Mediating mediations of the past: Monuments on photographs, postcards and social media

Abstract

Classical and contemporary monuments are widely depicted on images produced and circulated by the tourist industry. They appear on personal photographs of visited places, func-tioning as souvenirs on notice boards or social media profiles. This paper examines the transformations of three-dimensional monuments in two-dimensional mediating practices and their socio-cultural and media settings. Moreover, it looks at the role of such visual resources in the overall signification process of specific sites and places. This examination will consider the practices of three visual mechanisms: postcards, tourist snapshots and images circulated via the Internet and specifically through social media. The paper proposes a similar ontolog-ical characteristic between monuments and photographs: their ability to capture selected instances of time and feed or shape memory.