The Photographic Corpus// Diffractive Materialities, Agential Processes, and the Entangled Archive

This dissertation reconceptualizes photography as a corpus—a living, evolving body shaped by materials, labor, technological processes, and institutional conditioning mechanisms. It traces how photographic meaning is co-produced across historical, material, and cultural contexts, revealing the hidden labor, industrial networks, and technological shifts that sustain photographic practices. Organized into four vignettes bisected by an original photobook of the author’s visual works, the project moves across historical, vernacular, synthetic, and pedagogical terrains. The first vignette examines the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, where photography’s early substrates—silver, glass, and cotton—were embedded within extractive economies, imperial display, and classificatory logics. Turning to a secondhand archive of mid-twentieth-century color negatives, the second vignette (Nudie Ladies) interrogates gendered visual economies, the archival labor of digitization, and the unstable boundary between analog and digital forms. Positioned at the center of the dissertation, the photobook interlude reworks boudoir negatives and AI-generated images, depicting sex dolls and memorializing loss, to explore how photographic processes mediate intimacy, animacy, and archival displacement. Building on these inquiries, the third vignette analyzes contemporary sex doll photography, where synthetic bodies, digital imaging, and affective economies intersect with structures of surveillance and contested agency. The final vignette reflects autoethnographically on teaching within darkroom spaces, considering how analog photographic practices persist as sites of material engagement, creative negotiation, and institutional biopolitical control. Across these sections, the dissertation draws on feminist new materialism, media archaeology, and biopolitics to develop a diffractive methodology—foregrounding the material-discursive processes through which photographic bodies, and the bodies engaging them, become visible, legible, and contested. This work remains intentionally veiled. This gesture resists extractive visibility and affirms that knowledge, like photographic images, often develops in darkness before it fully emerges.