This is an online adaptation of the portfolio made within the Sustainable Strategies module as part of my master’s degree in photography, originally published August 2021. PDF-version found here.

Intention and Agencies

At what point does intention break, balance, collide or get overtaken by agency?

My photographic intentions cover an artistic research question, choice of locations, motif, time of day and different photographic methods. The different methods are kindred by the overarching methodology - an intention to attribute and acknowledge agency to several, primarily non-human, actors through the photographic process.

Non-human agencies can be seen in: the choice of equipment itself and how that forces a certain workflow, traits of the photo location (weather, topology, temperature), the architecture of a building, brought objects, props or (lack of) costume.

There are socio-material aspects affecting both the process and product of photography. Actions, events and meaning are sprung out of the meeting between the intentional human and the materiality of non-human agents such as objects, machines or environment.

Some scholars describe agency as something that is not attributed to single entities, but rather as something that emerges through intra-actions between human and non-human actors.

To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence. Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not preexist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating. (Barad 2007:ix)

I’m taking the post-anthropocentric philosophical stance that agency is not primarily intentional and distinctively initiated by human actions.

That said. I do carry intentions. But it’s not my intentions alone that shape my photographs. And I don’t really intend to communicate a certain narrative or a coherent visual style. My intentions are of the exploratory kind. Photography is my way of asking questions and doing research.

In the viewing of the photos, yet other agents are in affect. Agency and meaning emerge through the intra-action between you, the viewing device, a cultural capital, the room you're inhabiting and a multitude of other possible agents.

I carry some intentions. I don’t control the process. I don’t own the result. You, I, the photos emerge as part of entangled intra-relations.

Ideas and theories that surface through my statement of intent; Intention, Agency, Artistic research, Non-Humans, Agential realism, Socio-materiality, Intra-action, Entanglement

References

BARAD, Karen Michelle (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press

BUSCH, Kathrin. 2009. ‘Artistic Research and the Poetics of Knowledge’. Art & Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods, 2(2). Available at: http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n2/busch.html [accessed 1 August 2021]

KLEIN, Julian. 2017. ‘What is artistic research?’. Journal for artistic research. Available at: https://www.jar-online.net/what-artistic-research [accessed 10 August 2021]

READ, Shirley & Mike SIMMONS. 2017. Photographers and research: the role of research in contemporary photographic practice. New York, NY: Routledge

SCHLOSSER, Markus. 2019. ‘Agency’. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2019 Edition). Edward N. ZALTA (ed.). Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2019/entries/agency/ [accessed 10 August 2021]

WOLFE, Cary. 2010. What is posthumanism?. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press

ÅSBERG, Cecilia, Hultman, Martin & Lee, Francis (red.) 2012. Posthumanistiska nyckeltexter. 1. uppl. Lund: Studentlitteratur