The Centre for the Material Culture of the Photograph (CMCP)

Rationale

The Centre for the Material Culture of the Photograph builds on the established strengths and interests within photographic and lens-based research at Aberystwyth University’s School of Art. The Centre encourages the development of unique enquiries into photographic processes and the photograph as object (collected, read, stored, displayed, iconicised).

In addition to supporting staff research interests, the Centre is a hub for the growing number of researchers at masters and doctorate level drawn to Aberystwyth and its photographic specialisms. In addition, the Centre is concerned with generating and supporting the submission of research funding applications within the broader context of the material culture of photography; it aims to augment the experience of postgraduate students by providing a focus for their research; and it encourages cross-disciplinary research in exciting contexts - moving from epistemology to ontology.

The department has a sustained and applied interest in exploring the specific characteristics of photographic production and consumption including, but not confined to: a scholarly exploration of historic and alternative photographic processes as the basis for fine art practice and art historical research; projects that explore the notion (and reliability) of the photograph as material evidence of something that ‘has been’ (the esoteric, the document, the fragment); image making as a mode through which generic notions of identity and memory can be explored; and a line of investigation testing readings of the photographic image as ‘popular culture’.

Research

Areas of research have included:

Material memories in wet-plate collodion memory-texts; memory and transience in 16mm film constructions; cultural supremacy and performance in photographic images; photography as material evidence of crime; fakes and forgeries; occult and anomalous phenomena in photographs; alternative approaches to photographic practices; race, myth and criminality in physiognomic photography; the ‘language’ of the snapshot; photographic domestic dialogues; the digital photograph as visual and virtual text; found photographs – similarities/commonalities; value and detritus, the ‘arc’ of an image in a photograph’s ‘life’; time in photography (analogue and digital discourses).

Advisory Board

Mark Osterman (Process Historian, George Eastman House, USA)
William Troughton (Visual Images Curator, the National Library of Wales)
Dr Chris Wright (Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths College)
Professor Dr Rolf Sachsse (Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Saar, Germany)