Haptic Processing: How the Shutter Button Shapes Photography

The goal of this essay is to explore the haptics of taking photographs in the digital age. More specifically, I examine the evolving relationship between the body and imaging technologies. The body must, somehow, interact with the camera shutter, whether the shutter is a simple mechanical door or an electrical timing network switch. Human intention has to activate the switch via a button, even if this intention is complicated: since 2012, mobile phones can take photos using voice commands, relieving the need to physically touch the shutter button. One does not necessarily need to use the fundamental levers often associated with taking a photo: shoulder, elbow, wrist, finger. What is lost and gained by these new proximities to technology, these new haptics? A photographer’s decision to press the shutter is part of what Henri Cartier-Bresson (and more recently Teju Cole) calls the “decisive moment,” and this still holds. A serendipitous compression of speed, luck, and feeling helps congeal a photo, whether film or digital. I employ physiological and kinesiological hand function concepts alongside media studies ideas, especially those of Marshall McLuhan and Friedrich Kittler, to theorize an alternative processing that takes place when the shutter is touched. The shutter button is an overlooked component in today’s media ecosystem, a component that tethers mind and body, material surfaces and deeper layers of the epidermis. The shutter button is interface, prosthesis, metaphor, and locus of desire. The process of pressing the shutter button, old as it is, still matters.