What is it 'to move' a photograph? Artistic tactics for destabilizing and transforming images
type: CreativeWork
description: What is it ‘to move’ a photograph? Artistic tactics for destabilising and transforming images. This dissertation presents the findings of practice-led research that explores how artistic practices intervening in existing images ‘move’ images — in the sense of destabilise and transform. The notion ‘to move’ has guided this investigation and it has offered new insights on artistic tactics regarding the operations of de-contextualisation and re-contextualisation, montage, the categories of the still and the moving image and the ‘affective encounter’ that stems from touching. In parallel to exploring the artistic tactics of gleaning, working with archives, the performance-lecture, montage and the tactic I have called ‘performing documents’, this enquiry has also examined how images function, as this was crucial to conduct operations with them. Artistic practices that stemmed from existing images have been common over the last three decades. In the 1980s they operated through an understanding of the notion of ‘appropriation’ as ‘pastiche’. In contrast, this investigation, which also begins from working with existing images, explores photography through performance. These two artistic forms have often been defined in oppositional terms. This enquiry argues for a ‘performative materiality’ to renovate the discourse on images instead of the usual privileging position of the ‘textual’. This renovation deterritorialises and reterritorialises territories that are usually separated, in this case photography and performance, representation and presentation: putting these categories under pressure. As a result, this investigation re-conceptualises the notion of appropriation, through the practice of gleaning, towards an ethical and regenerative mode based on ‘invocation’, ‘restitution’ and ‘profanation’. Specifically, the work/research makes evident a form of ‘affective encountering’ of images which acknowledges their materiality, advocating that the materiality of images contrib…
abstract: What is it ‘to move’ a photograph? Artistic tactics for destabilising and transforming images. This dissertation presents the findings of practice-led research that explores how artistic practices intervening in existing images ‘move’ images — in the sense of destabilise and transform. The notion ‘to move’ has guided this investigation and it has offered new insights on artistic tactics regarding the operations of de-contextualisation and re-contextualisation, montage, the categories of the still and the moving image and the ‘affective encounter’ that stems from touching. In parallel to exploring the artistic tactics of gleaning, working with archives, the performance-lecture, montage and the tactic I have called ‘performing documents’, this enquiry has also examined how images function, as this was crucial to conduct operations with them. Artistic practices that stemmed from existing images have been common over the last three decades. In the 1980s they operated through an understanding of the notion of ‘appropriation’ as ‘pastiche’. In contrast, this investigation, which also begins from working with existing images, explores photography through performance. These two artistic forms have often been defined in oppositional terms. This enquiry argues for a ‘performative materiality’ to renovate the discourse on images instead of the usual privileging position of the ‘textual’. This renovation deterritorialises and reterritorialises territories that are usually separated, in this case photography and performance, representation and presentation: putting these categories under pressure. As a result, this investigation re-conceptualises the notion of appropriation, through the practice of gleaning, towards an ethical and regenerative mode based on ‘invocation’, ‘restitution’ and ‘profanation’. Specifically, the work/research makes evident a form of ‘affective encountering’ of images which acknowledges their materiality, advocating that the materiality of images contrib…
author: Cerezo, B
language: en
date published: 2015-01
date modified: 2026-07-24T06:30:54Z
provider: Nottingham Trent University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Nottingham Trent University