What happens when we take a photograph?

The photoshoot as a choreographic encounter

Hamish MacPherson. 2021

Largely overlooked in the literature, overshadowed by discourse on the resulting photograph, the photographic encounter will be understood as a socially situated event in which both micro improvisations (bodily awareness, movement, aesthetics) and macro relations (power, authority, care, representation) are played out. 

The research will look at the photographic encounter through the lens of choreography, both in traditional terms (of rhythm, duration, proximity and gesture etc.) and more somatic or expanded  approaches (examining the felt experience of the participants).

Najah. 2021

The first photograph of a person was taken in 1838 and now, 180 years later, we have never taken so many photos of each other (and ourselves). In all that time the performance of taking a photograph, “has been largely neglected,” but is something that “can constitute the locus of real aesthetic experience and value.” (Shusterman 2012). 

This practice-based research project will look at the activity of portrait photography as a kind of choreography (with the photographer as choreographer). By focussing on participants of the photo shoot rather than the view of the finished image, the research will shed light on the interpersonal and political forces at play in such encounters. 

This project uses practice-as-research to understand the interpersonal and political forces at play when we take a photograph. I propose that the photographer is a type of choreographer responsible for holding [proposing, monitoring, allowing making changes] the spatio-temporal [what concretely happens in times and space for how long etc.] and social worlds [people’s feelings] of the creative process. In doing so, I will bring choreographic and photographic practice and theory into dialogue. 

What happens when someone takes a photograph of a willing person during a photographic portrait shoot? The research will work from the inside of the shoot outwards (focussing on the experience of those directly involved) rather than the outside-in (focussing on the experience of people looking at a photograph who were not involved in its creation) which is the established [more common] position of photographic discourse. 

This research will provide fresh perspectives of photographic practice and pedagogy as well as expanded choreographic and somatic thinking into one of the most ubiquitous actions in the 21st century.