CenturyrutneC
'The snapshot that documents scenes of life's many turns--birthdays, holidays, and events of all kinds--perhaps exemplifies the most prominent aspects of the private motivations for image making, for it not only records that burning desire for the archival, it also wields a formidable ethnographic meaning. The photographic image, then, can be likened to anthropological space in which to observe and study the way members and institutions of society reflect their relationship to it. From family albums to police files to the digital files on Google, Yahoo, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, mobile phones, digital camera, computer hard drives, and assorted file sharing programs, a vast, shapeless empire of images have occurred. Organizing and making sense of them in any kind of standard unity is today impossible. At the same time we have witnessed the collapse of the wall between amateur and professional, private and public, as everyday users become distributors of the archival content across an unregulated field of image sharing. In this prosaic form, the photograph becomes the sovereign analogue of identity, memory, and history, joining past and present, virtual and real, thus giving the photographic document the aura of an anthropological artifact and the authority of a social instrument.' (Okwui Enwezor, 2008)