Intimacy is a key social goal and the fundamental basis of close social relationships. Current social relationships and the interactions through which they are created and maintained are highly visualised. This visualisation also transforms the way that intimacy is played out. Based on an interdisciplinary literature review, this paper focuses on the concepts of intimacy and visual intimacy, and maps the different roles that visuals can play in intimacy practices. It shows that the content of visuals is not always essential for creating and maintaining intimacy. Practices relating to producing, sharing, and talking about pictures, as well as practices of seeing, also need to be taken into account when discussing the overall concept of visualintimacy.

Photographic practices and photo-sharing have become pervasive routine communicative acts in everyday life. Photo-sharing can be beneficial for maintaining and strengthening social relationships, but it also requires a careful reflections of trustful disclosure, intimacy, privacy and vulnerability. Several scholars have found that conflicts regarding photo-sharing arise when assumptions regarding the “shareability” of pictures and an “appropriate” amount of photo-sharing differ. This demands for further insights into which practices are considered appropriate or inappropriate and for which reasons. The present study explores norms and rules of taking and sharing pictures and examines how these norms are defined in close relationships, more precisely in romantic partnerships and friendships. It is based on 34 repertoire-oriented, semi-structured interviews that are combined with creative visual methods. The analysis shows that trust, confidentiality and consent are the fundamental conditions for photo-sharing in close relationships. However, when it comes to negative causes and consequences of photo-sharing, trust and confidentiality are at the same time considered as unreliable and fragile constructs. Usually, the image-makers are held responsible for unintended sharing and re-sharing. Further responsibility is ascribed to invisible agents and insecure technological structures, while other involved persons are not described as accountable agents. This implies that the fragility of trust in relationships needs to be anticipated in sharing processes. We argue that this necessitates further critical discussions of responsibilities, agency and trust in order to sustain the value and importance of close relationships in current digitally networked societies.

Photo sharing has become a routine everyday practice and an object of increasing scholarly interest in visual communication research. Previous studies focused on single photo-sharing practices and on how particular photo-sharing services or devices are used. This article, in contrast, highlights the merits of a repertoire-oriented approach to better understand the complexity and entanglement of photo-sharing practices across various channels in diversified media environments. Based on semi-structured qualitative interviews that are combined with creative visual methods, the present study explores the everyday photo-sharing practices of eight young adults. It examines how they decide and reflect on which pictures are shared with whom and via which communication channel. The analysis shows that photo-sharing repertoires are not just the mere sum of the different platforms used for sending and distributing pictures, but rather a meaningfully structured composition of practices. Sharing repertoires and practices are structured by decisions and considerations based on (1) the imagined affordances of platforms and their expected audiences as well as on (2) interpersonal coordination and matching practices. These decisions require multi-layered media literacy skills that include knowledge of technical aspects of visual media usage, knowledge of platform-specific affordances and norms, as well as knowledge of communication habits, preferences and attitudes of the communication partners. On the methodological level, the study underlines two aspects. First, practices of ‘smartphone photography’ are manifold. They go beyond photo sharing and also include the use of apps as camera tools and photographic software. This needs to be taken into account when examining and discussing the usage of specific apps or platforms. Second, the study highlights that visual creative methods and elicitation techniques can make a fruitful contribution to the methodological repertoire of communication research as they help to explore the complexities of everyday media use.

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