Existing photographic theory prioritises the image over any account of making. To date there is no theory that engages with the making of photographs and photographic works. Where the critical theory of the late 1970s and early 1980s saw major developments towards more culturally inclusive accounts of photography, it did little to address and even avoided the conditions of how photographs and photographic works of art came into being. As a consequence making has been consistently overlooked in photographic theory, leaving the issue of making images and photographic works absent of any constructive theory that could be used to describe and account for the complex activities and thought processes that are involved. My research aims to address this and to work towards providing a theoretical approach that accounts for making, specifically within the context of making photographs of the landscape. In an attempt to provide this I have turned to a late essay by Martin Heidegger - The Question Concerning Technology (1956) - as a philosophical model since he addresses many issues related to making in a culture defined by its reliance on technology. In this essay Heidegger provides a rereading of Aristotleʼs theory of the causes of making (350 B.C.) to provide a rich potential for a constructive, though not unproblematic, account of how making takes place and is embedded in v culture. I adopt the model of four causes as a means to provide a hermeneutic description of the stages of making photographs and a completed work. I discuss at length my experiences of photographing, post-production and the construction of a book of photographs as a coherent work of art. In conclusion, I find that the theory of causation offers much potential in providing a means of theorising the drawing together of the things that have been photographed, the mode of their representation and presentation, the discourse that circumscribes making and the purpose of the work. A potential weakness is that in providing a model for excellence it does not fully account for failure, doubt and uncertainty, aspects that seem intrinsic risks when making art work. On the other hand it does seem to provide a method for navigating a way towards the construction of a work, albeit one framed within a particular genre, that accounts for the pre-existence of a greater world and history. In this way, it provides a promising theory for making in the absence of critical debate related to how photographers make work.

Platforms for discourse in architecture have been informed by standard patterns of architectural photography and yet critics have long found the configuration of temporality in professional practice problematic. The modernist paradigms that underpin standard depiction of buildings are thought to produce a narrative of architecture heroically withstanding the onslaughts of modernity yet they position buildings as dominant to the everyday, thus denying their corporeality. The thesis hinges on the idea that the image of architecture depends not only on temporal configuration in photographs but also on more general conceptualizations about temporality in the medium. The research project addresses this as an artistic dilemma, applying fine art methods to expand temporal configuration in photographs of buildings. These practical artistic experiments aim to find alternatives that extend the photographic image of architecture and discuss its relationship to, and role as essential element in, the landscape. As photographs have a didactic role in the educational and professional fields of architecture it therefore impacts on design leaving, at least theoretically, photographic traces on the landscape. Yet the powerful influence of standard architectural photography on the urban environment tends to remain under-­‐ acknowledged. This interdisciplinary research project examines material from the fields of architecture, photography and urban theory to provide background on the depiction of architecture as photographic image with a view to discover how temporal configuration covertly upholds particular narratives of architecture. In general the dissemination of architectural photography tends to depend on photographs as technologically produced passive documents and this is supported by a conceptualization of photography, through its instant of exposure, as freezing time and space. The thesis argues that this is a modernist view of photography that supports a heroic, spectacular view of architecture but denies any sense of architecture as, say, dynamic space. Recent theoretical debate on reconceptions of photography since digitization put forward a less technocratic view. Experimentation facilitated by digital image-­‐processing has also resulted in a reassessment of the medium’s relationship to time. Elements of these post-­‐ digitization debates in photography are brought in to counter entrenched ideas about photographic temporality and to position architecture and photography in a more open, ongoing flow of time and less as iconic, frozen moment. Fine art photographic methods are employed to view architecture self-­‐ reflexively, emphasizing the subjective, embodied presence and everyday encounter of the image-­‐maker challenging the notion of photography as passive and unintentional and amplifying the medium as a durational process. While the artistic practice has been aided by digital image technologies it includes a mix of analogue, digital and hybridized work to explore photography’s changed relationship to time post-­‐digitization. By making alternative images of buildings to demonstrate expanded temporalities in the medium of photography the thesis presents a discourse on the representational image of architecture and its potential impacts on the landscape.

The use of nature scenes in photographs, digital media and colours for stress reduction has increased in recent years. However, there are few studies of the effects of such initiatives. This study began with the researcher’s observation that whilst the practice of meditation could reduce stress and increase relaxation, many people who could benefit from it were unwilling to carry it out. They may however be willing to gain some of the benefits of meditation by engaging in other ways. The research started with a developmental investigation into the effects of three different media - photographs, coloured light and film - on participants in the UK. A large number of nature photographs and video footage was created and collected for this study. The selection of the nature scenes for the tests on participants, and the inclusion of coloured lights, was based on the researcher’s own experience and knowledge in the fields of visual art, meditation and alternative therapy practice, notably Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). These UK investigations were used as developmental studies to refine the methodology for China, where the research for this thesis was carried out. In China, collaboration with two different hospitals in three locations was established, and investigations were carried out with three different groups of participants: hospital patients, relatives of patients (relatives who were staying in the hospital to look after the patient’s living needs) and ‘healthy’ staff and students at associated universities. Because of the facilities provided in China, the part of the study which looked at the effects of photographs was dropped. Collaborations were formed with film makers and with hospitals to achieve the maximum research benefits. Whilst slight changes were made during the data collection phase to suit the participants and the differing environments offered by the hospitals, every attempt was made to keep the tests similar to one another. Quantitative data on pulse rate and blood pressure changes, along with participants’ post-test ratings of their relaxation levels were collected, as was qualitative information from participants consisting of their own descriptive words, phrases and comments. The process was designed to avoid any research method that might negatively affect participants, and to achieve maximum similarity of methods and fieldwork environments for the different groups of participants. This was so that the numbers of participants in each group in the different hospitals could be added together, thus creating three large groups overall, and the data from the three different groups compared. The tent structure (which was used for the coloured lights and created to provide an immediate therapeutic environment), the analytical method used and the ‘key elements’ diagram which describes the results of the qualitative data relating to nature films, were new developments which emerged during the study. The major quantitative and qualitative results, both positive and negative, are reported. Comparisons are made which show how the three different groups in China were impacted by experiencing the coloured lights and watching the films. The different impacts of the coloured lights and the films are also compared. A memory stick is included with the thesis which contains all the still and moving images used, as well as photographs of the tent structure and of some of the hospital environments encountered in China. The thesis concludes with a summary and discussion based on the findings. This argues that coloured lights and visual imagery of nature scenes both had a positive effect on participants, and that this effect could be understood as similar to some of the beneficial effects of meditation. The conclusion also discusses some of the other findings in more detail.

The central focus of my thesis is the aesthetics of the sublime in the work of Frederick Sommer (1905-1999), beginning with, but extending beyond, an encounter with Sommer’s Arizona landscape photography of the World War II period. Sommer’s oeuvre is notable for its cross disciplinary character, with no single element – photography, collage or drawing (this latter could as easily be described as painting) accorded primacy, and the thesis acknowledges this aspect as central to reading both the works individually and Sommer’s practice collectively. The multifarious aspect of Sommer’s practice has resonances with my own artistic concerns in relation to photography, drawing, montage and landscape. Taking Sommer’s desert floor photographs of 1940-45 as a starting point, I problematise the Kant-derived conceptions of the sublime in what is, to date, the most prominent monograph commentary on Sommer. I argue that the radical nature of Sommer’s work of this period does not conform to the descriptions offered by Kant, and, moreover, that what is significant about the works of this period are the formal challenges to the figure/ground dyadic relationships associated with depictions of the Kantian sublime. The thesis goes on to explore the sublime affect in Sommer’s oeuvre, as a whole, and I discuss the affective tropes of fragmentation and immersion that are constitutive of it. Reviewing some of the writing on Sommer’s work to date, the thesis draws upon a close reading of Sommer’s photographic prints and technique in the context of his wider practice, alongside work done over the past four decades in Literature, Women’s Studies, Lesbian and Gay Studies and Classical Studies, to propose that a model of the Sapphic Sublime as appropriate to Sommer’s work of this period. To this end, throughout the thesis and my reading of Sommer, I draw upon theories pertaining to literature as much as visual art.

Introduction - The submission consists of six visual artist’s book-works (1988-2009) that form the content of the landmark geographical visual art project, The Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity (1987- ). The accompanying essay describes the context, method and contributions of this immense sea-picture project. Context - The Atlas photographs identify, examine and report on the seas surrounding us. The Atlas publications accentuate the visual immediacy of the individual site specific, mutually indexical experiences of singularly making sea-photographs in “the far field”, and later, viewing these thematic picture-groups as a reader. The publications provide short locatory texts for each picture and basic background information into the adjoining cartographical, historical and cultural geographies particular to these remote places. The Atlas publications probe the complacent visual vocabulary of traditional sea-pictures, challenging their customary pictorial conventions. The Atlas pictures declare the establishment of a recognisably new pictorial space within the sea-picture tradition. They develop an abstracted visual narrative to portray the abstract metaphorical human concerns around - extremity, the edge and emptiness. Method - The Atlas Project requires a process of on going, far-distanced expeditionary, site specific, remote field exploration, to enable its picture-making goals. I organise the direction, purpose and content of all of these expeditions. The methods employed are simple and strict. I only ever make one single, unique photograph from any site. I always use the same nineteenth century camera and lens. The precise placements of locational field events are layered into the photographs to ensure a convincing indexical picture space. The nuanced use of an extreme photographic grey-scale is built into the photographs at the negative exposure and darkroom printing stages. This extensive optical tonal-range physically provides The Atlas pictures with their intense pictorial surface densities and increases the sensation of their complex visual tactility. Most photographs are unable to, or incapable of, physically conveying these visual-emotional perceptions. Every stage of the project is my original concept, work and the result of my own thought processes. The results of this effort are unique images made in remote places. Three of those places were newly charted and explored as the result of my expeditions. Contributions - The interiorised pictorial approach developed for the entire Atlas restores compressed, complex indexical pictorial space to photographic depiction. The Atlas publications examine this space, and through it expand the notions of representation and expectation in outdoor photographs. The Atlas photographs speak to the improvisational opportunities available beyond the edge of representational certainly, determined in their new abilities to photographically heed the remote liminal territorial experiences close to this project. The publications propose and verify a new territorial form of terra incognita. The Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity provides the only visual geographical map of the imagination for this unexplored territory. Conclusion - The Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity is one of the most inventive, geographically comprehensive, single-author analogue photographic fine art projects in the world today.

The focus of the investigation is the relationship between photography and The Picturesque. The principles of the Picturesque movement of the 18th century are drawn into a discussion of our current understanding of the picturesque photograph with the aim of revealing continuity in aesthetic values and subjective relationships with landscape. Vantage point is explored as an integral element of the Picturesque effect, with compositional structure being recognised as a means of centring the viewer within a subject/object dynamic. Lacan's notion of a subjectivity initiated by vision, and desirous of a state of wholeness, is connected with a pictorial form that is compositionally self-contained, and inviting of a view of rural Otherness where a resilient Picturesque figure appears embedded in 'nature'. The instability of the subject of language (the symbolic order) is in this way related to a pursuit of the corporeal in a wild (but imaginary) landscape. In addition to an engagement with the visual motifs that define the Picturesque, such as irregular form and ruin and decay, the temporal register of the Picturesque is examined. Associations with nostalgia are developed to consider the Picturesque photograph as a crystallization of actual and virtual conceptions of time, where the captured instant resonates with echoes of the past and alludes to future desire. With a renewed understanding of Picturesque principles, recent photography is examined with the intention of revealing a continuing presence of the original Picturesque aesthetic. Documentary, as a form commonly associated with factual recording, is scrutinized for tropes of Picturesque effect with presumptions of photography's indexical link with the real being reassessed. The empirical and aesthetic realms, often seen as distinct, are located in the photograph (and act of photographing) as immeshed and made complex by subjective desire.

The aim of this thesis is to explore a specifi c aspect of the relationship between photography and tourism, that is, how the democratisation of photography infl uenced the marketing of tourism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It focuses on the fi rst fi fty years of activity of the Polytechnic Touring Association (PTA), an initially philanthropic turned commercial travel fi rm, whose historical origins coincided with the Kodak-led emergence of popular photography in 1888. During this period, the travel fi rm moved from using photography-based images to rely increasingly on mixed media, including drawings and graphic design. This use of new representational media was certainly a response to new market demands; if and how a new approach to photography also infl uenced it, however, is still an unexplored question. By taking as its principal primary source the PTA archive, this research thus seeks to establish the extent to which such a shift can also be explained by accounting for the transformed perception engendered by new photographic practices. The thesis begins with an examination of how practices of photographic production and consumption might relate to changing understandings of photography and travel, and their consequent infl uence on the demand for and representation of tourism. It then moves on to consider this relationship between tourism and tourist practices in the context of the social and cultural changes that saw the emergence and development of mass photography, tourism, and tourism marketing from the late nineteenth century. The specifi c representational choices made by the PTA to promote its tours are then investigated against this historical background. Specifi cally, these are explored in relation to the changing function of the tours, and, in a related way, to the perception of tourists as evidenced by their practices, in particular photographic ones. Overall, this investigation argues that the multiplicity of photographic perspectives engendered by the democratisation of photography, and a related transformation of the value attached to the photograph, resulted in an organisation such as the PTA reconsidering how best to represent itself in light of a shift from broadly educational concerns to emergent commercial imperatives.

This thesis investigates artistic post-mortem photography in the context of shifting social relationship with death in the 1980s and 1990s. Analyzing Nan Goldin’s Cookie in Her Casket and Andres Serrano’s The Morgue, I argue that artists engaging in postmortem photography demonstrate care for the deceased. Further, that demonstrable care in photographing the dead responds to a crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s in America. At the time, death returned to social and political discourse with the visibility of AIDS and cancer and the euthanasia debates, spurring on photographic engagement with the corpse. Nan Goldin’s 1989 post-mortem portrait of her friend, Cookie in Her Casket, was first presented within The Cookie Portfolio. The memorial portfolio traced the friendship between Cookie and Goldin over fourteen years. The work relies on a personal narrative, framing the works within a familial gaze. I argue that Goldin creates the sense of family to encourage empathy in the viewer for Cookie’s loss. Further, Goldin’s generic and beautified post-mortem image of Cookie is a way of offering Cookie respect and dignity in death. Andres Serrano’s 1992 The Morgue is a series of large-scale cropped, and detailed photographs capturing indiscriminate bodies from within an unidentified morgue. I assert that Serrano intentionally presents these corpses as objects, outside of life. His stark lighting, emphasis on texture and the rich colours of Cibachrome print beautify and lavish aesthetic care on the corpse-objects. I propose a reading of The Morgue through Serrano’s deliberate use of beauty to transform the corpses into icons, and read the entire series as a visualisation of the sublime within the abject. Goldin and Serrano have fundamentally different approaches to post-mortem photography. Goldin’s work follows an artistic and historical tradition of memorial portraits taken of the deceased by friends or family; whereas Serrano follows from a forensic framework appropriated by artists who photograph within a morgue. Previous discourse separated memorial and forensic post-mortem photography in order to better appreciate the historical trajectory of each field. In the context of a time where death was moving from near invisibility into the mainstream, comparing Goldin and Serrano offers insight into the changes in America’s visual relationship with death.

This research is centred on the notion of landscape as a construct of marginal and multiple dialogues. It is a project that originates from a rediscovered family album of photographs of the Latin American landscape at the turn of the 20th century. In particular those that centre on the Paraná River in Argentina, a place where myth, recent history of the Desaparecidos (those ‘disappeared’ by the military junta 1976-1983) and memory collide. These early analogue photographs of the river have sparked a series of creative interventions that explore the interstices between photography and printmaking, fragmenting the initial image in order to create new hybrid photographic prints using photo-etching and photo-transfer processes. The return of the material to the flat surface of the digital is of critical concern, as the ‘uncanny’ surface is turned into a haptic object more in keeping with printmaking practices and early pictorial photographs. This leads to questions about their affective resonance, as touch and ‘noise’ return to the surface of the print as a resistance and response to discourses of acceleration and forgetting. The theoretical and practical methodology is cyclical, and the layers of discourse appear both in the printed outcomes and in the multiple voices I use to discuss the project in writing. In the ruined surface of the analogue image, therefore, a new ruination occurs, as I develop my photographic plates in situ, in the waters of the river itself. In the encounter with the landscape, the forensic traces of Argentina’s political disappeared, now part of an on-going forensic anthropological investigation, create latent marks on the surface of the photographic plates. These invisible fragments serve to embed disruptive historical narratives into the print outcomes, as the river acts as the site of convergence for these multiple histories. These geographical and metaphorical bodies of water, distorted, disappeared and ‘ruined’ both by a history of dictatorship cover ups and the failings of memory, are able to reappear in this research, as latent and liminal imageobjects in an open-ended encounter with the multiple narratives of the river.

The main concern of this research is to initiate a new artistic approach, with photography as a medium and an artistic form of investigation, into the borderland and community that exists from Western China to the Himalayan Region, in order to distinguish it from traditional documentary photography. The borderland exists as an ambiguous territory between governance structures, and the movements of the borderland community often seek to surpass the command of the states. The ideas of inclusion and exclusion, identity within one's community, and the relationship on the borderlands are hard to clearly define. This research develops the hypothesis that borderless borderland is possible with the intervention of fog and mist. This thesis encompasses creative ways to photograph borderlands under fog and mist conditions, creating a surrealistic, magical and meaningful representation of human and natural connections on borderlands, whilst contributing to the finding of new knowledge. It greatly differs from current approaches of documentary photographers and photojournalists, which mostly capture the real, sensational and horrifying moments at the borderlands. The process of discovering new methods of visual representation is important. Therefore, various practical and artistic investigations through different ways of seeing the borderlands are explored. This critical and artistic study is to achieve a hybrid photography style between traditional documentary and contemporary conceptual photography. The final outcome of this thesis showcases a series of practical photographic works at the continuously disputed territories, and to acknowledge the beauty of the borderlands and its peoples’ peaceful way of life.