Cameraless Photography and the Body

This research investigates the relationship between analogue cameraless photography and the body. It argues that direct bodily engagement with light-sensitive materials constitutes a critical practice capable of dismantling the hierarchical perspectival systems through which photographic representation is conventionally organised. The research is underpinned by a practice-led methodology in which the colour darkroom serves as a site for play and embodied inquiry. The practical dimension is tracked through four types of practice, each generating knowledge that theory alone cannot account for. A central finding is that photographic paper is not a passive substrate but an active material agent, structurally similar to human skin, whose encounter with the body is one of mutual exchange.

The theoretical framework draws on the index (Peirce), the haptic (as elaborated by Laura U. Marks) and the informe as formulated by Georges Bataille and developed by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss. The frameworks used resist fixed categorisation and refuse hierarchical organisation, as does the practice. Developed alongside theories of play, feminist accounts of the uncontainable body, and a framework of baroque vision, the sublime, horizontality, and non-perspective, the work establishes cameraless photography as a refusal of the camera apparatus and its perspectival and ideological orders that are encoded by the camera.

The research contributes to understanding cameraless photography on its own terms, repositioning the photographer’s body as simultaneously the subject and material of photographic production. The project work demonstrates that direct bodily engagement with photographic materials constitutes a rigorous method for generating knowledge about representation, materiality, and the boundaries that organise both body and photographic practice. The culminating final body of work, Alien Material (2025), enacts these arguments in thirty-nine photographs in which the boundary between the body and the photograph is not a fixed condition but a site of active and generative exchange.