Dust: Exploring the relationship between contemporary modes of viewing the printed photographic image

This practice-based research project was initiated through and informed by my own fine art practice, and examines how dust may be used as a visual element within contemporary image making to generate new modes of viewing and making. The practical work brings together the digital photographic print (as a landscape image) and images of dust to question how digital photographic surface and drawings of dust may sit together within the same pictorial surface to open up new possibilities of reading space and bringing about new apprehensions of temporality and mortality.

Theoretical and philosophical context is considered through two contrasting notions of pictorial orientation, the vertical (Alberti, 1435), and the horizontal plane (Steinberg, 1972)and of the interruptive, physical and metaphorical reading of dust within the reading of the photographic printed image. An assertion of the importance of tactile touch and proximity during image creation is made, referencing the thinking of Aristotle, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. Through an analysis of a number of key artists’ works, including Helen Chadwick’s The Oval Court, Carcass (1986); Man Ray and Duchamp’s Dust Breeding (1920); and Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Seascapes – along with a series of practical investigations using a digital flat bed scanner, the research explores how shifts in making and viewing occur as a consequence of changes in image orientation and materiality, and offer the potential of disruption or interruption in the viewer’s perception of photographic space. The experiments and analysis underpin the central argument of the research and demonstrate how materiality and orientation of making are key aspects of image creation, aspects which can be manipulated to create contradictory visual readings of surface and space. The tension brought about by this visual contradiction opens up new possibilities in the perceptions and meanings within the photographic print, tension further underlined by the significant symbolic and indexical presence of dust within the image.