The Handheld Image: Art, History and Embodiment
PhD Thesis, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, 2018
ABSTRACT
This thesis investigates how images become present through movement and bodily performance. Inspiring this investigation are the contemporary practices of viewers engaging with still and moving images of people on their handheld screen devices. These practices are not only central to contemporary visuality, they also provide a focus for two wider themes relating to images of people: first, the dynamic tension between image control and circulation; and second, the mutual contestation of the physical and the virtual.
To explore the struggle between image control and circulation, this thesis compares the dissemination of the twenty-first-century digital image with two historical instances of the handheld image: the sixteenth-century portrait miniature and the nineteenth-century carte de visite photographic portrait. While the physical control of the portrait miniature was paramount, the carte de visite, as the first form of mass-produced photograph, betrays the social benefits and perils of the shift from control to circulation. These historical forms are augmented through a consideration of contemporary moving-image portraiture that reveals the portrait as an interface for the interrelated demands and desires of artists, portrait subjects, and viewers.
Having tracked handheld images through the sixteenth-century bedchamber and the nineteenth-century parlour, this thesis then follows handheld devices into the twenty-first-century bed to witness the contest between the somatic and the virtual: between the vulnerable, fatigued body and the seductions of online screen engagement. This thesis challenges the view that an image becomes more powerful through unfettered circulation. Rather it proposes that the potency of an image is powered by the contestation of meaning and memory, through the struggle between circulation and control. It is through these moments of struggle, and the unstable fluctuations between the actual and the virtual, that the image becomes present.