Advertising identities: virtual galleries as places of identity

Abstract

This paper is focused on the public presentation of self through virtual art galleries, singling out the field of photography. Photography has always been disputed as being part of the highbrow arts because of its popular character. Today, anyone who owes a photo camera can experience photography as art, without a rigorous training. Everybody is able to expose the photos freely to a large number of people, on the Internet. Consequently, the Internet opens up a virtual space, in which photo artists and amateurs can promote their works and exhibit them in a personal online gallery, which represents their place in the virtual vastness. Therefore, my research approaches the matter of the virtual gallery as an identitary place, being focused on finding out why artists choose to exhibit in virtual galleries. I asked myself what are the new functions of the virtual art galleries? Are they understood as online markers that distinguish the owners in these virtual environments? In other words, are these personal galleries a way of expressing online identities?

Authors and Affiliations

Alexandra Zontea

Keywords

Related Articles

The anthropology of storytelling and the storytelling of anthropology

These research notes concern what anthropologists currently do, and can do, with stories. Although pleas for narrative have become increasingly widespread in contemporary anthropology, an anthropologist of storytelling c...

Fansubbers. The case of the Czech Republic and Poland

The paper presents a comparative analysis of Czech and Polish “fansubbers.” Fansubbers (also referred to as subtitlers) is a general term, which describes people who create subtitles for foreign language movies and TV se...

Transnational migration studies. Reframing sociological imagination and research

The multidisciplinary making of transnational migration studies has inevitably produced different definitions of transnationalism and, consequently, several approaches of transnational dynamics, each aiming at the develo...

‘Friends, dates and everything in between’: Tinder as a mediating technology

This paper represents an exploratory reflection about dating apps using the technological mediation approach, choosing Tinder as a specific example. In the first part of the paper, I present the technological mediation f...

Women teachers and policemen: different career transition paths to becoming lawyers

Within a larger study of career transition to law, a number of individuals were identified as having come from two occupational clusters, policing and teaching. These interviewee occupations were for the most part each c...

Download PDF file
  • EP ID EP129586
  • DOI -
  • Views 111
  • Downloads 0

How To Cite

Alexandra Zontea (2010). Advertising identities: virtual galleries as places of identity. Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology, 1(2), 169-186. https://europub.co.uk./articles/-A-129586