Dust: Exploring the relationship between contemporary modes of viewing the photographic printed 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 drawing (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, 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 making is drawn through the thinking of Aristotle, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. 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, explores how shifts in making and viewing occur as a consequence of image orientation and materiality, creating a disruption or interruption in the viewer’s perception of photographic space. The experiments and analysis underpin the central argument of the research, demonstrating how materiality and orientation of making is fundamental to a way of generating an image, which is visibly pulled apart through contradictory visual readings of surface and space. This visual contradiction opens up new possibilities in the perceptions and meanings within the photographic print whilst revealing the significant symbolic and indexical nature of dust within the image.