Loss in Space: Deconstructing Urban Rephotography

This practice-led PhD project investigates the photographic representation and mapping of lost urban landscapes. Through the use (and deliberate mis-use) of rephotographic techniques and archive images of the city, the work interrogates various ontological problems regarding time, materiality and medium, the spectrality of the changing city and the issues this poses for cultural memory and the archive.

Theories by Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin and Mark Fisher are brought together to underpin the practice, which deals directly with this absence by returning to places which no longer exist. Archive images of parts of the city which have changed beyond all recognition (either through rapid urbanisation, rewilding or slum clearance), are reappropriated to create ‘impossible’ rephotographic montages, which ‘deconstruct’ themselves. The usual trick of perfectly registering two images of the same scene from different time periods is only possible when features of that landscape persist, rendering the practice a meditation on permanence, rather than transience. This deconstructed form of rephotography works to reveal the latent impermanence of these urban spaces, but also the photographic artefact itself. Subject to the same forces of entropy and change as everything else, even this photographic afterlife must eventually come to an end – something we don’t usually see in the digital image itself.

The resulting rephotographic works are then projected back into the landscape and filmed, blurring the boundaries between photograph and moving image, then and now, material and immaterial. Through these haunting interventions the project hopes to reveal issues of transience and erasure in our cities, and the photographic archives which represent them.