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.

The thesis explored the theoretical implications of the African Revolution through an examination of its radical cinematic inventions. My research investigated points where the cinema screen became a site of radical gathering and ambitions of cinema emerged that expressed a revolutionary desire. The thesis mapped out a relational geography between different late liberation struggles of the 1970s and 1980s produced by cinema in the networks of connections lived out and constructed through radical drives. The exploration of aesthetics of liberation is the point of departure to investigate how screens, as urban surfaces of projection and reflection, appearance and masking, emerge from the world and have material and psychical effects in the world.

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.

Paris magazine and its derivatives - Paris Sex Appeal, Pages Folles, Pour lire à deux and Scandale - were published in France from 1931 to around 1939. Academic studies of nudes, candid humanist photographs and pin ups with artistic overtones were juxtaposed in these monthly illustrated magazines. Used by surrealist artists for their collages, they associate photographs by the greatest artists of the time (Brassaï, Kertesz, Man Ray, Germaine Krull) and the works of less famous photographers (Jean Moral,Pierre Boucher, Roger Schall, Nora Dumas ...). Forming a genre yet untapped by historians, these magazines feature both a real taste for erotic fantasies and a remarkable sophistication in composition and conception. They are to be inscribed in the context of the interwar years which they reflect through a bawdy style, audacious and multifaceted aesthetics - from kitsch to modernism - and a permeability to technological reproducibility. This project proposes to draw a panorama of the 1930s and of its underside through the study of a material which is at the crossroads of the history of photography, ideas of the body and the question of artistic appropriation. The magazines are to be dissected as indicative of the ambivalent emancipation of the 'modern woman', a photographic and graphic modernity but also of a colonial unconscious surfacing in a racist fascination for a pseudo (Far)-East. Claiming that the magazines are watched as much as read, I analyse the magazine's formal 'desire' for cinema as a guarantee of glamour and as a decisive element of its layout's plasticity. Nudes, landscapes and urban sceneries are linked or dissociated as the reader leafs through it, the poetic flicker of its images relating to the mechanics of editing. Cinema's influence is also to be found in the magazine's special relationship to the night as a site of criminal and sexual transgressions where the prostitute stands as a key figure of the city's margins. Dealing with the return of the repressed expressed in the collective imaginary transpiring through this kind of publication, I research the different types of interrelations established between texts and images as well as the bad taste which is integral to its saucy descriptions of sex scene. An analysis of its plain and clichéd literature sheds light on its relation to vulgarity and its depiction of the reading woman, an iconographic motif through which it equates female reading with masturbation. The magazine's margins and side issues - including small ads, advertisements and photographic contests organised every month to elect the most beautiful readers -, are given a special status within the thesis as as many 'finds' which allow for a more intimate and subjective interpretation of this archive. The plastic attractiveness of these magazines makes it indispensable to show them in an exhibition which is the visual continuation of the written thesis. The 'gesture of exhibiting' these publications is integral to the research process as it will allow me to reimagine an archive and keep it alive.

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.