For humanitarian organisations that use photography as their major medium of communication the visual portrayal of suffering remains an issue surrounded with controversy and sensitivity. Despite the adoption of regulatory codes and protective protocols by non-governmental -organisations, the criticism which has circulated during the past three decades still remains, directed at NGOs. media and-photographers by academics and audiences, over the production of formulaic and stereotypical imagery with accusations of subjugating populations of the global South. The main tension in this form of imaging is how vulnerablee populations can be portrayed in ways that do not infringe on dignity, yet meet the need for effective NGO visibility and fundraising communications in the image-saturated media landscape. Little primary data exists on how ethical behaviour in this type -of imaging is understood by its producers and how principles of ethics guide ,the processes and practices in tbe field. This thesis explores a way to redress this gap in Understanding by exploring the photographic representation of humanitarian subjects from the perspective of their production. The research draws on four humanitarian pbotographic assignments in Bangladesh supported by interviews with the social actors involved in the production of NGO visual communications. The ethnographic accounts of the experiences of the author as researcher and photographer point to complex production processes and practices that are imbued with continual ethical considerations framing the interactions of image-making. The findings emphasise the capacity,of the so called victims to negotiate and represent themselves and draws into question the regulatory claims of ensuring the protection and rights of photographic subjects. The findings reveal highly complex, if not haphazard, processes that evolve through situations in the field and the context of assignments, which complicates interpretation and realisation of this type of regulation as operational strategy.

This project, encompassing a written thesis and final exhibition of work, traces the trajectory of my development as a photographic practitioner, following from an interest in creating photographs of objects. This practice has been brought into an artistic research framework and uses an open-ended methodology involving critical reflection on my processes in order to draw out a research question. I ask what and how a practice of making pictures of things – made prominent as things themselves – might contribute to an ongoing interrogation of the ontology of photography. The context for this question is a ‘material turn’ within photographic discourse, identified by Batchen (1997) and Edwards and Hart (2004), that suggests a shift from a concern with the textual to a concern with the objecthood of the photograph. A detailed evaluation of my methodology encompasses technical and aesthetic considerations, examining the steps of my process – indentified as attention, creation, proto-production and resolute production – in order to investigate and make explicit the specificities of my methods of making pictures. I emphasize these stages and inter-stages (periods of latency) as important components in the final outcome of the work, which aim to conceptually distance an appreciation of the constructed image from the original object. The text argues that the thesis, together with the art works, constitutes a contribution to knowledge in the field of photography. It is specifically concerned with art practices that engage with a seeming paradox: that the photograph, while appearing to give relatively unmediated access to its referent, is also a catalyst for speculation whose very materiality is part of its affect on the viewer. I map the field with reference to historical and contemporary debates around the shifting identity of photography, locating critics including, Bazin, Barthes, Snyder and Elkins, and I nominate as exemplars, prominent practitioners from Edward Weston to Hiroshi Sugimoto, Thomas Demand and Elad Lassry. It is through the viewer’s experience of an encounter with the exhibition of artworks that the research is finally realised. My photographic practice of making Pictures of Things and Things that are Pictures – defining ‘things’ through their indeterminacy – produces an analogue with the unsettled territory of photographic theory and the anxiety of the photograph as immaterial image/material artefact.

This practice-based thesis uses photography as a method to examine how photographic archives constitute community. It develops a case study of the Worktown photographs, which were taken by Humphrey Spender during Mass Observation’s experimental study of everyday life in Bolton, Lancashire, 1937 -1938, and are now held as part of Bolton Museum’s Worktown archive. As ‘old’ photographs, the Worktown photographs prompt nostalgia for an idealised community of the past, destroyed through the decline of industry. In academic contexts they have been critiqued as exemplary social documentary photographs, ideologically charged visual representations of working class life which construct history as a false national memory of community and consensus. Here, I argue that this critical narrative of photographic subjugation has limited the productive potential of the Worktown photographs, and ask instead what understandings arise if we consider the photographs as material objects which constitute community in relation to place. This theoretical perspective, derived from contemporary practices of visual and sensory anthropology, informs the practical investigation and reinterpretation of Mass Observation’s experimental use of photographic and creative research methods at the intersection of art and anthropology. By responding to this archive in collaboration with local communities, I demonstrate that processes of taking, documenting, sharing and photographs generate new meaning in relation to the contingencies of place. In this way photography may be understood as an experiential form of knowledge, and the photographic archive is reactivated as an active medium creating new understandings of past and present communities.

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The physical presence of contemporary photographs – whether as magazine, hoarding, wet chemistry, museum displays, inkjet prints or on-screen displays – is subordinate to the content of the image. However, resurgence of interest in the autographic opportunities of nineteenth century contact-printing processes has drawn attention to the material attributes secured through the varied ‘performance’ of the print and its affective potential. This is a practice-led and practice-based project that explores the aesthetic saliency of the texture, tactility, reproductive qualities and materialities offered by selected ‘early’ photographic processes: albumen, carbon-transfer, cyanotype, photogravure, platinum/palladium and salt printing. The project has a triple focus. In the context of discourse on the language, syntax and automaticity of photography, it explores aesthetic impressions of materiality through vernacular descriptions of early processes prints. The lexicon offered by volunteer participants provides rich, imaginative, even ‘thick’ descriptions, that evidence nuanced awareness of, and response to, the physicality of photographic works. It is inferred that materiality colours, literally and metaphorically, the reading and affective impression of the work. Changes in the commercial availability of resources required for early-process printing has encouraged the use of contemporary technologies for the production of inkjet printed negatives and the use of digital image capture and manipulation software. The second, practice-led, strand of this research investigates ways in which digital techniques may be adapted to provide enhanced authorial control over image qualities, using selected ultraviolet sources in combination with colourisations of inkjet negatives. Within the context of discourse on the skin and the body, the third, practice-based, phase of the research is the production and exhibition of prints that respond to the vernacular lexicon of materialities and exploit the aesthetic potentialities of early processes. The works seek, through the ‘skin of the print’ to interrogate the skin and the body of the project’s, mainly older, subjects.

Home Truths is a curatorial project that examines photographic artworks depicting the experience and symbolism of motherhood in contemporary Western culture. Favouring autobiographical and documentary approaches in art photography of the 2000s, my curatorial practice draws on feminist precedents in art making and writing. There are four main outcomes to this project: an exhibition; an edited book; public programmes and a digital display titled Motherlode. In its entirety Home Truths negotiates what it means to be a mother in the twenty-first century, grappling with stereotypes, personal expectations and cultural constraints, revealing the maternal self to have both agency and power. The artists featured include: Janine Antoni, Elina Brotherus, Elinor Carucci, Ana Casas Broda, Fred Hüning, Leigh Ledare, Hanna Putz, Katie Murray, Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, Tierney Gearon, Miyako Ishuichi and Ann Fessler. In this thesis I investigate contemporary ‘maternal ambivalence’, which I identify as a response to social norms, expectations and the cultural conditions of mothering. I use the frame of ‘life narrative’ to examine maternal ambivalence in the artworks I have curated, contextualizing these within depictions of mothering in the larger photographic culture of motherhood. This thesis outlines the emergence and contextualization of the curated project and takes an expanded view of the possibilities of curating. I examine how Home Truths functioned in relation to institutions, audiences, aesthetics and display culture through the conditions (institutional, economic, aesthetic and theoretical) in which it existed. Crucially, I ask how one experiences the photography in Home Truths. Rather than viewing the different iterations of maternal life narratives examined here (literature, art photography and social networking) in contradistinction, I argue for them to be seen as productive expressions of self whose invocation of maternal subjectivities are reinforced and sustained by their relationship to one another.

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This practice-based research examines the relation between power, space, and photography, in relation to the office. It aims to investigate working conditions in service-based society, by addressing its dominant form of work: office work. Based on the hypothesis that office space has an effect on how office workers are made to work and feel, that it has not been sufficiently nor adequately addressed in documentary photography, the research proposes to employ documentary photography to investigate the relation between power and space in the office in relation both to actual offices and to their existing representations. Its questions are: how is space a means to exercise power in the office? Can this question be investigated through documentary photography? How, given the critique of documentary's (positivist) claims to truth? The research developed the concepts of witnessing and intervention as methods for the practice, positing documentary practice as the deliberate process of recording reality from a critical point of view, with the aim of making reality visible through images understood as visual arguments, thereby aspiring to criticality. Underpinned by a Foucauldian notion of power, the research developed an empirical visual enquiry accessing nearly fifty offices located in the City and Canary Wharf, London, informed by a study of power and space within organisation theory, organisation psychology and architecture and office design. The research produced a visual work titled The Politics of the Office comprising 128 photographs that give visibility to spatial power relations of hierarchy and control, physical and symbolic, and intervene in the structures of the photographic representation of the office space, through their visual strategy and their presentation as installation, thereby extending the documentary representation of the office space. The research further contributes to the theory of documentary photography by developing the concepts of witnessing and intervention. The research contributes to the understanding of spatial power relations in offices by allowing witnessing images of actual offices that are largely inaccessible to the general public.

"There is not a country in the world where the Surrealist voice found a faster response than Japan. From its origin (1924, date of the first Manifesto), until the war, there was no Surrealist activity in Europe that was not almost immediately reflected upon.", Breton, André ([1959] 2008). En guise de préface à l’anthologie surréaliste de Tokyo. In: Breton, André; Hubert, Étienne-Alain (et al.), Ouvres completes IV: Écrits sur l’art et autres textes. Paris: Gallimard, p. 1155. Regardless of André Breton’s insistence on how there was no Surrealist activity that did not have a response in Japan, the knowledge of Surrealist photography practised in the country during the decade between 1930 and 1940 remains ‘out of sight’ of the existing scholarship until the present day. Therefore, this thesis brings to the fore the significance of this practice, encircled by the multifaceted relations between Surrealism, photography and 1930s Japan, asking how can its historical condition be altered and written into the existing field of knowledge. Emerging and developing at a time of political oppression and military campaigning that led Japan into the Pacific War in 1941, Surrealist photography of this decade is an important case study into how photography can perform a critical role in visualising new and different strands of thought and action. As this photography was practised outside of a single Surrealist group, it played such a role by equally remaining ‘out of sight’ of the state censorship and maintaining a position in the marginalised space of the illustrated press. Such a position outside of a formal Surrealist group and on the margins of Japanese society is affirmed in this thesis through the notion of minor literature, characteristic for its deterritorialised, collective and immanently political character. These three defining characteristics enable construction of a minor historical framework through which Surrealist photography in Japan of the 1930s can be considered as of significant relevance to the discursive fields of Surrealism and History of Japanese Art. To argue for such relevance, this thesis is based on archival research of over a hundred photographs and offers a close reading of the main texts published with regard to Surrealist photography in the decade. It shows how regardless of its unorthodox position, Surrealist photography in 1930s Japan mobilised an extensive number of practitioners around the country, in Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, and Fukuoka, and how they acted as a subversive force to the homogenised visual culture from within all the major categories of photographic practice developing in the decade.