photo:fugue - complexity in the photographic universe

 

This thesis offers a contemporary account of photography by presenting it as a as systems of complex connections, ideas, processes, and technologies. It is an approach to photography which resonates with emerging research in other fields including the life and social sciences. It explores and highlights the complexity of photography, and emphasizes the connectedness of this view of photography to broader cultural ideas and activities. In order to pursue this inquiry, it is necessary to move away from conventional critiques of photography which limit the analysis to the photograph and its subject matter. Restricting analysis to the photograph, at best distorts and at worst ignores, the dynamic sets of relationships, connections and interactions that constitute photography. To understand photography in terms of its complexity, this thesis engages with principles and tools derived from systems thinking, cybernetics, network science, and other concepts related to the sciences of complexity. It is photography at a systems level.

 

This approach to photography is able to include marginalized, unconventional and hybrid photographic practices; accounts for change (technological, ideological and historical); has the capacity to investigate and offer insight into photography's contemporary condition; and highlights photography's relationship/position within visual and information cultures. Within the context of this research project it supports the generation of artifacts and forms the basis for the critique of those artifacts. It provides insight into the study of photography more generally while still being inclusive of conventional critiques and histories of photography. It offers a range of principles and concepts that better account for photography's transitions within information culture.

 

The online exegesis is available at photofugue.com.au