A Circle Around a Photograph: On Photographing as Research

A photographer often acts from a place of knowing, while a researcher is driven by what is not yet known. As a professional photographer and a researcher, Katarina Šoškić asks whether these two seemingly opposed positions can be reconciled, and how photography can function as a mode of inquiry.

Taking the phenomenon of travel and tourism as an initial site for this study, she tests the capacities of the photographic medium and the roles a photographer and their choices play in documenting, depicting, and generating realities. She experiments with non-linear forms of text construction, treating her camcorder as a writing tool, and creating chapters of an imaginary audio-photo book.

Rather than focusing on the documentary potential of the photographic image and its conventional modes of display,  Katarina Šoškić' PhD study employs walking, circling, shifting points of view, filming, and reading in public as means of reporting on the experience of photographing as a bodily, durational, and reflective act.

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Supervisor: Martin Krenn
Examination committee members: Ruth Anderwald, Martin Krenn, Marcel René Marburger, Barbara Putz-Plecko, Nina Strand