: a mode of being articulated through visual languages of absence, ephemerality, and ghostly presence. This thesis work draws on Jacques Derrida’s theories of trace and hauntology, this research conceives the feminine as an apparition that emerges through the material contingencies of analog photo processes.
Working with film and experimental darkroom practices, the project looks at presence as a symptom of residue and haunting. This ongoing work is not a repository of fixed facts about spectrality or the feminine, rather, it follows an invisible, yet perceptible, lineage of women who engaged in similar strategies of estrangement and spectrality; singular figures such as Georgiana Houghton, Anne Brigman, Maya Deren, Alix Cléo Roubaud, Francesca Woodman, and Helena Blavatsky.
Alongside these visual practices, the writing of Hélène Cixous provides a theoretical and poetic framework for understanding the feminine as force, writing with the body, and Écriture féminine. All of this resonating within analog image-making to make a tactile inscription of desire and vulnerability. Through these photographic acts, silver - gelatin printing is reconceived as a dialogic encounter across time.
The project is a persistance of the past into the present and proposes new configurations of visibility that argues that feminine presence, when approached as spectral, phenomenological, and formally estranged, may re-orient perception and inconveniences dominant powers of the day. By interweaving embodied knowledge, material processess, and affective resonance, this thesis offers an understanding as to how the feminine endures as a relational, haunting force in a space where absence and persistence are continually re-seen and re-felt.