This research develops an understanding of the ‘view’ as a historicised and contemporary socio‐political mediation. What is posited as a view, and its signification, as a view, is how we experience, understand and relate to others and the world around us. The thesis offers a re‐interpretation of accepted modes of viewing, what is viewed, and a re­‐presentation of viewed imagery, in order to question and propose how might we better relate to, and function in, the production of social space. The premise of the enquiry is that the ‘view’, is a visual, spatial, and conceptual ideologically political position that shapes our relationship as citizens societally and to public space. The ‘image’ of, and as, a view, and point of view, permeates society. In our contemporary times of socio‐political instability, it becomes prescient to question the ‘view’, how it is constructed, and how it operates. The approach of this enquiry is interdisciplinary using a dialectic process of theoretical and practical sources. It draws on theories of space exploration, film studies, religion, photography, popular culture, geography, politics, contemporary visual culture, historical painting, architecture, and urban regeneration. The practice of lens‐based moving and still image, and the contexts within which the works have been created as research, are temporal and spatial. Journeys have been undertaken to acquire ‘views’ by hot-air balloon, by cable car, up tall buildings, by train, and by foot as a key method of investigation. The rhythm of the text in the thesis reflects this method of temporality, and spatiality. With the practice interlinked throughout, and with the text, in the guise of image inserts, the structure of each of the three chapters enacts a positionality from the perspective of a visual, spatial, and conceptual vantage point as a means of guiding the reader/viewer through the research.

Communal trauma is a culturally constructed ascription. Social agents propose that disastrous events have had traumatic effects upon the communities affected. If this proposition is convincing, then these events become acknowledged as communal traumas, and those affected as traumatised. This thesis examines how two crises in northern England: the Foot and Mouth Disease (F.M.D.) epidemic in Cumbria in 2001, and the demise of the mining industry in County Durham from the late 1970s onwards, have been constructed as communal traumas. While the F.M.D. epidemic in Cumbria has been explicitly studied, and therefore constructed as traumatic in sociological studies, the crisis was also broadcast through landscape imagery in press and documentary photography. This thesis examines such imagery in the work of photographers Nick May, John Darwell and Ian Geering, and in the printed and television media, and assesses how it has also contributed to the idea of F.M.D. as a communal trauma. This is one of the original contributions of this thesis. Another is the examination of the disappearance of the mining industry in County Durham since the rationalisation of the late 1970s, as communal trauma. This demise also had devastating economic, social and cultural effects for the communities involved, but has seldom been construed as communally traumatic. However, the film and photography of Newcastle’s Amber art collective creates a narrative that suggests precisely this, and fundamental to that narrative is landscape imagery. Their collaboration with the communities experiencing the effects of this demise, and the exhibition of their films and photography back to that community has created a vision of traumatic social change that is both corroborated and constructed by those most affected. With a detailed examination of the imagery of these two specific crises in Northern England, this thesis examines how landscape has contributed to the cultural construction of trauma.

L’essor de la photographie au milieu du 19ème siècle est contemporain de changements importants survenus au sein de la société française. A Paris sous le Second Empire, la forte hausse du pouvoir d’achat, due en grande partie aux travaux haussmanniens, influence l’image publique des citadins. La ville et ses grands boulevards offrent aux plus privilégiés la possibilité de se promener, de s’exhiber, de paraître selon certaines normes pour se mettre en lumière. Représentations qui seront ensuite fixées par les artistes : écrivains, peintres, sculpteurs, caricaturistes et photographes, ils concourent tous à immortaliser ce nouveau mode de vie et ses acteurs.Le portrait, ce moyen de représentation par excellence auparavant réservé à l’aristocratie, deviendra finalement accessible aux autres milieux sociaux. En comparaison avec les autres techniques, le portrait photographique gagnera davantage de succès et ce, grâce à de multiples critères : la baisse progressive de son coût, sa vitesse d’exécution, sa véracité reconnue par le public, sa capacité d’être reproduit à l’identique en grand nombre depuis l’invention du procédé collodion humide, sans oublier la naissance du portrait-carte de visite qui accélère sa démocratisation.Notre recherche repose sur un dépouillement minutieux d’archives photographiques. Elle aura comme objectif d’analyser le rôle joué par la photographie dans la procédure de représentation sous le Second Empire en répondant à un certain nombre de questions. / When portraiture was made accessible to French citizens in the nineteenth century, someconservative critics did not consider all individuals to be “portrayable”. This did notprevent people of means from hiring portrait painters to create their own “visiblememory”. In the process, they redefined the nature of the artist’s model. These newsitters, who were employers rather than employees, were not obedient: they insisted uponimposing their individual style and references. Photographic artists, on the other hand,persisted in directing their sitters—as artists did their paid academic models—and had toseek compromises that, without relinquishing their favoured styles, would satisfy theirdemanding clients. Some photographers published manuals and treatises explaining howto produce a good portrait without being unduly disturbed by the model’s whims andfancies. Furthermore, self-proclaimed experts in modern “etiquette” taught people how totalk, how to walk and how to appear in society. A careful examination of the conditionsbehind the production of photographic portraits, especially those representing fashionablecitizens taken during the era of the carte-de-visite, reveals the importance of the rolesplayed respectively by the model, the portrait photographer and the social codes ofconduct of the day.

Cette thèse étudie un corpus de livres et d’expositions de photographies qui abordent les questions d’identité sociale, ethnique et nationale [en Grande-Bretagne]. Elle procède à une historicisation du champ photographique en s’intéressant au contexte social et politique de production et de diffusion des images, et en particulier aux politiques culturelles. Elle considère photographies et expositions comme des discours et pratiques qui contribuent à la formation des identités collectives. Le genre des photographies, et notamment le documentaire, est discuté au fil de l’étude, en lien avec la problématique de l’identification. En s’attachant aux rapports entre représentations, identités collectives, culture et pouvoir, l’analyse s’inscrit dans la lignée des cultural studies, dont quelques auteurs, comme Stuart Hall ou Paul Gilroy sont régulièrement évoqués. Il ressort que la photographie se fait le témoin et l’agent d’une dissolution des identités collectives dans les années 1990, en interrogeant l’identité nationale et ses vecteurs et en revendiquant un plus grand pluralisme culturel. Pour aborder la question sociale, devenue moins centrale, elle rompt avec le documentaire classique et la figure du photographe engagé. Par ailleurs, une photographie noire se structure autour d’Autograph-ABP. Lorsqu’une New Britain (jeune, créative et multiethnique) est promue par les travaillistes, la photographie en révèle les dissonances. Néanmoins, en entrant dans le domaine de l’art contemporain, le médium devient aussi l’objet des politiques culturelles multiculturalistes et se fait parfois source d’ethnicisation et d’essentialisation des identités. Après 2001, lorsque le multiculturalisme est critiqué, la photographie enregistre la diversité de la société britannique et démonte les stéréotypes qui visent particulièrement musulmans et réfugiés. Elle est aussi force de proposition dans la recherche de nouvelles formes de cohésion. Des pratiques documentaires collaboratives sont expérimentées pour un renouveau de la citoyenneté. La capacité de la photographie à explorer le rapport entre territoire et citoyens lui permet aussi d’inventer d’autres modes d’identification collective ancrés dans l’expérience quotidienne. / This thesis is based on a corpus of photography books and exhibitions dealing with social, ethnic, and national identities in Britain. It adopts a historicizing perspective by analysing the political and social contexts for the production and circulation of photographs, with special attention to cultural policies. Photographs and exhibitions are studied as narratives and practices that contribute to the formation of collective identities. The genre of photographs, and especially the notion of documentary, is discussed throughout the work, as a corollary to the question of identification. With a focus on representations, collective identities, culture and politics, this study lies in the field of cultural studies and regularly summons some of its prominent figures like Stuart Hall or Paul Gilroy. It shows that photography both documented and helped the dissolution of collective identities at the end of the 1990s, by questioning national identity and its representations, and by advocating greater cultural pluralism. As the social question became less prominent, photography departed from traditional social documentary forms and from the figure of the committed photographer. Parallel to this, in the wake of Black Arts, Black Photography was institutionalized with the creation of Autograph-ABP. It is also argued that when the New Labour party promoted a New Britain, some photographs acted as a magic mirror, revealing dissonances in the brand new narrative of a young, creative, multi-ethnic Britain. However, as photography entered the realm of contemporary art, it also became subject to the multiculturalist policies of the period and sometimes turned into a source of ethnicisation and essentialization. After 2001, as multiculturalism was questioned, photography kept documenting the diversity of British society and helped debunk stereotypes, especially those associated with Muslims and refugees in Britain. Finally, the late 2000s are analysed as a period when new modes of social cohesion are explored through photographic practices. Collaborative documentary projects are experimented to re-engage citizens. New photographs documenting the relation between people and territory in Britain seem to suggest that collective identification may rather be found in shared everyday experience.