Fourteenth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

My ongoing PhD research is an investigation of the role of subjectivity in the response to photographs. It is predicated on the belief that conventional theoretical exposition cannot encompass the complexity, fluidity and particularity of a viewing event, or an extended ‘relationship’ with an image or set of images. A key part of the research is a creative critical thesis entitled ‘Ornaments of Forgetting’, which charts my intellectual and emotional engagement with an archive of slide photographs inherited from my father in 2017, mainly consisting of family and travel pictures taken in the 1960s and 70s. At the core of the work is a chapter that focuses on the relationship between a fleeting childhood event that, for me, marked the onset of a period of serious mental illness in my mother, and a set of contemporaneous photographs taken by my father (travelling in eastern Europe at the time) that are ostensibly unrelated to this disturbing encounter. I discuss how these images become quasi-documents of something entirely unrelated to their content, and how this displaced corroborative effect is nevertheless based on the ‘truth currency’ of analogue photographs, their causal, indexical relation to reality. My analysis is meta-theoretical: it is ‘theory’ that operates within the specifics of my circumstances, and is reliant upon the pictures’ non-literal, yet asymbolic, properties, as perceived by me. Structurally, I begin with an image–text version of this experience (using half-remembered dialogue and my father’s images) from which the key points will be elucidated and contextualised.