This thesis examines the pioneering British weekly magazine Picture Post (1938-1957) which introduced a mass audience to the innovative style of European photojournalism characterised by the format ofthe photographic essay. Founded by the Hungarian emigre, Stefan Lorant (1901-1997) and led by Sir Tom Hopkinson (1905-1990) from 1940 until 1950, Picture Post has not yet been the focus of a single academic publication. This thesis explores the concept of visual narration through a selection of photographic essays published in the magazine between 1938 and 1945, and utilises the unpublished corresponding contact sheets to expose the manipulation of photographs. The present work has utilised archival material of the Picture Post archive, which forms pmi of the Hulton Archive at Getty Images, London, to inform a discussion surrounding the topics of manipulation, migration and memory in relation to photography, in order to identify the specific approach of Picture Post to photographic narration. The subject of migration and visual narrative is of great importance to this study, and so this thesis will promote the significance of the presence of emigre photographers in Britain during the Second World War, in order to redefine the analytical framework for looking at the photographic essay.

This thesis contributes to current scholarly debates concerning the witnessing and visualisation of twenty-first century systemic and "socially abstract" state-corporate-military power and its in/visible forms of violence. The nexus of neoliberal democratic hegemony, global corporatization, digital technologies of communication, and modern warfare have produced radically evolving contexts of war photography. This includes the engendering of artdocumentary practices which mark a significant departure from socially "realistic" representations to more abstract and conceptual visualisations. In this context, "postphotographic" imagery is not adequately served by recent ethico-political debates regarding the image-making/viewing of direct and/or symbolic violence, which tend to neglect that which is not seen in contemporary news frames (of what is being referred to here as traditional media), namely, the in/visible systems, structures and processes of state-corporate-military power. Accordingly, this thesis argues visual culture scholarship requires recalibrated vocabularies as well as revised conceptual and methodological frameworks for the critical exploration of the subject of systemic, socially abstract power/violence. This thesis strives to advance its contribution to theory-building by way of crafting an alternative approach to critically understanding art-documentary photography and its viewing/reception within a state-corporatist and military-mediatized dispensation. It takes a cocreative and forensic approach to the selected imagery of the UK/US-based photographers Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Simon Norfolk, Trevor Paglen, Edmund Clark and ~ 2 ~ Lisa Barnard, critically deploying the trans/interdisciplinary conceptual constellation of, inter alia, "Plexus", "war", complicity, “Vergangenheitsbewältigung”, "Gegenwärtige Bewältigung", corporate personhood, the open/public secret, the State-Corporate Exception, the "cadastral" and the "proxy measure". The concept of a "dispositif" (Rancière) is engaged in the analysis of the imagery, taking into critical account the heterogeneous elements beyond their visible content and framing. By its close, this thesis demonstrates why its refashioning of these concepts to serve as methodological and theoretical tools recasts pertinent aspects of current debates, affording critical and co-creative "ways of seeing" power, its violence, and its visualisation.

This thesis seeks to define useful conditions for children within primary education to develop greater awareness and understanding of cultural diversity. In order for children to have cultural exchanges, international school twinning practices was considered to be a sensible strategy to underpin this aim. For providing a communicative medium whereby children might have cultural interactions, photography was the other significant mediating resource. In this report, two interventions were described, involving two separate international school twinning projects between Turkey and the UK. The results of Intervention I indicated that despite gentle prompts from a co-participating researcher, and despite an eagerness from the children, there was limited visual sensitivity in reading and interpreting cultural implications in both their own and photographs and those shared between the participating schools. A modest advance towards the conclusion of the first intervention influenced the design of the next intervention. In Intervention II, a new international school project was established with fewer children and with more time allocated by the schools. Inviting the children to participate in preliminary cultural discussions appeared to create a more effective awareness of the cultural connotations in both their own and the shared photographs. Despite the children’s willingness around engaging with images, they remained limited in their reading and production of provocative visual communication. Suggestions are made for strengthening what is judged a worthwhile purpose, with particular emphasis on the need to scaffold the recruitment of semiotic cues in image towards the goal of cross-cultural discussion. This study found that the children’s semiotic reading of images are at a modest level. Considering this exposure of visual images in every aspect of their lives, this study indicates that the children should be provided with more communicative opportunities with images.

The introduction of High Dynamic Range Imaging in computer graphics has produced a novelty in Imaging that can be compared to the introduction of colour photography or even more. Light can now be captured, stored, processed, and finally visualised without losing information. Moreover, new applications that can exploit physical values of the light have been introduced such as re-lighting of synthetic/real objects, or enhanced visualisation of scenes. However, these new processing and visualisation techniques cannot be applied to movies and pictures that have been produced by photography and cinematography in more than one hundred years. This thesis introduces a general framework for expanding legacy content into High Dynamic Range content. The expansion is achieved avoiding artefacts, producing images suitable for visualisation and re-lighting of synthetic/real objects. Moreover, it is presented a methodology based on psychophysical experiments and computational metrics to measure performances of expansion algorithms. Finally, a compression scheme, inspired by the framework, for High Dynamic Range Textures, is proposed and evaluated.

Two modern technologies show promise to dramatically increase immersion in virtual environments. Stereoscopic imaging captures two images representing the views of both eyes and allows for better depth perception. High dynamic range (HDR) imaging accurately represents real world lighting as opposed to traditional low dynamic range (LDR) imaging. HDR provides a better contrast and more natural looking scenes. The combination of the two technologies in order to gain advantages of both has been, until now, mostly unexplored due to the current limitations in the imaging pipeline. This thesis reviews both fields, proposes stereoscopic high dynamic range (SHDR) imaging pipeline outlining the challenges that need to be resolved to enable SHDR and focuses on capture and compression aspects of that pipeline. The problems of capturing SHDR images that would potentially require two HDR cameras and introduce ghosting, are mitigated by capturing an HDR and LDR pair and using it to generate SHDR images. A detailed user study compared four different methods of generating SHDR images. Results demonstrated that one of the methods may produce images perceptually indistinguishable from the ground truth. Insights obtained while developing static image operators guided the design of SHDR video techniques. Three methods for generating SHDR video from an HDR-LDR video pair are proposed and compared to the ground truth SHDR videos. Results showed little overall error and identified a method with the least error. Once captured, SHDR content needs to be efficiently compressed. Five SHDR compression methods that are backward compatible are presented. The proposed methods can encode SHDR content to little more than that of a traditional single LDR image (18% larger for one method) and the backward compatibility property encourages early adoption of the format. The work presented in this thesis has introduced and advanced capture and compression methods for the adoption of SHDR imaging. In general, this research paves the way for a novel field of SHDR imaging which should lead to improved and more realistic representation of captured scenes.

The principle aim of this study was to use the concept of image defocus related to feature depth in order to develop a system capable of converting a 2-dimensional greyscale image into a 3-dimensional depth map. An advantage of this concept (known as depth-from-defocus or simply DfD) over techniques such as stereo imaging is that there is no so-called ‘correspondence problem’ where the corresponding location of a feature or landmark point must be identified in each of the stereo images. The majority – and the most successful – of previous researchers in DfD have used some variation of a ‘two-image’ technique in order to separate the contribution of the original scene features from the defocus effect. The best of those have achieved results typically in the range of 1% to 2% error in the accuracy of depth estimation. This thesis presents a single-image method of generating a high-density, highaccuracy depth map via the evaluation of the edge profiles of a projected structured light pattern. A novel technique of moving the projected pattern during the image capture stage allows the development of a 4-dimensional look-up table. This technique offers a solution to one of the last remaining problems in DfD, that of spatial variance. It also uses a technique to remove the dependence of original scene reflectance. The final solution generates a depth map of up to 240,000 spatially invariant depth estimates per scene image, with an accuracy of within ± 0.5%, over a depth range of 10 cm. The depth map is generated in a processing time of approximately 14 seconds once the images are loaded.

Walter Benington (1872-1936) was a major British photographer, a member of the Linked Ring and a colleague of international figures such as F H Evans, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen and Alvin Langdon Coburn. He was also a noted portrait photographer whose sitters included Albert Einstein, Dame Ellen Terry, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and many others. He is, however, rarely noted in current histories of photography. Beaumont Newhall’s 1937 exhibition Photography 1839-1937 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York is regarded by many respected critics as one of the foundation-stones of the writing of the history of photography. To establish photography as modern art, Newhall believed it was necessary to create a direct link between the master-works of the earliest photographers and the photographic work of his modernist contemporaries in the USA. He argued that any work which demonstrated intervention by the photographer such as the use of soft-focus lenses was a deviation from the direct path of photographic progress and must therefore be eliminated from the history of photography. A consequence of this was that he rejected much British photography as being “unphotographic” and dangerously irrelevant. Newhall’s writings inspired many other historians and have helped to perpetuate the neglect of an important period of British photography. As a result, the work of key photographers such as Walter Benington is now virtually unknown. Benington’s central involvement with the Linked Ring and his national and international exhibition successes demonstrate his significance within post-1890 British photography. Recent moves in the writing of histories of photography have called for the exploration of previously unknown archives and collections. A detailed examination of a cross-section of Benington’s work will illustrate that he was a photographer of great distinction and marked individuality fully worthy of a major reappraisal.

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The thesis investigates the oeuvre of Andreas Gursky, Jeff Wall and their contemporaries. It aims to provide an art-historical assessment, including the conceptual and philosophical context, complemented by an investigation of the production process of their photographs. One central focus is how the use of digital techniques and advanced printing technologies has affected their photographs. The thesis provides a traditional descriptive investigation and comparison of the artworks discussed; in addition, it relates these photographs to other art genres and thereby offers broader connections to the art world. This modus operandi is enhanced by the inclusion of specific writings on the history and theory of photography, wherein neither the art genres nor the theoretical sources are subject to any temporal or chronological restrictions. The thesis comprises six chapters: I. ‘What Happened to Baudelaire's ‘Secretary'? The Role of Digital Technology in Contemporary Photography' provides the theoretical framework for an understanding of photographic developments in the past, the influence of production processes, digital manipulation, perception and popular understanding of photographs. II. ‘Oscillating between Urmalerei and Urphotographie: Gursky's Journey from Analogue to Digital' examines Gursky's use of analogue and digital photography through a number of case studies. III. ‘Images of our Time: Jeff Wall, ‘a Painter of Modern Life' investigates Wall's artistic development, by focusing on his utilization of Baudelaire's concept of ‘the Painter of Modern Life'. IV. ‘Photographic Nuances and Variations: Contemporary Photographers in Düsseldorf and Vancouver' analyses the academic environment of Gursky and Wall and their fellow students. V. ‘Suspense or Surprise: At the Interface between Photographic Images and Film Stills' looks at the impact of the film genre on photography, and considers similar and comparable aesthetic and stylistic elements. Chapter VI provides a conclusion and a brief outlook in respect of photography.

This thesis explores how early photography contributed to the visual understanding of the world in the nineteenth century. It draws extensively on the collection of nineteenth-century photographic albums at the National Maritime Museum, London. These albums, compiled or purchased by officers in the Royal Navy, offer an extensive view of how the world was perceived by both the officers who collected photographs during overseas service and the photographers who competed to supply them. Chapter 1 considers two personal photographic albums compiled by naval officers Frederick North and Tynte F. Hammill. Through these it reveals the agency of the collector as a curator of their own world picture, and introduces wider currents visible across the archive. Chapter 2 explores the impact of photography on the visual representation of the Crimean War and the competitive market for travel imagery in Britain. Chapters 3 and 4 explore the work of photographer Felice Beato, the studio albums he created in Japan and Korea, and the role of the British navy and military in Asia – a significant early market for overseas photography. Chapter 3 looks at Beato's Views and Costumes albums (c. 1868) and problematizes previous readings, arguing for a more nuanced and cross-cultural approach. This chapter also offers evidence to support a realignment (caused by previous misbinding) of the V&A Views album. Chapter 4 employs Beato's Korean album (1871) as a case study and reveals pictorial slippage across albums previously believed to be homogenous. Chapter 5 explores the secondary use of overseas photographs as engravings in the British press and publications. The thesis concludes that nineteenth-century photographic albums compiled by naval officers while on overseas service offer visual evidence that vision underwent a profound shift during this time and that looking at the world became subjective, fragmentary and contingent.