Photographic estrangement: the measure of distance in photographic relationships

Date
2008-02-14
Authors
Olsen, Claire
Supervisor
Charlton, James
Jansen, Dieneke
Item type
Thesis
Degree name
Master of Art and Design
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Auckland University of Technology
Abstract

This research project investigates how estrangement is manifested within the photographic image, and how levels of estrangement establish conditions for the relationships between the subject, viewer and artist. Since the medium's inception the photographic process has involved encountering and negotiating otherness and the place of strangers. Over time a consistent photographic power dynamic has been established, and this project examines to what extent participants in this dynamic can escape or yield to the historically sedimented structures in which they find themselves participating. The images in this body of work tread the line between typological portraits and tentative encounters with strangers. These encounters/images do not suggest personal identity but question what it is to be a photographic subject. Rather than offer psychological insight into the subject, they attempt to foreground the signifying systems and process of photographic "representation". The project explores estrangement through physical and conceptual distance, negotiating photography's relationship to the real as a process, an image and an object.

Description
Keywords
Portraiture , Photographic theory , Indexicality , Photographic distance , Photographic space
Source
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