fetishized object in the landscape of the recreated or reinvented identity.
32During their investigation (“Troubles dans le genre chez les gamers” [Gender trouble among gamers] 2022), Augustine Laurent and Ninon Lacroix discovered that their respective brothers had adopted female characters on certain gaming platforms when they were younger. Did this practice of “cross-dressing,” which could be understood as a gender performance (Butler, 1990), induce a form of awareness of the reductive nature of female stereotypes and sexist violence suffered by young women? What did it reveal about the two sisters’ fraternal friendships (which they, up until that point, did not think contained any secrets?) This micro-sociology experiment proved very fruitful: while their brothers were not alone in their practice of choosing a female avatar, doing so did not particularly give them greater lucidity about the situation of adolescent girls in these digital spaces. Attracted by the accessories available to “warriors in panties,” the choice of a female avatar “was strategically effective to get help from and also the attention of other players.” Exposed to aggressive remarks, they would reveal their “true” gender identity as a means of escaping these. Ninon Lacroix focused her photographic series on the effects of proximity, mimicry, and concealment between two people, evoking the fraternal relationship. By playing on highly contrasting symmetries and shadows, she transforms, in the grain of a thick black and white, the familiar space of the kitchen into a strange space of reflections, brilliance, and gloominess in which everyone holds back part of a secret piece.
33Alice Calliopée and Julien Massicard (“Exploration autofictionnelle de déréalisations numériques” [Autofictional exploration of digital derealization] 2024) have the feeling that no one really understands the discomfort they may experience on their social and social network accounts; they feel mistreated by both the media, who only talk about addiction, and experts, who tend to see it as a marginal phenomenon linked to personal vulnerabilities. They invented a complex method. They expose the testimony of their own distress at the lost hours and the nausea brought on by binge-watching their accounts in a short epistolary exchange that allows them introspection regarding what is overwhelming them. They look for the right words to define these “states of erasure of thought,” this “feeling of being outside of oneself,” which they confront in two interviews with psychology researchers. And, for reassurance, or fearing they won’t find a better answer, they consult the oracle, ChatGPT. The page layout recounts this quest, and the visual productions strive to convey this state of semi-erasure through wavering images and by stretching portraits using a photocopier. Besides the discovery represented by this multi-modal method, they recognize that the exchange of letters and the conversations between them also allowed them to better control this state.
34In the heuristic displacements produced by mimesis, several productions used analogy. This also characterizes some of Stéphanie Solinas’ visual research, notably her work on Iceland, Guide du Pourquoi Pas (2020) (guide to the why not). Analogy allows us to take a sideways step “and discover a new aspect to something we thought we knew.”16
- 17 In painting, the all-over process consists in uniformly distributing colored elements across the en (...)
35Digital capitalism transforms the relationship to time (Rosa, 2013). Its acceleration has no other limit than the ability to capture the attention of internet users. Line V. and Louise Pasquier (“TikTok, le paradoxe fashion” [TikTok, the fashion paradox] 2022) chose to work on the acceleration of traffic on TikTok and some of its very concrete effects: the proliferation of clothing purchases among young users. The underlying hypothesis was that some brands might be able to offset the devastating effects of accumulation. This idea permeates the visual proposition that explores the opposition between fast fashion brands, which produce ever-more objects that are identical and flood the page in an all-over17 effect, and brands which recycle second-hand clothes; the latter also equates to an invasion but of individual, slightly different objects. The visual representation is striking. In both cases, space is invaded, and addiction to the act of purchase also seems to be present. The feeling of participating in the act of recycling by buying vintage alleviates feelings of guilt and encourages overconsumption. Through the projection of subtle images, Louise Pasquier’s visual proposal conveys the feeling of a saturation of clicks and of objects, which eventually obscures the world. She works by analogy with her object, similar to the approach of Gursky (Melay, 2020).
36Zelia Prigent and Mathieu Vachon (“Comment survivre aux violences sexistes dans les jeux vidéo en ligne?” [How to survive gender-based violence in online video games] 2021) worked on the borders between two worlds: that of platforms and that of offline reality. On platforms, young women are confronted with the sexism that structures gaming relationships and confined to roles of assistance or hyper-sexualized avatars. Their strategies consist of assuming the devaluing term e-girl, which hides their successes with the hint of “profiteering” seductress, or escaping their gender by simulating a boy. Are platforms heterotopias (Foucault, 2009)? To what extent are the lives of women on and offline marked by continuity or discontinuity? Mathieu Vachon proposed a sensitive, colorful, and perforated representation of the video game universe based on 3D images, in a visual approach that suggests a porous border between the two types of social space. Gender-based violence online is a testament to the power of misogyny in our societies. While video game platforms can be an outlet for energy or aggression, they also open up spaces for the struggle for women’s rights that are yet to be conquered.
37The methodology of counter-mimesis has not been employed as extensively. The most successful attempt is undoubtedly that of Ysé Jeener and Antoine Bertron (“Peut-on la mettre à l’envers aux Gafam?” [Can we turn Big Tech on its head?] 2023). Antoine Bertron is a young photographer who is passionate about DIY photography practices. His “Bicyclophototroc”18 project led him to use different anti- and ante-digital photographic techniques based on a box camera which incorporates a film camera and a mini-laboratory.19 His position is resolutely critical of digital uses of photography and nostalgic for the interpersonal exchanges which digital photography allows photographers to circumvent. The text imagines a state—Mafag—that would organize the disconnection of all digital technologies and reuse the boxes from digital devices by transforming them into analog tools. This visual and textual production uses fiction, counter-mimesis—with the reappropriated objects transformed into their perfect inverse—and humor. It initiates a positive way of considering digital decay.
38The pragmatist approach is based on experimental methods, in the manner of Dewey’s investigation, which was dreamt up by its creators and relies to a certain extent on their creative intuition. It corresponds to a trend in contemporary art which has been established equally by Aline Caillet in art and by Danièle Méaux (2019) in contemporary photography. Surveys carried out in the workshop are increasingly using this type of production which incorporates experimentation with digital platforms to measure the constraints by hand following a process of reverse engineering.
39Issa Keita, Julie Toupance, and Nicolas Szwanka (“Expérimenter la censure d’Instagram: ‘la censure de nos photos est injuste’” [Experiencing Instagram censorship: “censoring our photos is unfair”] 2021) conducted interviews with three young female photographers who state that Instagram censors photos of female breasts in a discriminatory manner when the image has not been identified by automatic moderation as art. Paradoxically, the chests of young girls who are still children are censored but not accounts that promote sex services or pornography. The photographers behind the project then tested the moderation algorithms by publishing pixelated images such as nipples in negative—sexual photographs reworked in post-production to make the work of the gender recognition algorithms more difficult and to expose the sexism of their criteria.
40The development of generative artificial intelligence software gave rise to several very fertile experiments in 2023 and 2024. Corinna Kranig experimented with Dall-E to test the appropriateness of producing images from prompts as part of a reflection on platforms that offer digital mausoleums (“Créer son mausolée numérique pour contrôler sa mort” [Creating your digital mausoleum to control your death] by Chen & Kranig, 2023). Aurore Burr and Maxime Berton created characters with ChatGPT to assess the software’s ability to avoid gender stereotypes (“IA Génératives: un danger pour les créateurs de l’industrie de l’animation?” [Generative AI: a danger to animation industry creators?] 2024). Manon Sarrailh and Leila Graindorge (“L’IA a-t-elle absorbé l’âme des artistes?” [Has AI absorbed artists’ souls?] 2024) explored the anxiety of the artist, as expressed by Tim Burton, about being “stolen:” if not “his soul” then at least his style, which is part of and expresses his personality. They set up an experiment to find out if Midjourney could copy the graphic style of an illustrator who is less well known than Burton. The experiment was coupled with a photo-elicitation device—the researchers presenting their essays to the illustrators concerned—which allowed to give rather negative answers. The creator’s fear was the subject of a visual creation by Leila Graindorge, inspired by spirit photography.
41In terms of research, the sociophotographic survey conducted by Emilio Sánchez Galán and Clément Montmea (“Exploiter la mémoire, oublier l’exploitation” [exploiting memory, forgetting exploitation] 2023) is one of the strongest. The visual production from archival images of abandoned mines reworked by Runway ML software succeeds in giving an aesthetic form to the extraction and abstraction work carried out by AI. It draws a parallel between the relocation of mining industries and the pursuit of digital extractivism. The visual narrative thus reveals the false promise of dematerialization through digital capitalism, as well as that of AI being capable of representing the world on demand, whereas what it produces is a slurry of pixels that destroys the sense of what is real (Jehel & Martin, 2023).
42The epistemic value of the visual (or sound) productions made in the workshop-laboratory, which combine text and photographic series, is multiple. These productions contribute to the documentation phase and may be essential to the execution of the ICS survey itself. They can draw from at least five methodologies: ethnographic photography; critical documentary photography; document capture; photo elicitation; and participatory photography. They also represent a method for disseminating the results of ICS research, far beyond an illustration, they support an interpretive visual narrative. Five sociophotography methodologies were tried out: documentary production, which remains the royal road of the photographic survey; reflective methodology; mimesis or counter-mimesis, following in the footsteps of fiction or utopia; and pragmatist methodology. Their heuristic value lies in their ability to build a critical visual imaginaire of digital technologies, in line with ICS research. The image-world in which we live lacks representations capable of accurate restitution of the emotions of users of digital platforms, just when the latter would like to seize the monopoly (Jehel, 2022). To do this, photographers are particularly valuable partners for Information and Communication Sciences.