On August 10^th 1839, François Arago presented Louis Daguerre’s invention, and the first example of the “daguerreotype” to the Académie des Sciences in Paris. Almost a century and a half later, Nancy Armstrong devoted a monograph entitled Fiction in the Age of Photography to the impact this invention had on what would become known as literary realism in the nineteenth century. Her thesis is that the emphasis on visual description which we associate so closely with Victorian literature is a “reaction to the sudden proliferation of transparent and reproducible images [i.e. photographs] that marks the mid-Victorian period” (Armstrong 1999: 4). Armstrong argues that the contemporaneity of the emergence of photography with the rise of capitalism is significant, in that an individual’s identity, which can be captured on film, can be transformed into an object of visual consumption.

If the Victorians were so deeply influenced by the invention of photography, even before the emergence, in 1888, of “the Kodak roll film […] which democratized the new medium of photography on an unprecedented scale and made photography a mass-produced commodity” (Breitbach 2012: 122), what can be said of writers in the digital age, where, far beyond the possibilities suggested by the invention of Kodak, “3.2 billion images […] are shared online daily”? (Thomson, Angus and Dootson 2020). If, as Armstrong suggests, nineteenth-century fiction revealed how analogue photography commodified individuals, it will be suggested here that twenty-first-century fiction explores how omnipresent digital photography pursues that commodification, adding to it the dehumanisation and depersonalisation of late-stage capitalism, as has been argued by Orlaith Darling in her work on millennial writers for whom “capitalism and the connected infrastructure of social media are forces of dehumanization and depersonalization” (Darling 2021: 549). The Irish millennial writers studied by Darling consistently engage with the online world – with particular attention to social media – but the specific nature of digital photography has perhaps received less attention from this cohort of writers. Indeed, a little more than half a century after the first digital photograph (Oktay 2024), which can be dated back to 1957, Julia Breitbach’s Analog Fictions for the Digital Age: Literary Realism and Photographic Discourses in Novels after 2000 questioned whether literature written in the digital age had genuinely come to terms with the revolution digital technologies have wrought on the medium of photography, suggesting that the digitisation of photography has altered photography’s relationship to the real “rather less than might be expected” (Breitbach 2012: 13).

The shift from analogue to digital photography is only one of the many transformations that have accompanied the rise of new technologies. This rise has been global, but there has arguably been no country in which these changes have been more transformative than Ireland. Indeed, the role played by computer hardware and software manufacture and development in the rise of the Celtic Tiger led Roy Foster to declare that “from about 1990 the traditional mantra for self-sufficiency, ‘Ourselves Alone’, had mutated into ‘Ourselves Online’” (Foster 2008: 29). Claire Lynch, in her 2014 monograph, Cyber Ireland, fruitfully studied how Irish literature was being affected by “the increasing overlap between online and literary narrative forms” (Lynch 2014: 7), highlighting that the digital age featured in recent Irish writing not only thematically, but also stylistically, ultimately impacting the writing itself. Her study considers

[…] the first novels to include references to emails, search engines and online shopping. In fact cyberculture is represented in contemporary Irish literature not only through characters’ actions and behaviours, but also in the forms and styles which echo online narrative conventions. (Lynch 2014: 7)

The online narrative conventions of email, Skype and Facebook are expertly detailed and analysed in Cyber Ireland, published before the explosion of platforms designed for sharing photos online, an explosion exemplified perhaps by the choice of “‘selfie’ […] as Word of the Year by the Oxford Dictionaries in 2013” (Eckel, Ruchatz and Wirth 2018: 1). This paper attempts to build on Claire Lynch’s work by studying a number of Irish literary texts which have been published since both Cyber Ireland and Julia Breitbach’s Analog Fictions for the Digital Age. The texts chosen make explicit reference to phenomena around digital photography, from selfies to revenge porn, and this paper will ask if and how digital photography is changing contemporary Irish fiction writing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given Eugene O’Brien’s assertion that the “proliferation of a visually-based technology has had a significant effect on […] the primacy of the visual image in gendered identity” (2023a: 42), the texts under study here have been written by women writers, and the visual phenomena at stake concern primarily their female characters.

Nancy Armstrong suggested that the invention of analogue photography had effected a profound shift in the writing of literary fiction in the nineteenth century. In order to ascertain how digital photography may be changing the writing of literary fiction in the twenty-first century, it will be useful to ascertain the differences between analogue and digital photography, and how these differences might be exploited by contemporary authors. Some of the fundamental differences between chemical and digital photography are explored by William J. Mitchell in The Reconfigured Eye and elsewhere. They include the loss of authenticity and ease of manipulation, the potential for infinite sharing and indefinite storage, and the evaporation of the distinction between producer and consumer of images.

To explore how specific references to digital photography in Irish fiction writing reflect these differences, this paper will focus on two recent Irish novels. These will first be briefly described, paying particular attention to the role digital photography plays within them thematically. They will subsequently be studied in order to ascertain how three different aspects of the specificity of digital photography appear within the writing itself. These aspects are fragmentation, temporality and authoriality. The two novels this paper aims to analyse are Louise O’Neill’s 2015 YA novel Asking for It[1] and Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2018).

Louise O’Neill’s second novel Asking for It was loosely inspired by “two cases of sexual assault and rape that took place in America in Steubenville (Ohio) and Maryville (Missouri) in 2012 and 2013 respectively: both involved teenage drinking, football players in a small town, alleged rape and sexual assault caught on video, and Twitter and Facebook harassment of the victims” (Mooney 2023: 5). The novel follows Emma O’Donovan, the prettiest girl in the small fictional Irish town of Ballinatoom, as her life implodes as a result of the online sharing of digital photographs taken without her knowledge. The first-person narrated novel is separated into two distinct parts: the first part is entitled “Last year” and is divided into individual time-stamped chapters “Thursday”, “Saturday”, etc. The second part is called “This year”, again with chapters for individual days. The catastrophic event which causes the rift between last year and this year occurs in the first-half chapter entitled “Saturday”, when Emma is gang-raped by a group of boys at a party at which she has consumed excessive quantities of drink and drugs, preventing her from giving consent. However, from Emma’s perspective, the catastrophe actually occurs in the aftermath of the party, when images of her ordeal are shared online with everyone she knows (and subsequently many she does not).

Sally Rooney’s second novel, Normal People (2018), tells the story of the on again/off again relationship between Connell and Marianne, from their final year of high school, when Marianne is a social outcast and Connell is one of the most popular boys at school, to university, when Connell struggles to fit in while Marianne is right at home, and beyond. Digital photography appears on a number of occasions in the novel: first, briefly, when Connell’s friend Rob shows his friends naked photos of his girlfriend on his phone. When Connell tells Marianne about this incident, she is unaware of the practice and he explains what the narrator calls “the politics of naked pictures” (Rooney 2018: 112), and in particular the “rules” around keeping (or deleting) them, and more importantly (not) sharing them. Marianne and Connell joke about the practice, but in the adaptation for television of the novel, a tearful Marianne takes naked selfies of herself after a heated argument with her abusive brother. It is, however, unclear if she sends them to Connell. These selfies are, however, possibly premonitory of the extremely unhealthy relationship Marianne has later in the novel with a photographer, who takes naked photos of her and, it is intimated after this relationship has ended, may have shared them online without her consent.

Digital photography, and the sharing of digital images online are key to both of these novels. But is digital photography more than a simple plot device? Or does the very nature of digital photography inform how the novels are written? In order to attempt to answer this question, both novels will be studied in light of three fundamental differences between digital photography and chemical photography: fragmentation, temporality and authoriality. Interestingly, while the use of fragmentation and temporality which will be discussed here are related to the thematic presence in the texts of digital photography, these techniques are in fact characteristic of much contemporary writing. Liam Harte comments that “the motifs of fragmentation and incompletion are themselves among the most recurrent in recent Irish writing” (2009: 201). While it may be that in twenty-first-century Irish writing, fragmentation is a common feature, the aspect of temporality which will be discussed here – the extensive use of the narrative present tense – has been identified as “a common, or commonplace, practice” (Miyahara 2009: 242) across novels written in English in recent years. Miyahara’s article on the use of the narrative present points to the failure of recent studies of the phenomenon to explain its prevalence. The emphasis of this article on a potential link between present tense narration and digital photography may begin to provide some answers.

Fragmentation

“Although a digital image may look just like a photograph […] it actually differs as profoundly from a traditional photograph as does a photograph from a painting” (Mitchell 1994: 4). William J. Mitchell goes on to insist that the differences between their “fundamental physical characteristics […] have logical and cultural consequences” (1994: 4). One of the consequences of such differences which may inform literary fiction writing in the digital age is the shift from the continuity of analogue photographs to the fragmentation of digital photographs. Concretely, the more you zoom into an analogue photograph, the more detail is revealed. This is because an analogue photograph is a “representation of the differentiation of space in a scene: it varies continuously, both spatially and tonally” (Mitchell 1994: 4). The quality of the picture will decline, becoming grainier and grainier, but the image will remain continuous. However, the more one zooms into a digital photograph, the more obvious its fragmentary nature becomes as, instead of more detail appearing, the image will pixelate, revealing not only its digital nature but also, as each pixel is a fragment of the whole picture, its fragmentary nature.

In Fiction in the Age of Photography, Nancy Armstrong associated the realism of the Victorian novel with the acknowledgement of the primacy of popular images. Subsequently, literary modernism appeared “as the moment when the primacy of popular images was both acknowledged and effectively suppressed” (Armstrong 1999: 276). Mitchell suggests that digital photography is “adapted to the diverse projects of our postmodern era […] a medium that privileges fragmentation, indeterminacy, and heterogeneity” (1994: 8).

Fragmentation in Asking for It

In The Visibility Trap: Sexism, Surveillance and Social Media, the Irish digital culture researcher and journalist Mary McGill describes the use of filters in online photography. She says that they are “designed to fragment bodies in intricate and minute ways, where seeing oneself through technology means carving up one’s face into parts” (2021: 36). In Asking for It, no filters have been applied to the photos of Emma’s rape which have been uploaded, and yet it is a fragmented body which Emma discovers when she becomes aware of the “Easy Emma” Facebook page which has been set up to share the images:

I click on the photo.

Pale limbs, long hair, head lolling back on to the pillow. The photos start at the head, work down the body, lingering on the naked flesh spread across the rose-covered sheets.

It’s not me. (O’Neill 2015: 146)

As her body has become fragmented (limbs, hair, head, body, flesh), so too does the narrative. From this point, the paragraphs become shorter, interspersed with short passages in italics representing Emma’s thoughts as she discovers the extent of the betrayal: “Who’s taking the photos?”, “why has he got a can in his hand, he was driving?”, “No. No. Turn it off, Emma. Turn it off”, “This is not happening, this is not happening, this is not happening” (O’Neill 2015: 147, 152-3; original emphasis).

Mary McGill goes on to say that “[w]ith fragmentation comes dehumanisation and alienation” (2021: 37). This is exactly what happens to Emma as she can no longer see her body without also seeing a superimposition of the degrading photos onto it: “The photos from the Easy Emma page sketch themselves on to the mirror, pink flesh, legs, a collection of body parts” (O’Neill 2015: 157; original emphasis) or “My body doesn’t belong to me any more” (O’Neill 2015: 195). Eugene O’Brien confirms that the “descriptions of her splayed body are graphic, unpleasant, misogynistic and difficult to read, especially as she describes the girl in the images in the third person, and dissociates herself from that objectified, abject image” (O’Brien 2023b: 103).

Throughout the rest of the novel, fragmentation seeps into almost all the passages relating to the shared photos. This translates on the page as bracketed words for body parts, repeated as incantations: “Stop talking about those photos. (Legs spread apart.) (Pink flesh.)” (O’Neill 2015: 166), “He would never be able to see me again without seeing those pictures. (Legs spread apart.) (Pink flesh.)” (O’Neill 2015: 167).

As Emma’s nightmare continues, the brackets disappear from the repeated expressions. It appears that she has integrated them as being the new defining features of her identity: “he has seen the photos. Pink flesh. Legs spread apart” (O’Neill 2015: 200); “I wake in the middle of the night. I remember. I am pink flesh. I am splayed legs” (O’Neill 2015: 205); “I am an It. I am a collection of doll parts of pink flesh, of legs spread open for all to see” (O’Neill 2015: 208).[2]

Fragmentation in Normal People

The fragmentary nature of the narrative in Asking for It is introduced through the sharing of the photos of Emma’s rape. It has been suggested (Barros-Del Río 2018) that fragmentation is a common feature of the writing of our second author under study here: Sally Rooney. María Amor Barros-Del Río describes the writing in Normal People as displaying “a disruptive and fragmented style” (2022a: 180).

Once again, the sharing of photos of naked (female) characters is described in terms of the “consistent fragmentation of women’s bodies” (McGill 2021: 36) which Mary McGill says “separates the sexualized female body parts from her wholeness. Thus, as fragmented parts, the viewer does not have to morally reconcile the woman who is being objectified with her complete humanness” (2021: 36). This is explicitly what happens at the Debs, when Connell’s friend Rob takes advantage of his girlfriend passing out drunk to show his friends the photos he has taken of her naked: “Under the table Rob showed Eric and Connell naked photos of Lisa on his phone. Eric laughed and tapped parts of Lisa’s body on-screen with his fingers” (Rooney 2018: 76; my emphasis). Connell refuses to participate in this dehumanisation of Lisa, saying “Bit fucked-up showing these to people, isn’t it?” (Rooney 2018: 76). Connell appears to believe that it is only the sharing of such intimate photos with others that transforms them into objectification, as he and Marianne had discussed her sending him naked photos of herself and he had reassured her saying “I’ll delete them whenever you want obviously” (Rooney 2018: 112). Connell’s refusal to join in with his friends’ ogling of their mutual female friend sets him apart from his peers, as no one else seems to find it “fucked-up”. María Amor Barros-Del Río comments, in an article on the adaptation for television of the novel, on the passage when Marianne and Connell discuss sharing naked photos of each other that “[f]emale body objectification is a recurrent practice amongst millennials and the series bears witness to it” (Barros-Del Río 2022b: 75).

It will later be Marianne’s turn to be subjected to such practices, leading her to lose the sense of her own humanness in the scene where Lukas takes photographs of her. It has been suggested that Marianne’s self-harming relationship with Lukas is symptomatic of the fragmentation of her sense of self: “Marianne accepts the fact that it is impossible for her to change the person she has become; she is a masochist with a damaged and fragmented personality” (Sarıkaya-Şen 2021: 86). This becomes apparent through the fragmentation of the narrative as Marianne discards items of clothing allowing Lukas to take more and more intimate photos of her, focussing in on her head, legs, chest, then shoulders. The scene takes place over seven pages, in which the scene of the photo shoot is interspersed with fragments of Marianne’s recollections in free indirect speech. The scene opens with “Marianne pull[ing] her sweater off over her head” (Rooney 2018: 191), followed by a long retrospective passage about how Marianne has lost touch with friends from different periods of her life, revealing her extreme loneliness.

The next step in the photographing process has “Marianne [turn] on the mattress, legs pulled up to her chest” (Rooney 2018: 195), followed by another series of memories – of painful Christmases in her own dysfunctional family and happier Christmases with Connell, which she has decided not to repeat, concluding that “Her life is so sterile now and has no beauty in it anymore” (Rooney 2018: 196). Having reached this conclusion, Marianne continues undressing for the photo shoot: “She reaches behind her back and snaps open the clasp, then slips the straps off her shoulders” (Rooney 2018: 196). The fragmentary writing of the photo shoot echoes how Lukas sees Marianne, as a series of sexualised body parts, and her vulnerability to the possible sharing of these images online is revealed by the narrative fragments which foreground her isolation.[3] This isolation is confirmed by Connell when he mentions her at the counselling sessions he attends. While he is still in almost daily contact with her, she appears to have been abandoned by everyone else:

People in college have been saying things about Marianne since she went away. […] Some drunk guy at a party told him that she was into weird stuff, and that that there were pictures of her on the internet. Connell doesn’t know if it’s true about the pictures. He’s searched her name online but nothing has ever come up. (Rooney 2018: 215-216)

That “nothing has ever come up” is the only difference between Marianne and Emma, but the potential for digital photographs of Marianne’s fragmented body to surface online, as Emma’s did, highlights the commodification of images of the female body prevalent in the post Celtic-Tiger society both these novels portray.

O’Neill and Rooney both foreground the sharing of digital photos online as integral to the objectification and dehumanisation of the characters whose privacy has been violated. The narrative insistence on the fragmentation of the bodies photographed translates in both texts into textual fragmentation, the textual equivalent of zooming into and focussing on the individual body parts of the displayed bodies. Where the continuity of the analogue photographs discussed by Nancy Armstrong encouraged authors of the Victorian era to provide a plethora of visual detail, the discontinuity of the digital photograph is translated into fragmentation within the writing itself.

Temporality

A second distinction which can be drawn between analogue photography and digital photography is in the value ascribed to the images themselves and how they are used. Before digital photography became widespread, personal photography centred on the family, and the images taken usually ended up in a family album. As José Van Dijck puts it in an article entitled “Digital Photography: Communication, Identity, Memory”:

In the analogue age, personal photography was first and foremost a means for autobiographical remembering, and photographs usually ended up as keepsakes in someone’s (family) album or shoebox. They were typically regarded to be a person’s most reliable aid for recall and for verifying ‘life as it was’. (Van Dijck 2008: 58)

It was their value as archive, and as a means to reflect on the past which was significant in a way which is simply no longer the case in the digital age. Indeed, “most teenagers consider their pictures to be temporary reminders rather than permanent keepsakes. […] Taking, sending and receiving photographs is a real-time experience and, like spoken words, image exchanges are not meant to be archived” (Van Dijck 2008: 62).

Digital photographs which are shared online, while they may in fact end up lasting longer online than initially intended, are much more related to the present than to the past that analogue photography was seen to have recorded, as exemplified by Barthes’ “ça a été” (Barthes 1980: 120). It is not insignificant then, that both Asking for it and Normal People are both present-tense narratives which bely the chronological progression their internal structures suggest. Both novels are divided into dated sections (Last year: Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and This year: Thursday, Friday, Saturday, etc.) in Asking for It, and Normal People’s opening chapter is dated January 2011, with each subsequent chapter taking place at subsequent points varying from “Five minutes later (July 2014)” to “Six Months Later (February 2015)”. However, in both novels the present of the most recently shared photo is the temporality that prevails.

Temporality in Asking for It

This continuous present is achieved in Asking for it, through the symmetrical repetition of the four-day time-frame of the events of the year of the rape, and one year later when the impending trial of the perpetrators is due to take place. The events of the second half of the novel occur on the one-year anniversary of the rape, and this anniversary incites the media (radio and television shows, newspapers, not to mention the hashtags on social media) to rehash the elements of the case, preventing Emma from moving on, just as the photos themselves are re-posted, re-liked, re-commented on, and the words which course through Emma’s brain (those studied in the previous section), as well as the recurrent comments posted on the site, which appear in italics on numerous occasions throughout the second half of the novel. The chain “Slut, liar, skank, bitch, whore” (O’Neill 2015: 275; original emphasis) occurs no less than eighteen times.

The permanence of the online presence of the damning photos of Emma on the night she was raped condemns her to live in a permanent present, in which the photos can be stored indefinitely and shared infinitely.

Temporality in Normal People

Similarly, in Normal People, the relationship between Connell and Marianne does not progress in the chronological way a conventional love story might – from the first meeting to the first date to the first sexual encounter to the wedding, the first house and the children. Despite the dated sections taking place over a five-year period, the overwhelming use of present tense narration precludes any forward movement of the narrative. As Barros-Del Río puts it:

But this format, close to life-writing or diary writing, does not match harmoniously with the Bildung progression. In fact, the sequences unfold with significant time-lapse alterations and the key moments in the plot follow no predetermined advancement. Hence, the reader is led through uneven time lapses that can vary […] Added to this, the present tense dominates the narrative in order to emphasise the immediacy and temporariness of the course of events. (2022a: 179)

The immediacy of the narration corresponds to the way digital photography is shared. Indeed, the shared photos of Lisa, Rob’s girlfriend discussed earlier, are initially presented in one of the first chapters. They are mentioned again towards the end of the novel as Connell attempts to come to terms with Rob’s suicide. He interprets Rob’s taking and sharing of the photos as part of his friend’s desperate need for social acceptance: “And on Debs night, Rob showing them those photographs of Lisa’s naked body. Nothing had meant more to Rob than the approval of others; to be thought well of, to be a person of status” (Rooney 2018: 212). The irreversible nature of photos shared online, while it is most excruciatingly experienced by Emma in Asking for It, is equally relevant here, as the present moment of the shared photos extends in time indefinitely, as any photos shared online will still be available at a later date, with or without the subject’s permission.

The closing lines of the novel again situate it in the immediacy intrinsic to the online, as Marianne tells Connell “You should go, she says. I’ll always be here. You know that” (Rooney 2018: 266). In a way, Marianne/Marianne’s photo “always being here” precludes traditional narrative progression or closure such as that provided by analogue photography.

Analogue photography tends to be construed as an archive and a representation of the past, and the literature impacted by the advent of the medium discussed by Armstrong was overwhelmingly written in the past tense. By contrast, digital photography – particularly digital photography which is shared online – is seen both as a real-time experience and as representative of what has been called “digital permanence”, most often expressed through the adage “once on the Internet, always on the Internet”. Rooney and O’Neill respond to these two facets of digital photography by choosing to write predominantly in the narrative present tense.

Authoriality: From Analogue Photographer to Digital Photographers

According to Nancy Armstrong in Fiction in the Age of Photography, “literary realism showed readers how to play the game of modern identity from the position of observers” (Armstrong 1999: 26), in the same way that the analogue photographer aimed his/her camera at a situation from his/her perspective. The authorial function of the analogue photographer has disappeared from the world of the digital, as digital photographs, in particular those shared online anonymously, as is the case in Asking for it, not only make it impossible to identify the provenance, but also, as these images are copied multiple times, with no alteration to the quality of the image (contrary to chemical photography), it is impossible to distinguish between the original photograph and its copy. Once one’s image has been shared online, one has no control over its diffusion, any manipulations it may be subjected to, and indeed any comments which may be associated with it.

Authoriality in Asking for It

This facet of digital photography is most productively explored in Louise O’Neill’s novel, as the traditional distinction between producers and consumers of images evaporates, and the likes and comments on the photos of Emma’s rape circulate as integrally part of the images themselves. In her 2018 book Mythologies postphotographiques: L’invention littéraire de l’image numérique, Servanne Monjour discusses how digital photography has changed the very nature of seeing, as from now on, the definition of seeing includes acting on the image: “voir, c’est désormais aussi agir sur l’image” (2018: 150).[4] Digital photographs shared online are not only seen; they are liked, shared, commented upon, in a process which has been labelled “editorialisation” (Vitali Rosati 2016: 1), an open-ended process of digital knowledge creation, over which neither the author of the photograph, nor its subject, has any control.

When Emma first discovers the Easy Emma page on Facebook, the first thing she sees is the number of likes (“345 likes. I click on the photo” (O’Neill 2015: 146)). Beyond likes, the participative nature of shared online photography allows each photo to be editorialised, as comments can be left, either by named users or anonymously. In Asking for It, both sorts of comments are embedded in the shared photos of Emma’s ordeal: “Matt Reynolds has commented under the photo: ‘Looks like Nirvana’s Rape Me is the song of the night.’ Twenty people have liked it. I scroll through the names. And I know all of them” (O’Neill 2015: 148); “Someone has commented under the photo: ‘Some people deserve to get pissed on.’ Five people have liked it. Six. No, ten, twelve, fifteen. Twenty. Twenty-five” (O’Neill 2015: 149). This passage shows in real time the afterlife of a digital photograph, which is never quite finished, as comments and likes continue to accumulate long after the original image was posted.

Authoriality in Normal People

Normal People makes little reference to the loss of authorial control for takers (or subjects) of digital photographs beyond the suggestion that people have seen “pictures of [Marianne] on the internet” (Rooney 2018: 216) discussed earlier. The photos Rob shows at the Debs remain on his phone and are only commented upon “IRL” by those he shows them to. However, Sally Rooney’s recent novel Beautiful World, Where Are You references the ways in which one can so easily lose control of one’s online profile. Here, the highly successful author character Alice complains that “Every day I wonder why my life has turned out this way. I can’t believe I have to tolerate these things – having articles written about me, and seeing my photograph on the internet, and reading comments about myself” (Rooney 2021: 53).

Literary realism was constructed on the idea that any individual (photographer) was an observer, and that a writer could describe any image which could be photographed and subsequently observed. In the age of digital photography, the reader is presented with a world which is no longer simply observed, but can also be changed, as the “text” of the shared photo can be constantly re-written. O’Neill presents the case of a victim who is not in the public eye, and whose photograph is shared online without their consent and endlessly commented on. In Beautiful World, Where Are You, Rooney hints at the case of a high-profile author who is also put in the position of losing control of their own image. Both cases reflect the ease of manipulation inherent to digital photography, and the ease with which such manipulation can be exploited to depersonalise the photographic subject.

Conclusion

The invention of photography in 1839 has always been seen as a watershed moment, with a socio-cultural before and after. From a literary perspective, Nancy Armstrong argued that literary realism and the Victorian novel would not have existed without it. Today, 3.2 billion photos are shared online every day. It seems inevitable that the literature written at this time of mass sharing of digital photography will necessarily reflect some of the socio-cultural changes which have necessarily accompanied the shift in the meaning and use of photography ushered in by the advent of digital. It may also appear unsurprising that these changes should first appear in literature written by young female authors, as Mary McGill points out that these visual digital technologies have overwhelmingly been adopted by “a cohort regarded as their most enthusiastic proponents: young women” (2021: 11). Irish millennial writers such as Sally Rooney and Louise O’Neill provide us with some examples of how digital photography’s prevalence is being explored both thematically and stylistically in works of literary fiction. This paper has attempted to extend Orlaith Darling’s work on Irish authors’ focus on social media as a force of dehumanisation and depersonalisation. Focussing on digital photography – and specifically digital photography shared through social media – we have sought to shed light on how the foregrounding of digital images in these texts impacts the writing itself. The authors chose to highlight the dehumanisation which results from fragmenting the photographic subject’s body and subsequently subjecting it to multiple authorial comments in the forever present of the Internet. In order to do so, they created a language which is attuned to the specificities of shared online photography, a language in which one’s past can never be consigned to the archive, as fragments of it may always re-appear, available to be commented upon in a present over which one has limited control, a language capable of portraying the dehumanisation and depersonalisation made possible by the malign use of digital photography.

Notes

[1] Readers should be aware that Asking for It contains references to non-consensual sex and rape.

[2] Some editions of the novel feature on the cover a Barbie doll’s legs, emphasising their disarticulation and the ease with which they can be (re)moved.

[3] Barros-Del Río discusses how camera technique in the television version of the novel reproduces the fragmentary and objectifying nature of the writing: “Marianne is shot kneeling on the floor, hands tied, and a dark canvas in the background. By means of a dual-perspective shot, the camera confronts the audience with an objectifying image of Marianne, capturing her indolence, apparent emptiness and total apathy with regards to the situation she is in” (2022b: 76).

[4] “To see now is also to act on the image”, my translation.