Bodies Beyond the Skin: Queer and Camp Inquiries of Australian Landscape Photography

Photography has historically assisted the colonial project through the capture, categorisation, and narrativisation of ecologies as ‘space.’ This practice-led research project investigates how landscape photography has privileged hierarchical masculinist assumptions and seeks to problematise this schema by using ‘queer’ and camp methodologies to ‘betray,’ ‘pervert,’ ‘fail,’ and ultimately ‘unsettle’ existing narratives of Australian landscape via photography. If photography and visual representations of the land are complicit in reinforcing and reproducing colonial systems, then how can practitioners work their way out of this entanglement? Can photography—a colonising practice—be used to unsettle narratives and visual representations of the Australian landscape through a practice of queering? To address these questions, this research project presents a constellation of creative and written works that were conceived through generative cycles of making, research, and reflection through queer praxis. In this project I interrogate settler visions of ‘nature’ and employ the concept of ‘queering’ as a methodology for unsettling the formulations of the Australian landscape through a range of photographic practices, including photobooks, video, sculpture, and installation. Additionally, I explore camp strategies of humour, parody, and appropriation to highlight current insufficiencies in the representation of landscape photography, as well as to formulate unusual ways to engage the body. By performing landscape photography within an expanded practice, this dissertation argues how photography slips into multiple disciplines, making it a suitable vector for complex concepts such as the ‘Australian landscape’ and the myths we have attached to it through its various representations. Through an expansive range of image-based creative works, this practice-led PhD contributes to the field of photography through its coalescence of queer and decolonial theory alongside landscape and photography studies to instigate experimental ways of seeing and conceptualising ‘nature’ and ‘landscape.’<p></p>