This research looks at comedy and question what its function is. It identifies the gag as a specific moment that solicits laughter and examines what is expressed within and through a gag and whether a gag can trigger a change in our thinking. What are the structures, functions and outcomes of a gag? The project approaches these questions through an examination of the relationship between the visual and the verbal within the gag. This examination involves two very different types of comedy, silent and stand-up, and considers specific gags from both. The methods used for this examination take the form of both a body of visual artwork and a written thesis. The visual work consists of photographs, videos and text pieces. It is within the video works that the relationship between the visual and the verbal is most readily seen and this is due to the mimetic techniques used to make the work. The videos are a series of re-enactments of silent and stand-up moments and involve my re-performance to camera of selected gags. I have removed certain elements from the gag while emphasizing others through mimicry. In doing so I hope to make the viewer of the relationship between language and gesture within a gag. The writing begins with an examination of what it is that constitutes a gag. The relationship between gag and narrative is looked at first, then the relationship between the comic performer and the audience, and finally the ways in which the comic performer manipulates the medium that is used to create the gag. Following this comes a close reading of three comic performers’ work: Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr., Richard Pryor’s Live in Concert and Jo Brand’s Barely Live. The gags in each work are examined in order to see how the relationship between the visual and the verbal is used to solicit laughter and then further examined in order to discover what effect the gag has on its audience. How do language and gesture work together to challenge the audience's thinking? The methods used in both the practical work and the writing are empirical in natures. The source material is examined closely: gags are unpicked and put back together again. This approach allows the research to tease out some propositions surrounding the relationship between the visual and the verbal.

Falling into Photography examines the relationship between loss, desire and the imaginary. Across writing, photographic works and film pieces, we move from real to imagined spaces, exploring the boundaries between autobiography and fiction within the alternate orphic worlds evoked. Within staged fantastical images, the subjects are turned-away figures of loss, desired but always already beyond reach. The photographic medium is worked upon with painting, collage and montage, narrative voice over juxtaposed with moving image. Here, the photographic is loosened from its referent, slipping in and out of darkness, cloaked in dripping inks and bathed in subtle hues of tinted light. The spaces inhabited within the films and images are womb-like liquid spaces of night, moving from beds to swamps and caves, from the mother to the lover in search of a primordial return. Central to the work lies an exploration of the origins of fantasy and desire and how these are bound to experiences of loss and representation. The following essays explore these themes, interweaving psychoanalysis, philosophy and fiction with the artist's own prose and visual works. This story of falling, into the image and into love, asks what it is to make a work of art and how this process is necessarily bound to the maternal. The relationship between mourning and the creative process is explored throughout the writing, with emphasis on the photographic object, process and encounter.

This research project considers the photograph as a common space, a space of encounter that unsettles the relations between word and image. It calls for a thinking of the photograph alongside notions of commonality at a time of increasing fragmentation and alienation in terms of what is communicable. The project is driven by different forms of description as a methodology and mode of enquiry. These methods of description constitute a series of experiments in writing and photography. They are presented in the thesis as image and text works and accompanying the thesis as an installation of photographic works and composition of voice recordings. The context of the research engages practices of space and everyday life along side ideas about community and commonality. Methods of description draw out the relationship between word and image, examining different particularities between writing as image and the construction of photographic sequences as a visual syntax in order to question the limits of description in relation to the photographic image and human encounter. The process of research is framed within a series of on-going conversations that embed themselves within thinking about and making photographs. Sitting on park benches and considering the space of The Look and the work Jean-Paul Sartre, converses with a series of photographs and writings that describe a space of human encounter. The description of Charles Bovary’s Hat in the opening sequence of Madame Bovary1 by Gustave Flaubert, informs a descriptive method and thinking about the photograph as a kind of mute or stuttering face. A dialogue with Walker Evan’s Labor Anonymous photographs emerges through experimental forms of writing and cropping. This concludes in a series of 150 sentences and photographic fragments that cover the entirety of the photographs in the Labor Anonymous archive, replacing editing with a process of cropping in order to approach an anonymous space within the photographic image. The thesis ends with photographs of discarded piles of organic matter constructed through a rigorous method of writing drawn out of the phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas and a reading of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Francis Ponges. Here the photograph is presented as an exhausted site where word and image exist alongside each other, radically passive, together — apart. Making a series of voice recordings enables an exploration of the incommensurability of word and image approaching problems surrounding a thinking of the face, and the face-to-face encounter through the photograph. Throughout the project a problem of pronouns is evoked, an uncomfortable sense of the relations between us all in looking and thinking about the space of the image and how it can be constituted and conveyed. Processes of description developed through the different forms of enquiry call us to the urgent task of considering the photographic image as a site of commonality and a space of community.

The aim of the research is to identify pathological relations between consumer culture and consumers. I explore the relation between people and objects, and the impact that images have as producers and disseminators of sign-value. Taking the term ‘advertisement’ loosely I refer to Dutch still-life paintings as advertisements for the craft-objects they depict and the lifestyles they suggest. The body is also considered to be an advertisement because of the commodities with which it is adorned and the socially prescribed ideals that it reinforces. I consider social networking sites as commercial spaces where body ideals are disseminated. Different forms of self-presentation, including selfies, thinspiration, and fat fetishism are examined as indications of the recuperation of aberrant signs in the system of sign-value exchange. The analytical methodology for this enquiry is framed by theories of commodity fetishism and sexual fetishism through which I consider both the socio-economic and the psychosexual dimensions of the relation between consumer society and individual consumers. I examine sexual fetishism and kleptomania by reference to psychoanalytic case studies in order to chart how objects are inscribed with value. Fetishists and kleptomaniacs endow seemingly trivial objects with a value that is incomprehensible to other people. These unusual relations to objects offer an alternative model for evaluating the value of commodities in a manner that might liberate the body of the consumer. The practical aspect of the research centres on the still-life. Taking my cue from Dutch still-life paintings from the seventeenth century that reflected a conflicting relation with material wealth, I produce still-life objects that reflect a contradictory relationship to consumerism. I produce still-life photographs in order to develop an alternative visual language for the commodified and objectified contemporary consumer body.

This PhD project proposes the idea of ‘attractions’ as a tool for the critical analysis and reassessment of moving images. The term ‘attraction’ is not a description of textual features, but an interpretation of a dynamic interchange between the spectator and the screen. My methodology for this research examines the structuring principles of ‘attractions’, focusing on the single shot looped film. I reflect upon its relationship with narrative, its modes of temporality and its method of audience address. My practical enquiry develops moving image works that incorporate these principles and attempt to reconfigure the perceptions of time through the movement of objects and things. In my written component, I accordingly expand and develop an understanding of the term ‘attractions’ to include practices that resist narrative integration, practices ranging from the ‘pre-cinematic’ devices of the nineteenth century, through the avant-garde filmmakers of the 1970s, and finally to contemporary digital developments. The moving image loop has become a common mode of gallery presentation. However, there have been few enquiries into its mode of spectator address. I do not believe that adequate distinctions have been drawn between practices of narrative integration and practices that demonstrate ‘attractional’ principles. This research therefore considers the articulation of temporality, questions of narration, and the structural determinants shaping the moving image. I attempt to redefine these practices and to provide new answers by pointing to neglected connections between practices of narrative and practices of ‘attraction’.

This PhD by practice sets out to reformulate the meeting between photographer and subject, from one that is commonly constructed as a power relationship to an empathic meeting between subjectivities. It is an attempt to re-engage with the original promise of photography –that of connecting with the ‘soul’ of the other. I take a phenomenological perspective, applying recent research in the field of neuroscience and psychology to throw new light on processes at play, both when we view photographically reproduced human faces and when we come face to face with others in the meeting preceding photographic portraits. My original contribution to knowledge consists of beginning to construct a theory as to why certain photographic portraits invoke an embodied reaction, whilst others leave us cold. What is it that makes us look again and again at particular photographic portraits? I propose that emotional contagion is an important factor both when making and viewing photograpic portraiture. It was not within the scope of this thesis by practice to explore this proposition, but it is an area suitable for further research. I use the practice as a testing ground, letting each new step develop out of my reflections on the previous work, using a qualitative methodology. I approach the face-to-face meeting through the writing of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and phenomenology, and make a series of experimentations, letting the practice twist and turn upon itself. I strip away and interchange the components of the photographic portrait one by one, project by project, letting my practice respond experimentally to both the theoretical research and the situation in which it is conceived. I move from still to moving and back again, through performance, text and sound, in an attempt to find that elusive embodied connection between subject matter and audience.

This thesis constitutes five sets of photographic work of self-portraits in diptych form within an installation, with two Artists’ Books and a written component. It explores and visualises my autobiographical condition as an exiled artist from Taiwan, seeking for an imagined return.

In my last four years of PhD by practice at the Royal College of Art, I have conducted extensive research on archival photography including materials held at the Museum der Weltkulturen, Frankfurt am Main; the Institute for Iranian Contemporary Historical Studies (IICHS) , Tehran; and the International Institute of Social History (IISH), Amsterdam. My project started with the fortuitous encounter with a photograph taken by Iranian photographer Hengameh Golestan on the morning of March 8, 1979. The photograph shows women marching in the streets of Teheran in protest against the introduction of the compulsory Islamic dress code. In 1936 Reza Shah had decreed a ban on the headscarf as part oh his westernising project. Over forty years later following the 1979 Revolution, Ruhollah Khomeini reversed this decision by ordering that women should now cover their hair. This ‘found image’ presented me with a glimpse into the occulted history of my own country and the opportunity to advance towards a deeper learning and understanding of the event of March 8, 1979 a significant date in the history of feminism in Iran. In what follows I revisit the history of Iran since the 1979 revolution with a particular inflexion on the role women played in that history. However, as my project develops , I gradually move away from the socio-historical facts to investigate the legacy of the revolution on the representations of women in photography, film and literature as well as the creation of an imaginary space of self representation. To this end my writing moves constantly between the documentary, the analytical and the personal. In parallel I have made photographs and video works which are explorations of the veil as object of fascination and desire as well as symbol of repression.