More-than-Human Photography

Andrea Jaeger’s research offers new insights into photographic aesthetics and processes through focussing on materiality and on the personal or industrial tactile procedures and experiences implicated in the making of imagery.

— Liz Wells, writer and curator, Professor Emeritus in Photographic Culture, University of Plymouth.

This rich and illuminating book starts with the smell and sound of the photographic developing lab. This sets the scene for this detailed and highly original field-based study of the affective, sensory, embodied, procedural, aesthetic and industrial conditions from which photographs emerge. In this it takes photographs analytically beyond the human and beyond the representational into the realms of the deeply material and haptic.

— Elizabeth Edwards, Professor Emerita, Photographic History, De Montfort University.

Andrea Jaeger’s project provocatively makes the case for an expanded photographic practice which engages all the medium’s multisensory, material, and agential conditions of production. In its stress on analogue experience, Jaeger offers a refreshing antidote to digital abstractions, reminding us of the many creative possibilities involved in the physical act of making photographs.

— Geoffrey Batchen, Professor of History of Art, University of Oxford.

This book challenges the image-centred orthodoxy in photography studies, shifting attention to the tactile, sonic and material interactions that unfold in darkrooms, commercial labs and manufacturing sites through which photographs emerge. Through a combination of artistic research, sensory ethnography and experimental aesthetics, it examines sites such as Bayeux London and the labs of Polaroid and Fujifilm to reveal the hidden infrastructures and embodied labour that shape photographic production. Filling a critical gap in photographic scholarship, this study invites readers to reframe photography as a multisensory, event-based practice.

Andrea Jaeger is a UK-based artist, researcher and lecturer in photography at De Montfort University.