Jonathan Schroeder - Featured Faculty 2014

I am especially interested in photography and how it works within advertising, branding, social media, and strategic communication. RIT has been a productive place for my work.

An ongoing research project is to develop a series of historical and contemporary examples to trace a visual genealogy of the ubiquitous selfie. Preliminary work has identified several interdisciplinary ways of framing the selfie, including self-portraiture, the snapshot, and self-presentation. As a contemporary version of the self-portrait, the selfie, rooted as it is in participatory consumer culture of new media forms, can be characterized as a significant form of self-expression, in which power may be subtly shifting to the hands of the consumers from the owners of social networking and image-sharing sites, while at the same time generating concerns over appropriation, privacy, security and surveillance. For brands, selfies have been deployed as new strategic tools to promote brands as authentic, to invoke the “average consumer” as a credible product endorser, and to show how brands might fit in with consumers’ lifestyles. I have found that within strategic brand communication, selfies invoke a realist interpretive frame that supports a range of powerful, positive associations for consumers, while at the same time valorizing a sense of staged spontaneity, in the moment, “authentic” record of consumer experience. Insights from this project include how strategic uses of the selfie reveal shifts in the traditional functions of the advertising photograph, from sources of information, persuasion and representation to emblems of celebrity, digital existence, and social currency. By taking a close look at how strategic imagery utilizes the selfie, insight is gained into how contemporary visual culture articulates certain assumptions about authenticity and lived experience, and how such articulations construct viewers as consuming subjects.