Clouded vision: Reframing multi-marginal landscapes through a lens-based practice

This practice-based doctoral submission presents a decade of lens-based inquiry into the visual representation of multi-marginal landscapes, examined through the interrelated conceptual frameworks of “’hin places’, partial opacity, and more-than-human relationality. The portfolio of published works spans five bodies of practice — Maunga (2014–2017), Tongariro Power (2015–2017), An Age of Iron (2017–2020), Clouded Vision (2024-5), and 1000 Years Per Inch (2024–2025) — and moves between the colonised and contested landscapes of Aotearoa New Zealand and the post-industrial multi-marginal landscapes of the English Midlands and Northwest.
The research is driven by two interrelated questions: how can a lens-based practitioner represent colonised, and exhausted landscapes without reinscribing extractive practices upon them; and how can lens-based practice reposition marginal landscapes as protagonists rather than backdrops or resources.
The thesis argues that prevailing documentary conventions of landscape photography — characterised by the fixed viewpoint, optical clarity, and the dispassionate aesthetic of large-format practice — reproduce the anthropocentric and colonising logics they may nominally oppose, rendering landscapes as image-resources available for contemplation and consumption. In response, the research develops an alternative methodology grounded in three interconnected propositions.

The first is the theorisation and practice of partial opacity as a constitutive ethics of lens-based image-making. Drawing on Édouard Glissant’s concept of the right to opacity — understood, following Drabinski, as an anticolonial resistance to modes of knowing that seek to absorb, possess, or render the Other fully legible — the research advances opacity not as an aesthetic preference but as a structural condition of ethical relations. This proposition is extended beyond the human subject to encompass more-than-human protagonists and is enacted through a set of disruptive production and post-production methods: speculative fieldworking; and the strategies of selection, occlusion, appropriation, and re-assemblage that together produce what the research terms ‘the enigmatic image’.

The second proposition concerns the theorisation of fieldwork as a relational-ethical practice rather than a neutral method of visual data gathering. Drawing on situated feminist epistemology, the kaupapa Māori protocols developed through sustained engagement with Ngāti Rangi, and Polly Stanton’s conception of fieldworking as a process of making-with, the research positions the practitioner’s embodied, porous,

and situated arrival at a site as a pre-productive ethical orientation. The practitioner is understood as a participant in a more-than-human encounter rather than a surveyor of it.
The third proposition advances the productive interval — drawn from Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s critique of naturalism in documentary practice and Lyotard’s theorisation of the fissure between discours and figure — as the site at which relational ethics and aesthetic innovation converge. Post-production strategies are reoriented away from their conventional function of resolving and polishing the image, and toward the generation of disruptive, affective, and partially opaque image-forms that act upon the viewer at the level of the unconscious, resisting assimilation into the extractive visual regimes of contemporary landscape photography.

A significant strand of the research reflects critically on the particular obligations and risks of working as a tau iwi, or non-Māori, practitioner within the post-colonial context of Aotearoa. The thesis demonstrates how an ethic of care developed through engagement with Indigenous cosmologies, kaupapa Māori research protocols, and the counsel of Ngāti Rangi knowledge-holders can be carried forward, with appropriate reflexivity, into subsequent practice in the landscapes of England. The most recent work, which introduces chromatography — a pseudo-scientific process of soil portraiture — and a critically interrogated collaboration with generative artificial intelligence, extends the research’s ethical and methodological concerns into the ecological and technological conditions of the present moment.

Taken together, the portfolio and accompanying critical writing propose a photo-filmic practice that operates as a form of planetary alliance. Through the integration of speculative fieldworking, surrealist-inflected post-production, and an ethics of partial opacity, this research advances new methodological and conceptual pathways for engaging with thin places in lens-based practice. The clouded vision articulated across the submission does not seek clarity or resolution; it affirms affect, uncertainty, and more-than-human relationality as the conditions through which responsible and responsive visual knowledge can emerge.