ORCID

Abstract

In so-called Australia, the legacies of British colonialism remain unsettled and unresolved, socially, politically and culturally. This thesis consists of a written and practice element that together explore whiteness and photography, and the ways they create and sustain affective atmospheres of imperial duress in suburban Naarm (Melbourne). The origins of this enquiry lie in my family histories of immigration and personal encounters with Australianness and Britishness. From these experiences, I identify a personal, nostalgic, cryptic and mythological sense of belonging. Thus, I explore the critical spaces where nostalgia, belonging and whiteness overlap using digital photographic experimentations. My practices think through the legacies of imperial violence, whilst mediating affective senses of belonging, while experimentations with personal collections and institutional archival images allow a thinking with decoloniality through methods of unlearning. Photographically, such critical and cultural work is minimal, particularly from UK-based practitioners. My methods open spaces for considering creative returns to, revisits and re-knowings of Imperial duress; photographic images are traced and layered, shifted and distorted, forming a practice that subverts photographic traditions, experiments with affect, and uses non-representational techniques exemplified by folding, layering and re-photographing. This engenders a process of remediation, with affective resonance, in which photography and theory become involute and unfixed, as they fold into and encounter themselves in practice and in thought. Through folding the significant surfaces of photography and theory I shift beyond the singular encounter with my topic, instead exploring it with multiple modes of practice and prose. Imperial duress, and its debris, are seen to shape and shift. Parallels between photography and whiteness are made explicit; both are seemingly concerned with the visual but more readily act in realms of the unseen and felt. Folding highlights the continual agency of the (photographic and imaginative) image, to return to, to feel, and to reconsider, while rephotographing problematises originality and/as the shuttered ‘event’ of imperial imagination. Folding and rephotographing, forms for re-emergence, and subsequently remediation, are processes for and of obfuscation, removal, repositioning, reconsidering and review. I consider this research as an ethical review of my own racialised experience of belonging (despite my practice remaining inescapably a further material manifestation of whiteness under conditions of imperial duress).

Keywords

Affect, Whiteness, Photography, Practice as research, Imperial Duress, Decoloniality

Document Type

Thesis

Publication Date

2025

Embargo Period

2025-02-18

Download

Share

COinS