With technological changes in the field of “networked photography” and the increasing spread of photo sharing via mobile and networked devices, current media environments and practices are rapidly evolving. The public discourse on these changes is dominated above all by fears of potentially negative implications for social relationships. Critical scenarios of consequences and effects are often developed without a differentiated view regarding the contexts of use and situational meanings of visual and image-related communication in social relationships. While previous research has focused primarily on analyzing certain individual communication technologies and platforms, or certain image motifs and genres, the project focused on social relationships from a non-media-centered repertoire-oriented perspective. This project examined the interrelatedness of visual communication and visual communication technologies in multimodal communication repertoires of close social relationships in Switzerland. The focus was on the role, functions, and meaning of visual communication in couple relationships and friendships, as well as related problem areas, rules, norms, and negotiation processes. The methodological design was based on a combination of problem-oriented semi-structured in-depth pair and individual interviews, combined with “creative” visual methods (e.g., visual elicitation, participative network drawings), tested in a preliminary study. Twenty-one couples and nine friendship dyads were interviewed, and a total of 90 interviews with 60 participants (in the form of 30 pair interviews and 60 individual interviews) were conducted. The methodology was extended due to the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic in Switzerland and globally, assessing participants’ current well-being and changes in their visual communication practices through online surveys and follow-up video-call interviews. Collected visual and verbal data have been analyzed through qualitative content analysis and image type analysis, followed by cross-case comparisons of visual communication practices and functions.
