Research

When first confronting the photographic object we see three-dimensional space compressed to two, scale reduced, colour washed out, tonal values heightened, visual reach and dimensions condensed and warped, movement frozen, time halted and so on. In other words, a range of complex optical, chemical and electronic operations produce the photographic object which is a particular representation of space and time. Importantly though, this is an object which can be handled, exchanged, published, archived—an object which feels as though it is part of, an imprint of, has a haptic relation to that which it represents and takes part in a social visuality. A first approach to photographic images then is to take them as representations of space, yet then from our experience with the photograph to understand that such a representation figures the relation between lived space, what we experience in everyday life, and a conventionalized conceptual framework coherently expressed as a photograph through the transformations mentioned above. Thus photographs evidence ways in which following Henri Lefebvre’s tripartite system of spatial practice, representations of space and representational space, space is socially produced as an emergence.
Understandings of space play a key role in determining how photographic visuality may be understood, and indeed vice versa. My intention is to explore exactly that—a variety of approaches to space and pitch them against understandings of photographic visuality and practices. Subsequent intersections between visual, textural, and philosophical discourses point out the uncontainable nature of images and space which weave through our lived experience.

Selected Works

• P. Burleigh, "The Burden of Moment: Photography's Inherent Monumentalizing Effect", in: Bezzola Lambert, Ladina; Ochsner, Andrea (Hg.), Moment to Monument: The Making and Unmaking of Cultural Significance (Bielefeld: transcript 2009), 185-195
• P. Burleigh and A. Ochsner, "The British Sitcom in the 1970s: applied tactics in confined spaces", 07.02.2009
• P. Burleigh, "Wallpainting", Imprimerie, Basel: 10.6.2009 (unpublished)
• P. Burleigh, "Photographic forms of the beach.", Conference 'Twixt Land and Sea: the beach in literature, film and cultural theory', Bern: 19.6.2009  (unpublished)
• P. Burleigh, "An Engagement Photograph in a Victorian Garden", CUSO, Université de Genève: 6.6.2008 (unpublished)