Ornaments of Forgetting and Photo Sensitive: An investigation into how creative, non-academic or hybrid forms of writing offer original insight into the subjective perception of photographs

Leach, Gregory Francis (2025) Ornaments of Forgetting and Photo Sensitive: An investigation into how creative, non-academic or hybrid forms of writing offer original insight into the subjective perception of photographs. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

File will be available on: 7 July 2027. Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives. Download (8MB)

Abstract

My research is based on the contention that the established systems of image analysis are incapable of encompassing the infinite subjective responses that photographs of all kinds can elicit. The research addresses this through two bodies of work, entitled Ornaments of Forgetting and Photo Sensitive, which, through contrasting strategies, offer insight into the complexity and fluidity of our relationship with photographs. Ornaments of Forgetting is a creative critical thesis that charts my intellectual and emotional engagement with an archive of slides inherited from my father in 2017, the majority of which record our family life in the 1960s and 70s. It adopts a meta-theoretical approach through the blending of literary genres (creative non-fiction, memoir, critical theory), supported by creatively reconstituted imagery that contributes to the substance of the work. The investigation is driven by parallel narratives: firstly, that of my progressive engagement with the contents of the archive and the diverse research that informs it; secondly, that of the family life that most of the pictures record, fail to record, or ‘record’ in ways that are oblique and sometimes unique to my reading of them. Consideration throughout is given to the ways in which events are translated as fallible memory. Photo Sensitive is a collection of ten short fictional stories about characters that have encounters or extended relationships with a specific photograph or set of photographs. The unique responses are determined by their specific circumstances and disposition – their prejudices, preoccupations, and even obsessions. Written in the third-person intimate, the stories engender a form of ‘interpretative expansion’ whereby I, as the author, perceive and understand the featured image(s) in ways that depart from my own untrammelled interpretations, whilst ultimately – and inevitably – remaining attributable to me. These stories are designed to reflect the complex interweaving of collective sociocultural and personal experiential influences that shape subjective viewing. The research is a consolidation of my previously discrete modes of practice, specifically photography, critical writing, and creative writing. Through it, I have engaged with creative non-fiction and memoir, aspects of which are integrated into a para-literary form, most conspicuous in Ornaments of Forgetting. As a PhD by Practice, I have devised a methodology for Ornaments of Forgetting that blends the academic rigour of a thesis with both literary and visual creative practices; this, in part, constitutes its contribution to knowledge.