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World-making and Un-doing: Looking at minor cultural forms through moving image practice, examines how contemporary artistic practice - particularly artists' moving image - can function as a unique and productive site within which to explore the 'world-making' capacity of certain objects. These include photographic postcards and woven tourist items; 'minor' cultural objects which combine aspects of representation, technology, memorialisation, and militarism in material form. This PhD takes the concept of 'world-making' to be broadly understood as attempts to "imagine, shape, revise, control, and articulate the dimensions of the world" to master it, through the employment of current theories of modernity. World-making, in this sense, is bound-up with acts of observation, measuring, naming, and re-naming: and with the technologies which enable these processes of mastery, such as photography. World-making is also connected to practices that inform and dictate how (modern) people engage with the world, such as tourism and the military: large-scale industries with global reach. In this practice-based research, "un-doing" has been considered as a strategy, act, or approach that dismantles or disassembles human-made constructs. Whether in relation to a physical object or a concept, the process of un-doing is intended to stop such constructs from functioning in the manner intended by their makers, and to reveal their constituting elements. My research draws on theories concerning the ontology of the photograph (Roland Barthes) and of photography (Susan Sontag); the use of the 'still' photograph in moving image practice (Raymond Bellour, Volker Patenburg); its relationship to the employment of suture (Jacques-Alain Miller) and forms of collage. In exploring minor forms of representation in relation to militarism (Teresia Teaiwa), in addition to the photographic postcard, this project is informed by the historic and contemporary deployment of textiles (Julia Bryan-Wilson, Elizabeth Barber). My thesis considers the work of filmmakers who explicitly use the photograph in their films (Jean-Luc Goddard, Harun Farocki), artists working across analogue and digital photography (Simon Starling and Moyra Davey), and practices of undoing (William Pope. L) and puts their work into critical dialogue with my own. Each chapter of the thesis anchors and informs the three main artworks which I have produced as practice-based research: Mean Time (2020) is a nine-minute film with sound that considers photography as a product of looking at, and thinking about, the world, prefigured on separating or shuttering it - thus questioning the (modern) apprehension of the world as divisible. Mean Time suggests that minor forms of photography, such as the postcard, have the potential to access undertheorized and overlooked connections, related to our understanding of historic or global events. The film uses the postcard to reflect on the observer and the camera in motion, mobilised across time zones and other invisible 'world-making' lines. The solo exhibition Parataxis (2021) comprises two works; a digital collage, manifest as a limited-edition hand-pulled printed textile titled, Revolution is a Living Language, and, Looking and Being Overlooked, a silent 20-minute looped video. These works are the result of a commission (from Centre for Research Collections; University of Edinburgh, and the A.G. Leventis Foundation; Greece) to explore the temporal overlap of the Greek Revolution of 1821 with Enlightenment discourse in Edinburgh. Parataxis foregrounds female experiences and contributions relative to the exhibition themes by bringing particular 'overlooked' figures, symbols, and structures into assembly, in an attempt to conceptually and physically undo dominant narratives and images. Apparent Time (2022) is an 11-minute film with sound, formed from a handful of photographs, footage of the un-doing of a piece of woven fabric, and the erasure of a tattoo. Whereas Mean Time uses an array of mass-produced photographic postcards, as visual interdictions and allusions to movements, through acts of travel and scanning, Apparent Time focuses attention on static or fixed positions to enable telescopic views of time and events. The film's central subject is a photograph titled, 'Photo 9 - Boat on spot where Elugelab once stood, now a crater, 1972' taken in Enewetak Atoll, in the Marshal Islands, 20 years after the nuclear device 'Mike' was detonated there, completely vaporising the island of Elugelab.

In this thesis, I investigate the different ways in which photography can be used to build peace in conflict situations. Although its role can be ambivalent, I primarily focus on its positive uses with the question: to what extent can photography promote peace rather than violence and conflict? My contention is that photography has the potential to contribute to building peace through several important roles in pre-conflict, post-conflict, and conflict situations: it can bear witness to truth, represent victims' suffering, encourage nonviolent resistance against violence, reconstruct painful memories, and re-imagine justice and reconciliation. To do this, I primarily focus on the May 18th Gwangju Democratic Uprising which happened between the 18th and 27th of May 1980 in the city of Gwangju, in the south-western region of South Korea. In the first chapter, I explore the relation between photography and peacebuilding, providing a brief history of 'war photography' particularly between the mid-19th century and the mid-20th century. I focus on two movements in war photography - realism and surrealism. Then, I consider the role of war photography from a peacebuilding perspective, by focusing on the concept of 'social psychological distance' between photographs and audience. In the second chapter, I consider how a photograph can reveal truth in violent conflict situations, focusing on the concept of 'bearing witness'. In comparison with the concept of 'eye witnessing', I examine how photographs have contributed to bearing witness to violent events. In this fashion, I focus on the importance of journalists and their roles as bearing witness to truth. In the third chapter, I investigate how photography can represent a victim's suffering and promote empathy. For this, I re-examine compassion fatigue theory, drawing upon the work of Susan Sontag and Susan Moeller. I then explore the theme through analysis of social documentary photography in the mid-twentieth century in the United States. In the fourth chapter, I argue that photography has the potential play an active role in empowering people to overcome fear and resist violence nonviolently. This offers a balance to those who propose a compassion fatigue theory, arguing that repeated exposure to violent images can reduce moral sensibility. In other words, even though photography can produce cultural fatigue from overwhelming violent representations, it can also promote moral sensibility and social actions against violence. In the fifth chapter, I investigate the role of photography in the aftermath of violent conflict, mainly focusing on the relationship between remembering and painful history. Drawing on cultural memory theories such as those developed by Maurice Halbwachs and Aleida and Jan Assmann, I contend that social identities can be reconstructed through the process of remembering. I argue that photography can be a tool for remembering the painful history wisely, mainly focusing on reconstruction of identity and healing of cultural trauma (Hicks 2002; Volf 2006). I explore how photography contributes to the practice of remembering painful history rightly. In the final chapter, I focus on reconciliation and restorative justice as an alternative approach to building a just and peaceful society in the aftermath of a conflict such as the Gwangju Uprising. Because of the relational aspect of reconciliation and restorative justice, I argue, the approach can contribute to the development of the 'moral imagination' that overcomes the limits of the current juridical justice system. Reconciliation cannot be only the end of peacebuilding, but also a practical guideline for achieving both peace and justice.