Beyond The Photograph

Works from the doctoral research GSA 2015-2019

I interrogate a specific power of family photographs.

I devised an excavation strategy. The collaborative and performative fine art photography research practice, enabled me to took up an emotionally proximal position to the participating storytellers, from which I detect, elevate and embed content into the critical discourse.

I hypothesise that family photographs can point beyond themselves. That beyond their visual representational surface they hold silenced, private content that can’t assimilate to official archives. Such content offsets the ideologically determined collective discourse; if excavated act as counter-memory and archive. I triangulate between fields of fine art, humanities and social sciences with methodologies of photography theory, archiving, autoethnography, oral history and philosophy. Through the theoretical and methodological foundations set by Marianne Hirsch, Annette Kuhn and Martha Langford,

The research output is a unique drawer system – that encompasses the written critical and the visual component of the research journey such as photobooks, visualisation maps and participatory objects.

Whereabouts You Are, Glasgow: Reid Gallery, 2016

Beyond the Photograph, Glasgow: Garage Space, 2019