Contemporary photography practice: From landscape to expanded modes of place representation

Contemporary photographic practice has evolved into a broad field of possibilities, a flux of representational modes that represent emotions, experiences and feelings. In parallel the depth and layering of places offers a stimulating challenge to researchers and artists whom are willing to creatively explore nuances of land and nature as well as the multi-sensorial and spatial “reality” of places. The Waikato River is my research locale, located in the central North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand. I draw on contemporary photography practice and theory to develop multimodal approaches to my research place, expanding objective modes of landscape and place representation. I trace a timeline from early landscape photography practice particularly during the British colonisation in New Zealand juxtaposing my photography practice as a counter approach to Eurocentric modes of place representation. This is informed by local Waikato Māori cosmologies and more contemporary readings on place. As a result I conceptualised a theoretical framework around the notion of place imaginaries as a creative platform for the development of expanded photographic modalities.

Forest Loss is Accelerating Along the US Gulf Coast

Sea-level rise is impacting the longest undeveloped stretch of coastline in the contiguous United States: The Florida Big Bend. Due to its low elevation and a higher-than-global-average local rate of sea-level rise, the region is losing coastal forest to encroaching marsh at an unprecedented rate. Previous research found a rate of forest-to-marsh conversion of up to 1.2 km2 year−1 during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but these studies evaluated small-scale changes, suffered from data gaps, or are substantially outdated. We replicated and updated these studies with Landsat satellite imagery covering the entire Big Bend region from 2003 to 2016 and corroborated results with in situ landscape photography and high-resolution aerial imagery. Our analysis of satellite and aerial images from 2003 to 2016 indicates a rate of approximately 10 km2 year−1 representing an increase of over 800%. Areas previously found to be unaffected by the decline are now in rapid retreat.

Era of exploration and new topographics : annotated bibliographies of two landmark exhibitions

In 1975, two landscape photography exhibitions were held concurrently in upstate New York; Era of Exploration: The Rise of Landscape Photography in the American West, 1860-1885, at Buffalo's Albright-Knox Art Gallery and New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape, at the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, in Rochester (now The George Eastman International Museum of Photography and Film). Era of Exploration treated nineteenth-century landscapes of the American West while New Topographics addressed contemporary landscape practices. Though applying fundamentally different approaches to their subject matter, each exhibition proved to be extremely important to the understanding and development of not only landscape photography, but also the genre's place in photographic history. This thesis examines the essential literature relating to these two landmark exhibitions, through the construction of two extensive annotated bibliographies. Each bibliography comprises nine sections that present and evaluate significant materials, published both before and after the exhibition, relating to the exhibitions and their publications, the included photographers, and the exhibitions' influence as revealed in subsequent specialized studies and general histories of photography. The bibliographies' chronological listing allows readers to re-construct the exhibitions, and to trace the development of historical and curatorial interest in the exhibitions, the photographers, and American western landscape photography. The thesis describes the process of compiling and annotating this literature and offers reflections on how these two important exhibitions, while employing very different curatorial approaches, influenced the aesthetics, methodologies and concepts of landscape photography.

Era of exploration and new topographics : annotated bibliographies of two landmark exhibitions

In 1975, two landscape photography exhibitions were held concurrently in upstate New York; Era of Exploration: The Rise of Landscape Photography in the American West, 1860-1885, at Buffalo's Albright-Knox Art Gallery and New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape, at the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, in Rochester (now The George Eastman International Museum of Photography and Film). Era of Exploration treated nineteenth-century landscapes of the American West while New Topographics addressed contemporary landscape practices. Though applying fundamentally different approaches to their subject matter, each exhibition proved to be extremely important to the understanding and development of not only landscape photography, but also the genre's place in photographic history. This thesis examines the essential literature relating to these two landmark exhibitions, through the construction of two extensive annotated bibliographies. Each bibliography comprises nine sections that present and evaluate significant materials, published both before and after the exhibition, relating to the exhibitions and their publications, the included photographers, and the exhibitions' influence as revealed in subsequent specialized studies and general histories of photography. The bibliographies' chronological listing allows readers to re-construct the exhibitions, and to trace the development of historical and curatorial interest in the exhibitions, the photographers, and American western landscape photography. The thesis describes the process of compiling and annotating this literature and offers reflections on how these two important exhibitions, while employing very different curatorial approaches, influenced the aesthetics, methodologies and concepts of landscape photography.

Visualizing Debt and Credit in Hồ Chí Minh City

While conducting research on debt in the lives of sex workers in Hồ Chí Minh City, I stumbled upon an ad a moneylender had glued to a wall. It revealed that financialization was thriving in Vietnam, and more specifically that credit was rapidly expanding and colonizing the urban landscape. Photography became a tool to visually capture this radical financial transformation. This article argues that photography can be an effective inductive research method for moving from the particular to the general and seeing the big picture. I contend that looking at the world through the camera viewfinder with an open mind can help us to uncover hidden patterns and generate a rich and meaningful overall picture of a research problem. This process facilitates the formation of research perspectives and generalizations based on observations. I support this argument by describing the reflexive journey that drove me from photographing debt records in enclosed spaces to wandering in Hồ Chí Minh City’s streets to document a thriving credit boom. This journey radically transformed my research agenda on credit and debt.