This Master's Report is a discussion of the ideas, research, and methods I have developed over the course of my three years of study at the University of Texas at Austin. As an artist I am interested in systems and structures of control--personal, political, economic, and environmental--and our efforts to understand, escape and navigate them. I use photography in an attempt to visually describe what is un-seeable: love, loss, desire, anticipation, fear, and failure. Throughout this time, I have made pictures as a method for exploring varying systems of categorization, cataloguing, and the translation of emotion into images. / text

An essay concerning the development of documentary photography, its relationship to political norms, conventions of realism in visual culture, and the form of the photographic book.

This thesis examines my artistic practice over the past two years at Virginia Commonwealth University, which has led to the installation of my thesis exhibition, JPG Artifacts. My work inspects the current process of image making within a responsive studio practice of deconstructing the digital image into a physical space. While my thesis exhibition is just one culminating formal installation of my experimental studio practice, this paper will examine some main points of reference towards what has led me to the most present public iteration of my work. I hope to position my research in context of contemporary art and artists that have most heavily influenced and shaped my work.

The world around us is in constant flux. The photographs we make of the world, no matter how true or untrue, have a direct influence on how we perceive the environment around us. Photography serves to categorize our perceptions of the world. The value of an image is not in what it represents, but in what it recalls. Photographs are fragmented and clear, imperfect and idealized all at the same time.

Auslander (2006) states that images generated from performance documentation and practices stemming from performance to camera could be considered ‘performative’ if they are meant to be seen as happening in the ‘now’ they are viewed, with the spectator as the current intended audience. This thesis takes Auslander’s supposition and situates the term performativity within an established academic discourse as a social, political or cultural ‘doing’ and questions what, apart from performing, performance ‘does’ in its transcription to a photographic image. I propose a ‘doing’ occurs because the intentional performance of a given act invokes the power of citation, in turn setting in motion broader cultural references. The contribution to knowledge this thesis makes is the proposition that aspects of the agency of performativity cannot be fully present in the moment of performance, but can be subsequently revealed by the photographic image as it affords the différance [distance/deferral] the spectator requires to consider the action within a wider structural unconsciousness. Originating from a conceptualist tradition of using ‘art as experiment’, the hypothesis is tested heuristically using a practice-based method of performance to camera. This is presented in the manner of autoethnographic fieldwork, which explores the time-based tensions between performance and photography in three different ways. Firstly, through instantaneous performance actions and the subsequent withdrawal of motion in the still image; secondly, the staging of one-off performance interventions and how they are perceived outside of the time and place in which they occurred via the photograph; and lastly, how repetition is used as a visual device to allow the spectator to ‘revisit’ their framework of understanding. By connecting critical reflection of these photographic investigations to theoretical perspectives, each chapter concludes how viewing the performance outside of the live act in the form of a photograph uncovers the ‘doing’ of its performativity. The final conclusion reviews why performativity surpasses the presence/absence binary previously perceived in photographic documentation, and how we might revise our usage of the term ‘performative’ in the area of performance to camera and studies of performance documentation in the light of these discoveries.

This thesis explores and documents the development of an adapted ethnographic methodology that is defined through its orientation towards the representation and production of landscape. As a result of this methodology, I document the shift within my practice from a topographic photography tradition to a filmic, ‘more-than-visual’ (Jacobs, 2013: 714) mode of production, in response to ideas of creative ethnography as an immersive methodology. The resulting movement of films forms a ‘landscape ethnography’ (Ogden, 2011) that acts as both survey and auto-biogeography. Informed by the diversity of registers, and voices within landscape ethnography, and contemporary psychogeographic practice, the thesis and films shift tone to reflect this. To clarify, this work will inform a cross-disciplinary reading of place and landscape through an experiential methodology of both ethnographic and auto ethnographic methods. This practice-led body of research investigates the multi-layered interstitial spaces that occur in the areas between infrastructure and planned development known as edgelands in the Thames Gateway. My multimodal creative practice will be informed by existing literature relating to marginal/liminal landscapes in and beyond geography and landscape writing. The written thesis explores the contemporary landscape photography and new nature writing traditions, which I believe to be closely interconnected, through critique and production of new bodies of practice. Through a consideration of my own practice and others, I demonstrate a web of connections: between landscapes; between practitioners past and present; and, significantly, between theory and practice. Through examining both landscape theory and my own experience of an embodied approach to landscape, this research examines not only the potential of lens based practices to act as a portal to read and experience the landscape as a whole, but also the practice and process of making work. viii These sites will be seen and discussed as interconnected phenomena, stitching together ‘archipelagos of interstitial ground’. This along with the idea of landscape ethnography can then be adopted as a methodology to develop an immersive form of virtual exploration that can utilise developing forms of media dissemination to explore the audiences’ relationship to remote locations.

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University / Reciprocity failure is defined as the failure of a photographic emulsion to obey the Bunsen-Roscoe reciprocity law for photochemical reactions. This law, set forth in 1862, stated that the product of a photochemical reaction depended only on the total light energy (exposure) producing the reaction, and was independent of the rate of application of the energy. Within fifty years of the publication of the law, its failure had been confirmed several times. It is concluded that reciprocity failure can cause a serious loss in speed when extremely short exposure times are encountered. The common films used in oscilloscope photography, such as Linagraph Pan and Linagraph Ortho, show a severe speed loss at very short exposure times. If the need for rapid processing dictates the use of very thin, highly hardened emulsions, those emulsions used must, in addition, be examined for reciprocity failure before their application to high -speed recording can be recommended. [TRUNCATED]

Thesis (MTech (Graphic Design))--Peninsula Technikon, 2003. / Word processed copy. Summary in English. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 87-88). Also available online.

Thesis (M.S.)--Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1991. / Vita. Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 85-90). Also available via the Internet.

Senior research project (B.S.)--Rochester Institute of Technology. / Typescript.