I am a photographer. In photographing the city, r remap it intuitively and libidinally. I distort it. Places in the city are turned inward, into a mental space, into a projection of my own desires and deceptions. I do not speak of this city, of which I know very little, but speak from within the city. I am a tourist. For me the location is full of fantasies, dreams. It reminds me of art, of other photographs and films. I am with myself in this unknown and yet so familiar landscape. A place already close to me, already seen. It feels uncanny. It feels as if I were at the confines of memory, in what is left under forms of impressions, traces of stories, fantasy, and dreams, but also deceptions, frustrations, fears and symptoms. I look at the city through moments of deja vu. This thesis examines the relationship between photography and the city through the phenomenon of deja vu, hence engaging the artistic practice with contemporary theories of space, time and consciousness. After a conceptualisation of key concepts, deja vu, the cinematic and the excess, the thesis progresses through a speculative reading of the images exploring the boundaries between photographic practice, contemporary philosophy, and fiction. In interweaving those elements, at times dissonantly, the thesis investigates how deja vu can implicate one's subjectivity into the sense of duration, in a Bergsonian sense, and how this creates heterogeneous worlds rather than a homogeneous space. By fragmenting thought and dislocating the persona of the researcher, the thesis attempts to respond to such vision. Deja vu permits a displacement of the relationship between photography and the city into questions of time. The thesis examines this displacement creatively and moves into a Deleuzian philosophy of becoming.

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Invisible Boundaries has as its practical project a photographic archive of 1200 images that sequentially documents and records my living space by (re- )visiting the same locations, objects, traces and detritus over a period of three years, 1999 to 2002. This resulted in two major national exhibitions at the Michael Tippet Centre, Bath Spa University 2002 and The Thelma Hulbert Gallery, Honiton 2005. Here photographs from the project Invisible Boundaries were displayed in 27 enlarged photographic images and a cdrom of 700 images. My written dissertation describes and explores the relationship between my varIOUS recording methods and the various evocative outcomes produced as an exhibition, where images are visually enlarged, magnified and displayed, and a cdrom, where implicit details are archived and revealed in greater scope and magnitude. Chapters 1 and 2 (The Work and The Archive) explore in detail the photographic collection in my work and explicitly in two major works, Gerhardt Richter's Atlas (2004) and Sol LeWitt's Autobiography (1980), two large bodies of archived photographic works. In Chapter 3 The Domestic and Personal, Invisible Boundaries is considered alongside modern documentary practice relative to the home context through the images of Martin Parr, Nan Goldin and Larry Sultan. Both personal and objective, my thesis specifically analyses the projects Signs of the Times (Parr 1992), The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (Goldin 1982) and Pictures from Home (Sultan 1989). The practical work allowed for the single image to be taken, stored and reviewed against a larger body of images that formed the archive. This practical analysis is concluded in Chapter 4, Photographic Fiction and Loss, which draws on the contexts of documentary and archival practice established in my work, where these works become an emotional and nostalgic product. Throughout all chapters I am interested in the continued dominance of the singular image in contemporary writing at a time when digital technology and culture are making the multiplicity of images prevalent. Overall Invisible Boundaries is an in-direct autobiographical and cumulative photographic archive. Through its continuous photographic recording of the rooms, spaces and items in my home, it shows how the tracings and residues of an existence and the banality of moments, holistically form an archive of historical moments, which also says something about my life.

This thesis is written from the viewpoint of a working British artist. Providing a new context within which to assess the representation of time in Tacita Dean's films, the thesis groups together works located in the rural landscapes of Britain, which are evaluated for their ability to convey rural Britain with a dynamic and complex present-time temporality as living and working entities containing actual places. Influence from the culturally constructed, countryside ideal, is revealed, including Romanticism's historical agency in the countryside ideal's formation, as well as Romanticism's current, somewhat hidden influence. The selected works are observed to lack a dominant present-time frame of reference. Linking temporal representation to place, Dean's written statements regarding place are then compared to place representation in her films. Extending Jorg Heiser 's discussion on Dean as Romantic Conceptualist, the selected works are demonstrated to be largely situated within Romantic Conceptualism, shown to make a contribution to the affirmation that actual rural places exist, by attempting to convey each place's unique temporality. Unlike her writing on place, Dean's film work is demonstrated to not only contain the more rebellious forms of Romanticism associated with Romantic Conceptualism, but also more conservative forms. Instead of offering new insight, her filmic approach is found to sometimes confirm nostalgic Romantic misconceptions of a somewhat generic, primarily past-time experience in the rural British landscape. For some films this is shown to situate her somewhat outside the bounds of Romantic Conceptualism.

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This thesis examines Francesca Woodman's self-representational photography, not as a project of self-portraiture, but a means of exploring the relationship between self and objectified image through a re-staging of the drama of the photographic medium's process on her own skin. I re-situate Woodman's work within 1970s art practice by examining her relationship to performance, body art and photography, in order to disrupt the strictures of existing psycho-biographical interpretations. I also address the ways in which Woodman stages photographic dialogues with a diversity of historical precedents, from photographic contemporaries of the period, from the nineteenth-century, Surrealist photography, and from American modernist practice. The first chapter concentrates on Woodman's best known photographs, addressing the problems of the existing literature, and how in this series Woodman uses the technique of blurring to make reference to archaic photographic practice, as a haunting of the medium staged through an artful `stretching' of the print's surface and temporal fabric. The second chapter considers Woodman's description of `skin' in her photography, and the ways in which she performs a subject in the process of formation or breakdown. The third chapter concentrates on Woodman's reconfiguration of the photographic `crop' as she re-situates the process in the moment of framing, excising her own face and subjectivity in a kind of `self-cutting' which dramatises the medium's own language of implicit violence. The fourth chapter discusses an unpublished artist's book, in which Woodman's own skin is the support for a sequential act of disappearance. By re-enacting the photographic moment of the negative, the series alludes to the process of self-absenting on which representation depends. The final chapter examines Woodman's use of masking and repetition to re-enact within the single shot the photograph's status as copy, and the ways in which the imaged subject is always split and doubled in representation.

This dissertation examines the practice of Sierra Leonean photographer Alphonso Lisk-Carew (1883-1969). Through an exploration of his photography, it engages the key issues relating to Lisk-Carew's biography, his contribution to Sierra Leonean photography and his photographic practice within a complex multiracial society. In the 1980s, Vera Viditz-Ward's pioneering scholarship introduced the established, yet little-known, histories of photographic practices in Sierra Leone. Her early research on Alphonso Lisk-Carew engendered a new approach to the study of Sierra Leonean photographers. Here, I build on Viditz-Ward's groundbreaking work by investigating a range of photographs and postcards that highlight his photographic ideas and practices in Sierra Leone, and by introducing oral testimonies from some of his descendents and friends as well as local citizens. Moreover, I utilize an extensive body of primary materials found in local newspapers such as the Sierra Leone Weekly News to contextualize and shed new light on the social, political and economic contexts under which Lisk-Carew built his commercial enterprise. I also consider Lisk-Carew's gendered position, and following on from his body of work, examine his legacy in a 1970 retrospective exhibition. Subsequent to the aftermath of a protracted civil war in Sierra Leone (1991- 2002), both individual and institutional archives were decimated and made vulnerable. In light of this, I consider the reconstituting of photographic archives and address the ways in which the surviving institutional archives in Freetown can be reclaimed, preserved and maintained.

This thesis draws on psychoanalytic theories of trauma to interrogate works produced by Polish photographers after the Second World War. The aim of this thesis is to excavate traces of trauma latently embedded in post-war Polish art photography. By closely analysing a selection of photographs produced between the years 1945 and 1970, I argue that the events of the war cast a shadow over the lives of Polish artists. Rather than looking at photographs which directly visualise these traumatic events, I explore the ways in which these experiences manifest themselves indirectly or obliquely in the art of the period, through abstraction, a tendency towards ‘dark realism,’ and an interest in traces of human presence. Drawing on the photographs of Zbigniew Dłubak, Zdzisław Beksiński, Jerzy Lewczyński, Bronisław Schlabs, Andrzej Różycki, Józef Robakowski and other post-war photographers, I argue that the events of the war were not the only traumas to cast their shadow on the Polish psyche. Between 1945 and 1970, Poland underwent a series of transitions and changes in leadership, population and Party politics. Periods of optimism and leniency oscillated with phases of repression and social unrest. In my analysis, I suggest that multiple traumas can be discerned in these decades. What is at stake in this thesis is the proposition that a photograph can bear imperceptible traces of events that have wounded the psyche, which could not be articulated at the time, but which were made visible at a later date. Photographs made in the post-war years provided a space to belatedly return to encrypted traumas, to relay ideas that could not otherwise be articulated, and to acknowledge events that had been disavowed.