Glitchy Vision

Book excerpt: A novel exploration of popular photographic media cultures in 1930s Europe through a feminist lens—and how visual social media changes what it means to be human both then and now. Glitchy Vision takes a feminist approach to media history to examine how photographic social media cultures change human bodies and the experience of being human. To illuminate these glitches, Greene focuses on the inevitable distortions that arise from looking at the past through the lens of the present. Treating these distortions as tools as opposed to obstacles, Greene uncovers new ways of viewing social media cultures of the past, while also revealing parallels between historical contexts and our contemporary digital media environment. Greene uses three “born-digital keywords”—real time, algorithmic filters, and sousveillance—to examine photographic media environments in and around 1930s Europe. Each chapter of the book places one of the keywords in dialogue with an unconventional archive of popular “feminized” cultural artifacts and technological innovations from this historical moment that have been overlooked as critical resources for media studies: Evelyn Waugh’s bestselling novel Vile Bodies (1930) and photographic reproductions for the tabloid press; Lee Miller’s war photography for British Vogue and glamourous photo-retouching techniques; and the Mass-Observation Movement’s surrealist anthropology. Glitchy Vision provides new strategies for reading history that show how small shifts in the circuits that connect bodies and media affect what it means to be human both in the past and today.