What the subject did negotiating agency within representation

Lisa and John is a radical re-imagination of an earlier photographic project. As an intervention devised through participation with those depicted within the photographs, the project interrogates recurring theoretical questions that challenge the discourse of social documentary photography through alternate mediums. Lisa and John presents distinct contributions to knowledge, to question representational methods evoking what else was knowable from the terrain of possibilities when the sovereign images were captured, reaching into photographs, to open contextual focus on the social, political and relational aspects of production. The critical commentary identifies the project in the context of expanded documentary photography as a substantial piece of practice-based research. After a chance meeting with Lisa in 2015, I invited her and her former husband John, both of whom were portrayed within my series Pictures from the Real World: Colour Photographs, 1987-88 (Moore, 2013), to review the full body of documentary photographs interpreting their own lives. The couple’s participation as former subjects facilitated a step into the space of production, providing the catalyst for Lisa and John, itself, a response through the media of performance and three-dimensionality that renegotiated the initiating project. This submission for PhD by Publication comprises; theatrical maquettes representing the making of the earlier photographs, and a verbatim play based on conversations with Lisa and John, who were depicted in the earlier series.