Permanent Photography

Since a camera entered the phone that never leaves us, from 2005 onward, the image has stopped being an object we make at certain moments and has become a milieu we live within. I try to name this shift with a concept, permanent photography, and to situate it in the long anthropological span, in order to understand what function the image actually holds in our lives today.

A photograph sent from the delivery room

A photograph arrives on my phone. A friend who has just given birth sends it to a circle of close ones from the delivery room. The baby still bears the marks of birth, resting on the mother. The message arrives before the young mother has been able to sleep, sometimes before the child has even been given an official name. This gesture, now so ordinary that we no longer notice it, did not exist fifteen years ago. It might have been technically possible, but it was not part of practice, and no one saw it as the natural continuation of the event. Today it would feel almost strange not to do it. The photograph does not wait for the birth to be over in order to document it; it accompanies the birth, it extends it, it introduces it to those who are not in the room.

This example condenses what I would like to try to think through here. Something has settled into the fabric of our lives that is no longer a matter of a new usage. A regime of existence of images has taken hold, and it changes the place images occupy in our lives. I would like to give an account of it, with the tools of anthropology, of the philosophy of the image, and of cultural history, while avoiding both alarmist diagnosis and naive celebration. What is happening is more interesting than either of those stances.

I will advance a concept to hold this shift, that of permanent photography. By this I mean the fact that photography no longer has an outside, that it has become continuous, latent, ready to be activated at any instant, and that in this sense it has left the condition of a tool one picks up and puts away in order to become a dimension of life itself. To situate what this changes, I rely on a second notion, that of the anthropological fabric. The fabric is the web of relations within which an existence takes on consistency, made of poles that structure it such as work, kinship, food, spoken language. My claim is that permanent photography has settled into this fabric as a further pole, one that redefines its balance.

These two notions allow me to displace the question. As long as we think of the image as an object, we ask whether we make too many, whether we should make fewer, whether the proliferation is a gain or a loss. Thinking of the image as a pole of the fabric brings into view a different set of questions, ones that bear on how to live with a dimension that has settled in and that we can no longer decide to abolish. I want to show how this shift took place, what it inherits from a very old function of images, what it changes in the body, in the relation to the gaze, and in childhood, and what it means to care for it. This is a text of philosophy of the image, and its aim is to help us think the real function the image fulfills in our lives, so that others might take it up.

From the image-tool to the image-milieu

Ten years ago, in the journal Esprit, I published an article called Des vies en images (Lives in Images). What I was trying to do then was to name a shift that was taking place. That amateur and professional images cannot be ranked but have different functions, as Roger Odin had formulated as early as the 1980s in his work on private cinema. That 2005 had been a turning point, with the arrival of a camera in the phone and the appearance of community video platforms. That the image had become a tool of conversation. That part of our life now unfolded inside images. That was the state of discourse to build at that moment, and the work of the text consisted in getting recognition for what was not yet recognized.

These intuitions are not ones I discovered while writing. I have been working on them since 2005, in professional training and in my own creative practice, and I already laid their groundwork in the Esprit article. The eye in the hand, the image-orality we pass on like a spoken word, the potential image, the sidestep of mediation: these are notions I began to elaborate at that time and that were clear to me by 2006 or 2007. I took them up and refined them in recent articles, but they are not novelties for me; they are almost starting points.

At that time I was directing a festival of films made with mobile phones, the Pocket Films Festival, at the Centre Pompidou. Many people told me it made no sense, that we had cameras to make films. I answered that we should on the contrary take this object seriously, because ten years later almost all of us would have a camera permanently in our pocket, and that this would produce anthropological changes. Artistic creation seemed to me a way of being an agent of reflection on what was going to happen to us. I also recalled that the Lumière brothers’ cinematograph had not been designed to make films, but as a scientific curiosity. No one had foreseen that others would take it up to tell stories, to make filmed theatre, to invent cinema. It was a diversion of the technical object, and it was through that diversion that cinema invented itself. With the phone, the same movement took place, and we now have enough distance to see it. There emerged the civic function of images, the image as proof that films an instance of police violence or documents a conflict, the image that circulates to bear witness, all uses that no one had programmed and that were born of appropriation.

I say this to situate where I speak from. In 2005, I was asking these questions by anticipation, from the before. Today I take them up from the after, once the shift has been accomplished, and it is this change of position that justifies writing again. In my recent articles I tightened this vocabulary of regimes of the image, the image-memory, the image-proof, the image-fiction, and the image-orality, which coexist in our practices. This conceptual ensemble describes what is happening with a certain precision.

And yet something is still missing. This vocabulary of functions and regimes posits images as objects or operations one can describe. It places them alongside life, like the tools of life. But what children born since 2007 experience is not quite that. For them, permanent photography is not a function one would activate at certain moments. It is a milieu one grows up in, as one grows up in a language, in a family, in a diet. It is this dimension, where images have stopped being alongside life in order to become a dimension of life, that I would like to try to name. The concept of permanent photography is made to hold this passage from the image-tool to the image-milieu.

Permanence is not frequency

The first reflex is to say that we make far more images than before. This is true but insufficient. If we reason in terms of frequency, we miss the principal shift. Before, we had moments dedicated to photography: we took out the camera, we made photographs, we put it away. The practice had an outside, that is, times of life when we were not in a photographic stance. Photography was a sector of experience.

With the phone permanently in the pocket, photography no longer has an outside. There is no longer a moment of the day when we would be outside the possibility of the image. This possibility is continuous, latent, ready to be activated. And this latency is itself a state of existence of images, regardless of whether we actually make any at every instant. The fact that we could at any moment take a photograph, send an image, look at a feed, changes our relation to the present even when that possibility is not activated. It is this passage from the dedicated sector to continuous latency that I call permanence, and it is this, more than the number of images, that makes the shift.

This shift is a matter of regime, not of frequency. Hans Belting, in Pour une anthropologie de l’image (An Anthropology of Images, Gallimard, 2004), proposed to think the image in a triad: the image, the medium that carries it, the body that perceives it. Belting was reasoning from traditional images, the painting on the wall, the viewer in front of it. His geometry was a geometry of separation between the three terms. With digital permanence, the medium has drawn so close to the body as to become inseparable from it. The phone is in the pocket, in the hand, under the pillow during sleep. The triad still holds, but its geometry has changed; the medium has become intimate to the body.

Vilém Flusser, in Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983) and then Into the Universe of Technical Images (1985), sensed something of this order. He spoke of a universe of technical images, which is not a set of images in the world but a world made of images, one that closes upon itself and within which we stand. Flusser could not observe this universe in its material generalization; he had the intuition of it. Permanent photography is the effective realization of that intuition. The universe of technical images has materialized in an object that no longer leaves us.

Pierre Bourdieu, in Un art moyen (Photography: A Middle-brow Art, Minuit, 1965), had studied the family uses of photography in the working classes. He described a strongly coded practice, concentrated on high points such as the wedding, the baptism, or the holidays, most often carried out by the father of the family as officiant, whose images consolidated family memory through their very rarity. The social function of photography rested then on this rarity. Permanence undoes the ceremony. It does not abolish the social function of images, but it dissolves the condition of rarity that gave the gesture its solemnity. Photography is no longer a middle-brow art, in the sense of a cultural practice distinct from the everyday; it has become the everyday itself, in an integration that makes it almost invisible to those who practice it.

A very old function in a new regime

There is a trap to avoid when speaking of permanent photography. It would be to believe that it invents something radically new in the human relation to images. But humans have always made images, and the function they have entrusted to them is remarkably stable across the centuries, even when techniques change. Understanding this stability allows us to situate better what, today, is effectively new. This too is what the concept of permanent photography serves, not to celebrate a novelty, but to measure what shifts within a function that is not itself recent.

Belting notes that the most ancient use of the image, in all the cultures he studied, is the funerary image. The image of the dead. The primary function of the image is not to represent what one sees, but to render present what is absent. The Fayum portraits, painted on small panels in Roman-era Egypt and placed over the faces of mummies, are the purest example. The portrait replaces the face, makes it available for the cult, ensures that the dead person continues to have a face for the living. This function recurs in the medieval royal effigy, where the image continues the institutional body while the biological body decomposes. Ernst Kantorowicz described this double corporeality in The King’s Two Bodies (1957), where he shows that the king’s biological body is mortal, that the institutional body does not die, and that the effigy is what ensures the continuity of the second.

Louis Marin, in Portrait of the King (Minuit, 1981), extends this analysis to the classical age. He shows that the portrait of Louis XIV is not one representation among other images of the king. It is an operator of sovereignty; it makes the king. The monarch’s power becomes real and effective only in the signs and images that carry it, to the point that Marin can write:

The absolute power of the monarch becomes totally real and effective only in the signs and images that represent it; the king is truly king, that is, monarch, only in images.

To see the king’s portrait in a town hall, on a medal, in a book, is to be placed under the king’s gaze, and therefore constituted as a subject. What Marin gives us is a case where we see clearly that the image fabricates social life, and does not merely document it.

This function is not reserved for royal portraits. John Berger, in Ways of Seeing (1972), showed how the bourgeois portrait that flourishes in Europe from the fifteenth century onward fulfills an analogous function at another scale. It attests to a position. It says: here is a man who owns, who succeeds, who is surrounded by his goods, his wife, his children. The bourgeois portrait is an accountancy of possession translated into image. It fixes one’s position within the class. This function continues into photography in the nineteenth century, in the photographic carte de visite of the 1850s, in the studio portrait that the middle classes commission to sign their belonging.

Carlo Severi, in Le Principe de la chimère (The Chimera Principle, Aesthetica, 2007), works on Amerindian societies where a ritual statue is not the representation of a spirit but the point of fixation through which the spirit allows itself to be addressed, heard, mobilized. Without the statue and its chant, the spirit has no grip on the human world. The statue does not represent, it summons. Severi proposes a useful generalization: there are cultural configurations where the boundary between representing and bringing-into-being is not drawn as we draw it. Representing someone can, within certain frames, be to make them come, make them exist, make them enter the common world.

If we gather these analyses, we have a solid point of support. The function of images, in the long anthropological span, has not first been memory or entertainment. It has been presentification, that is, the work of rendering present what is not, whether because it is dead, or because it is distant, or because it exceeds the biological body of the person. The image makes things exist socially.

Permanent photography does not invent this function. It inherits it. This is a point to hold against readings that would either demonize it as degradation or sacralize it as rupture. A profile picture on a social network, at its modest scale, does for the ordinary person what the king’s portrait did for the sovereign: it places them in a social space where they exist for others as a recognizable presence. The wedding photo, the holiday photo, the photo of the newborn sent from the delivery room, extend the funerary effigy and the bourgeois portrait. They install the person in the fabric where others can meet them.

The novelty, then, is not in the function. It is in the regime where that function is exercised. Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida (1980), had formulated that every photograph is melancholic because it says that-has-been, and therefore that-is-no-more.

The Photograph does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been. This distinction is decisive. In front of a photograph, our consciousness does not necessarily take the nostalgic path of memory, but, for every photograph existing in the world, the path of certainty.

This tonality remains valid for the photographs that are entered into the register of memory. But an ever-larger part of our photographic production is no longer in this regime. A photo sent to say I am here, I am thinking of you is not in the melancholic that-has-been. It is in the that-is of a shared present. The two regimes now coexist in the same phones, and the share of image-orality steadily grows.

Régis Debray, in Vie et mort de l’image (Life and Death of the Image, Gallimard, 1992), had proposed three ages of the gaze:

• the logosphere, where the image is a work, an object of cult addressed to a presence;
• the graphosphere, where it is art, an object of contemplation submitted to judgment;
• the videosphere, where it is spectacle, an object of consumption caught in the flow.

His division has its limits, but it reminds us that the structural function of images has already undergone major upheavals. What is happening today may open a further threshold, where the image is no longer consumed passively as in the videosphere, nor produced by a few for the many as in the graphosphere, but produced and received by all, continuously, as a constitutive dimension of sociality. To put it otherwise, an age in which the image ceases to be an object in order to become a milieu.

The image as a pole in the anthropological fabric

To describe this milieu, the vocabulary of the object no longer suffices. To think permanence with the concepts of the image-object, the trace, the proof, the souvenir, is to miss what is at stake. Permanent photography has become a pole of existence, on the same footing as other structuring dimensions such as work, kinship, food, spoken language. It is no longer within the anthropological fabric as an object; it structures the fabric as a pole. This is the other concept I hold to be operative, because it changes what one can do with the analysis, by moving from the question of usage to that of the ecology of an existence.

An important clarification. To speak of a pole does not mean that the image has become the dominant pole, having taken the place of the others. Children who grow up with permanent images still eat, still sleep, still play, still love. The fabric has not become icon-centric. It has welcomed a further pole, one that redefines its balance without tipping it over entirely.

To speak of this fabric without falling into imprecision, several philosophical traditions offer tools. Augustin Berque, in Écoumène (Belin, 2000), works the notion of milieu, which he distinguishes from environment. The milieu is not an external frame within which one would find oneself; it is the set of relations through which a being takes on consistency together with the things that sustain it. There is no human on one side and world on the other; there is this relational tissue without which neither has any meaning. Tim Ingold, in Lines: A Brief History (Zones sensibles, 2011), speaks of the meshwork, that network-tissue made of lines that cross and that constitute things themselves. Yves Citton, in Pour une écologie de l’attention (The Ecology of Attention, Seuil, 2014), thinks what is happening not as an accumulation of objects but as a distribution of attentional intensities.

None of these traditions describes permanent photography exactly, because none was elaborated for it. But all point toward a common intuition: what characterizes human existence is not a set of objects placed in an external space, but a tissue of relations in which the subject is constituted and which the subject contributes to constituting. Permanent photography has come to settle into this tissue as a new pole, that is, as a dimension that organizes entire aspects of existence.

Philippe Descola, in Beyond Nature and Culture (Gallimard, 2005), proposed that human societies are distinguished by the way they draw the boundaries between the human, the animal, the vegetal, the mineral, the spirits, and things. Four great ontologies, he says, organize these boundaries. Modern naturalism, ours, separates nature and culture, human interiority and material exteriority. What permanent photography is doing, within contemporary naturalism, is not a change of ontology in the strong sense. One does not become animist because one photographs one’s child every day. It is an internal recomposition of naturalism, one that modifies several boundaries modernity held to be stable. The boundary between inside and outside, because the image is in the pocket but also in the screen that watches from afar. The boundary between present and past, because the image brings the past back into the present at each consultation. The boundary between presence and absence, because one is here while also being present in images elsewhere. The boundary between self and other, because images of me circulate among others and return to me. These displacements touch the very organization of experience.

A body that no longer lets itself be enclosed

Another dimension of the mutation is better grasped if we attend to what happens in the body. Permanent photography is not an external practice the body would adopt. It has become a dimension of the body itself, and more precisely of the body schema that organizes experience.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in Phenomenology of Perception (Gallimard, 1945), had described how the blind person who learns to use a cane no longer feels the cane in their hand; they feel the ground at the tip of the cane. The cane has ceased to be an object in order to become a part of the subject’s perceptual apparatus. Touch has extended beyond the skin. This incorporation, Merleau-Ponty says, is not a metaphor. It is a real modification of the body schema, that is, of the map the body has of itself. The body schema is not fixed by anatomy; it extends, it modifies itself, it reorganizes according to the tools the body incorporates.

Merleau-Ponty was working on partial, occasional incorporations tied to a use. The cane, the steering wheel of a car, the feathered hat one learns not to catch in doorframes. The permanence of the phone produces a continuous incorporation. We no longer leave the extension behind. When we forget our phone at home, we feel an amputation, in a precise phenomenological sense: the body schema was configured with the phone, and its sudden absence produces the effect of a phantom limb.

Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media (1964), had formulated the thesis that media are extensions of the human. The wheel extends the foot, the book extends the eye, clothing extends the skin. His formula simplifies, but it has a virtue: it reminds us that techniques are not added to a human who would remain identical to themselves; they reconfigure that human. McLuhan added an intuition we have retained less: every extension is also an amputation. The foot, once extended by the wheel, loses part of its own power. Memory, once extended by writing, loses part of its oral virtuosity. This dialectic is useful for thinking permanent photography. The phone extends the eye, memory, contact, the voice. But these extensions have their reverse side. Internal memory atrophies where external memory replaces it. Attention to the present thins out when the present is constantly capturable.

McLuhan did not mourn these amputations. He observed that each extension produces a new bodily economy, and that this economy had to be thought without nostalgia for the prior state. This attitude seems right to me. What has been extended has not been lost; what has been modified is not in mourning.

Bernard Stiegler, in the successive volumes of Technics and Time (Galilée, 1994-2001), pushed this intuition to its philosophical end. For him, the human is essentially constituted by the exteriorization of its memory into techniques. There is no human without externalized memory. Technique is not a complement; it is constitutive. This thesis, which radicalizes André Leroi-Gourhan, takes on new acuteness with digital permanence. The phone has become the principal support of each person’s tertiary memory. When we lose our phone, we do not only lose an object; we lose a part of ourselves that was stored there. Donna Haraway, in her A Cyborg Manifesto (Socialist Review, 1985), had proposed a word for this condition. We are cyborgs, that is, hybrid beings no longer thought within the separation between the organic and the machinic.

By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics.

We are not humans onto whom machines have been grafted, but beings for whom this graft is no longer thinkable as a graft because it is constitutive.

The comparison with ancient practices of bodily inscription becomes clearer in this frame. David Le Breton, in Signes d’identité (Signs of Identity: Tattoos, Piercings, and Other Body Markings, Métailié, 2002), documented the anthropological function of inscriptions on the skin. In societies where scarification is ritualized, it does not decorate the body; it inscribes the body in a symbolic order. The mark says belonging, passage, status. Without the mark, the person is not fully integrated into the community. The mark does not represent identity; it constitutes it.

There is a comparison to be made with permanent photography, but it must be made with caution. The two practices belong to one and the same anthropological register: the inscription of the subject in a symbolic order through an act that marks the body, either directly through the skin or indirectly through the circulating image. Scarification makes the body a support of signs for others and for oneself. The permanent image makes the body a referent multiplied across supports that are not the skin but that extend its symbolic function. The major difference is that scarification is concentrated and irreversible, whereas the permanent image is distributed and reversible. But the function of identity inscription is common to both.

Tested against these analyses, we can say that the body of contemporary humans is no longer the biological body enclosed within its skin. It is an assemblage composed, at each instant, of the biological body, the phone it carries, the images of it that circulate, the distance relations it maintains through those images, the servers where those images are stored, the screens that display them elsewhere. This assemblage is not a metaphor. It is observable in behavior: when one is deprived of one of its parts, one experiences an effective diminishment of self.

This is precisely what I had experienced physically with drones, from 2013 onward, in the artistic experiments I was conducting. When you pilot a drone, you look from a point that is not your biological body. The eye is up there, the body is down below. And yet one does not feel this as remote control. One feels one’s body grow, occupy space differently, exist at once where it is and where it looks. Piloting the drone is a kinaesthetic experience in which the body feels itself extended. This experience is more radical than with a phone, but it reveals what the phone does in an attenuated form. It gives me, through lived experience, what the preceding analyses posit through the concept: the contemporary body overflows its skin.

A partial, situated, conflictual horizontality

Permanent photography has transformed another aspect of the visual apparatus, the position of the one who makes the images. For a long time, this position was held by a restricted number of people, and unequally according to gender, class, and profession.

Bourdieu, in the family photography of the 1960s, observed that it was the fathers who photographed. The mother appeared in the images, with the children. The father, for his part, made the images and rarely appeared in them. This asymmetry was not anecdotal. It reproduced, in the photographic gesture, the general asymmetry of the male gaze over the domestic sphere, as described later by Laura Mulvey (Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, 1975) for classical cinema, or by John Berger for Western painting.

Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves.

The family camera reproduced this apparatus. The father held the device and structured family memory; the others let themselves be recorded.

It is this apparatus that digital permanence has partly undone, by the mass diffusion of the tool more than by any raising of consciousness. When each member of the family has a camera in their pocket, the monopoly of the framing gaze no longer holds. The mother now appears in the images because she makes them, but she also appears in images of herself, through selfies, that are no longer mediated by someone else’s gaze. The child, as soon as they have a phone, makes their own images and actively takes part in the visual construction of their world.

But horizontality has not settled in everywhere. Several old hierarchies remain in place or have shifted. The platforms’ algorithms redistribute visibility according to criteria we do not control and that largely reproduce earlier social hierarchies. The most followed accounts are massively carried by codes of seduction, of class, of race, of gender, which are those of contemporary capitalism. The generalization of production has not generalized circulation. Many make images; few are seen widely. The platforms belong to a very small number of actors, mainly American and Chinese. The horizontal generalization of the photographic gesture takes place on a profoundly vertical infrastructure, whose verticality is rendered invisible by the fluidity of the user experience.

The patriarchal hierarchy, in particular, has not disappeared. It has shifted. It is now exercised in part through online violence, practices of cyber-harassment, the non-consensual sending of intimate images, revenge porn, comments on women’s photos, algorithmic standards of beauty. The making of images by women themselves is exposed to a new form of violence, one that did not exist as long as women were only the objects of images. Horizontality has freed production without freeing the gaze.

A film made at the very beginning of this history nonetheless shows what the shift can produce when it does take place. In 2006, within the Pocket Films Festival, Louise Botkay made Mammah, eight minutes filmed with a mobile phone of the time, with a heavily pixelated image, in the hammam of the Grande Mosquée de Paris. She films women, and she is herself one of those women, not hiding, taken into the same bath. The fragile camera is part of the milieu and is accepted there because it is a woman who holds it, which radically changes the place of the gaze. Where orientalist painting had made the hammam a scene offered to the male gaze, Botkay’s film invites us, as viewers, into a space to which we would not normally be admitted, and it does so with nothing voyeuristic about it. The position Berger described, men look, women watch themselves being looked at, is here outwitted. It is no longer a gaze that extracts; it is a gaze that belongs to the inside of the scene, and that shares its presence. The film is no longer visible online today, which takes nothing away from what it captured. Botkay, heir to the method of Jean Rouch and whose work would later turn to trance, experimented there, almost by chance and as early as 2006, with a displacement of the function of the image that still illuminates what permanent photography makes possible: an image made from inside the bond rather than from the position of the one who looks.

Heide Goettner-Abendroth, in Matriarchal Societies (Côté-femmes, 1991; expanded English edition with Peter Lang, 2012), documented contemporary societies, the Mosuo in China, the Minangkabau in Indonesia, the Khasi in India, certain Akan societies of West Africa, which she qualifies as matriarchal. Her thesis is that these societies are structured without a relation of domination between genders, without individual private property, without centralized power. Her reading is sometimes contested by other anthropologists who judge that she idealizes. The debate is open, and it would be imprudent to settle it here. What interests us is what these societies allow us to think as a limit-case: there exist human configurations where the circulation of goods, narratives, and decisions is not organized hierarchically.

The analogy with the circulation of images is tempting, but it has a limit. Goettner-Abendroth describes societies where horizontality is constitutive of the entire social organization, sustained by institutions, rituals, rules of kinship. This is not the same as a partial horizontality settling into one sector, the production of images, within a society that is otherwise deeply hierarchical. Horizontality does not settle in through the diffusion of a tool; it settles in through an overall social organization. The generalization of phones has not sufficed to make the circulation of images matriarchal, and it was illusory to expect it to do so on its own.

Tested against this, I think we can hold a more precise formulation. The permanence of photography has made part of the apparatus horizontal. The gesture of making images is no longer the prerogative of the father of the family. On that level, which is not negligible, horizontality exists. This horizontalization took place without reorganizing the other dimensions of the fabric. Patriarchy, algorithmic capitalism, social hierarchies, inequalities of attention persist. They have reconfigured themselves around the new pole instead of being abolished by it. The result is a conflictual situation, in which a horizontal tool is inserted into a vertical milieu. This tension is productive; it opens possibilities the old apparatus closed off. It guarantees no automatic progress.

Children born into images

The place permanent photography gives to children is poorly grasped by inherited vocabularies. The classical critique, in the 2010s, framed the matter in terms of failing: parents do not respect their children’s right to their own image, they do not have their consent, the private sphere is violated. This critique had its pertinence when the mass production of images of children by parents appeared as a novelty added to a childhood that had until then been less imaged. It said something true about the asymmetry of an adult power exercised without consultation.

The moment when this critique could be structuring is probably past. Not because the questions of image rights and consent had become void. They remain juridically and ethically important, and they are in fact relayed by the first natives of permanent photography themselves, who are taking a position today. But they no longer suffice to describe what is happening. A child born in 2015 or 2020 does not experience the proliferation of images as an intrusion into an initially protected sphere. They experience it as the ordinary dimension of their coming into the world. They have not known the world before.

The child growing up today has at their disposal, should they ask for it, a volume of images of themselves that bears no common measure with the repertoire of the family albums of previous generations. Hundreds, thousands of images since birth, in every posture, every mood. These images have not been sorted. They are not a narrative. They are a layer. The child grows up with an iconographic double of themselves that precedes them everywhere. This double is not a memory; it is a presence. It is in the mother’s phone, in the father’s phone, in the cloud, in the family groups. It exists simultaneously with the child, in several places at once.

Daniel Stern, in The Interpersonal World of the Infant (PUF, 1989), had shown that the sense of self is built in the infant through affective attunement with parental figures. The infant becomes someone by seeing themselves recognized in the gaze and the voice of their parents. Stern worked from the observation of dyads, of gazes, of voices. He had not anticipated that these interpersonal regulations would widen to an iconographic cloud. What widens is the instance of recognition. The infant is no longer recognized only by the gazes that fall upon them in the room. They are recognized by a wider circle that sees their images, speaks of them, comments on them. The construction of the self takes place in a relational layer widened by images.

The place of the parent has shifted as well, and it is worth describing without judgment. The contemporary parent is in a continuous gesture of producing and circulating images of their child, a gesture that has integrated itself into their parental practice to the point of no longer being distinct from it. There is not the moment when one is a parent and the moment when one photographs one’s child. There is a being-parent within which photography is one dimension among others, like food, language, carrying, play. The parent does not photograph their child as they would photograph a street scene. They photograph their child as a parent, that is, within the weaving of the parental relation.

This gesture fulfills several functions at once:

• a function of recognition, since to photograph the child taking their first steps is to say that this event matters;
• a function of circulation, since to send the photo to the grandparents is to inscribe the child in a lineage and to maintain a bond that would otherwise fray;
• a function of temporal holding, since the photo does not stop the fleetingness of childhood but allows one to traverse it without losing oneself in it.

These functions are old. What changes with permanence is their fluidity. They have become continuous, ready to be activated at any instant. The threshold of solicitation has become very low. It is no longer the great event; it is the light, the smile, the tender gesture.

There is a cost and there is a gain. The cost is real. The permanence of the gesture reduces the share of childhood that is not imaged. It alters the quality of the parent’s presence to the moment they are living. It exposes the child to a circulation they do not control and that may, in time, weigh on them. It transfers to the platforms a share of family memory, which becomes dependent on their technical and economic choices. The gain is just as real. Permanence allows scattered families to maintain a daily bond that distance made impossible. It allows grandparents to know their grandchildren in a way that was once reserved for families living in the same town. It widens the circle of affective presence around the child.

The error is to believe that the cost cancels the gain or that the gain cancels the cost. The two coexist and belong to the same configuration. Permanent photography is neither a good nor an evil in itself. It is a new relational fabric within which precious effects and less precious ones play out simultaneously.

An important fact, borne out in recent years: the first children to have been massively imaged from birth, those born around 2007-2010, are today between fifteen and twenty years old. They are of an age to take a position on the images of their childhood that circulate, and they do so, increasingly. Some ask their parents to stop posting photos of them. Some ask for old photos to be removed from public accounts. This reclaiming is redefining parental practice for the next generation. Parents of children born in 2025 do not photograph exactly as those who photographed their children in 2010. A new attentiveness is spreading, one that did not exist before. The fabric does not freeze. It modifies itself as the first natives take the floor and negotiate their place within the apparatus.

Caring for the fabric

The question is no longer should we. That question has passed. Should we photograph our children, should we circulate images on social networks, should we limit screen time: these questions occupied public debate ten or fifteen years ago and continue to circulate in certain discourses. They assumed that permanent photography was a usage one could adopt or not, a behavior one could regulate by a personal decision or by a law. That presupposition no longer holds. Permanent photography is a constitutive dimension of the anthropological fabric within which we live. We can modulate its uses, do more or less of it, do it with more or less attentiveness, but we can no longer decide that it does not exist. This is the whole interest of thinking it as a pole of the fabric rather than as a tool: it brings to light that the right question is not that of choice but that of care.

The question has become how. How to make do with this dimension that has settled in, how to care for it, how to leave room for what is not imaged, how to welcome the reclaiming of children who have grown up, how to articulate image-memory and image-orality without confusing them, how not to exhaust oneself in an iconographic labor that would end up filling all the space, how not to lose sight of the hierarchies that have settled into the appearance of horizontality.

This calls for several displacements of the gaze.

• Abandoning the vocabularies of transgression and loss. They remained apt when permanent photography was a novelty. They are no longer so once it has become a milieu. To speak today of extimacy or of the violation of image rights to describe what a five-year-old child lives is to use concepts that presuppose a boundary between private and public that the child has never experienced as such. The concepts are not false; they are out of step. Other concepts are to be invented, ones that describe native inscription in the iconographic layer without reading it through lack.

• Accepting that caring for a dimension of existence does not consist in mastering it. We do not master food, we do not master sleep, we do not master kinship. We tend to them, that is, we attend to their quality, their rhythm, their moments of excess and of want. Caring for permanent photography is a matter of the same attentiveness. Which moments to leave without an image? Which images to let circulate, which to keep for oneself? Which conversations to have with one’s children about their place in this circulation? These questions are not settled by principle; they are worked through case by case, over time.

• Taking the measure of the fact that what is happening with images is not isolated. The anthropological fabric that has recomposed itself also concerns our relation to time, to space, to memory, to the body, to death, to kinship, to the political. Permanent photography is one of the visible markers of a wider displacement whose other signs are political ecology, the critique of gender, the recognized place of non-humans, the calling into question of colonial hierarchies. All of this works in the same direction: the gradual exit from a modern configuration that believed it could neatly separate the subject from its environment, the human from its tools, nature from culture, private life from public life. This exit is under way; it is conflictual, it is uneven, it guarantees nothing. But it is taking place, and it concerns us.

There remains what Roger Odin had formulated as early as the 1970s: to take images seriously. Not to judge them in advance, not to rank them on inherited criteria of prestige, not to make them the scapegoat of a civilizational crisis that exceeds them. To look at them for what they do. For the place they occupy in our lives. For the functions, old and new, that they fulfill. For the fabric they have helped to recompose and that will continue to recompose itself after this article. Permanent photography has become the milieu within which our existence unfolds, and it is with this milieu, more than against it, that we have to reckon.