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2. In what ways can cosphotography be understood as a form of “fan capital”?

Photography plays a big part in cosplay. Photographs and video record people cosplay as a character in anime or manga performance. They are cosplaying, as a character takes time and money. Photography will be a useful resource for fans to look at and refer to someone who already cosplays their favourite character. Cosphotography helps cosplayers exchange their costume in an online network in the cosphere (Mountfort et al., 2019).

According to Elena Dorfman describe in her portraits of cosplayers that the photo of cosplayers represent in the image will show the way it communicates with fandom. Therefore the photo display should be peeled apart (or collapsed together) for the fandom viewed it (Lamerichs, 2011). Cosplayers motivate themselves to cosplay at a character they like in a fan convention. The most common is shown in the fashion delivered where cosplay photos have been taken from the camera.

Fashion show photograph will be an excellent source for fandom because fashion shows are organised for fashion culture with catwalk or stage where cosplayers can show their outfits from various angles (Lamerichs, 2011). Fashion shows where fandom can involve in the costume of the character they are based on or interested in (Lamerichs, 2011). 

The photograph will promote the costume as a central role. The fans model for the photographers can use the pictures to promote their costume activities to other fandoms. Cosplay conveys “cultural capital” (Bourdieu 1986) to other fans with the same exciting areas such as comic book convention (Ramirez, 2017). The convention allows fans to gather and demonstrate their cultural knowledge of the same culture and exciting regions to express them in the same topic or culture that they know.

Not the only photograph will be a source online for fandom, but their communities help fandom gain more knowledge and express their interesting over the internet. They can show their experience, their cultural capital to each other’s on the internet through their photos (Ramirez, 2017). Through the activities of cosplay can help cosplayers escape from reality and enter into their imaginative world. They can transform from an “ordinary person” to a “superhero”, from a game player” to a “performer”, and from adulthood to childhood (Rahman et al., 2012)

Photographed and videoed are not only taken on private value but fan capital as well in wider, mainly online networks (Mountfort et al., 2019). Understanding the subculture or fan capital photograph will help fandom understand more the frame, the issue surrounds cosphotography (Mountfort et al., 2019). Cosphotography has been updated in many platforms but cosers images of their body shaming to advertise or commercial cosplay has a bad outcome and destructive influence on the internet. Online galleries for pictures of cosphotography are in many platforms, and it is essential to commercial cosplay, they still have a cosplay music video in television shows. Cosplay requires time and money; also, it can connect in many particular ways, such as mash-up and parody. This means cosplay is not just fan-based consumerism but also a critical practice (Mountfort et al., 2019). Many cons of commercial media assist cosplayers market online fan cultures.

Cosphotography changes its form to fix with the setting and existence into a broader economy of desire to let fandom see the change of cosphotography in the cosphere that has a vast example of embodying a specific character.

References:

Mountfort, P., Peirson-Smith, A., & Geczy, A. (2019). Planet Cosplay: Costume Play, Identity and Global Fandom. Intellect Books.

Lamerichs, N. (2011). Stranger than fiction: Fan identity in cosplay. Transformative Works and Cultures, 7(3), 56-72.

Ramirez, M. A. (2017). From the panels to the margins: Identity, marginalization, and subversion in cosplay.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 2002 [1986]. “The Forms of Capital.” Pp. 280-291 in Readings in Economic Sociology, edited by Nicole Woolsey Biggart. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub

Rahman, O., Wing-Sun, L., & Cheung, B. H. M. (2012). “Cosplay”: Imaginative self and performing identity. Fashion Theory, 16(3), 317-341.