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 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.

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.

published_or_final_version / Literary Studies / Master / Master of Arts

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