This thesis aims at articulating the paradoxical nature of the photographic image, via a practice based creative activity. The temporality of the photograph lies in a unique instant-moment when the image is transcribed onto a particular frame, the photographic frame. But in order to open up this very photographic instant or photographic frame, we must also situate the photographic act in its surrounding. The exercise takes place `out in the open.' Situated in the natural landscape, the photographic event relies on the mutual immanence of being and doing at the same time. Opening up the temporality of the photographic frame leads me to consider the meaning of pasearse and also the notion of creative memory. Thus the temporality of the photographic frame does not appear completely autonomous from the photographic body or from the natural surroundings of the photographed place. Rather, it is a relational event combining stillness and movement. The nature of this instant is that at one moment (at the same time), it belongs to a plane of immanence (Spinoza) or the temporality of duree (Henri Bergson). What the photographic frame does is give support to an illusion of a stop or arrest in the passage of the flow of time. Pasearse is a self-reflexive active verb that opens up a temporality where immanence and being coincide. Pasearse can help to open up a photographic instant, to ascribe a certain temporality to the photographic event. The aim is to describe the opening up of the frame or instant as transference, rather than a bifurcation of passive or active. Being as pasearse (Giorgio Agamben). This idea of a perpetual present tense is the experienced time or `folded time. ' (Michel Serres). This temporality constitutes the event of the frame as a time that allows oneself a `view to viewing' (Derrida).

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The original contribution of this thesis is the insight that photography is better served through the philosophy of difference than through the metaphysics of identity. This thesis takes seriously the mechanically produced image in order to claim that its technologies can be considered as the method that allows access to the subjective modes within difference and develops them in relation to the specifically photographic conditions of production: repetition, simulacra and the latent image. This thesis proposes that considering photography from the point of view of the content of the image is a false move as it necessarily brings in the question of the subject (a key concern for philosophy), narrowly understood as the immobile centre for which the world is represented as meaning, Rather than pursuing photography as text, which brings in the problem of language. this thesis suggests that visuality - understood as fragmentary and recursive selfreplication – is nothing other than photography's pull away from representation and pointing to the way difference, as multiplicity of open-ended possibilities, could be approached as the sine-qua-non for photography. This thesis not only shows that visuality can never be fully understood as representation and requires the untamed environment of difference, but that in so doing one realises that philosophy of visuality is nothing other than photography. This has the additional outcome inasmuch as it also begins to pull away at the whole edifice of metaphysics itself, which opens up another avenue of research that leads not only out of thinking metaphysically. but also out of thinking humanly. These are wildly creative paths, and this thesis is pointing in the direction that can be taken without however solving these questions.

Informed by feminist epistemologies, cultural theory and social history, the thesis takes as its primary focus discourses of gender and sexuality in the field of photographic culture. The accompanying contextualisation reflects the shifting theoretical and methodological terrain of visual cultural studies over the historical period in question (1983 - 2003). Earlier articles cover the project's initial development and subsequent essays navigate the work into a more historical context culminating in Seeing her Sex: Medical Archives and the Female Body (2002). This book draws forms the main body of the submission. It draws upon theories of feminism and sexual difference, the histories of mass-reproducible visual technologies and the philosophy of science in order to understand how human generation became female reproduction. Thus it places photography within a longer historical framework of visual technologies (engraving, lithography, stereoscopy, radiography and microscopy) that amalgamated to produce new kinds of objects and observers. It offers vertical 'deep' studies of particular historical images, and also more lateral, horizontal connections across disciplines. Its approach is therefore interdisciplinary and engages in an argument about the historical and geographical boundaries of knowledge, about what comes before and after and about what gets to lie inside and outside the discursive field of photography. This work examines and develops arguments that are always located in, but also move beyond, the archive. The essays included here re-think questions of visual representation and discursive formations in order to foreground the inter-connected relationships between institutional, cultural and embodied aspects of scholarship. Within the field of visual cultural studies the question of agency and the relationship between theories, histories and politics became urgent in the political climate of the 1980s and 1990s. Increasingly questions of the subject's participation, cultural location and perspective in constructing any 'field' or 'terrain' became important and the relationship between experience and theory has consequently been re-thought. In the later publications the body is therefore discussed as both subject and object of visual knowledge. The work argues against an essentialist understanding of what any 'body' is, and for an understanding of the body in its material and historical corporeality, rather than its biological specificity. Understood as subjective and embodied, situated and partial, this more phenomenological, intersubjective approach to visual cultural studies acknowledges the sensory, emotional and imaginative dimensions of looking. Knowledge here is conceptualised not as possession, but as empathy. What we see as observers depends not only on where we stand but also on how we position ourselves within any given historical field. Moreover, this is a political question; not all perspectives are equal. This work has grown out of an antipathy to the disembodied approach of the humanities within which the human body had become alienated, suspect, denigrated. In its drive for fixed standards, the human sciences subordinated body to mind, emotion to reason thus foreclosing crucial sensory aspects of knowledge and creating an incapacity to acknowledge the wide diversity of our different modes of knowing. Historically, photography certainly does have an ignoble history as a technology of ethnographic domination and control (imperial, colonial, racial or sexual), but it is also, equally, a form of counter-memory. Images are a question of human rights and here visual cultural studies has a key role to play.

The thesis constructs a filiation relating transcendentalist photographic practices. The historical span stretches from the early nineteenth century inventions of photographies (Daguerre, Arago, Talbot, Hill, Holmes), through American modernism (Stieglitz, Strand, Weston, Adams), and ends with structuralist film and photographies (Frampton). This lineage is argued to mark significant shifts in the gender politics of the transcendentalist impression of the photographic archive. I argue that the filiation is underpinned by major photographic forms of infinity: detail and proliferation. Within the gender-political context of their archival dimension, these forms are compared to major philosophical forms of infinites (in Plato, Longinus, Virgil, Burke, Kant, Hegel). The thesis marks the dismantling of this tradition through the feminine coding of the archival ad infinitum - extending canonical feminist thought (Irigaray, Kristeva) into photographic history via a deconstructive methodology (Derrida, Felman, Lyotard, de Man). The key theoretical contention of the thesis is that the ur-scene recorded by photographic and philosophical discourses is an encounter with and retraction from infinities which are figured in gendered terms. This traumatic encounter is argued to be the archival motor which produces material archives. The thesis tests the relationship between this motor and the gendered impression of the social circulation, storage and dissemination of images produced by a given photographic practice. The practical aspect of research is engages with the social circulation and storage of art through the photographic. These works hazard critical purchase in the residual archival ambience of Minimal and Conceptual art. Practical and theoretical work are linked by two main issues: an attention to affects associated to the dissolution of concepts, by which unity becomes fragmented, particularised and thus, an attention to 'the detail' as a form of (feminine) contingency. Key here is the quasi-concept of the 'impression' (Derrida) - the precise impact of a vague image of conceptual unity.

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This thesis performs a deconstructive reading of Roland Barthes's text Camera Lucida (1980). It considers the text as a mesh of dark ecology after Timothy Morton. The first three chapters conduct a comparative analysis of the manifest content of the text in order to contest its inheritance and complicate the question of Barthes's realism, often erroneously conditioned as “naïve.” Chapters 1–3 approach Barthes's figure of the “vrai hallucination” by interrogating the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre (Chapter 1) and André Bazin (Chapter 3) on the text. Chapter 2 forms a bridge between Chapters 1 and 3 by considering how Bazin translates iterations inherited from Sartre. This thesis argues that Barthes is an irrealist when considered through the lens of Sartre and a surrealist when considered through the lens of Bazin. Barthes's attempt to distinguish his work from his predecessors fails: this thesis argues that charting this failure has ecological significance. The second part of the thesis moves into new territory, turning around the figure of Barthes's “Palinode” (Chapter 4) towards a post-deconstructive understanding of photography in relation to Barthes's Winter Garden photograph (Chapter 5). The conclusions from Chapters 1-3 are built upon with a focussed reading of the question of redemption of essence in the Winter Garden photograph. This thesis argues that Barthes fails to experience the essence of his mother in an unmediated way, instead involving her singularity in distributed networks of alterity. Rather than a deep ecology of restoration, a dark ecology of complicity is signalled by the text. The thesis is framed in terms of the text's relevance for thinking about the imminent ecological crisis we face, and the conclusion gestures towards the possibility of reading Camera Lucida progressively, and without the figure of Mother Nature.

This study is an exploration of everyday photographic practice and of the places that photographers visit and inhabit offline and online. It discusses the role of movement, the senses and repetition in taking photographs. Ultimately it is about photographers and their photographic routines and habits. Since the advent of photography, numerous texts on the subject have typically focused on photographs as objects. This trend has continued into the digital age, with academic writing firmly focusing on image culture rather than considering new issues relating to online practice. Although various technological innovations have given the photographer flexibility as to how and what they do with their images, the contention of this thesis is that analogue routines have been mostly transposed into the digital age. Nevertheless, there remains a lack of empirical enquiry into what photographers actually do within online spaces. This study is one of the first to address this knowledge gap. Taking a unique approach to the study of photography, it draws upon work in various fields, including phenomenology, social anthropology, human geography and sensory ethnography, to produce an innovative conceptual and methodological approach. This approach is applied in the field to gain an in-depth understanding of what ‘doing’ photography actually entails. An in-depth analysis of interviews with and observations of North East photographers reveals how they engage with everyday life in a distinctive way. Habitually carrying a camera allows them to notice details that most would ignore. Online and offline movements often become entangled, and when photographers explore Flickr there is a clear synergy with the way in which they explore their local city space. This research is a call to others to give serious consideration to online and offline photography practices, and an attempt to stimulate new discussions about what it means to be a photographer in the world.

This thesis argues that photographs enhance the repertoire of seeing the way eyeglasses, microscopes and telescopes do. This kinship is based on these devices sharing a feature called transparency. Transparent devices facilitate visual information about objects without interrupting the causal link between the object and our eyes, and do so by maintaining a belief independent and similarity preserving counterfactual dependence on that object. Handmade pictures also offer visual information about objects, but because handmade pictures depend on the perceptual experiences of their makers, they interrupt the causal link between the object represented and our eyes. Consider how a drawing can represent the misperceptions and hallucinations of its illustrator, but in contrast, photographs do not reproduce the contents of hallucinations or misperceptions had by their photographers. I use transparency to map the epistemic province of photographs, arguing that photographs are not just ontologically similar to microscopes and telescopes, but also epistemically akin to them, –perhaps even more than they are like other picture types. This is illustrated by two further comparisons. The first is technological: while cameras define the information scope of photographs, handmade pictures are not subject to pre-sets that strictly limit their representational scope in the same way. The second comparison shows how photographs and handmade pictures are subject to different sceptical hypotheses: handmade pictures are susceptible to scepticism about their illustrator, –i.e., as we might question the credibility of someone giving testimony– but photographs are not beholden to scepticism about their photographer. I conclude with a proposal on the epistemology of photography, where contrary to the character of other picture types, photographs provide genuine perceptual knowledge about objects.