Social media, crucially characterized by practices of self-visualizing and evaluations as ‘immediate’, have become standard tools for political communication and political subjectivation within current digital media societies. In this presentation – based on a corpus of photographic politicians’ depictions in political social media communication (Facebook, Instagram) from the Austrian parliamentary election campaigns in 2017 (n = 394), a corpus of 9 significant political PR texts reflecting on these specific campaigns, and receptions-based focus groups (n = 24) discursively perceiving and discussing a stimulus set of these depictions – I want to discuss both, (a) different conceptual and method/olog/ical pathways of analyzing photographic genres empirically, and (b) different significant conceptualizations of photographic genres within the specific domain of political (socialmedia) communication, including their ir-/relevances and uptake within ‘everyday conversational’ settings.

Drawing on a praxeological concept of (digital) photography and a meta-/pragmatic notion of genre, and combining tools of Social Semiotics, Visual (Culture) Studies, and Linguistic Anthropology/Metapragmatics, I want to show how triangulating different strands of empirical data and approaches can serve to systematically analyze not only product/ion-based genre types but also their specific conceptualizations and appropriations within real-world (conversational) settings.

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