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Paper short abstract:

Through critically engaging with my own practices and learning of portrait photography in Dakar, I show how the enskilment of media practices introduced me to specific forms of sociality and to aesthetic, sensual and experience-based dimensions of femininity and the shaping of relationships in Dakar

Paper long abstract:

Media practices like other practices are highly skilled practices that not only involve sensuous, aesthetic and embodied aspects, but are shared and learned socially. Taking the Skilled Visions approach as a starting point for my reflections on learning the practices surrounding portrait photography in Dakar, I show how the enskilment of media practices introduced me to a specific form of sociality and to aesthetic, sensual and experience-based dimensions of femininity, self and the shaping of relationships in Dakar. Through reflecting my own processes of learning and doing portrait photography, dressing up, posing in front of the camera but also learning to take images and circulating and talking about photographs on Facebook, I show how the cooperative process of learning these media practices enables and broadens our understanding of the social worlds we encounter and how they mediate anthropological knowledge on very different levels. With my example of the practices surrounding portrait photography I can 'decentralise' photography and the resulting focus on vision and seeing, and see photography embedded and entangled with social processes, other senses and other media practices. These 'mediations' and engagement also allow for the critical analysis of digital media practices on Facebook: how they are on the one hand continuations of previous forms of (social) media practices, e.g. of closeness and distance and how they on the other hand offer new forms of publics, expanding relations and participation. The paper will be developed as a photo-essay that includes photographic montages of my interlocutors.