Multi-view Video Coding (MVC) is vital for low bitrate applications that have constraints in bandwidth, battery capacity and memory size. Symmetric and mixed spatial-resolution coding approaches are addressed in this thesis, where Prediction Architecture (PA) is investigated using block matching statistics. Impact of camera separation is studied for symmetric coding to define a criterion for the best usage of MVC. Visual enhancement is studied for mixed spatial-resolution coding to improve visual quality for the interpolated frames by utilising the information derived from disparity compensation. In the context of symmetric coding investigations, camera separation cannot be used as a sufficient criterion to select suitable coding solution for a given video. Prediction architectures are proposed, where MVC that uses these architectures have higher coding performance than the corresponding codec that deploys a set of other prediction architectures, where the coding gain is up to 2.3 dB. An Adaptive Reference Frame Ordering (ARFO) algorithm is proposed that saves up to 6.2% in bits compared to static reference frame ordering when coding sequence that contains hard scene changes. In the case of mixed spatial-resolution coding investigations, a new PA is proposed that is able to save bitrate by 13.1 Kbps compared to the corresponding codec that uses the extended architecture based on 3D-digital multimedia. The codec that uses hierarchical B-picture PA has higher coding efficiency than the corresponding codec that employs the proposed PA, where the bitrate saving is 24.9 Kbps. The ARFO algorithm has been integrated with the proposed PA where it saves bitrates by up to 35.4 Kbps compared to corresponding codec that uses other prediction architectures. Visual enhancement algorithm is proposed and integrated within the presented PA. It provides highest quality improvement for the interpolated frames where coding gain is up to 0.9 dB compared to the corresponding frames that are coded by other prediction architectures.

The film Red Line and accompanying thesis revisit the Documentary Torre Bela (1975) by Thomas Harlan and its memory, reflecting upon the role cinema played in revolutionary process in Portugal in 1975 and its enduring significance to the collective memory of this event.

This PhD thesis addresses an artistic research practice based on the ontology and phenomenology of the photographic image. Part I presents a series of photographs entitled Midnight in Mumbai, and Part II considers the act of photographing by examining the phenomenological aspect of photography arising directly from my artistic practice. By looking into the prehistory of photography, foregrounding the early developments of the nascent medium, I first consider notions of photography before the medium’s actual materialisation in the 1830s; these emerged alongside the latent desire to see the world as a picture ‘true to nature’ which predominated in literary fiction and experimental scientific texts. It informs us about how the medium was initially understood, discussed and defined, and offers a valuable insight into the ontology of the illuminated image (‘Photography before Photography’). Expanding upon André Bazin’s essay ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, I consider the discourse of the early history of the medium to be vital in informing the ontological questions developed in the thesis. Taking photography’s early history as a point of departure, my research looks into the possible manifestations of thinking photographically, and asks whether we can only photograph what we know already. This relationship of the photographic image to the world frames my enquiry into the domain of photography. I talk about my photographic work by answering the questions: Can I only see what I name? (‘Naming’) How do I learn how to look? (‘Echo’) and Where can I find the photographic picture? (‘Doubt’). The title of the thesis refers to the speculative history of the medium and to my own photographic work. Like the nineteenth-century photographers who tried to photograph the spirit of a human being, my photographs aim to allude to what might not be apparent by evoking a vision of seeing things that are invisible. The expression ‘via fotografia’ is used as a method of making phenomena visible photographically. As a medium based on reality that can reflect the world, however visible or invisible that might be, photography continuously questions our perception of such reality (‘Picturing Thoughts’). Do we photograph what we see, or what we think and imagine? This is not to suggest that the acts of photographing and thinking are the same, but rather to propose that they are not separate from each other. Photographs, in that sense, are not experienced in terms of their appearance, but in terms of their continuous appearing.

Memories Made in Seeing considers the relationship between memory and film through examining what is its cultural and experiential effect, how it can show and write memory and History. Four post-war films - Muriel, or the Time of a Return (Resnais, 1963), (nostalgia) (Frampton, 1971), Level Five (Marker, 1996) and Memento (Nolan, 2000) – that are complex manifestations of thought in practice, which trace and examine film’s ability to distinctly embody and produce memory, and are part of a dialogue in form and time. To contextualise and consider memory’s effect, it is charted from the advent of film (the nineteenth century’s ‘memory crisis’, the founding and understanding of modern memory, the related ideas of Proust, Bergson and Freud), through the twentieth century (the development of a more subjective reckoning, the seeming impossibility of memory (and understanding) that followed World War II’s trauma), till its millennial disposition (multi-various considerations, the inception of prosthetic memory, the seeming need for nostalgia). The case studies’ varied forms and alignments consider the tension between the demands of narrative resolution and the mutable and open-ended nature of memory, and how different film practices seek to utilize and appraise its perceived function, relevance and production. These films are also a record of viewing experiences, which influence one another and create a narrative of personal engagement that forms and substantiates recollection. To examine this conceptual process further I contend the tension between narrative (something fixed by duration and intention) and memory’s imperatives (formal and personal) form an axis of experimentation and exploration and this correspondence is central to comprehending the ways in which films represent and invoke forms of subjective and cultural recollection. I propose that film’s unique and associative account of memory’s evolving resonances becomes a series of palimpsests, which emphasize that the experience of film is an act of re-writing and recollection and misrecollection. This context tethers the subject, is the point of initiation, and explores how memories, which are made when seen, are mutable, historical and present, essential.

This thesis examines the work of New Zealand artist Darcy Lange (1946-2005) who,trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art (1968-71), subsequently developed a socially engaged video practice, making remarkable studies of people at work that drew from social documentary traditions, structuralist videomaking and conceptual art. My research into his oeuvre draws on intertwined artistic, theoretical, historical and cultural discourses from the period in which he was active, particularly those concerned with realism and representation, reflexivity and video feedback, the document and documentary, the dialogic and participation, art and society, and social activism. Starting with his last sculptural ‘environment’ Irish Road Workers (1971) and ending with the series Work Studies in Schools (1976-77), labour was the sole subject of Lange’s oeuvre for much of the 1970s. In his words, his aim was “to convey the image of work as work, as an occupation, as an activity, as creativity and as a time consumer”. He engaged in comprehensive studies of people at work in industrial, farming and teaching contexts across Britain, New Zealand and Spain. A commitment to realism guided his works in the early 1970s, evident in his adherence to an observational practice reduced to its bare essentials. Using photography, film and video (at times simultaneously), he portrayed workers performing their tasks, and cast workplaces, schools and mines as complex societal mechanisms engaged in the production and reproduction of class identity. Work Studies in Schools introduced a radical shift in his practice, influenced by current epistemological and philosophical concerns about the politics of representation that recognised representation (and its making of meaning) as contingent and dependent on context. Rather than engage in the examination of the image’s process of signification through structuralism and semiotics, Lange grounded his analysis in human experience and opted for the dialogic possibilities of camera lens media. Focusing on pedagogical practices in the classroom, Lange explored the implications of video for teaching and learning, inviting his subjects to speak through their own analysis of their experiences of work and class. In enabling a situation where the social exchange between teacher and pupils could be observed and analysed collectively, Lange turned a closed process of exchange into something more open that could be mutually redefined and transformed. In so doing, his images of people at work sought to confer agency, in an effort to realise his expressed ‘socialist aspirations’. Lange’s political awareness grew in a decade of intense politicisation in the United Kingdom. In New Zealand, the 1970s saw the beginning of the so-called ‘Maori Renaissance’. Lange joined the efforts of fellow activists and documentarians there to raise awareness and support for the land claims by the Maori indigenous people and, working in collaboration with Maori activist and photographer John Miller, produced the Maori Land Project (1977-1980). It was in the Netherlands where he further developed the ideas and aspirations behind this project, collaborating with René Coelho, founder of Montevideo in Amsterdam, and Leonard Henny, professor at the Sociological Institute’s Centre for International Development Education in Utrecht. Theoretical debates about cultural difference of the period framed this project, driven also by Lange’s desire to further extend social agency with his videomaking. An activist impulse also lay behind his political multimedia musical performances People of the World (1983-84) and Aire del Mar (1988-94). Unlike many of his contemporaries, Lange’s turn to video was not to engage in conceptual activities or as a deconstructive exercise. I argue that he was drawn to video (film and photography) for its experiential and dialogical nature and capabilities, as “a way to get closer to people” and leave the isolation of a studio practice. He was driven by a desire to seek out a social purpose to artistic activity while avoiding the dogmatic political advocacy of his community art contemporaries.

“Phenomenology is the place where hermeneutics originates, phenomenology is also the place it has left behind.”(Ricoeur ). In this thesis I shall examine possibilities for bringing into dialogue the practice of social documentary photography and the conceptual resources of the post-Structural and critical philosophical hermeneutics of text and action developed by Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) from the 1970’s onwards. Ricoeur called this an ‘amplifying’ hermeneutics of language, defined as ‘the art of deciphering indirect meaning’ (ibid). Social documentary photography is an intentional activity concerned with the visual interpretation, ethics and representation of life, the otherness of others, and through them something about ourselves. The narratives form social histories of encounters with others. They raise challenging questions of meaning and interpretation in understanding the relations of their subjective agency to an objective reality. Traditionally the meaning of such work is propositional. It consists in the truth conditions of bearing witness to the direct experience of the world and the verifiability of what the photography says, or appears to say about it. To understand the meaning of the photography is to know what would make it true or false. This theory has proven useful and durable, although it has not gone unchallenged. The power it has is remarkable and new documentary narratives continue to be formed in this perspective, adapting to changing technologies, and reverberate with us today. A more subtle way of thinking about this is given by a pragmatic theory of meaning. This is what I am proposing. The focus here is upon use and what documentary photography does and says. A praxis that I refer to by the act of photographing: a discourse of locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary utterances in whose thoughtful and informed making are unified theories of visual texts within the theories of action and history. The key is the capacity to produce visual narratives made with intention and purpose that in their performative poetics and their semantic innovations attest to the realities of 1 Ricoeur, P. 1991: From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II. trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson. 2nd Edition 2007: with new Forward by Richard Kearney. Evanston. NorthWestern University Press. experience and sedimented historical conditions witnessed, and communicate those to others within a dialectic of historical consciousness and understanding. The narrative visualisations disclose a world, a context in which the drama of our own life and the lives of others makes sense. In their interpretations of an empiric reality can be found ethical concerns and extensions of meaning beyond the original reference that survive the absence of the original subject matter and the original author of the photography whose inferences our imaginations and later acquired knowledge can meditate upon and re-interpret. Thus in the hermeneutic view, the documentary photographic narrative is a form of text that comes to occupy an autonomy from, a) the author’s original intentions, b) the reference of the original photographic context, and c) their reception, assimilation and understanding by unknown readers-viewers. Ricoeur argues that hermeneutic interpretation discloses the reader as ‘a second order reference standing in front of the text’, whose necessary presence solicits a series of multiple and often conflicting readings and interpretations. Consequently Ricoeur’s critical, philosophical hermeneutics brings us from epistemology to a kind of ‘truncated’ ontology that is only provisional, a place where interpretation is always something begun but never completed. Interpretation according to Ricoeur engages us within a hermeneutic circle of explanation and understanding whose dialectic is mediated in history and time. For Ricoeur this implies that to be able to interpret meaning and make sense of the world beyond us is to arrive in a conversation that has already begun. His hermeneutic wager is, moreover, that our self-understandings will be enriched by the encounter. In short, the more we understand others and what is meaningful for them the better we will be able to understand ourselves and our sense of inner meaning. The central thesis of his hermeneutics is that interpretation is an ongoing process that is never completed, belonging to meaning in and through distance, that can make actively present to the imagination what is objectively absent and whose discourse is undertood as the act of “someone saying something about something to someone” (Ricoeur 1995: Intellectual Autobiography).

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There are many motives for making art, but economic drivers are often acknowledged as key attributes of artistic success. In particular, they figure in discussions about the strategic orientation of successful artist’s careers. However, in the literature on which this thesis is based, commercial factors are seen as important but limited, in relation to the actual range of values driving creative output. Hans Abbing (2002, p.59) notes, for instance, that other value concepts (such as social values) also have a strategic role alongside financial considerations. The practice-led inquiry asks what key concerns influence the day-to-day decision-making processes of artists and what information would be needed to be able to critically ‘think through what being and artist means to you’ (Butler, 1988, p. 7). In order to obtain access to the motives and value concepts of a practitioner, the author of this thesis has invented a ‘strategic studio framework’, a tool by which to access and assess day-to-day decision-making in practice, thereby gathering the information needed to make informed professional decisions. The thesis argues a continuous flux in the values a practitioner may assign to the key concerns in the Framework at different points in time- and stresses the importance of self-conceptions and personal aspirations in this process. The degree by which these insights would aid judgement of the relative success of the decision-making process, is also discussed. As a result, this thesis provides a better understanding of the way artists make decisions, and of what would be needed to improve or stimulate such practices on their own merits. The thesis will be primarily of interest to artists and art school lecturers looking to find new ways of critical self-inquiry, reflection and discourse. Secondly, it could be of interest to theorists who deal with visual artists and to those involved in supporting organisations within the cultural sector.

Despite the fact that photographs come into being as material objects imprinted with light reflected off the subject in front of the camera, and therefore possess a decidedly physical connection to their referent, the materiality of photographs tends to be overlooked in favour of apprehending them as primarily visual signs independent of their physical support. This practice-led research project under the title Taking Photographs Beyond the Visual: Paper as a Material Signifier in Photographic Indexicality explores the status of photographs as physical traces. In an attempt to find ways in which remote natural locations could be expressed more fully than it is possible by means of purely visual representation, papermaking and image-formation are combined in a single process executed entirely on-site. This working method was developed during the course of the project through artist residencies in Switzerland and a thorough research of traditional papermaking that included visits to numerous European paper mills. The making of each work involves an absurdly laborious and time-consuming process of hiking to an alpine location, making paper on-site from local plants and - using only the inherent light-sensitivity of plant substances - exposing it for many days in a camera built there partly from found natural materials. The resulting photographic objects function as pure indices in the semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce’s understanding of the term – as traces that point to their causes without necessarily revealing anything about the nature of the latter. They are artefacts testifying primarily through their presence, rather than through pictorial representation, to the exposure having taken place. Such process of signification requires the viewer’s active, haptic and imaginative response. The work proposes a way of photographically representing place as elemental - that is, existing outside the human schema of production, consumption and meaning – instead of through such cultural constructs as ‘landscape’ or ‘the scenic’.

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.