A Circle Around a Photograph: On Photographing as Research
We are delighted to announce the Public Defense of Katarina Šoškić!
This dissertation examines photographing as a research practice, analysing the gestures and processes that precede, surround, and condition the creation of an image.
A photographer often acts from a place of knowing, while a researcher is driven by what is not yet known. As a professional photographer and a researcher, the author asks whether these two seemingly opposed positions can be reconciled, and how photography can function as a mode of inquiry.
Taking the phenomenon of travel and tourism as an initial site for this study, the author tests the capacities of the photographic medium and the roles a photographer and their choices play in documenting, depicting, and generating realities. The author experiments with non-linear forms of text construction, treats the camcorder as a writing tool, and creates chapters of an imaginary audio-photo book. Rather than focusing on the documentary potential of the photographic image and its conventional modes of display, this PhD study employs walking, circling, shifting points of view, filming, and reading in public as means of reporting on the experience of photographing as a bodily, durational, and reflective act.
