Current Students

Briony Carlin

My research explores the affect of the photobook, meaning a specific, designed and printed contemporary book work, made in multiple by a photographic artist as a platform to present and disseminate a specific body of photographic work. The project considers questions such as the ways in which material form impacts the perception and reception of photographic images, and how apprehension of non-verbal texts is formed in a situated encounter. My thesis aims to understand and theorise the photobook as a social cultural artefact, and its encounter as a relational experience, by considering the photobook’s agency in the event of its interaction. My professional background is in photography curatorship, working previously as Assistant Curator of Photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum. My research interests stem from a desire to understand in greater detail the various material encounters with the photographic image. I regard photobooks through similar discourses to exhibition studies: both provide situated, temporal and interactive engagements with photographic images, presented through an interpretative design. My PhD extends this further through its aim to expand and update methods of object-centred research in cultural contexts with notions of more-than-human agency, through using photobooks to explore social interactions between humans and things.

Supervisory Team: Prof. Christopher Whitehead, Arts and Cultures (Newcastle), Dr Tina Sikka, Arts and Cultures (Newcastle).

Start Date: January 2017