PICTURING CLOUDS OF UNKNOWING:
Photography, Lostness, and Cognitive Decline
Lucy Carolan
Doctor of Philosophy
Newcastle University
School of Arts and Cultures
January 2024
ABSTRACT
The central premise of this doctoral project is that the progressive cognitive ambiguity that is dementia can be creatively apprehended by way of lostness. As defined by Rebecca Solnit, ‘lost’ holds “...two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing.” The initial hypothesis of this research was that in certain neurodegenerative conditions the familiar and unfamiliar can confoundingly combine, and that it’s through the lens of this particular combination that some comprehension of dementia as lived experience may be approached. The disorienting misperceptions most commonly encountered in cognitive decline are visual in nature. Given, then, that dementia reveals the importance of vision to perception, how may the photographic, with lostness as optic, be used to illuminate cognitive decline? In what ways can creatively visualising aspects of neurodegeneration in dementia inform understandings of its existential ambiguities?
Although dementia has been broached in the arts, photographically the tendency has largely been to look at the condition. In contrast, and through particular focus on symptoms that occur in dementia and the metaphors used to convey them – agnosias or ‘unknowings’ and, for example, ‘clouded thoughts’ – this research has aimed to develop fresh lens-based approaches to subjective experience of cognition as it declines. For this, photography has been tested in sculptural installations, as moving image, with creative writing, and in the medium of artists’ books. In the course of this hybrid practice-led enquiry, novel approaches to using the photographic as means of manifesting neurocognitive disorders have been opened, supporting the proposition that metaphoric ideations of imperceptible symptoms have direct relevance to photography as visual art, and thereby contributing to the growing field of creative approaches to cognitive decline. In parallel, reappraisal of the photographic from the perspective of dementia invites review of photography as an analogical medium. The conceptual and creative visual approach developed in the project offers distinctive insights into cognitive decline with ramifications beyond enhanced comprehension of it as lived experience.
CONTENTS
With thanks to Richard Talbot for making a PhD seem feasible in the first place; to Chris Jones and Andrew Newman for stepping forward as supervisors, Mike Lewis for later joining them, and all (but especially Chris) for providing stimulating things to work with and against; to AHRC/Northern Bridge, Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research’s ‘Thinking Through Things’, and Newcastle University’s Doctoral College Enhancement Fund for providing the means to complete this project; and to Heather Ross for sharing the pain.
The majority of the images in this exposition were made by the author, Lucy Carolan, but those that were not have been appropriately and sufficiently acknowledged. The exposition presents, as a not-for-profit online publication, the outcomes of non-commercial doctoral research, made openly available for consultation and fair use. However, without first obtaining specific and express permission to do so, the original research texts and imagery (still and moving) in this exposition are not to be used as material for purposes of ‘training’ artificial intelligence and other similar technologies capable of generating outputs in like style or genre, and/or for any manner of reproduction or use related to such technologies.
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