Figuring the photographic portrait studio as a psychic apparatus

This exhibition marks the culmination of an AHRC funded PhD research project that has been undertaken at the University of Brighton.

The photographic portrait studio is pictured here in ways that suggest the complex yet vital relationships between photography and the production of modern subjectivity. The studio encounter seems haunted by a constraining and coercive discourse, moulding bodies to a standardised set of typologies that seem increasingly anachronistic. Yet the ever more banal conventions of the studio photograph mask a psychical dimension in which the mobilisation of desire elicits an unease that is perhaps unique to the photographic representation of the self. The way that these seemingly disparate qualities coexist within the architecture and the apparatus of the photographic studio is proposed through this photographic practice and goes on to become articulated and conjectured through the written element of this research.