Unfolding presence: an interpretative phenomenological analysis of photography

Media theorist Marshall McLuhan argued that media actively shape and transform the spatial, temporal and biopsychosocial dimensions of our lives, facilitating modes of perception and experience that are, arguably, medium-specific. Seeking to better understand the movements of mediation that unfold in and through acts of photography, I conducted a series of in-depth interviews with five artist-photographers in which I asked them to describe what photography does for and to them, what it ‘affords’ and what it ‘requires.’ Through these interviews, the medium and practice of photography emerged as an influential participant in a range of complex existential and hermeneutic processes. Drawing on Deleuze’s concept of the fold, I mapped the movements of mediation as they unfold in embodied consciousness as a flow of un/folding a sense of time, space and presence, of enfolding embodied being-in-the world and of infolding a range of contexts that give perception a place in experience.