Telling places, a photographic exploration
Date
2019-12
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University
Abstract
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis and accompanying exhibition explore landscape
photography practice within the politically fraught context of the
Southern African landscape and equally fraught traditions of
landscape representation, especially in previously colonised
countries. Ideological and political readings of landscape
photographs tend to automatically position the artist and, by
extension, the viewer, in a distanced, contemplative relation to the
landscape (Malpas, 2011a: 6). This kind of relation skews power
relations towards the viewer; in part due to the nature of the
photographic medium with its monocular, static, linear perspective.
This thesis seeks to question this determinist position and to explore
through reflective photographic practice an alternative frame within
which to engage with places photographically.
With this study I propose that a postphenomenological approach to
making and thinking about landscape photography can bring about
a co-constitutive relation between photographer, camera, and
environment through which places continue to become. Landscape
photography as representation of place is conceptualised as
consisting of two stages: firstly, the act of photographing in the
physical environment (Being-in) and secondly, the process of
preparing and presenting the works (Telling-of).
For the first phase, Being-in, I created three photographic events
that allowed me, as a practising photographer, to engage with the
complexity of place in terms of Casey’s (2001: 417) definition, which
draws socio-political histories, personal histories, and the physical
environment together into individual embodied experience. In the
cyclic process of engaging in the practice of photographing place
and reflecting on this practice in relation to phenomenological
understanding of being, as well as postphenomenological
developments that entangle technologies in this being, I tested the
practice against the theory and the theory against the practice, as
recommended for a phenomenology of practice by Max Van Manen
(2014: 66-68). For each of the three places – Morgenster, Mochudi,
and Kempton Park in Southern Africa – selected for their role in
different times in my personal history, I chose a different
photographic system with which to work that resonated with my
individual experience of that place and facilitated distinctive
expressions of the experience. I then produced three bodies of
photographic works.
Phase 2 is titled Telling-of. This section deals with the process of
bringing the work produced in Phase 1 into the public discourse on
land in South Africa as well as on South African landscape
photography. In this telling-of, physical places are represented as
‘landscape’, with all its ideological and art historical ‘baggage’. To
contextualise the work created for this thesis, I consider this
‘baggage’ and relate it to the ideas and understandings developed
in Phase 1, as well as a brief history of landscape photography in
South Africa. UNSETTLED: One Hundred Year Xhosa War of
Resistance (1776-1876) by Nunn is discussed as emblematic of South
African photographers’ engagement with land from a highly political,
personally involved stance, but also as a form of practice-based
research. Curatorial practice is then explored as a form of telling-byshowing
in the work of Nunn, as well as the curation of my exhibition
that forms part of this research: Telling Places: A Photographic
Exploration. I explore how the curatorial process becomes a
phenomenological act of shaping relations between display
technologies and viewers that tells of, and is telling, of places, and
thereby ‘emplaces’ the viewer.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Geen Afrikaanse opsomming beskikbaar nie.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Geen Afrikaanse opsomming beskikbaar nie.
Description
Thesis (PhD)--Stellenbosch University, 2019.
Keywords
Landscape photography -- Exhibitions, Phenomenology and art, Art philosophy, Phenomenology, Photography in the social sciences, UCTD