The Influence of Photographic Narrative in Healthcare Dialogue is a research project which developed within an interdisciplinary practice-led environment between arts and healthcare. The overall project aimed at employing photographic narrative to explore concepts that support a holistic approach to clinical interactions, for example empathy and reflective practice. The key proposition in this thesis is that communication between a doctor and his patient is enhanced when the medical practitioner recognises the shared narrative that develops as the process of diagnosis and treatment unfolds. From the medical practitioner's perspective, these narratives contribute to empathetic doctoring and this thesis reports on the author's interest in promoting an active sense of the visual narrative expression during the training of medical students. This project was developed in a series of experiments undertaken during a medical photography elective at Newcastle University Medical School (entitled The Camera Never Lies?) and the student's photographic stories uncover a range of attitudes to learning about 'good doctoring' during a conventional training in clinical practices, a process that demand that the students value professional detachment (Coulehan, 2008:56). My research was developed in response to the experience of teaching photographic practices to medical students within this module. In supporting the students' production of photographic artworks I was able to better understand the potential of non-verbal narrative in clinical environments (the types of professional medical contexts in which the students will apply their knowledge after they have graduated) and in medical training (the context into which I had been invited to transfer my knowledge of photographic portraiture in order to enhance the students' sensitivity to visual communication). In this sense, my thesis reports on the progress I have made as both a translator of visual arts ideas and as an artist exploring the narratological nature of taking portrait photographs (based on a range of influences from Jo Spence to Cindy Sherman). Moreover, my research provides an alternative approach to portraiture by producing photographic portraits with a method of renarration. My activities with the medical students were developed as a practice-led research project in which I used my personal experiences of creating sequences of photographic self-portraits to stimulate reflective practices amongst my students. Once they had learnt to make their own reflective portraits I was able to respond to their images with more of my own that interpreted and reflected their narratives back to them. The students clearly gained from this experience and over the past three years I have evolved the process into a teaching method specifically aimed at improving clinical skills. This photo-narratological interaction, and the benefits that the students experienced, became the basis of my research question and my methodology. My interest in finding solutions to the process of applying 're-narration', a concept I adapted from psychoanalysis (Josselson & Lieblich, 1996), to both my arts practice and my medical teaching became the central quest of my project. As with all practice-led research, I saw this exploratory journey as an opportunity for action research and my thesis considers this approach using Winch and Gingell's five stages: situation, concern, intervention, documentation and dissemination (Gingell & Winch, 1999). As a result, I am able to systematically shape my thesis around my entire journey: from the initial, open-ended phase embedded in the arts and health research project at Northumbria University to its later, more focussed period in which I am able to prepare my findings for conferences in the Medical Humanities sector. At this stage, the student projects have become case studies that are conceptualized and investigated within the framework of life narrative research, an interdisciplinary method that is used in sociology, psychoanalysis and anthropology (Czarniawska,2004). The central section of my thesis describes this part of my project in both practical and theoretical terms. All along, my aim has been to use photography as a vehicle for opening new lines of communication between arts and healthcare, two distinct fields of research that stand to gain from being brought into closer relations with one another (see the Wellcome Trust website in support of this claim, available at http://www.wellcome.ac.uk). My conclusion is that the engagement of medical students with photography can facilitate reflective learning and encourage the development of visual skills that many commentators believe is absent in the structure of medical training yet necessary for the practice of good doctoring (Coulehan, 2008:56). The reflective use of photography through re-narration has resulted in the development of photographic narratives by the students which express their understanding of the different facets of the human condition and health in a range of subjects from self-portraiture to patients' health narratives. The photographic works illustrate an ongoing dialogue of trainee doctors within healthcare situations, the professional engagement with their subject of study and also their individual personal development. The medical students who attended the medical photography elective: The Camera Never Lies? developed an in-depth understanding of the concepts of self-reflection, empathy and also engaged with the important role of these concepts in their professional practice. Some medical students used photography to express their preoccupations with health related subjects by engaging with patients on the basis of photographic projects, whereas others engaged directly with their own personal experiences with eating and mental disorders. As a result the students deconstructed medical stereotypes, challenged their own preconceptions of illness and embraced empathy as the essential skill for the performing of good doctoring. The changing attitudes became evident in both the students' photographic work and their final assessment presentations. Additionally, the public exhibitions of the students' work revealed attitudes of a wider healthcare system. Where healthcare staff responded to the students' work in a controversial way, the hospital patients engaged very positively with the students' approach in the photographs. This contribution of photographic re-narration uncovered healthcare attitudes that respond to Coulehan's definition of gooddoctoring. Reflection through re-narration suggests that an empathetic engagement between medical practitioners and patients could result to a more valuable medical practice compared to the traditional professional detachment. In this sense, the doctor-patient empathetic engagement develops in a two-directional way both from the doctor's and patient's perspectives. As a result, the doctors have learnt to use their reflective skills to communicate better with their patients and in turn the patients have become more empathetic towards their doctors. The Influence of Photographic Narrative in Healthcare Dialogue was supported by an AHRC New Collaborations award hosted by Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust and Northumbria University.

This thesis offers a close reading of Quentin Crisp’s auto/biographical representations, most particularly The Naked Civil Servant. Published in 1968, Crisp’s autobiography was dramatized for Thames Television in 1975, a film that would prove seminal in the history of British broadcasting and something of a ‘quantum leap’ in the medium’s representation of gay lives. As an interpretative study, it offers a scope of visual and narrative analyses that assess Crisp’s cultural figure – his being both an ‘icon’ in gay history and someone against which gay men’s normative sense of masculinity could be measured. According to particular thematic concerns that allow for the correspondent reading of the visual and the literary auto/biographical text, this thesis considers the reception of that image and the binary meanings of fashioning it embodies. It explores not the detailed materiality of Crisp’s figure but its effects – the life that his fashioning determined and the fashioning of that life in textual discourse and media rhetoric. Observing Crisp as a performer of the auto/biographical, the following themes are addressed: the biopic, its tropes and ‘the body too much’; desire, otherness and the ‘great dark man’; the circumscribed life of the art school model; the ‘exile’ of a Chelsea bedsit; and the drag of a queer dotage.

This thesis seeks to develop an aesthetics of spectacle in mainstream cinema. Whilst a significant amount of critical work has been undertaken on spectacle within the context of narrative theory, little attention has been paid to defining and analysing spectacle in itself and its place in the cinematic experience. Not only does this mean that a pervasive concept in film studies is left poorly defined and unconsidered, it also hampers an understanding of the nature of the cinematic experience itself. The central question addressed by the thesis is ‘What is the role of spectacle in the cinematic experience, with particular reference to mainstream cinema?’ This involves a consideration of the ways in which spectacle has been treated in theoretical terms to date. In particular, the contribution of cognitive approaches is critically assessed with a view to establishing a more inclusive framework that recognises the experiential nature of cinematic spectacle. In the light of this, the thesis proposes a new critical model for understanding spectacle, one based on a notion of transmission which presents narrative and spectacle as coexistent within the cinematic experience rather than as antithetical qualities. As another aspect of this, the thesis considers the historical development of spectacle in the context of spectatorship at the time of early cinema at the end of the nineteenth century. The latter part of the thesis applies its definition of spectacle to specific elements of the cinematic experience, namely the use of technology and miseen-scene. It thereby engages with the aesthetics of spectacle within particular contexts and conditions. This exercise makes it clear that far from being a marginalised element, as suggested by current narrative-centred film theory, spectacle is central to the cinematic experience.

The aim of this research was to establish a new style of AV performance that facilitated me in knowingly steering audience engagement. My interest in steering engagement stems from the intent I have with my performances; an intent to encourage audiences into considered thought about the topics I bring to my shows. As practice-based research, a series of performances formed its basis, with each adapted toward establishing a new style. I introduced audience conversations to my performances, doing so in real-time by harnessing the audience's second-screens. In this way, their smartphones facilitated spontaneous collaboration between the audience and I; in turn this gave me a way to steer them toward thinking about the themes behind my performances. By then bringing this style of performance to the context of live debate, a new paradigm emerged; one that challenges the audience to participate in shaping the emergent audio-visual event. I had to develop the capacity to monitor audience engagement, first online with the `video-cued commentary' and then in real-time via two different `audience-commentary systems'. This may be of interest to anyone engaging in forms of audience analysis or viewer studies. How I developed second-screen systems may be of interest to designers of phone-network-based social-media commentary platforms. My effort toward simplifying how I generated audio-visual content and how I controlled it on-stage may make this research of interest to other digital-media performers and installation-designers.

Using a practice-based method, the outcome of this research is a trilogy of films looking at three post-war modern prototype houses built by British architects. The examples chosen are: H.T. 'Jim' and Betty Cadbury-Brown's 3 Church Walk; Aldeburgh, Suffolk (1962); John Penn's Beach House, Shingle Street, Suffolk (1969) and Richard and Su Rogers' Spender House and Studio, near Maldon, Essex (1968). With each of the films a house is reconstructed on film, reactivating the architectural space as filmic space. The films explore the interaction between architectural space and its filmic translation using artists' film and moving image practice as a method to examine how the relationship between moving image and sound can activate architectural space to create a sensory experience on film, and to determine how the physical traces remaining contribute to new possible readings of the architectural examples considered. The combined research project and the films examine two architectures that are inhabited simultaneously: physical architectural space and filmic architectural space. Techniques and conventions of both documentary and artists' film and moving image practices such as critical and reflexive filmmaking, direct observation, archive research materials, sound composition from location recording and archive sound are used to rework space in filmic terms. Taking an individually tailored approach to each of the soundtracks of the films highlights the role of sound in activating architectural space on film. Following the premise of the house as a phenomenological concept set out by Gaston Bachelard and examining Giuliana Bruno's notion of the film viewer as voyageur as opposed to voyeur, the shift from optic to haptic is explored through my practice to examine how an architectural space can be translated to film in a way that goes beyond functional description into the realm of the poetic, narrative and the event. Several case studies of artists' films by Heinz Emigholz, Elizabeth Price, Man Ray and John Smith that take the modern house as subject are analysed to demonstrate a range of approaches to articulating space on film. How each one allows for a particular reading or understanding that operates outside of the official historical narratives of modern architecture is discussed. In the context of wider research into the interrelationships between film and architecture and the role moving image and sound play in interpretations of architectural space, this project shows how this practice-based method arrives at a contribution to knowledge of the particular buildings chosen, and how this method contributes to current readings of the modern house in film. New knowledge is generated on each of the case study buildings as evidenced through the films, which are an artistic response to each of the houses and through the writing, which gives a historical, theoretical and formal context to the works produced. In capturing these houses lost to architectural history, reactivating the spaces through moving image and sound the films, both individually and as a trilogy are a contribution to knowledge. Each acts as a record of a significant example of 1960s design at a moment in its history, adding to the archive of each and providing material for further research in the area.

The thesis explores the post-millennial boom in the production of Catalan films. Previous critical work on Catalan cinema has tended to focus primarily on documentary and realist forms. The research presented here maintains an interest in documentary as a key mode but it also examines historical and fantasy-based feature film production as important aspects of what has been termed the ‘New Catalan Cinema.’ It places a series of Catalan films in the contexts of their production and reception, paying particular attention to developments in audio-visual industries and cultural policy that have taken place since 2000. Through this, the thesis demonstrates that the New Catalan Cinema challenges pre-existing critical conceptualisations of both national and regional film cultures. The main question addressed by the thesis is ‘In what ways has Catalan cinema consolidated a new identity in the 2000s?’. This has involved historical consideration of pre-2000 Catalan film culture. More explicitly, the thesis examines the main institutions that have supported the development of Catalan cinema since 2000, including educational (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Escola Superior de Cinema i Audiovisuals de Catalunya) audiovisual (MEDIA, Acadèmia del Cinema Català, Barcelona/Catalunya Film Commission), governmental (Departament de Cultura, Institució Català d’Empreses Culturals) and cultural (Institut Ramon Llull). Additionally, it presents case study analyses of documentary, historical drama and horror as important areas within which regional, national and global crossovers and tensions are negotiated.

This thesis identifies approaches to film-making which stimulate a relationship of active involvement between the cinematic image and the viewer through the evocation of tactility and embodied memory, thus inviting the viewer’s whole body into the experiencing of the moving image. I do this specifically by defining and exploring, in theory and practice, the concept of tangible territory which, I propose, emerges from the encounter between the viewer’s embodied self and the moving image work.

Recollected Places: Photography, Memory and Ekphrasis. The practice component of my PhD, ‘Recollected Places’, consists of exhibitions combining my work as an artist in still photography, video and installation and books that combine text and the photographic image. My written thesis, ‘Photography, Memory and Ekphrasis’ looks at a number of artworks from the 1950s to the present day which employ the photography-ekphrasis relationship. ‘Ekphrasis’ is the verbal description of visual works of art, for example, Homer's imaginary evocation of Achilles' shield in The Iliad. It became the object of intense academic scrutiny during the 1980s, as part of cultural theory’s emergent ‘visual turn’ and its attendant concentration upon image-text relations. The Iliad’s extended description of the shield, and the world of peace that it describes, are noticeably different from the ‘real’ events of the Trojan wars described throughout the rest of the poem. However, the ekphrastic scenes, whilst being distinctly different in tone, are arguably as ‘lifelike’ as the rest of the action described. So, from this very earliest recorded instance of ekphrasis, we can see how the mode opens up fundamental ontological questions about art and its place in the world that would be highlighted by conceptual art almost three millennia later. What holds more presence? The physical work itself, or the idea of the work? In a similar fashion, the invention of photography raised questions that were not methodically articulated until the 1980s. Thus a body of research from the early 1990s onwards has addressed the relationship between ekphrasis and photography. However, the vast majority focuses on ekphrastic writing about photography: ‘poems for photographs’, in James Heffernan’s phrase. The small extant literature that focuses on photography’s relationship to ekphrasis tends to emphasise the technical aspects of the medium. My research is both the first book-length study that I am aware of to examine ekphrasis’s relationship to photography and the first such study that I know of to be written by a practising visual artist. I consider recent writing on ekphrasis through the prism of various psychoanalytic theories, particularly those from recent debates on photography and melancholia. I examine the absence of the ‘lost object’ that is both the very condition for ekphrasis and melancholia and a precondition of all photographs: simultaneously trace of the object and reminder of its absence.

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.

“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).