Visual Anthropology - PhD Research in Arjeplog
My PhD research (2016-2020) explored local experience of landscape and climate change in rural Northern Sweden, and how it is important to understand local climate scepticism in the context of environmental history, land-use, and national and global environmental discourses. In 2017-2018 I conducted fieldwork in Arjeplog and, along with 35mm photography, I used a number of experimental techniques as an anthropological method in my explorations of landscape. This research has been published in Visual Anthropology Review (2021) and Anthropology News ART issue (2020).
In order to learn about ways of being emplaced in Arjeplog, and relationships to nature and landscape, I wanted to be more creative with photographic processes and play with different techniques of materiality. I explored the physical spaces of photography, both inside the camera and on tabletops and exhibition spaces - using my own and my participants’ images in elicitation sessions. This allowed me to use the ‘discursive space’ of the exhibition, as Bourriaud describes, to use my own practice to better understand local representations of nature and what was important to show about life in this particular place.
I also explored the idea of tracks as an artistic devise, using techniques including cyanotypes (to explore the material trace interaction of object, light, and photographic surface) and pinhole cameras made in beer cans and left in place as part of the local landscape to record the tracks of the sun over time. Below are some examples of these practices.
