First coined in 1997 by Guggenheim curator Jennifer Blessing 'performed photography' is an inter-disciplinary genre that highlights the relationship between the performative act and the act of photography. By concentrating and promoting the inherent act of performance implicit in all photography it is hoped that the medium can be re-invigorated as a signifying process and the balance between the spatial and temporal concerns of photography can be re-addressed. DR. Paul Jeff is leading this research area, which forms part of the IPCRES Project (working with PhD research student Laura Jenkins). Jeff’s work demonstrates an attempt to formulate a time-based conception of photography, in response to a particularly held perception that the ‘world as picture’ has been more or less exhausted. The alternative assertion here is that photography should be interpreted in its complex relations to the concept of event, rather than its reified and literal manifestation as picture. The work incorporates a re-calibration of photographic communication, with an emphasis on the photographic record as the trace of an act, (an over-lapping event) rather than the act of making a significant trace. Research active staff include PhD candidate John Paul Evans whose research interests interrogate how photography is deployed to reaffirm notions of gender through a masculine/feminine active/passive binary. Queer Theory is interpreted through corporeal performances which are influenced by Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism and the carnivalesque, in combination with Michel Foucault’s concept of discourse, as a mode of  ‘resistance’ to the visual codes that support male hegemony. The research of PhD candidiate Laura Jenkins is an exploration into the anti-representational possibilities of the photographic medium. If photography is divorced from its habitual alliances such as naturalism, mimesis and identity, then the hermeneutic or interpretive possibilities of such a medium would become richer and more complex. Taking the medium out of the light of reason and into the dark crypt of enigma, the photographer becomes cryptographer. 

Links:

http://www.smu.ac.uk/ciric/index.php/projects/ipcres 

http://www.morebeautifulthangod.com

http://www.johnpaulevans.co.uk

http://www.laura-jenkins.com