Francesca Woodman and the Kantian Sublime (introduction)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, 2005

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2002

Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes’ final book, is a work steeped in associations of death, absence and memory. Published one year after the author’s premature death in 1981 as a result of injuries sustained in a road traffic accident, the book is a deeply personal meditation on the nature of photography. Barthes’ reasoning in Camera Lucida is mediated via an extended reflection upon one particular photograph of his recently deceased mother, Henriette Barthes, to whom he was very close and with whom he lived for many years. Nevertheless, despite the pall of grief with which the book is imbued, this essay sets out to discuss Barthes’ statement “Yet it is not (it seems to me) by Painting that Photography touches art, but by Theatre.” to understand its significance to photography beyond its parent text.

FICTION AND THE REACTION TO PHOTOGRAPHY: LITERALISM, THE LAW AND THE CONDITIONS AND THE CONTROL OF READING FROM THE INVENTION OF PHOTOGRAPHY TO THE 1920S, 2019

In this chapter, I aim to outline how photography was linked to literalism and literalist reading in art criticism in a strategy intended to produce, simultaneously, art viewers and readers. As I aim to show, fiction shared this strategy. Focusing on John Ruskin's writings, although I also discuss other art critics, I aim to show exactly how his tying together of literalism and photography and his position that they were limited in terms of artistic truth influenced both narrative painting and fiction and consequently produced both intended readers and art viewers. It is my intention to show how Ruskin's formulations were productively exploited by both narrative painting and fiction drawing on his own statements about the conceptual relationship between power, the law and reading which he understood as enmeshed and mutually reinforcing categories.

Academia Letters, 2021

My paper seeks to explore interlinks between gender, photography and pleasure and how gender is mediated through photography in the works of Barbara Kruger, Orlan and Cindy Sherman, who use the female, gendered and erotic body in order to rewrite the parameters of happiness and 'jouissance' by producing ad-scapes and photographs which bespeak the suture between the 'femaleness' of identity and the stereotypical notions of aesthetic female beauty as they are valorised and canonised in the West. In the first instance, the photographs themselves serve as an instance of the commodification of desire and pleasure in consumerist culture. Yet beyond their fetishistic value, they also exemplify an attempt to undermine phallogocentric discourse and the objectifying, 'penetrating' and all-seeing male gaze. By drawing on theorists such as Derrida, Cadava, Benjamin, Barthes and Sontag I hope to show that although such photographic representations can be extremely empowering and engaging in light of the various provocative issues they raise in relation to gender and the female body, they also freeze and stultify the female body in a kind of temporal death by placing it into and within the photographic frame and locking it into a framework of reciprocal (mostly male) gazes and exchanges.