In this article-based dissertation I problematize the concept of photographic materiality in contemporary art, which is currently evolving in two directions. On the one hand there has recently been a new interest in notably tactile methods of photographic image-making as photography is often used in collage, sculpture and mixed media. On the other hand, in the context of digitality, the materiality of the single photographic image seems to have become increasingly irrelevant. Photography in contemporary art is thus at the same time both extremely tactile and material, but also almost immaterial, a non-object. I investigate this materially twofold status through five case studies.
The international selection of artworks studied contest the ontological and conceptual limits of photography. In the works analyzed, photographic practices become intertwined with other material methods and environments: embroidery with needle and thread, exposure to geothermal forces, the agencies and workspaces of photography editing software, sculptural ways of working, the organic nonhuman agents and processes of bioart, and the sensitivities of scanography as an artistic process.
The main theoretical framework I use is new materialism, which I combine with art historical analysis and photography history and theory. The aim of my dissertation is to find new pathways of understanding the material aspects of photography, focusing on how materials and material environments factor in the creative process as well as in the interpretation of the artworks. Through a dialogical and multidisciplinary research stance, I aim to make a methodological contribution of reassessing the ways these phenomena can be studied.
Research on the materiality of photography has been gaining academic recognition since the 1990s, but until recently it has been mostly centered around social and cultural modes of employing photographs and photography. Photographic materialities have often been approached from a very practical point of view, such as how photographic archives and collections are managed and how analog/chemical photographs can be digitized for example. However, in connection to photography theory and philosophy, questions of materiality have until recently been seen as less significant. My study is situated in this meeting point between the philosophy of photography and the materiality of photography.