Wilding Photographs - Exploring the Turbulent and Affective Qualities of the Material Phenomenon of Photography

PRESS RELEASE:

This installation celebrates the culmination of my practice-based PhD research:

Wilding Photographs - Exploring the Turbulent and Affective Qualities of the Material Phenomenon of Photography

By wilding photographs (used as a verb deriving from the meaning of ‘wild’, defined by theorist Jack Halberstam as “going beyond the structures we inhabit and that inhabit us.” (Halberstam 2013) returning the photograph to a physical condition and mutable image, sitting between matter and mediums, the photograph is seen in a turbulent state of confusion and instability, both fixed and not. This turbulence reveals an important ambiguity; it reorders perception before representation, returning the photograph to the experiential realm. This rupture collapses the dividing line of image to the sensuous world, encompassing the body, showing the potential to form multiplicities of new and unique situations... These affective and turbulent qualities manifest in the photograph as a threshold, a threshold to the Other, to dialogue, to performance, to unforeseen imaginative narratives, gesture and material matter. It shows its state as crucially undone, continually merging and emerging.

The research widens critical reflection on the material encounter of photography in the social and cultural sensorium. The visceral and psychological enquiry of this project draws on key texts relating to photography’s expanded field (Baker 2005) as well as the ‘experiential turn’ (von Hantelmann 2014). Furthermore, considering the embodied encounter through the critical sphere of phenomenology; (Merleau-Ponty 1945; Dufrenne1973) and ‘situated cognition’; (Brown, Collins & Duguid 1989).

The research found relevance to the feminine sublime which sustains “a condition of radical uncertainty as the very condition of possibility” (Freeman 1995). As well as theory on ‘New Materialism’ in cultural geography, anthropology and contemporary feminism; to rethink and challenge conventional epistemological systems used to define our material world.

In wilding photographs, this practice-based research has challenged the narrow conception of photographic images as ubiquitous, immaterial representations. It has also sought to counter the dominant paradigm in photographic theory that overlooks the transformative, nuanced affective qualities of the material phenomenon of photography.