Abstract
This practice-based research critically examines the cultural and theoretical discourses surrounding landscape studies, as well as photography's traditional role in visualising place and nature. Recognising photography's capacity to shape geographic imagination, the main objective of this thesis is to develop original photographic strategies to investigate the value of place to identity and sense of belonging, reimagining the hegemonic ways rural landscape has traditionally been represented and valued.The project sits within a field of landscape photographic practice using analogue and darkroom methodologies. It is developed through a series of small, monochromatic images taken with a 4x5 field camera, hand-printed on traditional silver halide film, and created in response to walks along the ancient paths of the South Downs. Organised in a series of unpopulated landscapes bearing traces of a long history of human presence, these images form a collection of fragments of nature that, locating the rural within a local landscape, combines individual and collective memory, interior and social spaces. Memory plays an essential part in the research and is translated through diverse artistic strategies, fostering a self-reflective practice that—connecting meaning to process—cultivates a performative concept of the photographic gesture, capable of evoking memory's partial and selective mechanisms and the invisible emotional ties that connect people with places.
The critical thinking of Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Karen Barad's agential realism, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology underpin the research's methodology. They provide a critical filter to reconsider photographic landscape representation and materiality as having social and political agency rather than as instruments of control and consumption. Through embodied practices like walking and darkroom operations, this methodology champions the primacy of the body in environmental perception and advocates for sensorial engagement with the landscape. This approach offers a richer understanding of place anchored in embodied experience and, through the performative qualities of photography, reimagines the landscape as a space where identity is aesthetically negotiated in contact with the surrounding environment.
By adopting a performative, rather than representational, approach to photography, the research recognises its force in producing new imaginaries and influencing perceptions. Through the development of experimental, analogue photographic practices that challenge the medium's ontological and epistemological characteristics, the research makes significant contributions to the field of landscape photography by visualising the hidden and unseen bonds that tie people to places, thus providing new conditions for alternative ways of thinking and relating to rural place and understanding landscape and belonging.
| Date of Award | Sept 2024 |
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| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | Fergus Heron (Supervisor), Douglas McNaughton (Supervisor) & Zoe Childerley (Supervisor) |