Finding the Found - Critically locating contextually-reflective photographs

Abstract

This research explores the ontological positioning of found photos. To date, there has been little research into the conditions which support how found photos exist or could exist in the digital era. However, as material conditions for the photograph in the analog era give way to mediations of increasingly subjective experiences with media, found photos can be analyzed for how they came to be through how they are experienced.

Found photographs operate as both a trace of the represented past and as evidence of technological and social relations during image-making. Therefore, found photos will be positioned as a contextually reflective artifact that is inclusive of a variety of influences beyond an overly simplified relationship with a photograph’s representational qualities. They will be used to reveal the act of noticing as a mediator of both localized visual-cultural and embodied experiences.

Therefore, the primary aim of this research is to situate found photos within digital era ontology by focusing on the experience of the finder in the act of noticing. A secondary aim is to see if found photos can be utilized to reflect on the conditions which impact how they are experienced. Both aims are necessary because of the situated and co-conditioned relationship, which brings photo-taking and photo-looking into a mediated interaction with imaging technology in the digital era.

The research unfolds by first exploring a theoretical grounding of the found photograph. In doing so, investigating the found photo as a phenomenon leads to conceptualizing a contextually bound found photo experience. Interviews with photographers, collectors, and those with a chance encounter with this media help to situate found photos as inducing awareness of socio-cultural and technological contexts beyond the image’s own frame (through trusting or doubting the mediation of their experiences). Because such impactors on experience are routinely overlooked, the found photo experience becomes one of seeing the unseen both within and through reflection on the act of noticing.

A comparison of locations where found photos are encountered in Hong Kong is analyzed to negotiate the found photo experience as a visual-material practice of noticing that can occur in daily life. These observations guide a series of workshops wherein local photographers, visual designers, and publishers encounter found photographs as an experience of seeing the unseen. These experiences consist of hermeneutic meaning-making as well as gestural and emotional registers. Together, they lead the found photo experience towards a processual-reflective ontological stance. As the initial theoretical grounding implies, the found photo experience is helpful for the future design frameworks that preface the ability of the user to notice the impact of Design’s own workings.

Date of Award	15 Jun 2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Supervisor	Jae-eun Oh (Chief supervisor) & Laurent Gutierrez (Co-supervisor)