Photography and Culture, 14.3 (2021): 371-393.

In special issue of Photography & Culture, Digital Heritage in Cultural Conflicts, edited by Gil Pasternak, 2021.

In March 1942, the Director of British Naval Intelligence, Admiral John Godfrey made a public appeal via the BBC Radio requesting listeners to send in holiday photographs and postcards of Europe, particularly places of potential military interest. Relevant photographs garnered from the public for Operation Overlord were incorporated into military briefing materials, along with maps and zero-elevation aerial photographs, then issued to assault troops in preparation for the invasion of France in June 1944.

Photography and Culture, 12.2 (2019): 227-248.

The German Democratic Republic undertook mass surveillance of its citizens during the period 1950–1989 undertaken by its secret police service, which took the form of documents, audio recordings, moving footage, and approximately two million photographs. This article considers the ways in which photography was utilised by the surveillance regime to infiltrate everyday lives.

Mashriq and Mahjar: Journal of Middle East and North African Migration Studies 6, no. 1, (2019).

In her writings and video works, Hito Steyerl presents a disruptive tension between the pervading sense of constantly being under surveillance and the desire not to be seen or to be invisible. This essay takes these concepts as a point from which to consider an aesthetics of disruption and the conditions that cause a subject or an image to withdraw, to hide or to disappear in the work of artists from the Arab diaspora; Cherine Fahd, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige.

IMAGE: Cherine Fahd, Ephemeral sculpture no 1. with fan, 2013, Courtesy of the artist.

In Photographies 9.3 (2016): 233-249.

In “The Ontology of the Photographic Image”, André Bazin elucidates how photographic images enable the subject to elude death because by its very nature the image preserves the subject through the act of memory and remembering. This paper explores the disruption to photography’s meaning and memory in selected photographs by Thomas Demand that are restagings of photographs by Adolf Hitler’s official photographer Heinrich Hoffmann. This paper analyses these photographs in terms of memory and indexicality and considers how banality can affect the circumstances of looking—a concept that is here applied in order to reconsider these images.

IMAGE: Thomas Demand, Thomas Demand, Modell/Model. 2000. C-print/Diasec, 164.5 x 210 cm. Courtesy Demand Studio. © Thomas Demand. VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn/Viscopy, Sydney.

In Photographies 3.1 (2010): 7-21.

Photographs of the urban landscape reveal a multiplicity of histories and memories that challenge perceptions of knowing and seeing. I argue that such images indicate and speak about events, memories and histories that form part of the fractured space that sits outside of, or adjacent to, the events that they reference. In this paper, the literary Denkbild, as practised by Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer and others, is used as a means by which to analyse both photography and re-photography of place in the context of post-war urban landscape.

IMAGE: Thomas Struth, Hermannsgarten, Weissenfels 1991, © 2009 Thomas Struth

with Ann Shelton in Memory Connection, 1.1 (2011): 335–347.

The relationship between the photographic impulse to record events in the landscape and how those events are viewed in the “here now” unfolds across complex layers of meaning that engage with artistic, philosophical, and theoretical positions on photography in relation to memory, trauma, time, and history. What is the association between trauma and time, between the photographic image, the past and the present? This article examines how the photographic might relate to concepts of trauma, and how those subjects are expressed in relation to landscape from a contemporary position.

IMAGE: Sarah Schönfeld. Lichtung from the series Void, 2009. Courtesy the artist.