Abstract

This PhD by Published Work responds to the institutional, conceptual and practical problems that arise when digital programming is introduced as a discrete curatorial strand within a photographic in stitution. It presents a programme of practice - centred curatorial research undertaken at The Photographers’ Gallery London over a period of nine
years from 2011-2019.
The outcomes of this research take the form of exhibitions, commissioned artworks, public events, workshops and scholarly texts published between 2012 and 2020.
Through an analysis of five key exhibition projects, the thesis offers insights concerning how the expansion and circulation of the networked image comes into a relationship with traditional modes of photography curating.
When brought together, the works delineate a field of enquiry
which is termed ‘post-photographic curating’ which responds to the problem that ‘the digital’ is not in itself a new artistic or photographic medium, but a hybrid set of socio-technical
practices generating new sites of expertise and forms of value. It calls for an expansion of the institutional concerns of photography in order to address the paradoxical condition of the networked image, which remediates the received cultural form of the photograph, whilst concealing the operations that produce them and their status as networked data. The central
contribution of the research is therefore in defining new practices and cultural forms that respond to the socio-technical conditions of visual culture, in order to widen the horizon of how the photographic image is modelled and understood by the photographic institution.