Photographs, Narratives and Subcultures - A context for Practice based PhD

‘Everything is a self-portrait.’ (Palahniuk, 2000, p132 – 133)

‘To photograph is to violate them (the sitters), by seeing them as they never can see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.’ (Sontag, 1977, p81)

‘The photograph is an incomplete utterance, a message that depends on some external matrix of conditions and presuppositions for its readibility.’ (Sekula, 1982)

‘There is a popular notion that the photographer is by nature a voyeur, the last one invited to the party. But I’m not crashing; this is my party. This is my family, my history.’ (Goldin,1986, p6)

The contemporary world is continually in motion where new forms of art mediums are on the rise. In recent years artists and writers seem to be experimenting more with embedding photographs within their works of prose fiction and vice versa. As a result, the emergence of multimodal works of art are now reflecting how people experience everyday life, popular culture and the visual media of television and film by producing not just one story line for the reader/viewer to follow but also multiple narratives to analyse through image and words. This marks the increasing need for critical analysis that can manoeuvre such print multiple narratives. For this reason, photo diaries, multimodal texts and popular culture’s influence on them need to be considered in academic discussion in more depth.