Latency in the Photographic Work of Ursula Schulz-Dornburg

This thesis investigates the archive of the German artist Ursula Schulz-Dornburg (born 1938), known for her mostly black-and-white conceptual photographs of architecture within landscape. Since the 1970s, Schulz-Dornburg has sought out places of transit and borderlands, locations geographically and politically caught up in a state of in-between. Her archive now forms a unique record of lands, people and places which have since been irrevocably changed, making it vulnerable to being read through a single historical lens.

Taking her archive as a complex case study, I investigate how its contents are positioned and repositioned politically across time. This thesis explores the challenges and possibilities of researching, curating and keeping for future posterity an artist’s archive which is continually in flux. Through breaking away from a chronological reading of the artist’s archive and allowing for a perpetual circulation of images, which shift back and forth in response to and anticipation of historic events, I aim to reveal an entanglement of narratives which overlap and converge across time and space.

Throughout this thesis, I propose latency as a methodology for understanding and interpreting photographic images and their relationship to past and future events. Here, latency acts as a framework through which to recognise an extended sense of time and space as evoked in Schulz-Dornburg’s images and how this allows them to operate recursively; to change and adapt as history unfolds and to anticipate multiple events in the past and into the future.