Dr John Hillman

For users of the image messaging Snapchat app, expressiveness is largely mediated through in-built filters and extensive use of short pieces of text and emojis. It is also contingent upon the disappearance of the image after a set time. The certainty these images will not be retained – that they will disappear – sanctions a degree of liberty in what is sent between users. However, there is also a reciprocal level of trust, since despite the app itself having no feature to save an image, recipients can screen capture the images they receive. Users do receive notification that their image has been saved in a screen capture, and this is likely to elicit a spontaneous reaction of despair, a breach of the code of disappearing images that is implicit in Snapchat’s communication method. In this essay, I propose Snapchat portraits express not the face as image but image as perplexing, disappearing, mutating phenomena. With their filters and distortions they unsettle our notions of the index...

By considering the camera as a node connected to a network through which information is transmitted and received this paper will consider what issues confront those seeking to offer photographic education. Asking if the twenty first century presents us with a different photographic student, who now identifies with a new and equally distinctive character and form of photography. The paper will present a framework of what the environment of photographic education could look like. Suggesting that it is the interactions of photographic and other image based practices that may constitute the basis of a re-shaping of the landscape of photographic education. The challenge is how photographic education directly addresses the modifying medium of image creation. How does it distinguish its modern methods from its past ones? How does it meaningfully relate to the multiple discourses of image making and image consumption? How can photographic education acknowledge the importance of a practice t...

Based within the context of community learning/participatory photography projects this paper will investigate the work and challenges associated with using photography as a tool for enquiring into the relationship between people and place through a process of representation. It will also consider photography as a method for articulating research ideas. The research study is ongoing and has been undertaken as part of a PhD research project entitled: Representing communities and the post-industrial landscape in the shadow of the “Cornish Alps” currently in its second year. This research aims to establish whether representations of the landscape impact on the community living in it. The focus of the enquiry is to identify whether a process of representation alters the relationship between people and place asking whether practice can “interpellate a subject of the signifier” (Burgin, 2011). Don Slater states; a “diorama - like most illusionism, and particularly like photography – is a d...

Why study for a photography degree? It could be convincingly argued that the technical skills required to make photographs are becoming easier to learn and master. For many people, the sophisticated automatic systems built into today’s modern cameras largely dispense with the need to use a camera’s manual controls. It appears that being able to produce a technically competent image may have never been easier. With extensive access to many free online resources and tutorials, covering almost every facet of image making, such as lighting, composition and post-production, it is difficult to imagine why there would be any demand for a formal academic qualification in photography. It may therefore be timely to ask what is wanted and expected from studying for a degree. Without doubt, a degree in photography needs to offer a significant alternative to what is already openly available.

This paper considers how the juxtaposition of disparate perceptual elements forms the experience of encountering the image. We argue that the image is perhaps best understood not as a unitary narrative but as a fragmentary encounter. This poses a problem for scholars who use photographs in their research. What must be bracketed or exposed so that the researcher can engage with photographic sense-making given this paratactic encounter? To address this methodological quandary, this paper considers how two seemingly irreconcilable subjects — community based participatory photographic practices and 3D fetal photography — organize an ongoing conversation about affect, subjectivity and power relationships. We ask: What are the image researcher’s obligations to understand the multiple clauses that arise from or organize the viewer's encounter with the photograph? The focus is to identify how viewership constructs the understanding of images. To be interested in the power of the photogr...

As a method of recording, documenting, reporting and giving testimony, photography is often one of the visual researcher’s tools of choice. Arguably, photography may be thought to represent its subjects accurately and reliably. However, in this paper I examine the significance, not of photography’s representational qualities – its ability to capture moments or to contain our memories – but how it specifically configures subjects of representation. Photography - and with it contemporary cultural identity - assumes its subjects contain within them something photographically recognisable. The structuring characteristics of photography are its fragmentary, accidental and incomplete in nature, traits also common to much of modern culture. Since our experiences of the world are mediated by experiences of photographs, we might ask whether the world should be considered to be in some sense ‘photographic.’ The implication apropos to the configuration of subjects of representation is that the...

There is a significant but sometimes overlooked difference between virtual reality and augmented reality. Virtual reality takes an environment, either real or imaginary, and maps it into a digital one. The experience is immersive: we remove ourselves from any so called ‘actual reality,’ and enjoy something entirely simulated. Augmented reality, on the other hand, takes reality and the digital and locates them, simultaneously, within the same experiential frame. In this world, our interactions with ‘real’ reality are continuously mediated via a digital fantasy of augmented experience. A popular example of augmented reality is Pokemon Go. This GPS location-based game was designed to be played on smart mobile devices. In the game, players explore, find, capture, battle and train virtual creatures, known as Pokemons. Importantly, as they are mediated through the screen, these creatures appear as though they are actually within the player’s real environment. When users locate Pokemons, r...

In this paper, I consider how the inefficiency of photographic images, as seen in their inability to fully represent, opens up and situates a post-factual functioning of representation. Thus our conception of notions that maybe understood as post-truth or post-factual do not necessarily present a real or persistent problem, since they are at the very centre of the symbolic functioning of image. Using examples from contemporary photography, this paper suggests that a post-truth condition is very much integral to photographic image making. It will develop the formulation that representation, always and necessarily, requires something additional that cannot easily be comprehended; something that is, ultimately, in excess of itself (such an excess can be understood in the structure of conspiracy theories or in the functioning of religions. In such cases, in order for a system of belief to work it is necessary that there is something more to believe, something beyond what we can understa...

Based within the context of community learning projects this paper will investigate the work and challenges associated with using photography as a tool to articulate research ideas. The study is ongoing and has been undertaken as part of a PhD research project entitled: Representing communities and the post-industrial landscape in the shadow of the “Cornish Alps” currently in its second year. This research aims to establish whether representations of the landscape impact on the community living in it. The focus of the enquiry is to identify whether a process of representation alters the relationship between people and place asking whether practice can “interpellate a subject of the signifier” (Burgin, 2011). Don Slater states; a “diorama - like most illusionism, and particularly like photography – is a demonstration of a technical power to transform the material of the world into representation.” (Slater, 1995) By considering the “Cornish Alps” as a diorama, a representation of land...

Photography shares little with the logic of simulation and simulacrum, instead it facilitates a dimension within which people and objects we photograph emerge from an impossible frame. Its intrigue resides in the palpable sense of impossibility that photographs render visible to us. This sleight of hand obfuscates the question of how appearance appears. In Finders Keepers, Dutch photographer Laura Chen works with imagery sourced from undeveloped films purchased from eBay and car-boot sales. When Chen develops the films, the real of someone else’s reality is transformed into art. Left undeveloped, these images occupy nowhere in particular, but Chen makes appearances fill in a void and poses a question which is not one of “why” but of “where” are images? Furthermore, in seeking out meanings, the magic of photography is understood through the misdirection of illusion and appearance. What is more useful is to ask how photography appears to appear? Keywords: photography and illusion, mag...

Augmented reality is fundamentally different from virtual reality: it does not map a real world environment into a digital one, as a virtual experience. Instead, it locates both reality and virtual within the same experiential frame. Through it, our interactions with reality are mediated via the fantasy of an augmented experience. Thus, augmented reality supplements what we see with the the purpose of trying to maintain our attention. What is most fascinating about augmented reality is how reality itself becomes a part of, rather than distinct from, digital information. It is in this sense that the very notion of seeing is fundamentally challenged. Since when augmented technology is not deployed, what is left is an apparent incompleteness of simply looking. But what are the consequences of confronting this incompleteness or blind spot? In this article I examine how augmented reality simply renders a structure that has always sustained the visual field.

This PhD research project examines the agency of photography and the photographic image. The research develops insights into photography as one of the dominant image making, cultural practices in the Twenty-first Century. Its focus is on digital photography and it begins by understanding agency as distributed, connected and networked: properties predominantly associated with an image that is digital. The intended contribution to knowledge is a philosophical engagement with how images embody notions of representational failure because they present themselves as image in support of a fiction of reality. What this means philosophically, is that there is no access to reality other than through representations that fail to represent. Underpinned by the question as to whether and how “practice interpellates a subject of the signifier” (Burgin, 2011: 196) the research considers the role of photography in helping to determine individuals as viewing subjects. Since photography is the “quinte...

At a time when photography can, perhaps, be described as one of the essential activities of the 21st Century, it feels all the more urgent to consider whether photography has evolved into something radically new and progressive. While there can be little doubt that more and more people appear to take more images, it remains somewhat uncertain as to why this might be happening. However, uncertainty may very well be the kernel of this activity.

This paper considers how the surplus of images of the 21st Century directly maps the crisis of critical new ideas and the social shifts away from confronting economic, environmental and political consequences by suggesting exchange as the formal determinant of a distracting means of re-production.

In an age of Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook, photography may be described as a form of abstract labour and enjoyment or through the value theories of exchange and use. Clearly, as an overdetermined subject of study, perhaps photography has too many definitions to ever really satisfy a universal description. But it is this very excess of interpretations suggests the notion of surplus may be useful for defining a new concept of photography.

While we most usually consider photographs as being equivalents of a diverse number of things – when they show us our faces, our sunsets, our favourite food, our pets, our holidays and our celebrations – ultimately they fail to maintain this assertion, under even minor scrutiny. Inevitably, they are at some point understood and reduced to being simply representations. However, what if photography contains within it the capacity to be more than being a representation of some thing or other? Would this not provide a radical re-reading of photography and provide a means to reimagine the structures of capital? In other words, to engage with photography as a way of thinking allows us to begin to rephrase the discourses of production and exchange.

Following Marx’s formula of commodity-money-commodity I suggest there is a process of experience-image-experience, wherein an experience is photographed and after which photographs become a new and different experience, which then stand in for what they depict. However, I claim in the digital world, we are currently undergoing an inverted shift to that of image-experience-image. This occurs when the creation of digital images becomes the primary aim and objective. In this formula, image turns out to be more than image: it becomes the mediation of experience into something incrementally excessive of simply image. Here, image itself becomes a new means for a different mode of production.

Making images fulfils unconstrained exchange in order to mediate the satisfaction of largely undefined needs. We no longer use images simply to remember things or record how things were. Entangled into their production are the terms of their exchange. However, we can also clearly see etched into production and exchange is the very same entity: image. What remains unexplained is how production and exchange can be substantially differentiated. Of course, Marx would point toward production as the site where labour is embedded. However, in a world of likes, swipes, interactions, comments, re-tweets and responses, exchange obfuscates a new tier of hidden re-production.

Why study for a photography degree? It could be convincingly argued that the technical skills required to make photographs are becoming easier to learn and master. It appears that being able to produce a technically competent image may have never been easier. This article makes a provocation about the changing face of photography education.

In this paper I argue that in an age of data visualisation, how we understand the form of the digital image should be re-considered as being neither purely visual nor purely perceptual. Instead, we may interpret digital images as being figural, as having a greater reliance on associations and connections. This figural reading of the image interrupts and disrupts the established framework of discursive reading and seeing. The narrative of the digital image becomes the story of information and data. I suggest that digital images themselves may be better understood in the 21st century, as interfaces located in the gaps between information, data and experience.

I examine the embedded correlation between algorithm and image, between data as image and images of data. I propose, in an age of ‘Big Data,’ semiotics is no longer the most appropriate tool for approaching visual forms and the indexical relation of the digital image is to ones and zeros rather than to material objects.

For users of the image messaging Snapchat app, expressiveness is largely mediated through in-built filters and extensive use of short pieces of text and emojis. It is also contingent upon the disappearance of the image after a set time. The certainty these images will not be retained - that they will disappear - sanctions a degree of liberty in what is sent between users. However, there is also a reciprocal level of trust, since despite the app itself having no feature to save an image, recipients can screen capture the images they receive. Users do receive notification that their image has been saved in a screen capture, and this is likely to elicit a spontaneous reaction of despair, a breach of the code of disappearing images that is implicit in Snapchat’s communication method.

In this essay, I propose Snapchat portraits express not the face as image but image as perplexing, disappearing, mutating phenomena. With their filters and distortions they unsettle our notions of the index and with their built in disappearance they challenge any notion of image as a memory prosthetic. Snapchat, as a form of portraiture, is not engaged with likeness or reproducibility. Instead, it stresses duplication, disguise and disappearance as the dominant features of contemporary culture.

When understood as a medium of modernism, photography is generally considered as being concerned with making the world visible. In the post-modern age, photography was assumed not to be a transparent window or mirror but rather the mediating interface hiding the mechanisms of the world through simulation and representation. Today, the digital age presents a new condition for photography by shifting emphasis from visual image analysis to a closer consideration of how algorithms, data and processual information create image in a new form. Photography is therefore one of the organisers and interfaces of digital data. Given this context, the ground of representation and the symbolic order now appear determined by code and computer logic.

I argue, in the digital age, a new subject is being formed that embodies: a proximity replaced by the interface of the screen; a sharing that fervently excludes those unable or unwilling to participate; and an excess of choice but an inability to chose. It is no coincidence that these are qualities, not only of the digital subject, but also of photography itself.

In this paper, I argue digitalisation threatens a decentred subject by appearing as a coherent and consistent framework shaping lives from the outside. In other words, the apparent formal order of the digital closes the constitutive gap of subjectivity and produces a subject no longer based on the antagonisms and inconsistencies of representation.

Unlike in the past, where if we were to penetrate the surface of the photograph all we would find would be nothing more than the site of a questionable representational practice, today we encounter incontrovertible commands driven by data and the algorithm.  From this position, I set out new terms and purpose for photography, suggesting it can be understood as the interface of a new human subjectivity.

Although indexicality has been connected to various claims about truth and resemblance, it is a term that often frustrates rather than elucidates our ideas about what photographs do. Pierce suggested the indexical properties of a photograph mean they have a point-by-point correspondence to nature. In other words, what was in front of the camera lens produces a trace that remains long after the object has gone. While an index implies a referent, I suggest indexicality is generally formulated as a counterfactual proposition, based on crude visual determinism. In this reading of the index it is possible to form the notion that a photograph exists simply because an object was at some point subjected to a photographic process. We then can understand the existence of a photograph as only being possible by virtue of the subject it captures. In this sense, indexicality becomes the means through which we retroactively justify photographic necessity. It is this concept of indexicality that has structured a particular understanding of what photography is and photographs are. And given this I suggest that indexicality relies on a false proposition: one rooted in a systematic photographic deceit. Therefore, in this paper, I will argue that a more appropriate analysis would discern that indexicality does not point to that which has been.

Photographs are not only representations of objects in the world, but they are also embedded into a relationship with the world, one derived through the processes of technology, production, distribution and storage. Photography is also the means through which both information and experience are structured. From these positions, I propose a more radical reading of the index can be arrived at by claiming that the photograph is an index of its opposite. Which means that indexicality does not express the relationship of a referent to a sign, rather it points to the limitation of photography itself to ever adequately represent what is in the world. From here it is then possible to deploy indexicality as being effectively an indicator of the empirical limitation of the symbolic order. Thus it signifies, not an absent object, but the presence of this particular absence.

The desire to render objects with more clarity, accuracy and precision represents a general shift toward reality being understood predominantly as image. This means if an object can be photographed, then photography is also implied in the object itself. In a similar fashion world events are reduced into ready-made images, image becomes the ultimate measure of reality. The task for re-thinking photographic indexicality is therefore to understand it as signifying and rendering the absence of an object rather than pointing back toward the object itself. A consequence of this recalibrating of the notion of indexicality means photography no longer needs to be determined by an implicit relationship of objects and their representations. Instead, photography can be understood as a figural account of thinking, perception and consciousness.

As a method of recording, documenting, reporting and giving testimony, photography is often one of the visual researcher’s tools of choice. Arguably, photography may be thought to represent its subjects accurately and reliably. However, in this paper I examine the significance, not of photography’s representational qualities – its ability to capture moments or to contain our memories – but how it specifically configures subjects of representation.

Photography - and with it contemporary cultural identity - assumes its subjects contain within them some thing photographically recognisable. The structuring characteristics of photographs are their fragmentary, accidental and incomplete in nature, traits also common to much of modern culture. Since our experiences of the world are mediated by our experiences of photographs, we might ask whether the world should be considered to be in some sense ‘photographic.’ The implication apropos to the configuration of subjects of representation is that their formation occurs, not unavoidably, through how we photograph what we photograph. Rather, subjects of representation are created through the systematic forces of replication and distribution that underpin photographic practice. In this conceptualisation, a photograph cannot be presumed to be simply an inscription of an external subject; the photograph implicates and calls into being its subject through its own various modes of duplication, circulation and transmission. 

Within any visual research, photographs presuppose a photographic subject of research. I suggest it may therefore be a pressing task of photography, within the context of academic research, to expatiate something of the un-photographic subject.

Augmented reality is generally understood to be a direct or indirect view of the world supplemented by additional information, data or graphics. It provides an enhancement to our perception of reality, usually in real time. This paper examines how digital photography, with its image-creation based overlays and information, may be understood specifically as a process of perception enhancement. This approach, differing from previous understandings of photography in the analogue age, may offer a new account of how the world is mediated and interfaced.

Digital photography and the resultant convergence of the camera with the cell phone, has created the conditions for exponentially more images to be created. This proliferation of photographs and the ease with which they can be shared across a network has, in turn, radically altered our experience of visual culture and visual communications.

The focus of this paper will be to explore the doxa of image-making interfaces built into the devices we use to produce digital photographs. I argue that these controlling augmentations force us into a perception of the world as being simultaneously a visible reality and a representational object. With the subsequent addition of geo-tags, meta-data along with online social and user generated interactions, digital photographs are no longer simply representations of reality but are perhaps better seen as annotations of a particular kind of imaged reality.

Digital photographic agency and vision is an enhanced and augmented process; one that intelligently organises our perception of reality. Perceived agency is regulated through the alignment of a set of technologies, uses and practices. All of which produce a photographic object that is primarily a socio-technical object. The augmented reality layer, situated onto imaging devices, is therefore an actant located within a socio-technical system. I argue that this augmented layer of image-making interface will inevitably bring alternative cultural practices into being, in the sense that the knowledge required to produce images today is significantly different from the past. This in turn has created a new environment of creation and distribution into which images interface and augmented alternate realities (for example Microsoft’s Photosynth application).

Within the paper I shall examine a three-year participatory photographic project that examines the agency of the photographic image. It does this by considering how making and looking at photographs helps structure people’s relationships with place and with themselves. The project undertakes an analysis of the interactions taking place between space, place and people through photographic image making. It explores the effects of the camera interface and screen on the making of images. Its focus is not to directly address ‘looking at’ and ‘making images’ of places but to consider the affect of seeing place as augmented image through a camera.

By considering the camera as a node connected to a network through which information is transmitted and received this paper will consider what issues confront those seeking to offer photographic education. Asking if the twenty first century presents us with a different photographic student, who now identifies with a new and equally distinctive character and form of photography.

The paper will present a framework of what the environment of photographic education could look like. Suggesting that it is the interactions of photographic and other image based practices that may constitute the basis of a re-shaping of the landscape of photographic education. The challenge is how photographic education directly addresses the modifying medium of image creation. How does it distinguish its modern methods from its past ones? How does it meaningfully relate to the multiple discourses of image making and image consumption? How can photographic education acknowledge the importance of a practice that connects with and relates to a network of imagery already taken and continuing to come into existence? Beginning with these questions, I shall ask how we can create in students the capacity to extend or challenge their own understanding of photography.

If, as historian David Wootton suggested, the purpose of the discipline of history is to ‘give the past its place in us.’ Then perhaps the starting point and underlying purpose of the discipline of photography may be to find us in the images we all have taken. With this is a starting point; I shall suggest that as the world around us changes our relationship to photography and its relationship to us also changes. As the terrain of photography is re-shaped we will inevitably need to create new maps to orientate and link the multiple nodes of twenty first century photography.

The quest for a complete view is perhaps best articulated in the form of the panorama, a representation of a seemingly continuous whole. In the 21st century the panorama is encountered in multiple ways - through technologies built into modern day digital imaging devices, in virtual computer generated worlds of 3D modelling and games. Even our own movement around the space of a gallery recalls the immersive experiences of early painted panoramas. What links all these experiences is a practice of viewing that is neither stable nor static and is connected to a form of movement. Multiple encounters and multiple events emerge from the movement of viewing that is interrupted by distractions or the shifting of our attention elsewhere. It is as though, in seeking out completeness, we perceive only very limited fragments of experience at any given moment. Viewing is therefore an incomplete event.

This paper will consider whether incompleteness is a necessary part of viewing and whether a photograph is better understood not, as Barthes asserted, as a ‘certificate of presence,’ but in its connection to absence. The paper will ask how can a work effectively describe an absence and whether it is it possible to visually express absence or create a perceptible condition that embodies both presence and absence?

It will be argued that the ontology of digital photography emerges as an ecology of viewing, movement and transmission and that its representational properties are potentially less significant than its affective and sensorial ones. By examining the non-optical function of an image, which exposes the invisible, unconscious connections of the viewing subject, the paper will argue that digital photographs are not discrete flat visual surfaces or material objects. Instead they are considered as a part of subjective events that span physical and psychological experiences. It will suggest that digital photography is less about connections to the existence of actual things or people that are its subject matter. Rather it will argue that in the space between a photograph and its viewer is a structuring absence out of which a complex of unfinished meanings may arise.

While digital technologies provide a framework for various types and forms of digital images produced, it also allows for them to be transferred into an always-updating, incomplete and infinite network of other imagery. The viewing subject’s interaction with such images is an integral part of the same continuous network of incompleteness. Located as a disembodied subject, like a viewer of the panorama with no centred point, the subject’s infinite imaginary shifts perception to a space beyond the purely visual.

The unprecedented production and consumption of images and words we experience is in part, linked to advances in digital imaging and the Internet. It is also linked to the ease with which these tools enable opportunities to personally create and curate our own lives. Gary Winogrand once suggested, we photograph in order to see what something is like when it is photographed. However, we may have now entered a time when we behave for no other reason than ‘to be photographed’ or to update our social media status. It is as though, through these forms of representation, we determine who we are and where we are.

Communities are many things; they are not just geographically based groupings. They are the shared interests and values of multiple relationships: Between people, between people and things and between people and places. This paper will explore how images and words may be used as tools for community groups to engage with who they are, how they view the world and their relationships with each other and where they live. Beginning with the premise that we see ourselves through a lens of representation, how faithfully that lens projects ‘who we are’ depends on where it is focused and who has control over what it produces. The paper will therefore consider whether, in a digital democracy, creative practice can actually have any political effect in the real world or whether it is a complacent and self-serving act.

John Hillman
Falmouth University, Cornwall, UK

Victoria Niva Millious
Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada

This paper considers how the juxtaposition of disparate perceptual elements forms the experience of encountering the image. We argue that the image is perhaps best understood not as a unitary narrative but as a fragmentary encounter. This poses a problem for scholars who use photographs in their research. What must be bracketed or exposed so that the researcher can engage with photographic sense-making given this paratactic encounter?

To address this methodological quandary, this paper considers how two seemingly irreconcilable subjects — community based participatory photographic practices and 3D fetal photography — organize an ongoing conversation about affect, subjectivity and power relationships. We ask: What are the image researcher’s obligations to understand the multiple clauses that arise from or organize the viewer's encounter with the photograph? The focus is to identify how viewership constructs the understanding of images. To be interested in the power of the photograph is to engage with a process that deals with the real exterior and psychological interior spaces. As Bergson suggested, the ‘image’ offers transcendence between the object (exterior) and consciousness (interior) and thus the very capacity to engage multiple, impartial encounters. These two spaces (object-exterior and conscious-interior) we argue, are often understood or articulated through narratives and memories that may express something of the power of the photograph and the agency of the viewer. Drawing on Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics, the research has so far indicated that the function of photography and the photograph may be to create a social circumstance in which these exterior and interior spaces intersect, organising and joining random fragments of perception. How can scholars engage fruitfully with this multiplicity?

To address this we consider whether the power of the image is not in what it represents but in what it draws together. If the object of photography is not the image itself, but the thing-power of the image, which, again, is inherently capable of producing and being produced by multiple encounters, then how are we to use photographs in our research? We argue that if the power of images is not “a given” but rather one that must be inferred, then a further exploration of the affective and emotional responses to images is needed. This may lead to an enhanced understanding of how responses to images are interwoven and embedded within our ideological frameworks, and further, how these frameworks themselves both stabilize but also potentially limit our image-knowledge. In turn this analysis serves to revise our understanding of the complex relationships that perpetuate and make possible photographic meaning.

This paper examines the construction of a narrative that “speaks” of the landscape without showing or revealing it in full. Considered as “objects of abjection”, distanced and displaced from their original context the paper considers a  a body of work suggests the presence of the landscape within objects. These objects tell a story not only of where they came from but also of themselves and ourselves as we read them in the work.

By considering photography both as a tool for undertaking practice based research and as an act of performance, this presentation will ask how these two positions can coexist as part of a research project.  The presentation will explore the potential difficulties when working with photography as part of a method of research into representation and also as a subject of that same research. It will consider whether or not it is important to draw sufficient distinction so that the methodological approach does not become the subject of the research itself.

Asking whether photographing a subject can be understood as a collective performance carried out by both photographer and subject, the presentation will consider the meaning of a “photographic performance” and how this contrasts with viewing the resulting image. In looking at metaphors in the post-industrial landscape of my research, the presentation will consider the experiential, the real and the imaginary and ask whether photography, seen as an act of performance practice, can offer any insights into our understanding of place as space. By extending the notion “Car nous sommes où nous ne sommes pas.” (Jouve, 1956) (“For we are where we are not”), it will interrogate how photography bridges between two moments; the time of looking and the time of looking back.  It will explore whether this photographic duality can provide a case for photography being both method and subject of my research.

In exploring these questions the presentation will consider how photography, employed as both a research process and a performance practice, can be usefully used as part of a method for research. Following on from recent photographic theoretical questions as to “where is the photograph?” I shall ask: “Where is the camera within the practice of research?”