The AAANZ PhD prize is judged on the merits of the final submitted thesis or exegesis and documentation of a recently graduated PhD student The prize alternates yearly between research-based and practice-led. In 2024 the PhD Prize was open to practice-led PhD entries, of which, three were shortlisted.
WINNER
$1000 sponsored by Taylor and Francis
Yvette Hamilton, ‘Photography at the Event Horizon: The Appearance and Disappearance of a Medium’, (University of Sydney)
Abstract
On April 10th, 2019, scientists unveiled the world’s first ever photograph of a black hole, declaring, “we have seen what we thought was unseeable.”* The photograph of the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy prompted this doctoral research, which argues that in the contemporary era of ‘late photography’, the photographic medium can be likened metaphorically to a black hole: its trillions of images create a powerful force and scale that is almost invisible due to its ubiquity and supermassive attributes.
Through practice-led research, “Photography at the Event Horizon” aligns photographic processes, images, and the medium itself to the qualities of black holes as a key metaphor for understanding the beginning and end of photography. In making such an argument and in recognition of the scientific claim that most black holes are the result of a collapsing star, this metaphor is extended further to contend that early photography can be likewise aligned to the formation of a star. Thus, this research examines the ontology of the photographic medium at two points in time: its star-like appearance(s) in the nineteenth century, and what I argue is its black hole-like disappearance in the twenty-first century. Where a star emits light, a black hole removes it. Where early photography aimed to capture light, contemporary photography no longer needs it.
Emerging technological breakthroughs since the inception of photography have tended to produce images that are often unfocused and wavering, pushing at the limits of the medium. This research aligns this material blurriness with the equally blurry ontological foundations that lie at the heart of photography. It explores these zones through the lens of creative practice, where blurriness, light, and dark are familiar territory for artists working with photography. Within this research, the emphasis is not centred on the attempt to draw sharp definition within a medium that has always been ontologically unfocused, but rather to examine these blurry edges, and to show how photographic practice eloquently teases out this ontological blur.
In using contemporary art practice as the means to examine photographic ontology, this research also shifts the discourse from the often-passive response to photographs that are seen but not made by theorists, to the active creation of photographic work by creative practitioners that articulate the current conditions of the medium. In doing so, this research engages with the shifting territory of photography’s representational functions. From its past as a presentation of the “what-has-been” as coined by Roland Barthes, to the new condition of what Mette Sandbye calls the “what-is-going-on” of contemporary photographic
culture.**
“Photography at the Event Horizon” uses the M87 black hole photograph as both its origin point and locus to undertake an onto-epistemological exploration of the medium of photography through creative practice, with specific attention paid to interrogating the dominant representational contract of photography. By drawing upon my own practice-led research and the works of other contemporary artists, this research stakes a claim for photographic practice as an eloquent contributor to contemporary debates around ontologies of photography at its beginning and at its end.
* National Science Foundation News, ”[LIVE] Unveiling First Ever Image of Black Hole,” streamed 10 April 2019, YouTube, 7:15, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnJi0Jy692w.
** Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Vintage, 2000), 85; Mette Sandbye, “It Has Not Been—It Is. The Signaletic Transformation of Photography,” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 4 (2012): 2, https://doi.org/10.3402/jac.v4i0.18159.
Shortlisted
Rebecca Grace Richards, ‘Muda is bigger than the archive: Analysing Adnyamathanha use of archival photographs in communicating and negotiating Adnyamathanha Aboriginal identities’, (University of Adelaide)
Abstract
This thesis analyses Adnyamathanha photography, focusing on Charles Mountford’s photographs within the archives and their repatriation to the Adnyamathanha community. Throughout this thesis, I weave a pathway through various Adnyamathanha
interpretations of historical photographs of ourselves and our Country and contrast these understandings to Udnyu (or Western people’s) understandings of these photographs.
I am an Adnyamathanha woman collaborating with my community for this research. This thesis is based on fieldwork, including interviews, workshops, and photo-elicitation. I chose a range of photographs from the Mountford collection in the State Library of South Australia to take back to Adnyamathanha. I conducted interviews with Elders, sometimes alone or with their families. I held workshops in several schools with young people to gain artistic responses to the photographs. I also curated the Minaaka Apinhanga: Through Many Eyes exhibition (Richards 2019)— hereafter referred to as ‘the Exhibition’— at the South Australian Museum in 2019 of photographs, objects and artworks made in response to photographs.
I predicate this thesis on knowledge and understanding of Adnyamathanha epistemology, especially about photographs, rather than an analysis of Euro-Western (hereafter referred to by the Adnyamathanha term of Udnyu) understandings and anthropological theories of Adnyamathanha society. I explicate Muda as encompassing Adnyamathanha law, history, and Creation stories. Muda underlies Adnyamathanha vision, interpretation, and discussion of many aspects of relationships. It is an overarching concept I need to address to understand how Adnyamathanha people view photographs. My aspiration is to fulfil, in some measure, the first aspect of Tuhiwai Smith’s (1999: xiii) call for decolonising methodologies: to ‘open up possibilities for knowing and understanding the world differently’. This is an Adnyamathanha-grounded theory of Adnyamathanha interpretation and uses of photography. These are our stories.
Across the generations, perceptions of photographs have a consistency as well as significant differences. The continuity of concepts in Adnyamathanha understandings of photographs shows the strength of the intergenerational transmission of culture. There have been over 180 years of Adnyamathanha contact with Udnyu people. However, many aspects of interpretations of the photographs are culturally specific, showing the power of those interpretations for both young and old Adnyamathanha participants regardless of Udnyu pressures to assimilate into Udnyu (Western) culture. This is particularly the case with Adnyamathanha’s understanding of Spirit in the photograph, as shown within this thesis.
Analysis of Adnyamathanha understandings of photographs also reveal historical and colonial misconceptions of the interpretation of Adnyamathanha gender relationships, which research has sometimes erroneously imputed to Adnyamathanha society today. This thesis shows how some of these misunderstandings of gender relationships have shaped contemporary understandings of kinship, relationality, and gender relationships.
The second aspect of Tuhiwai Smith’s (1999: xiii) call seeks solutions to problems caused by colonisation. I endeavoured to suggest ways such efforts can be further advanced in managing archives and in representing Indigenous people. To avoid misconceptions arising from some earlier representations of Adnyamathanha and Aboriginal people in general, I suggest a way to manage more adequate representations in conjunction with the contemporary subjects and owners of that representation.
Miska Mandic, ‘Folding Cinema: How does a cinematic temporality that is relational and intimate work against dominant, established modes of temporal reproduction?’, (University of New South Wales)
Abstract
This thesis sets out to theorise how a cinematic practice can consciously orient itself towards an alternate sense of time, in the process generating a responsive and relational model of engagement with the ecologies of production. The project analyses and critiques the dominant time of colonial-capitalist Western modernity through a cinematic practice by first interrogating cinema’s emergence from and connections to colonial-capitalism, and second by investigating how the cinematic medium is temporised. To achieve this, two cinema works were produced as the practice-based component of the doctoral research project: The Fold (2021) and Residue (2024). These two cinematic works and the accompanying dissertation contribute to, and extend, the idea that time, as it is reproduced by the geometries of colonial-capitalist Western modernity—those same linear geometries seen in cinematic production systems—is relevant to how many humans see themselves in relation to the ecological environments we constitute. Thinking of time as a material in the very production of cinema, or as a contributing ecological force within a ‘cine-ecology’, a term from Debashree Mukherjee, is necessary because it encourages a practice aligned with the survival of complex ecosystems under attack from the ongoing colonial-capitalist project. I propose that while late colonial-capitalist temporality is linear, incremented and precise, it interweaves with many other kinds of temporal reckoning, where non-linear images abound. These non-linear images provide not only ways of thinking time otherwise, but offer methods for an alternative cinematic, temporal practice able to energise film-makers and spectators to recognise their impact in creating cultural understandings of time, thus empowering them to engage with the material, temporal and historical realities of cinema in relational and intimate ways.