Photographic uncertainty in the everyday
: keeping unknowing states present in the making, sequencing, and presentation of photographic images

Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis

Abstract

This PhD by photographic practice was undertaken to investigate the productive potential of ‘photographic uncertainty’ in the representation and interpretation of the everyday. The term ‘photographic uncertainty’, is usually aligned with reading images. However, this practice-based research has considered uncertain states at every stage of the process of making photographic images. From the uncertainty that operates in the embodied actions of the photographer in the moment of image capture, to the selection, display and dissemination of resulting imagery. The concept of autoethnographic writing (Denzin, 2014), is used in the research to articulate and examine the lived experience of making and looking at photographs and is a key device for building a methodological structure which informs the written narrative of the research. This methodological framework was developed to be attentive to the emergence of photographic uncertainty at each stage of the practice.

The methodology has three stages. The first titled, making in situ, emerged from the analysis of my movement through everyday space with a camera, which intersected with an ephemeral interlude, described by Erin Manning (2016), as a predominance of awareness to the environment's potential. Making in situ was my affective response to this space of experience. The second stage of the methodology, writing through, reflects on the images produced from the making in situ process. These images resonate with the state of unknowing, encapsulated by Manning’s ephemeral interlude (2016). This helps to establish connecting threads between each of the photographs that formed each sequence. I argue that the production of a sequence of images is an essential means of amplifying uncertainty in the encounter with the photographs. The third stage of the methodology, curatorial strategies, analyses the photographic sequences in the practical outcomes. The photobooks, produced as a series of volumes generated a pivot in the practice. One of the volumes, Suspended, is a purely written account of the embodied experience of making the images, which points to the importance of the non-visual aspect of the photograph, which David Green and Joanna Lowry (2003) termed the expanded index of the photograph. I consider the expanded index in relation to the development of a projected installation with a sound composition of field recordings. I discuss how the installation Everything is Suspended in Movement (2024), destabilises the experience of viewing the image sequence.

A key finding in this PhD research is that the relationship between imagery, audio and space, generates the conditions for photographic uncertainty to occur. This disrupts the viewers’ received response to resolve the photographs’ relationship to the event in the world. An experience, when allied with Annette Kuhn’s aesthetic moment (2013), becomes a productive, transformative space.
Date of Award30 Sep 2024
Original languageEnglish
SupervisorRowan Bailey (Main Supervisor) & Liam Devlin (Co-Supervisor)

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