Conclusion
Snapshot Stories concludes as the twentieth century ends, and paper photographs and analogue cameras are replaced by digital images and new technologies. However, the final chapter provides an examination of how some of the themes explored throughout the earlier chapters have adapted since the close of the century. Indeed, it is arguable that the themes addressed throughout this book have only become of greater relevance in the twenty-first century, as the visual has increasingly played a more pressing role in everyday life and political culture. Photograph albums have now been deposed by photographs on social media as a forum for displaying and curating identity. The photographers who stood with their cheap cameras on top of Derry tower blocks in 1969 today seem to be the ancestors of activists who record police violence on smartphones. However, just as the shift to the digital is producing an image saturated culture which seems to offer new modes of political participation and personal self-fashioning, it also poses fundamental questions for the historian. Online databases of images open up newly accessible source bases, but they also require new methods to work in them, while the certainties of cutting, pasting, and annotating of photograph albums and framed photographs have now disappeared in the new image-culture of the twenty-first century. The final pages of the book bring all these themes together by briefly examining photo culture in modern Ireland, scrutinizing how archival practices are changing, historical questions are being reshaped, and looking ahead to the challenges and potentials for the future of work on photography.